HOME Mission History Worship Sermons Photos Contacts Directions Links

Jesus Christ: The Darkness Does Not Overcome Him

John 1:1-18

January 2, 2005

The Word Became Flesh

John 1

¹In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ²He was in the beginning with God. ³All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being ⁴in him was life,^£ and the life was the light of all people. ⁵The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

⁶There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. ⁷He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. ⁸He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. ⁹The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.^£

¹⁰He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. ¹¹He came to what was his own,^£ and his own people did not accept him. ¹²But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, ¹³who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

¹⁴And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son,^£ full of grace and truth. ¹⁵(John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’”) ¹⁶From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. ¹⁷The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. ¹⁸No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son,^£ who is close to the Father’s heart,^£ who has made him known.

What has come into being ⁴in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. ⁵The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

The Darkness of this world cannot be denied can it?

Thousands of Americans were caught in the Asian tsunami devastation, and many have been recounting their ordeals in interviews and in e-mails home this week. Fourteen Americans died in the disaster, and the number is sure to rise as authorities get a clearer picture of the devastation.

For Patrick Green, the terrifying wave came in a trickle.

He and friend Becky Johnson were on a hotel elevator, on their way to the beach, where they planned to get one last hour of Thai sun before heading to the airport.

Outside, a tsunami had crushed the shore, but in the elevator, the only sign that something was wrong came when the lights flickered and water began seeping through the doors ever so slowly. His confused mind raced to find an explanation as "inhuman, indescribable" screams pierced the walls from outside.

His answer came when the elevator thrust downward and the doors burst open, revealing a raging river through the Phuket hotel. Dirty water, waist-deep and rising, gushed into the elevator. He and Johnson swam to a door. Outside, people, cars, tables and trees floated by.[1]

Another woman, a mother of two, had to choose between her children when she made a life-or-death decision.

Swept up by mountainous tsunami waves at a Thai resort, she could not hold on to both her young sons and survive.

Fighting to stay above the surging waters, she had to choose which one would have to take his chances in the swirling, debris-strewn torrent.

"I knew I had to let go of one of them and I just thought I'd better let go of the one that's the oldest," said Jillian Searle, from the Western Australian city of Perth.

Searle said she was near the hotel pool with her sons Lachie, 5, and two-year-old Blake when the waves struck.

"A lady grabbed hold of him for a moment but she had to let him go because she was going under," she said referring to five year old, whom she finally decided to release.

"And I was screaming, trying to find him, and we thought he was dead."[2]

Friday morning, more than 2,000 displaced residents of the Sri Lankan village of Karaitivu had returned from inland camps to a refuge in a school in their home village. But with only two toilets and diarrhoea starting to spread, their situation was bleak.

A local doctor who was assisting the aid effort at the camp, described the predicament facing the mourning, homeless and hungry inhabitants. "We have many sanitation problems here and obviously need medicine, shelter and clothes, but the main problem is psychological. People are in trauma and are shocked. Almost everyone has lost lots of relatives."

Mrs Thangapon, a frail 65-year-old, unable to stand as she was overcome with grief, described how she had lost her daughter and was left with five grandchildren under the age of 10. "There's no home for us and these children have no mother to look after them," she cried.

Selvarajah Perinparajah, 47, stepped forward to recount how his wife and two children - a one-year-old girl and a four-old-boy - had been swept away as their home collapsed. "I was not at home as I had gone to work inland," he said.[3]

Many British newspapers featured the story of one woman, a mother of four, who had just got out of her family's rental car to buy suntan lotion at a supermarket when the tsunami hit. It swept the car carrying her husband and the four children inland; they survived.  The poor woman did not.[4]

The darkness of this world can be profound and depressing and overwhelming, and yet, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

You see we can’t prevent the darkness.  We can’t wipe it out completely and forever, to be banished out of the experience of all creation forevermore.  Darkness will always be with us.  As sure as in the winter months here in New England, the clouds and the cold and the bitter weather cannot be avoided.  As sure as darkness comes and the sun disappears for a time in each daily cycle.  Darkness is as much a part of this life as any other thing within it.  What can we do?  How do we live and survive?

In his book The Power of the Powerless (New York: Doubleday, 1988), Christopher de Vinck tells a simple story:

"One spring afternoon my five-year-old son, David, and I were planting raspberry bushes along the side of the garage .... A neighbor joined us for a few moments .... David pointed to the ground .... 'Look, Daddy! What's that?'

"I stopped talking with my neighbor and look down. 'A beetle,' I said.

"David was impressed and pleased with the discovery of this fancy, colorful creature. My neighbor lifted his foot and stepped on the insect, giving his shoe an extra twist in the dirt. 'That ought to do it,' he laughed.

"David looked up at me, waiting for an explanation, a reason .... That night, just before I turned off the light in his bedroom, David whispered, 'I liked that beetle, Daddy.'

