I preached this sermon on Sunday, December 11 at St. Lydia's as part of our exploration of the Gospel of John. The text is John 1:3b-4; read it here.
As a small child growing up in a small town, I spent a lot of time at our public library. Russell Library, it was called. I have a vivid memory of statue that stood out in front: is was a metal arch with steps, painted like a rainbow, placed there for children to clamber up and down.
The library had an extensive children’s section with a carpeted floor for story time, and colorful displays with the latest chapter books. It also had a very small viewing room, located up a set of stairs, where, every once in a while, a film was shown.
One Sunday afternoon, my mother took me to see “The Wizard of Oz.” I must have been five or six at the time -- it would be about a year until my family purchased a VCR. So looking back on it, I don’ think I had even seen a movie in black and white. As a child of the ’80’s, I had only watched movies in the theatre and on TV, and all of them were in color.
I was so surprised by the lack of color on the screen! What a drab, drear world Dorothy lived in -- all shades of sepia, as if it had been washed and hung out to dry again and again, faded from use.
And then came the moment when, after being shaken and rattled by the winds of a tornado that carried her a long way from home, Dorothy opens the door of her muted gray house, and finds a world that is busting with color, vibrant and florid with a yellow road and red poppies and a blue checkered dress.
She had found a land over the rainbow.
While Dorothy moved from black-and-white to color,
With Christ, we move from darkness to light.
For the writer of the fourth gospel, our lives are as veritably altered by Christ’s advent as Dorothy’s is when she walks out her front door into a world of technicolor.
Jesus brings light to a world that has only known darkness.
He brings life to a world that has only know death.
He is poppy red and brick yellow and checkered blue
to those who have known nothing but muted shades of sepia.
As we move through John’s gospel, we’ll discover the layers that slowly accrue on these two words: “light,” and “life.” Character after character in this gospel stumble into Jesus’ technicolor world, yet are too stunned and bewildered to accept what they see. If you live your life in black and white, you have no vocabulary for colors. No word for “aquamarine” or “magenta.” And so the man born blind sees the truth of who Jesus is, while the Pharisees simply can not accept it. They have never seen the color yellow before, and so they simply go on believing that the brick road in front of them is grey.
What Jesus brings to the world is something that we have never seen before.
If we thought that we were living, we were wrong.
Our lives were but a dim shadow of the true life that he offers,
The light we once perceived is diluted and indirect in comparison to his light.
Scholar Sandra M. Schneiders writes that, for John, it is our disbelief that keeps us from accepting this new, kaleidoscopic reality that Jesus opens before us. She writes, “Belief is a fundamental openness of heart, the basic readiness to see and hear what is really there, the fidelity to one’s experience no matter how frightening or costly it appears to be, the devotion to being that refuses to tamper with reality in order to preserve the situation with which one is familiar.”
Unlike Dorothy, an encounter with Christ does not allow for a return to the black-and-white place we once knew to be home. Once our eyes are opened to the prism in front of us, we are never able to go back again to the limited spectrum we used to accept as reality.
Everything is different now.
For John, there’s no half way.
We cannot click our heels three times
and go back to the place where it all began.
The gospel is fundamentally disruptive.
It tears our house from its foundation,
turning us every which way
as we careen through the sky,
and drops us with a thud
in a place is vibrant and new.
Filled with light and life.
Advent is a season of expectation:
The true light is coming into the the world.
It is a light that blinds and disorients us,
as we step squinting into a strange new world
in technicolor.
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