Ephesians 5:8-14
March 22 MMXX
I.
It is interesting that the apostle Paul talks here about the members of the gospel community as light. It echoes Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount to his disciples: “You are the light of the world.” So what does it mean to be light?
I once heard a physicist say that when something becomes light it immediately expands to fill the whole universe. It makes sense. I mean, the light of a star does traverse the eons of space in all directions; the star itself doesn’t, of course, but its light does. There is a sense, then, that being light is to be radically expansive and inclusive, it is to reach everywhere and illumine, which is to say reveal the true nature of, everything.
To be darkness would therefore be the opposite. It would mean collapsing and shrinking into yourself like a black hole from which nothing escapes, nothing gets expressed or communicated, not even light, to use another analogy from astrophysics. It would be to hoard, store up, and keep what you have, not to share or give or contribute, but to implode into a sour, consuming greed, sitting on your precious treasure like that dragon, Smaug, in The Hobbit, sleeping in his dark cave.
The main thing that distinguished light from darkness is what Paul calls fruitfulness. Jesus talks about “bearing fruit” as providing benefits to all. There is this wide, universal beneficence we receive from something that bears fruit, as distinct from the useless character of something that doesn’t. That’s the difference between the weeds and the wheat in one of Jesus’ parables. Weeds suck up the resources of the soil and don’t provide anything that benefits the whole community, except I suppose as compost. But wheat gives grain that gets processed into bread to feed people.
When Jesus curses a fig tree on the way up to Jerusalem because it wasn’t bearing fruit, he intends the fig tree to serve as a metaphor for the fruitless institutional establishment religion of his time. He is frustrated with it because it wasn’t producing anything good for people. It was, in effect, darkness, and darkness is unfruitful, it sucks all the light out of the room, it keeps whatever energy it has for itself alone. It gives nothing.
Bearing fruit also applies to our actions, whether we are doing something purely for our own benefit or something that feeds, heals, enlivens, or delights everyone.
Fruit bearing is light in the sense that it conveys energy outwards as a kind of gift; it makes like better, it inspires joy and gratitude, it reveals the truth of God’s amazing abundance and generosity.
II.
I think we are seeing some “unfruitful works of darkness” in our current crisis, this pandemic. The maniacal and bizarre run on toilet paper being one example of a selfish panic-buying of staples, cleaning out store shelves, getting ours while leaving nothing for others, and not caring. Or even worse is the disgraceful spectacle of politicians using their insider information to sell off their stock portfolios a couple of weeks ago, before the markets tanked, turning a nice hefty profit for themselves. And this is made even more disgusting by their simultaneous hypocritical rhetoric downplaying the pandemic! Such breathtakingly careless selfishness is what it means to be darkness. Paul says such things that people do often secretly are “shameful even to mention.”
And the fact that these folks apparently see nothing wrong in their actions indicates that they are only following the basic values and practices of our whole culture and economy, which are quite explicitly rooted in the darkness of selfishness and consumption. As the whole machine now grinds to a halt due to the pandemic, some of its inherent corruption is being exposed.
In the next few days we will see whether the darkness only deepens in a trillion-dollar government stimulus/bailout that benefits only a few of the already rich, or whether the ordinary people whose lives have been disrupted, often catastrophically, will get enough relief.
The apostle urges the church to call out and separate from the “unfruitful works of darkness,” attitudes and practices that do not benefit the whole community, especially the most vulnerable. For one thing, we cannot let this crisis devolve into an excuse for racism, bigotry, or xenophobia. To keep framing this is as “Chinese” or “foreign,” as if that somehow mattered, is to be darkness. It is to fall into self-serving scapegoating and blaming which only divides us.
Neither can we attempt to profit personally from this disaster. Such self-centered greed is another example of darkness. Such activity needs to be exposed, in Paul’s view, and the way to expose it is by bringing it into the light.
And it is the job and calling of the followers of Jesus to be the light. They witness to Jesus by serving as the opposite of black holes of consumption and hoarding. They shine like bright fountains, giving, sharing, spreading, offering, and emptying themselves, bringing good things to the community. They are about following the example of Jesus Christ, who empties himself out of love for the life of the world, pouring the love of God into our hearts by the Spirit. When Christ shines on his followers, they don’t just reflect his light, they express and become his light.
Last week I read this article talking about how the moon does not simply reflect sunlight like an inert, inanimate object, as is usually thought. Light photons don’t just “bounce” off the moon, but their character is to interact with the substance of the moon in such a way that what we see as moonlight is actually new light generated by the moon. I do not pretend to understand the physics of this either, however it makes my point that we do not just reflect God’s light, we become it, we participate in it, we change with it as it interacts with us, and then we express it.
III.
The light of the Creator shines on us in Jesus Christ. And it is up to us to translate that light into mission and ministry, into acts of kindness and grace, acts of generosity and goodness, sharing and giving, welcoming and healing, in our specific time and place. That is going to take some creativity and imagination in this crisis in which physical proximity and contact are potentially dangerous.
Paul tells the church to “try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord.” The word for “find out” here means active research, experimentation, and attentiveness, both to the Word and Jesus’ teachings, and to what is going on around us. It means seeking out and locating the people in the deepest need. It means finding the ones who are not getting help, or worse who are being victimized by the system or other people. It means consciously becoming aware of our own gifts and resources, things we can do. The point is looking for ways of being a shining example and expression of love to others in a dangerous and confusing time.
We do need to celebrate, pray for, defend, and support all the many people who are endangering themselves to help people: the doctors and nurses, the EMTs and orderlies, even the people who are sewing surgical masks at home to try and deal with the shortage. They are the light in this story, connecting and healing, giving for others.
And we can reach out to people in different ways. Even just checking on people with a phone call is to be light. We can get food to the food banks, or even directly to neighbors we know are in need. We can order take-out from restaurants. We can wash our hands and staying out of public interactions. We can do what we can to keep in contact with each other.
“Everything that becomes visible is light,” says Paul, meaning perhaps that light is participatory and that it is our fruitfulness in terms of our service and compassion that will make us visible to the larger community in new ways.
He is probably quoting an early, ancient baptismal liturgy when he says: “Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” These words were likely proclaimed to the person being baptized, just as they came up out of the water. They signify the understanding that baptism is a passage from death to life, carrying us from an egocentric existence of sleep-walking in darkness, only concerned about ourselves and ours, only caring about what we can get and keep, into the light of God’s love in Jesus Christ, showing us the truth of a creation full of goodness and blessing.
IV.
Here we finally find the connection with that long passage we read from the gospel, about the man born blind who washes in the Pool of Siloam at Jesus’ command and returns able to see. He represents all of us who were once darkness but who are now light, walking freely in the Way of Jesus.
Let’s make sure we are light: exposing the bad and unfruitful, driving away the darkness of selfishness, greed, bigotry, and division, and revealing and doing the good which is bringing benefits to all. Jesus says that as long as he is in the world he is the light of the world. He is in the world in and as us, his followers, the ones he commissions to be the light of the world in his name.
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