ICYMI (In case you missed it) - Here's the transcript from 4th Grader Marshall Talton-Buck's sermon yesterday for Children's Sabbath! I am so, so proud of each of the children who led us in a very special morning worshipping God and celebrating the gifts of all of our church family! If you want to watch/listen to the amazing kids preaching, praying, singing, playing piano, wiggling & giggling, click here. (And shameless challenge to share the video link or your favorite Children' Sabbath & Scout Sunday photos on social media to celebrate all these children and our congregation is doing to shine the light of Jesus like Marshall encourages us below!)
Grace & Peace,
Rev. Susan
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“When you think about light, what do you think of first? Maybe the glow in your room at night from a lamp or night light so that it isn’t completely dark, or electricity or maybe even a car’s headlight. Or of course the sun and the stars.
Back in the Bible times, houses were small and lamps were SUPER important; because of course there was no electricity. These were not lamps you plugged into the wall, no but more like oil candles. People needed a lamp to get from one room to another. They would put them high like on a stand so that the whole room would benefit. One small lamp like this could light up a dark room. Sorta like these days if somebody turns on a cell phone in a dark room! Now let’s go a little deeper. What can light provide? What does it do for us? It can show a path or fill a room. It can make things less scary at night. It provides a way in the dark – like Jesus. After all, this is a sermon and you know the answer at church is always Jesus!
When Jesus told us we are the light of the world, He was giving us a picture of who we are supposed to be. The light is your sweet spot. Where you are smart; it is yours and only yours. It makes you unique - it is your light to share with others.
Maybe your light is the gift of encouragement or a talent like music or writing. We all have different gifts and talents - ways to share our unique light of who God made us to be with the world. And of course, you don’t even have to be talented to share love and kindness - to choose to do the right thing and stand up for justice and equality – that’s shining God’s light in ways that everybody can. Other religions and even science fiction agree that we all have this special light…it reminded me of Harry Potter where each Patronus takes the form of a different animal that has a special link with the caster. The Patronus is ‘a kind of Anti-Dementor – a guardian which acts as a shield between you and the Dementor.’ It’s also ‘a kind of positive force, a projection of the very things that the Dementor feeds upon – hope, happiness, the desire to survive – but the Petronus cannot feel despair, as real humans can, so the Dementors can’t hurt it.’. So basically, when we are shining our light, the darkness cannot win. As the Bible says in the Gospel of John, Light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it!
The lights you thought of earlier; like the light switches in our houses, we can turn those off and on as we wish. And sometimes our grownups remind us over and over again to turn them off so we don’t waste electricity. But for sharing the METAPHORICAL LIGHT, when we are less of ourselves or we change who we are because we are scared, we are turning our light off. Jesus asks us not to put it under a bushel, Jesus is telling us not to extinguish our light. We should not hide it. We must put it up high so the light can fill the whole room. When someone you see needs help, your light can do that. If you see someone alone at the playground or at work for the adults in the room, and we don’t use our light to be a friend and ignore them, we are turning off our light. We are turning off and away from what we know Jesus would do.
Sadly, in times of war, a defense strategy is a blackout. As the name suggests, blackouts require businesses and residents to turn off ALL lights that would enable enemy aircraft to identify population centers or specific targets by sight. There could be no lit street lights or neon signs, no flashlights or car headlights. Drapes or blankets covered all the windows. Some of our grandparents lived through blackouts during World War II and sadly some kids still live through this in Ukraine and other places around the world right now. It’s hard to imagine complete darkness…the closest most of us get is going camping in the woods but even then we have the moon & stars and flashlights. I’ve never been spelunking in a cave, but Rev. Susan tells me that a famous preacher named Barbara Brown Taylor writes about the total darkness of caves in her book “Learning to Walk in the Dark.” But I’ll leave her teachings about light and darkness to another day - afterall, I’m just a kid! MY point is, even one TINY light, especially in the complete darkness like during a blackout or in a deep, dark cave, or a word of hope when everything else seems hopeless, or an act of kindness when everyone else is being mean, really can make a huge difference. Light can LITERALLY mean life or death.
I think that’s why Jesus was reminding the disciples that “a city on a hill cannot be hidden,” and “neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl.” In studying for this sermon I learned that the city Jesus was talking about could have been Jerusalem, which sits on top of Mount Zion, since in Israel Jerusalem as the holy city was considered light to the world. BUT since Jesus was actually in a region called Galilee during this teaching, he may have been talking about a local city, because he often used images from his surroundings to illustrate his teaching. In either case, it is impossible to hide a city located on a hill and that’s the main point!
In the book Lightship by Brian Floca, there is a ship - a boat - that never moves. The boat does not sail from port to port. It cannot carry passengers or mail or packages. The Lightship holds to one sure spot. As other ships sail by, It waits. It is a ship in the water but the ship is more like a lighthouse on the land. When the fog and the darkness rolls in, it shines its light so bright it reaches all around far and wide. Then other ships sail safely, because the lightship marks the way through fog and night, past rocks and shoals, past reefs and wrecks, past danger. Other ships sail home safely because the light ship holds its place. And of course, you can probably guess where I’m going with this, as Christians, we look to Jesus as our Lightship. We might travel around the world literally and figuratively, we might turn our own lights off and on - again, literally and figuratively, but we know that Jesus Christ - the light of the world - is always in one place - with us. We can find him here at church every Sunday or in nature at a beautiful waterfall or the ocean. We will definitely find Him as we go to help others who are suffering - at food pantries and homeless shelters and the airport traveling with asylum seekers. He goes to my school and the schools of all my friends here. He goes to your work and he lives at each of our houses - no matter what our homes or families look like.
My family always goes to Savannah for Christmas. At my grandparent’s church they end the Christmas Eve service with one by one lighting each others’ candles. I hear Glenn does that on Christmas Eve as well, and probably at a lot of other churches, but I’ve just always been in Savannah at my grandparents! What starts as just one light - the Christ Candle from the Advent wreath - is then lit from the altar and becomes a whole room full of Jesus’s light. It becomes a beacon, a light ship to show others the way. And of course in real life we have to help each other - especially kids - because Rev. Susan shared some crazy stories of people catching their hair on fire while singing Silent Night! So that’s probably a good reminder that we should always be helping each other to shine our lights. And while it’s always special on Christmas Eve to see those candles fill up a sanctuary, now we are here on a sunny February morning for Children’s Sabbath and we want to remind you that the light you carry for Christ is not only shining in that wax-dripping candle you toss back into the bin as you leave church on Christmas Eve. The light is within you every single day - God put it there when you were born and God helps keep your light shining even on days you feel surrounded by darkness - it is your sweet spot. Where you are smart; it is yours and only yours. It makes you unique - it is your light to share with others. As Jesus taught us, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify God in heaven!”
Amen.
