“Arise, shine,” says the prophet Isaiah. “Your light has come.”

Problem is, many of us can’t see it.

One of the wonders of our world is that it is absolutely full of light, even on dark and gloomy January days -- but only a tiny sliver is visible to us. Our human eyes are designed to detect only visible light, which is a tiny slice of the electromagnetic spectrum – it’s the part made up of light with relatively short wavelengths. All other forms of light are completely invisible to us.

Take infrared light. We cannot see it, but in this case our blindness is really a blessing. If we were seeing infrared, which is linked to heat, every person in this room would be glowing – and that would be distracting. We really don’t want to see who’s hot … and who’s not.

There do exist some deep-sea shrimp living near hot vents in the ocean who can see infrared light, but that makes perfect sense for them. They need to see the heat. But we don’t.

Or how about long, stretched out radio waves, another part of the electromagnetic spectrum? In order to detect this kind of light, we’d have to have huge eyes, like satellite dishes.

Who wants dish eyes? I sure don’t. My eyeglasses would have to be huge.

When you come right down to it, our human eyes do pretty well for us. Each eye has about 125 million rods and cones, specialized cells with such enormous sensitivity that some can detect a mere handful of photons of visible light. Joel Achenbach writes that visual data is very important to us, and about one-fifth of our brain has the job of doing nothing but processing information from the visual world around us. (Joel Achenbach, "The Power of Light," National Geographic, October 1, 2001, http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/data/2001/10/01/html/ft_20011001.1.html)

We humans can see visible light very well, which is a wonderful ability to have in a world so full of the visible light of the sun. But maybe there is still another form of radiance that we should tune ourselves into – another wavelength that can bring fresh light into our lives. Not gamma rays or x-rays or ultraviolet radiation. Not microwaves or radio waves or electric currents.

Instead, I’m talking about the light which is called “the glory of the Lord” (Isaiah 60:1).

This is a wavelength that doesn’t require dish eyes big enough to capture radio waves. But it does require the eyes of faith. This powerful light of the Lord appeared when Jesus Christ was born, and the glory of the Lord shone around the shepherds in Bethlehem, terrifying them (Luke 2:9). Simeon said that the baby Jesus was “a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel” (Luke 2:32). Glory appeared again in the transfiguration of Jesus, and in the resurrection. Looking back, the apostle Paul rejoiced that God “has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6).

The glory of the Lord. It’s intense, overwhelming, frightening at times … but most of all it’s illuminating. It helps us to see the full power and personality of the Lord God. The gospel of John says that when the Word of God became flesh and lived among us, it was then that we saw “the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (John 1:24).

Grace and truth. That’s what becomes so clear in the light of the glory of God.

So why don’t we perceive it?

Maybe we haven’t fully developed the eyes of faith. These particular eyes aren’t dish eyes that can see radio waves, and they’re not fish eyes that can see infrared waves. Instead, these eyes are faith eyes that can see the light of God in every time and place.

Faith eyes can pick up divine light in times of deep darkness, and this was as true in the first century as it is today. There wasn’t much brightness in Judea in the time of King Herod, when Jesus was born in Bethlehem – in fact, Herod’s reign was an absolute orgy of violence and bloodshed. Full of insecurity, Herod ordered the killing of his brother-in-law, his uncle, and then his wife. Fearing loss of power, he went on to execute his mother-in-law, a son, and then two more sons. At one point, Caesar Augustus remarked that he would rather be Herod's pig than Herod's son!

And this list of murders doesn’t even include the massacre of the infants, which Herod ordered in a desperate attempt to kill the baby Jesus. He commanded the slaughter of all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under … but fortunately Mary and Joseph spirited Jesus away to Egypt before the massacre began (Matthew 2:13-18).

These were dark days. The kind that would lead to “Code Orange” alerts today. But through the blackness, there were some who kept their focus on the light. Wise men from the East came looking for Jesus, and after working their way around Herod they found the baby in a house with Mary his mother (Matthew 2:1-12). They offered him wonderful gifts, fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah that they “shall bring gold and frankincense, and shall proclaim the praise of the Lord” (Isaiah 60:6). These men were the kings that the prophet said would come to the brightness of his dawn (v. 3).

The wise men had eyes of faith. They could see a faint flicker of light in the middle of the darkness, a light that signaled the presence of God’s son, Jesus Christ.

Today, our challenge is to focus on this very same light, and to trust that Christ is always present -- even in times of chaos. It was 21 years ago this month that an Air Florida jetliner crashed into the Potomac River in Washington. Raise your hands if you remember it. There were 79 people on board, but only five of them survived the crash into the icy river water. David Van Arsdale reminds us that the five who survived owed their lives to an unknown person referred to by rescuers as the “sixth man.” The rescuers reported that the rope from the helicopter came to this man over and over again, but he passed it on to the other five as they clung on for life, floating on debris in the frozen water. By the time the helicopter returned for the sixth man, he had slipped beneath the ice and drowned. (David L. Van Arsdale, “Seeing Others Through the Eyes of Faith,” February 9, 2003, First Presbyterian Website, www.kalamazoofirstpres.org)

Reflecting on the event, the pilot in the rescue helicopter said, “Imagine! He had just survived that horrible crash. The river was ice-cold and each minute brought him closer to death. … He could have gone on the first trip but he put everyone else ahead of himself.” The sixth man was a brave and good man, a person who had not asked the others about their religion, job, political preferences, or even family status. No, he simply did what he could to save them, and he gave his life in the process. He is a reminder to us that Christ is always present, even in times of complete chaos.

There is always some light to be found, if you have the eyes of faith. In fact, none of the shadows we encounter in day-to-day life are totally dark and depressing – they all contain some small amount of light. Shadow experts tell us that you have to go to the moon to find a shadow that is completely black; here on earth, every shadow is going to contain at least a little bit of light reflected from the sky. This is equally true whether your shadow is being created by a lost job, a failed exam, a powerful temptation, or a tension in your marriage. Nothing on earth is completely black, because God is always present to bounce some light into your darkness.

The good news for us is that faith eyes are developed over a lifetime of looking. If we are willing to search for the light of God in times of deep darkness, we will find it. If we look hard for Jesus Christ in situations of chaos and confusion, we will discover him. We can even help each other to sense the small glimmers of light that are present in our shadow times, which is why we are ordaining and installing church officers this morning. These elders and deacons are people who have demonstrated that they have faith eyes – eyes that can help us to find the way through any black night that threatens to overwhelm us.

It’s true that darkness may cover the earth. But “the Lord will arise upon you,” promises Isaiah, “and his glory will appear over you” (v. 2). No dish eyes are needed, no fish eyes are required.

All that’s needed is faith in the Lord of light. Amen.

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