Third Sunday in Epiphany 2011, Immanuel Chapel, Psalm 27
The sun will rise this afternoon in Barrow, Alaska. Sunset will occur one hour and seven minutes later. Today marks the first sunrise in Barrow since it was up for 6 minutes on November 19. We are people created to be drawn to the light. When I attended Concordia College, St. Paul, I regularly worked as a campus night watchman. Especially in the summer I would begin to look to the east about 4 am waiting, for the first hint of dawn’s light over downtown St. Paul. Musician John Ylvisaker has written a hymn that expresses our need for light entitled “Drawn to the Light.” “Dawn is in sight! Gone is the night, drawn to the light and the morning. Glorious and bright, oh, what sight to be drawn to the light of God.”
Yes, drawn to the light of God. The author of Psalm27 knew what it was to be drawn to the light of God. “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” For the psalmist the Lord was his security light and his safe haven. The presence of the Lord his is light, dispelling all fear and fright.
Epiphany is about the inbreaking of the light. The inbreaking of light began when the creation was a formless chaos, enveloped in darkness. God said, “Let there be light and there was light.” There is no darkness in all creation or in our lives which is beyond God’s power to claim and shape into that which serves the purposes for which he created it and glorifies him. The psalmist confesses in psalm 139, “even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you.” In creation, God separated the light from the darkness and thus began the first day of the lord and it was good. He created servants of light, the sun to light day and the moon and stars to brighten the night. These heavenly bodies are not only intended to serve him but to serve you and me also.
We are unable to live long without the light. Cormac McCarthy’s novel, “The Road,” tracks the journey of a father and son in the aftermath of a disaster which has clouded the sun. All vegetation died. It snows, not snowflakes, but flakes of ash. The father and son are seeking light, warmth and people who have not turned to doing the most unspeakable things to one another in order to survive.
When human beings fell so deeply into the darkness of rebellion against God, “that every imagination of the thoughts of the heart was only evil continually,” God regretted he had made humankind and he was grieved over the darkness that clouded men’s souls. But one man, Noah, found favor in God’s eyes. Noah still trusted in the Lord as his security Light and safe haven and lived accordingly. When the sun was blotted out by clouds, the pouring down of rain and up welling of water from deep of the earth, Noah and his family and representatives of all the species of the earth were in the safe haven of the ark. After the waters subsided and the skies cleared, God showed Noah a spectrum of the light in a rainbow as a sign of the covenant of the full favor of the Lord toward his creation. God, the Lord of creation, would show himself forever as the God of salvation, the God who is our Savior and the One who rescues when we are in over our heads.
About three years ago I was walking under Luther’s Tower at Concordia Seminary. Dale Meyer, seminary president, was talking to someone. He called out, “Ron Jansen, I’m in over my head.” Since I had just started to fill another vacancy, I said, “So am I.”
Whether it’s a seminary president, a pastor failing retirement, a mother struggling to keep her sanity, a small business person facing overwhelming challenges, all of us being squeezed by the economy or pressures and setbacks in our personal life, we are able to understand that it is the Lord who is our light, salvation and strength. In the dark times of life I am able to see what Jesus means when he says, “I am the light of the world.” When I am weak, then I am able to boast in the Lord’s strength shown on the cross. When I have no defenses left, then I can look to Christ as my true fortress and protector. When illness brings me down, then I am able to confess that I will again see the Lord’s goodness in the land of the living.
Without light we stumble and fall. The psalmist confesses, “For evils have encompassed me beyond number, my iniquities have overtaken me, and I cannot see, they are more than the hairs of my head; my heart fails me.” The full spectrum of God’s light broke into the world and into our lives in Jesus Christ. John tells his Christmas story in terms of light. “In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.” No, rather Christ overcame the darkness and in a renewal of creation said, “I am the light.” The Lord who was the light of the life of the psalmist had taken on human flesh. Jesus was the radiance of the glory of God. He upholds the creation by the power of his word. He made purification for our sins and took his place at the right hand of God.
Tuesday, the church remembers the conversion of St. Paul. As a young man he had sunk into darkness of defending a tradition that rejected Jesus. He was present when the Deacon Stephen, “full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.” Paul, then known as Saul, was among those who cried out against Stephen, stopped up their ears and dragging him out of Jerusalem, they stoned him to death. Not even Saul was beyond the light of Christ. On his way to Damascus, with arrest warrants in his hand, the light which is Christ knocked him to the ground and changed his life. Only days later, he began proclaiming that Jesus was the Son of God.
No wonder the psalmist proclaims, “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid.” With that hope and confidence he faces life in the face of Christ who will be faithful to him even if his own parents forsake him. The Lord will take him in.
Finally he confesses, “I believe that I shall look upon the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.” During my freshman year at Concordia College, St. Paul, Prof. Harold Otte directed the Choral Club choir. Every weekday afternoon I sat in the 2nd tenor section in the renovated basement of a pre-20th century building. On July 31, 2007 Dr. Otte died. According to his son, a treasured friend visited him that day and read Psalm 27 to Dr. Otte and his wife. During the reading, Dr. Otte simply closed his eyes and stopped breathing. Robert Holst the school president, who in his student days also sang under Dr. Otte’s direction wrote, “Quietly and peacefully, God transferred him from time into eternity…We who still wait and watch continue to find peace and can express our faith in the words of that ancient hymn , “I am still confident of this: I will see the Day of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord: be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.”
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