The Light We Never Noticed
5:45pm, Sunday 6th November
Lamentations 3.17-26, 31-33
John 6.37-40
In the Church’s year, we are in the midst of a season of remembering – the time of All Saints and All Souls and Remembrance Sunday. It is a time when our consciousness is enlarged, when we are sensitised to glimpses of a world beyond our present reality. And it is a time which coincides with the fading light of late autumn.
It always comes as a bit of a surprise, doesn’t it, how quickly that light draws in once the clocks go back. We seem to be racing towards the shortest day, through dark mornings, evocative dusks and early blackness.
This darkness finds its echo in our first reading: ‘My soul is bereft of peace,’ says the writer of Lamentations; ‘I have forgotten what happiness is.’ It is part of our humanity. There is no getting round the pain of grief, the darkness of that night. Countless people have known it before us, and all of us gathered here have known it and know it still.
Thanks to the gunpowder plotters, into the blackness of our November nights blasts the light of a thousand fireworks. Other cultures have them too, of course, and if it hadn’t been for Guy Fawkes, we’d probably have found another reason to have them. They make our darkness bright. They lift our spirits, and make us gasp with wonder.
And of course, faith can be like this, too. We can know the sudden breaking in of God to our lives in amazing ways. We can have our whole view of the world turned upside down by experiencing his power.
But more often than not, it’s not like this. Joy doesn’t just blast through our grief. Faith is not like fireworks.
But that doesn’t mean that we are simply left with our darkness.
‘My soul…is bowed down within me,’ we hear in our reading, ‘But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope. The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.’
This is no quick-fix, spectacular, spirit lifting firework. Instead, it is the result of little glimpses of light. The little glimpses that you catch unawares, like starlight, or a shaft of sun across water, or the dappled pale yellow of a winter dawn. It doesn’t happen immediately, but it comes unbidden if we wait. Because God, whose love is our light, will always wait for us.
God’s light is shown to us in Jesus, his Son. He knew what it was to be bereft of peace as he walked the way of the cross. He knew what it was to be plunged into darkness as he died for us. It is only through this pain and darkness that the Light comes into the world, and with it the hope through which we know that darkness never has the last word.
It is through Jesus that we come to know love and life again, even in and through sorrow. In a quiet, often unspectacular way, His light surrounds us all the time, even when the world feels very dark. The priest and poet, Malcolm Guite, speaks of this as ‘the light we never noticed [falling] into our lives’.
We will never see its fullness in this life, but all these unremarked beams, which shine around us and reflect and shimmer in our earthly lives, are gathered up when we die, so that as Jesus says, he will lose nothing – all will be raised up on the last day.
So as we remember those who are so dear to us, let us also trust in God’s grace to touch and comfort us, to turn us towards the light, to draw us to himself, so that we might know the love of Jesus with us now, and in the years to come. In his name. Amen.