A sermon on John 1: 1-17
Preached Sunday, July 13, 2025 at Ballston Spa UMC
Video available here

Would you pray with me?

God of all times, places, and things, you have promised to stay by our side in darkness, in light, and in twilight. By your Spirit, make your presence known among us here today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

This is our second Sunday in our series on the five symbols we use in worship. Last week, we discussed the bread and the cup, our communion elements, as we thought about the meaning of communion and what happens when we receive the bread of new life and the cup of promise, the body and blood of Christ. This week, as you may have guessed from the hymns and the liturgy, we’re talking about light. The next two Sundays, we’ll be focusing on our two w’s, word and then water.

I think light is the most practical of the five symbols we use. Bread, cup, word, and water are all a part of our daily lives, and yes, so is light, but we don’t worry about “keeping the words on” when we talk about budgeting. Light is essential accommodation for those of us who navigate spaces using our sight, and before electric lights, candles and windows were how we lit up our spaces. Why do we use light in worship? Because most of us need it.

But, unfortunately for y’all, that’s not where the sermon ends.

See, the symbol of light is used all throughout scripture. You can probably think of a few examples just off the top of your head.

Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. (Psalm 119:105)

God said, “Let there be light.” (Genesis 1:3)

The pillar of fire lit up the night for the people leaving Egypt in Exodus 13.

You are the light of the world. (Matthew 5:14)

A verse later, let your light shine before others. (Matthew 5:15)

The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it. (John 1:5)

We have been called out of darkness into God’s marvelous light. (1 Peter 2:9)

The Lamb is the light of the city of God in Revelation 21.

What we see from these verses is that light is often tied to the presence of God in scripture, and I think that for many of us, light in worship often means the same thing. When we light the candles at the beginning of worship, we are inviting God to be present with us. When we blow the candles out after the postlude, we invite the presence of God to go with us out into the world, like smoke that rises up to the sky.

Much like we ask Jesus to be present with us in the breaking of the bread and the sharing of the cup, we also bring light into worship to help us remember those who are not with us here in the flesh. We might light candles on All Saints Sunday or we might light candles in honor of our loved ones. There is something about creating light that invites, like a bonfire in the fall or a warm hearth in the winter.

Maybe this is because light is the first thing that God called into being. Genesis 1 begins, “When God began to create the heavens and the earth, 2 the earth was complete chaos, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. 3 Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.”

Now, the bible wasn’t written to be a scientific textbook. Any biblical author, if you could speak to them today, would tell you as much, once you explained to them what science is and what a textbook is. And we’ll talk more about the creation story next week, when we consider word as a symbol in worship, but I want us to pause on these first five verses in Genesis because there is a parallel between what we read in Genesis and what we have observed about the beginning of the universe.

I think we often image the Big Bang to be loud and bright, like a hundred thousand million stars and galaxies all exploding from a single point in space to fill up the entirety of the cosmos. And I get the desire for that image. It’s fun to think about. But it’s not exactly what astronomers have observed.

No one has observed the beginning of the universe directly, because, to our knowledge, no one was there at the time, but we have observed the expansion of the universe. We can see that space itself is getting bigger. Galaxies are being carried away from us, to the point that there are galaxies humanity will never see, no matter how long humanity exists, because space is expanding faster than their light can get to us. (That is the problem with astronomy- it is a science that depends on light and time. We rely on photons traveling from distant objects to our telescopes.) But this observed expansion of the universe leads us to theorize that if space is expanding now, it must have been smaller in the past. When we run the equations backwards, we come to the Big Bang.

Seems simple now, but this is literally Einstein-level thinking.

And it’s not just that we have theorized that this happened; we have some evidence that aligns directly with this theory. It’s called the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, and many of you have seen it for yourselves.

Remember when TV stations used to stop broadcasting at the end of the day, when TVs showed static during the night? A portion of the static that your TV was picking up was cosmic microwave background radiation. It was the first light ever seen in the universe, echoing back to us here on earth.

But the CMB isn’t from the Big Bang. The Big Bang actually happened in silence and darkness, though if you’d been alive, you would have felt it.

See, immediately after the Big Bang, the universe was a hot, dense plasma of photons, leptons, and quarks, subatomic particles and energy, all full of energy and bouncing around. It was chaos. And photons, the light particles, they weren’t able to travel well. They would get absorbed by other particles, or they’d bounce around. They couldn’t get free to traverse the wideness of space because there was too much chaotic stuff in the way. What needed to happen was recombination and decoupling. Particles need to cool enough to combine together to form protons, neutrons, and eventually, atoms, so that the light could get out.

This era at the beginning of the universe, from the Big Bang to decoupling, when the photons can escape, isn’t short, either: it lasts until about three hundred and eighty-seven thousand years after the big bang.

When God began to create, it was complete chaos. Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

Now, again, the bible isn’t a scientific textbook, and science doesn’t always have a moral lesson to teach us. But I find it profound that in order for the light to get out, in order for us to receive information about how the world is and has been, things have to calm down and come together. Electrons have to connect to protons. How often is it that we, as people, have to calm down and come together before we can learn? How often do we have to calm down and come together before we can make something new?

So for us, in worship, light often indicates to us the presence of God, something we see in scripture from Genesis to revelation, something we connect with on a deep level.

But is God only found in light? Is that why we use it in worship?

Well, when the preacher asks a question this late in the sermon, it can only mean one thing: they’re setting a trap for you.

Let me spring it for you.

God is not only found in light.

We often have a basic assumption that light equals good and dark equals bad, and many of us received that assumption from what we learned in church, and sometimes in society. To be honest, the fear of the dark probably goes back to the days when we slept outside in an uncertain dark, but it continues to this day. In history, we hear about the Enlightenment, the age of progress when the foundations for our country and all scientific understanding were laid, when we all emerged from the Dark Ages in Europe after the fall of Rome. And, as we’ve seen in scripture, white light and brightness are associated with God and purity. Someone could write a book about this topic, and probably has, but safe to say, many of us have the assumption that God rejoices only in the light and that God banishes the all darkness.

Except.

Except we know that’s not true. Scripture itself tells us so. God sends people dreams in the darkness of night, dreams that will save a people and save the world. God gives Abram a vision of his descendants in the night, under darkness and stars. God wrestled Jacob all through the night. The cloud that Moses ascends into to receive the commandments is actually a cloud of darkness. Samuel, in the temple, receives his call when he’s supposed to be sleeping. The star appears to the Magi at night. The shepherds hear of Jesus’ birth in the night. Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night. Jesus is held safe in the darkness of a tomb until the time for resurrection arrives. The women travel to the tomb in the darkness before dawn.

You see, God calls to us in the dark of night. God reveals things to us in the dark. We are not abandoned in the darkness. In fact, it is in darkness that God is able to appear to us in ways we don’t expect. Sometimes the light is too bright for what God wants to show us. Sometimes we need the darkness to open our hearts and our minds to something new. Sometimes we need the relief of night to ease us into God’s unknown.

So what does this mean for our light in worship?

Well, practically, those of us who use light to move around a space and read words on a page or screen still need it. Candles still remind us of the presence of God. Scripture still points out the way light reveals God to us. But we must also trust that God is with us and speaks to us in the dark.

And this means that we can play with light in worship. What would it look like for us to sit in the quiet and in the dark, listening for God together? How can we invite in different kinds of light in different seasons? Where is light too bright? Where could shadows be illuminated? Where could they be used to help us see the familiar anew? How can light and dark together invite us deeper into God’s presence?

I don’t know. But I’m hoping we can find out.

May God’s holy light and holy darkness continue to reveal the God of the universe to us all.

Amen.