"'I did too,' I whispered back."

--As quoted by Marilyn W. Spry,

"Giving Birth to Compassion," Bread Afresh, Wine Anew:

Sermons by Disciples Women,

ed. Joan Campbell and David Polk

(St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 1991), 124.

When darkness comes, all we can do is to come into touch with our own horror, our own pain, our own sadness and our own dismay at the depth  and power and ugliness of that darkness and express what we feel about it.  We can not ignore it, hold it and trap it deep inside in an effort to control it.  We cannot train ourselves to disregard our revulsion or pain at the darkness, and to forge on bleakly and without feeling or anger or fear or sorrow.  In the face of the darkness we must speak our mind and speak to whatever has been our experience and speak to whatever is our hope and our reason for resilience.

For even in the darkness, there is hope, for “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

For even in the darkness, there are those who testify to something that transforms their darkness and is not overcome by it. 

⁶There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. ⁷He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. ⁸He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. ⁹The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.^£

You see like John the Baptist, who himself was overcome by darkness, who himself was arrested by the corrupt powers of his day and who was beheaded by that hateful authority, as long as he had breath to speak, as long as he had an opportunity to do so, testified to the light, to the hope that he had.  For all is not darkness, and all is not desperate, dismal, harsh and without hope.

Remember that mother who was engulfed with her two young boys in her arms and had to make a decision as to which one to save?  She chose to hold on to the 2 year old and watched as the 5 year old was swept away,

He was was found alive about two hours later clinging to a door and, though traumatised by his ordeal, otherwise uninjured..

As she spoke to reporters, she was accompanied by the two boys and their father who had watched the drama safely from their hotel room, safely above the torrent. [5]

Remember that couple that came out of their hotel elevator to be snatched away by a river of water and debris?

They kept swimming and found the structure that would save them: a jungle gym in a nearby play area. They pulled a few other people aboard it, including a woman who clung furiously to her baby as she looked for her 5-year-old boy; they were later reunited.

Despite that this earthquake and the ensuing tsunamis that ravaged 3,000 miles of African and Asian coastline last Sunday have claimed more than 150,000 lives, these two tourists can thank the jungle gym and a palm-leaf roof for saving them.

As they shouted prayers amid the flooding, a thatched roof blown off a small building lodged against the jungle gym, helping shelter them from the last and biggest wave -- one that swelled 10 feet over their heads.

"It was freaky that the thing protected us. We miraculously didn't get hit."[6]

Another man survived for two days in the jungle, despite being unable to walk. He lived on coconuts and sweet potatoes and drank coconut water. Aboriginal inhabitants of the island showed him and his fellow Indian police officers how to live off the fruits of the jungle.

As survivors are rescued from India's most remote islands, extraordinary stories are beginning to emerge of how they clung to life on islands where all traces of modern civilisation had been wiped out by the tsunami.

Constable Paul was one of six Indian police officers serving a three-month tour of duty on the island of Chowra, which was home to about 1,500 people. More than 900 were still missing earlier this week.

"When the wave hit, the wall of the building I was in collapsed on me," constable Constable Paul. "The wave went 3km in to the jungle from the coast, but when it drew out to sea the force lifted the wall back off me. As I was dragged out to sea I grabbed hold of a tree and it saved me."

Constable Paul was badly injured, his hip smashed and his face and body grazed raw. Fellow officers got him into the jungle but they had no link to the outside world. "I didn't even have any clothes," Constable Paul said. "My clothes were dragged off me by the sea."

The officers had no idea how to survive in the jungle, but locals helped. "They have these sweet potatoes that grow naturally in the jungle. I had never eaten them before, but the tribal people showed us how to get them. You eat them raw."

Finally, two days later, Constable Paul was evacuated by helicopter to Port Blair, the capital of the Andamans, where he is being treated in hospital.[7]

The most remarkable story light not being overcome by darkness is the story of a Sri Lankan Christian missionary who saved his entire flock.  Two hundred yards away from the beach, in the orphanage he had built, Dayalan Sanders lounged in his bed early Sunday morning. He was thinking, he said, about the sermon he was scheduled to deliver in the chapel in half an hour. A few yards away, most of the 28 children under his care were still in their rooms, getting ready for worship.

Then he heard the pounding of feet in the corridor outside his room, and his wife burst through the door, a frantic look on her face.

"The sea is coming!" she said. "Come! Come! Look at the sea!"

Thanks to quick thinking, blind luck and an outboard motor that somehow started on the first pull, the orphans and their caretakers joined the ranks of survivors of the epic earthquake and tsunamis.

