Let There Be Light January 8, 2012 The Baptism of Our Lord, Year B Genesis 1.1-5

            In his famous essay “Meditation in a Toolshed,” C. S. Lewis describes the difference between standing in the dark looking “at” a shaft of sunlight, and stepping into it looking “along” the same beam to the sun beyond. Lewis likens this experience to two ways of knowing: standing outside a thing and analyzing it, and stepping into the same thing and experiencing it.

            Modernity, Lewis charges, assigns “reality” to the exterior view and dismisses the interior vision as fantasy. “But,” he cautions, “it is perfectly easy to go on all your life giving explanations of religion, love, morality, honour, and the like, without having been inside any of them. And if you do that, you are simply playing with counters.”

            “Then God said, ‘Let there be light.’”

            The first recorded words of the Almighty bring forth a blaze that bathes the chaotic creation in brightness. Light is not here to look at, but to look by – and all light ultimately shows its source, the light-giver God.

            Many millennia after Eden’s illumination, after speckled centuries of the chiaroscuro of God’s goodness checkered by humanity’s sin, Our Lord waded waist-deep into Jordan to plunge into the symbolic darkness of the death that would literally swallow him on Calvary. As Jesus rises spluttering to the surface, Mark’s Gospel describes the sky-splitting descent of the dove: the Heavens “opening,” like a shrunken patch ripping a thread-bare shirt (Lk 5.36), like a record catch of fish shredding an over-burdened net (21.11), like the grace of God tearing apart every boundary that righteousness has woven between a loving Lord and fallen creatures (Mk 15.38).

            Some looked at the light that day, and saw the scandalous particularity of a soaking-wet peasant, one more convert to some radical religious revivalist. But the Baptizer stepped inside the beam; he looked along the light and saw the source and knew that his Lord had come.

            Some watch baptism and see a religious ritual that they can take or leave. Some get wet and see a solidarity with their Savior. “Let there be light” – and there was, and there is. But are we looking at, or looking along?

Come In, The Water’s Fine!

Doug