Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne
Readings – Isaiah 9. 2-4, 6-7; John 1. 1-14
“…the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”
The dark skies of Wiltshire,13 August 2024 © Gerry Lynch
It’s a pity that it’s so cloudy tonight, because the night sky is magnificent at present, especially around midnight. The winter stars, held together by Orion and Sirius are all rising in the south-east about this time of night, with the brilliant white of Jupiter and jaunty red of Mars making a cameo appearance for this winter only.
One of the first things I noticed when I moved to Devizes four years ago was how dark the skies are in this part of Wiltshire, especially as one looks south towards Salisbury Plain, where there is very little artificial light to ruin the view.
A sad reality of the present is that only a small minority of people in the world now ever see the night stars in all their glory. Most people now live in cities, where thousands of streetlights waste much of their energy by leaking upwards, doing no good to anyone below but ruining the night sky.
The human race now has so much power that the light we waste is enough to obliterate the glories of nature.
The light that really dominates our lives in the 21st Century, however, is that of flickering screens, the sickly blue glow that comes from our phones, tablets, and televisions, which impacts our system so profoundly that it even disturbs our sleep. Beyond that, these screens make us agitated about things that we can do little about and could probably quite easily ignore. The programmes on our TVs and apps on our phones are also intentionally designed to seize our attention, to distract us from anything that might encourage us to tune away from the channel, or close the app.
By possessing our attention these screens crowd out the space we might have to think, or just to allow our minds to slow down. I am as guilty of being distracted by all this as anyone; I am constantly flipping between tabs as I try to write my sermons.
None of this technology ever seems to make us better. We live in a society surrounded by all sorts of light we have generated ourselves. But our souls are as dark as they ever have been. In fact all this artificial light just seems to make that spiritual darkness more visible. We parade our anger and intolerance on social media apps and radio phone in shows.
“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.” The people who wrote that famous phrase saw the glories of the night sky as few of us today ever have. They wrote the lines of verse in our first reading long before streetlights, in fact around 2,700 years ago, closer in time to the builders of Stonehenge and Avebury than they are to us. Perhaps their extraordinary gifts of poetry and visionary writing came from all the space and time they had simply to sit under the stars and contemplate. Their small country loved the tales of their great kings like David and Solomon who had ruled a few centuries before, during their golden age. But in the time our lines were written, the international situation was becoming darker the great powers more aggressive, and they knew they weren’t half the people their ancestors had been.
Their wisest and holiest men dreamed visions of a new king who would come, a child who would be even greater than the mightiest from their glory days, who would build a realm of peace, justice, and growing power.
Yet later on the times only got worse, bringing military defeat, foreign occupation, even ethnic cleansing. For more than seven centuries people would look back at this magnificent poem and long for the king it foretold. Then a wandering preacher called Jesus emerged, born in terrible poverty in strange circumstances, and proclaimed a new sort of kingdom. Instead of being built on power and fear, this one would be built on love.Jesus would be put to death as a troublemaker by the authorities, although He had committed no crime, but then a strange series of appearances led His followers to understand that Jesus had done the impossible—He had risen from the dead. Then His followers looked back on this ancient prophetic poem and realised it had been talking about Jesus all along.
Jesus came not just to bring light, but was Himself the light, the true light that could not be overcome or even understood by the darkness.
I am conscious that I preach here tonight at a time when the Church of England is in crisis. The darkest parts of what it has been are now exposed to public gaze. I’m not sure I was much surprised at anything that has emerged in recent months. For my entire adult life, I’ve been involved in various worthy, do-gooding, institutions, both religious and secular, and the truth is that they all have some shady characters. Churches are not made up of people who are better than any others and clergy are not particularly better people either. Any Christian and especially any clergyperson who tries to tell you otherwise is someone you should be wary of—at best someone lacking self-awareness and at worst something darker.
The Church isn’t unique, however. All our institutions seem to be in crisis, often because of safeguarding issues. The tragic case of Sara Sharif showed social services, police, and the courts not only often to be incompetent, but also hiding the identities of those whose errors led to this little girl’s murder.
All institutions have power, and that often attracts people with bad intentions; all institutions simply make mistakes sometimes too. But we still need institutions, religious and secular—without them, we are just a mass of individuals, where the strong dominate the weak. Another awkward truth is that there is darkness in all of us: all of us have moments when it is only by the Grace of God and not by any strength of our own that it does not overwhelm us. None of this is new, and it has frightened people for as long as any of their writings have survived.
Today, we are so frightened of the randomness of life that we develop ever more technological power, which we’re already struggling to use safety. The screens that promise to bring us together seem to have driven us apart in all the ways that count. No matter how much power we give to the state to intrude on what we can think and say, terrible evils still happen. Beyond the localised horrors of crime, the world feels an edgy place at present with drones and Artificial Intelligence reshaping the nature of war in ways we don’t really understand until after they’ve happened.
Where does hope lie in this often dark world? Well, the world has always had darkness, and hope lies where it always has done—in the light that shines in the darkness. In the tiny baby, born in terrible poverty, in a place of no importance, who was nevertheless a king—a king who proclaimed a kingdom not of this world, a kingdom with no armies and no territory but which exists wherever love and humility exist, and crumbles when people try to play power games with it.
More than that, this king was actually God made human, the Word who was already together with the Father before time began.
The true light came into the world as the Babe of Bethlehem, tiny and vulnerable, and still shines brightly enough to be seen even in this world of darkness made visible: if we follow the Light, it will lead us to being fully human, as His heavenly Father and ours made us to be.
And now to our wonderful counsellor, mighty God, everlasting Father, to Jesus Christ the Prince of Peace, and to the Holy Spirit who overshadowed Mary, be glory in the highest, until the end of all ages. Amen.