Sanders, is a Sri Lankan-born missionary and U.S. citizen whose mother and siblings live in Gaithersburg, Md.  A member of the country's Tamil ethnic minority, the fifty-year old Sanders, once studied to be an accountant before founding a missionary group and moving to Switzerland in the 1980s. In 1994, Sanders founded the Samaritan Children's Home in Navalady, a small fishing village that occupies a narrow peninsula in Sri Lanka. He built the orphanage with donations and money from the sale of his Maryland townhouse.

On Sunday morning, Sanders said, he rose at his customary hour of 4 a.m. to wander the grounds and pray, then went back to bed. He woke up again around 7:30. He recalled the stillness. Not a breath of air stirred the surface of the sea. Small waves rolled listlessly onto the beach, then retreated with a gentle hiss.

It isn't clear who saw the wave first. His wife, Kohila, said she was alerted by one of the orphans, a girl who burst into the kitchen as Kohila was mixing powdered milk for her 3-year-old daughter. Kohila ran into the brilliant sunshine and saw the building sea.

Sanders ran outside and looked toward the ocean. There on the horizon, he said, was a "30-foot wall of water."

With barely any time to think, let alone act, he ran toward the lagoon side of the compound, where the launch with its outboard motor chafed at a pier. By then, many of the children had heard the commotion and had also run outside.

A moment later one of the older girls thrust his toddler into his arms. Sanders heaved her into the boat, along with the other small children, as the older ones, joined by his wife and the orphanage staff, clambered aboard. One of his employees yanked on the starter cord and the engine sputtered instantly to life — something that Sanders swears had never happened before.

Crammed with more than 30 people, the dangerously overloaded launch roared into the lagoon at almost precisely the same moment, Sanders said, that the wall of water overwhelmed the orphanage, swamping its single-story buildings to the rafters.

Eventually the boat made it to the opposite shore, about 1 1/2 miles away in Batticaloa. The Sanders, their daughter and perhaps a dozen of the orphaned and now displaced children have found temporary refuge in a tiny church; the rest have been sent elsewhere.

The scene at the orphanage was one of utter devastation. Several buildings were wiped away, and the others were damaged beyond repair.

Surveying the wreckage, Sanders broke down and cried. "Twenty years of my life put in here, and I saw it all disappear in 20 seconds." The orphanage had no insurance.

But Sanders also was philosophical about his loss. "If there was anyone who should have got swept away by this tidal wave, it should have been us," he said. "We were eyeball to eyeball with the wave."[8]

The stories of the darkness will not overwhelm the light.  Jesus who is the light, who was present in the beginning as this awesome, glorious and yet unpredictable, and even terribly dangerous creation was formed, is moved and motivated and mobilized by the stories of individuals overcome by darkness, yet he is not overcome himself.  ³All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being ⁴in him was life. 

And we, like each of these who have faced horrible death and destruction, who have been “eyeball to eyeball” with the darkness are called to testify to our own experience against the darkness, to testify to our own hope for light in the darkness, to live as if we have a choice.

IN the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy, we hear these words,

¹⁹I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, ²⁰loving the LORD your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days.[9]

My prayer for each of us here today is that we too can withstand and not be over come by the darkness of this world, but that we would choose life, choose  the Life and find ways to overcome the darkness itself and bring glittering, shining glimpses of that heavenly light into the world we inhabit.

Jesus himself instructed how this happens, how light overcomes darkness, how we can participate in that struggle for Godliness over suffering and pain, hatred and desperation.  As we begin this new year together with communion, let us remember that teaching of Jesus himself who instructed us all for the struggle over darkness,

‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ ³⁸This is the greatest and first commandment. ³⁹And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ ⁴⁰On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”[10] 

If we are to prevent darkness to overcome us, we too must live with the illumination provided to us by the one true light that shines in the darkness, by the one who created this universe good in the first place, by the one who teaches: love the Lord your God and love your neighbor.  That is have faith and reach out in compassion with the power of that faith.  As we come to communion on this first Sunday of the New Year and yet are bound as we leave here to be met with the darkness of this world, I pray the illumination of these truth will become true light to our darkness and give us hope and courage and will to survive and thrive on our own.

Amen.

Children’s Sermon

This Little Light of Mine
a children's sermon based on Epiphany
by Rev. Frank Schaefer

Object:  a battery operated electric candle.

Tell about the meaning of Epiphany as God's Light coming into the darkened world.  Turn on the electric candle and ask the children what light is useful for (vision, beacon, warmth--let them feel the heat of the bulb).

Tell them that "God's Light" is a picture word (metaphor) for a person who came into the world and whether they know who it is.  Ask them why they think Jesus is called God's Light (he made blind to see, he helped us understand God in a new light, he saved us from sin...).

God's Light is still in the world today, shining in the form of the church of Christ.  We are the church, you and I are God's little lights and we are called to shine in the darkness around us--to make this world a better place.   Examples?

If your children know the song "This Little Light of Mine"  this is a great time to sing it with them to close the children's time in worship (you may want to use the hand-motions too).