Light it Up!

Lent 4: Epistle, Ephesians 5:8-14

It isn’t often that all three lectionary readings in one day have a common thread. This Sunday they do. Light, Sight, Change and Clear Vision. We can find elements in all our stops this week. In our epistle reading the great apostle points us first to a foundational point and that is this: Light in Christ is WHO WE ARE. How very important it is for us to be reminded of that. Not light in and of ourselves but light in the Lord (v.8). Every year I teach the confirmation students about two kinds of light: “source-light” and “reflection light.” God is the first and we the second. Both are real and both carry power to change ourselves and others but the “reflection light” always borrows from “source-light.”

Light is liberating too. Don’t we know that from every experience? There’s a marvelous something that happens upon awakening and seeing a sunrise, or the sun break the clouds following a dark, rainy afternoon. I think it’s why light and life are so closely tied in Scripture and why light is always a picture of the good love-works of the Kingdom. Light has that penetrating quality as well and Paul tells the Ephesians that the shining of their light in Christ should expose the evil Satan would work amid church and world (vv. 13-14). How magnificent this gift of light given to us.

More to it. The life-energy of light is seen most gloriously on resurrection morning and although we’re not quite there in the calendar, we are getting glimpses and flashes from the days ahead. Paul quotes what may well be an early Christian hymn composed of lines from both Isaiah and Malachi (v. 14) and they bid us rise and walk under the light of our Savior. It’s as if they cry, “Rise from the power of His light and then … and then never walk outside it.” People of Light. People of the Day. Open your eyes!

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1. Do you see yourself as “light in the Lord?” What makes it difficult to live what God says we are?
2. Open your own eyes to this passage and ask the Lord to guide you to bring His transforming light to someone in need. Then write down your experience and share it.
3. Just bask in the hope of Jesus’s resurrection and yours. Peace to all, in Christ.