Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany
“Let Your Light Shine” — Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (1 Corinthians 2:1-12/NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (Matthew 5:13-20/NRSVUE)
One night not long ago I woke up at about three a.m. and just couldn’t to get back to sleep. After about a half hour of tossing and turning, and getting increasingly irritated, something on the outskirts of my field of vision drew my attention to the far side of the room. When I was finally able to focus my sleep-deprived eyes, I figured out that it was the light on my phone telling me that I had an email or a text. It blinked on and off every few seconds for what seemed like an eternity.
A tiny blinking light is one of those things that, once you’ve seen it in the middle of the night, is awfully tough to unsee. It’s only about the size of a pencil point, but to me, it seemed like one of those giant searchlights. I swear, when I closed my eyes, I could still see it flashing through my eyelids. And even when I rolled over and looked in the opposite direction, I could still see it flashing ever so faintly up on the ceiling.
I endured this torture for a while before I finally decided go through the trouble to get out of bed, find my glasses, walk across the room and see who could possibly be emailing or texting me at that hour. You might be wondering: Why didn’t he just get up and put and end to it right away? I don’t know — it was the middle of the night and I wasn’t exactly thinking clearly.
It’s a good thing I did get up and check my phone, though, because the email alert that appeared on the screen told me that I had received a coupon from Harbor Freight Tools. I mean, I couldn’t possibly have waited until morning to find out about something as important as that. Having been enlightened with respect to my newfound fortune, I set my phone back on the dresser (face down this time) and crawled back into bed making a list of things I might need at Harbor Freight hoping that this activity might actually lull me back to sleep since it was kind of like counting sheep. If only I could have been so lucky.
You see, soon after I went back to bed the light on my phone was blinking again. Sensing that something was amiss, I opened my left eye only to see that this tiny beacon was somehow continuing to project its beam intermittently onto the wall.
At this point, I was tempted to get up and either throw my phone out the window or go bury it in the backyard but my more rational side prevailed and I chose just to put it inside a dresser drawer instead, which was probably for the best — even though I knew it was still blinking in there. I don’t know why I got so worked up — I mean, that light on my phone was simply doing what it was made to do. But this whole ridiculous experience reminded me that a small light that just won’t stop shining can have quite an impact.
“You are the light of the world,” says Jesus to his first disciples in today’s reading from Matthew’s Gospel. That’s right, this bunch of very ordinary people, this group of unremarkable fishermen standing there on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, are, according to Jesus, the light of the world.
This is kind of a bold declaration on Jesus’s part because, at this point in the story, these guys haven’t done anything to earn such a title. Truth be told, even as the gospel continues to unfold, the disciples’ track record of actually living into what Jesus teaches and preaches ends up being spotty at best — which, of course, makes them a whole lot like us.
But Jesus seems to know something about them and he seems to understand what they are capable of — even if they don’t ever seem to know or understand these things themselves. And so Jesus doesn’t hedge his bets at all here at all — he doesn’t tell the disciples that they could be the light of the world if they can prove themselves worthy; he doesn’t tell them that they will be the light of the world once they put their time in; he tells them that they are already the light of the world.
Now, there’s a tendency in our day and age, in which the individual seems to matter above all else, to read this line about you being the light of the world and assume that Jesus is speaking to his disciples (both then and now) as individuals — you know, you are the light of the world, and so are you, and so are you, and so on and so forth. I hate to be the one to burst your bubble, but that’s not what Jesus is saying.
One of the shortcomings of the English language is that it’s hard to differentiate between the singular and plural usages of the word “you.” But in the original Greek of the New Testament these two kinds of “you” are actually separate words, and so its pretty easy to figure out that Jesus is addressing the disciples not as individuals but as a group here. Jesus telling them that they, taken together, are the light of the world (and the salt of the earth to boot).
And since this ragtag band of misfits also happens to be the very first Christian church, what Jesus is saying that the church is the light of the world. But you probably wouldn’t have thought it if you’d been up there on the mountaintop when Jesus was sitting there on the ground talking to these guys, though.
Long ago, the prophet Isaiah had said that all of the people who sat in darkness and in the shadow of death would one day see a great light and most of these people, as much as they might have hoped that it was true, probably thought Isaiah was crazy.
And then, hundreds of years later, Jesus suddenly appeared in the wilderness claiming to be that light; he went around teaching and healing all sorts of people who were among those still sitting in darkness and in the shadow of death in order to show them that he was that light. And they mostly thought he was crazy too. You can’t really blame them for that, though, because a working-class stiff from the middle of nowhere wasn’t exactly the most obvious choice to be the light of world.
But Jesus understands that he’s not going to be here all that much longer (well, at least not in the traditional sense anyway) and so he decides to enlist some help in order to carry on this whole “light of the world” project for the long haul. Think about that one for a second — even Jesus didn’t believe, for whatever reason, that he could manage to pull this one off on his own. God would need our help in order to continue bringing light to the world.
Simon Peter and Andrew, James and John? They’re just four fishermen? They’ll do, but we’re going to need even more people.
Martha toiling away there in her kitchen? Yeah, we’ll need her too.
Matthew? But he’s a tax collector. I don’t care; sign him up anyway.
Thomas? I’m not sure he’s one hundred percent on board. That’s okay.
Saul of Tarsus? You mean the one who persecutes your followers? Don’t worry, I’ll have a talk with him. He’ll be great.
Jesus truly believes that these people are light of the world. What on earth did he actually see in them? They doubted as much as they believed; they failed more often than they succeeded; they were at least as cowardly as they were courageous. They didn’t necessarily work together all that well; they competed with one another to be Jesus’s favorite; they sometimes turned away those who came to them seeking healing.
Then again, perhaps they were really no worse (and no better) than any of the rest of us. And people, with all their strengths and weaknesses and vices and virtues, were what God had given Jesus to work with, so that’s what he did. We have to remember that not a single one of these people asked for this — the whole “gather as a church and be the light of the world” thing was totally Jesus’s idea. They were just going about their lives and minding their own business before he arrived and turned everything upside down by teaching them about the importance of peace and love and justice and community. But maybe, just maybe, this was exactly what God had created them for in the first place.
This would certainly explain why, when the light that is Jesus shows up here in the world, it is impossible for the disciples to deny it for very long. Even though it is not necessarily in their self-interest to follow it, even though they often fight it tooth and nail, they ultimately cannot resist being drawn together by the power of that light and being light themselves. It was true for that very first church composed of just a handful of people and it remains true for our church today.
Sure, we can try to contain that light by placing it under a bushel basket like a lit candle because it’s annoying or inconvenient, though there’s a better than average chance that we inadvertently end up setting the basket on fire and burning the whole house down.
Sure, we can, out of tiredness or laziness or frustration, try to hide that light in a dresser drawer, even though we know deep down inside that it hasn’t actually ever stopped blinking.
Sure, we can focus so much on other things that we sometimes fail to see the light that brought us together here in the first place: the desire to serve and love God and our neighbor because that’s what Christ called us to do and taught us to do.
But make no mistake about it — the light of Christ has always been there beckoning us towards something greater, it has always been there inviting us to be a part of something that is far bigger than ourselves, it has always been there calling us to go and be the light of the world — because we truly are the light of the world. And we can try to ignore the light of Christ, but it’s always gonna there.