The Tunnel at the End of the Light

The Tunnel at the End of the Light

Feb 27, 2022

Luke 9: 28-42

Six-year-old Thane's most prized possessions is his "Nighthawk."  A "Nighthawk" is a teeny, tiny flashlight that attaches to a finger with a narrow velcro strap.  The light itself comes from a bulb about the size of a BB shot.  Adding to its allure, it is tinted a deep amber color.

Its small size and color mean that as an actual flashlight the "Nighthawk" doesn't exactly give you a perfect view of what's coming your way in the dark.  But for Thane, the joy is that he can wear it anywhere -- out playing tag with friends, taking a night-walk with dad, reading under the covers in the safety of his bedroom, or keeping him company when he hides from his sister in the closet.

The "Nighthawk" is portable, personal, and able to pierce the darkness with a warm, if not terribly illuminating, glow.  It's the perfect go-anywhere, go-everywhere night-light.

The comfort of night-lights is something we cherish as children but tend to forget as adults.  The world can truly be a dark and scary place.  But by the time we are grown, both our eyes and our hearts have often become so accustomed to the dark that we forget the warmth and radiance that light can bring to our souls.  Our theological ancestors remind us that one of the primary ways God has made the divine presence known on Earth has been through revealing glimpses of the divine light.

After speaking with God on Mt. Saini, Moses found his face forever emblazoned with God's radiance (Exodus 34).  The prophet Habakkuk describes God with beams of radiance shooting out from the Creator's hand (Habakkuk 3:3,4).  Today's Transfiguration text introduces the miraculous mountaintop epiphany with the presence of dazzling light.

God is always present in creation and humanity.  But when God wants to bring special illumination to an event, a messenger or a message, God does not hesitate to turn on a light.

The three disciples wanted to build three temples of light at the top of the mountain.  A transfiguration "booth" would serve as a light at the end of the tunnel, a beacon of light beckoning those squinting from dim tunnel vision or those stuck at the wrong end of long, dark tunnels.

Jesus rebuked their "light-at-the-end-of-a-tunnel" understanding of discipleship and challenged them to embrace a tunnel-at-the-end-of-the-light discipleship.  The church is not called to invite people out of the darkness into the light so much as to bring the light into the darkness.  We spend so much time building our booths, our own safe "temples of light"-- our church buildings and communities -- but fail to spend anywhere near that much time bringing that light into the dark tunnels.

The Transfiguration does not call us to be "a light at the end of the tunnel," waiting for people lost in the dark to blunder their way towards us.  The church is to take the light of truth, the gospel, boldly into the tunnel.  There is always a tunnel lurking right outside our ring of light.  Will we move forward and further into that tunnel with the light of the gospel?

If we are to enter the tunnel at the end of the light; if we are to poke new windows, not drill tiny peepholes, into the darkness of the world; if we are to live our lives in the light and to lead others toward Christ, then we need to build three new kinds of windows in that tunnel.

First, we need to build windows that face outward:  Did you ever notice which way the beautiful stained-glass windows of our church are directed?  Most stained-glass windows only tell our stories to those already safely inside the church community.

To those trapped outside in the tunnel, our beautiful windows are nothing but hazy, multicolored blurs, a visual cacophony of confusion incapable of casting meaningful, penetrating light on anything.

One of the biggest barriers to exposing God to our society today is that the church seems to be a closed community.  It is almost like there is an invisible "For Members Only" sign on most of our churches.

It's time to turn our stained-glass windows outward, to tell our stories to the world.  But a word of warning: once we turn them around, it must be light enough inside for outside people to see them.  Unless the community inside is on fire for God, there will not be enough light to illuminate the windows so that the world can see them from the outside.

Next, we need to build windows that let in the light from outside.

Some churches have forgone the expense of stained-glass windows but have instead erected great panes of frosted, glazed-over, or intentionally crackled glass to obscure any view of what lies outside the walls of the sanctuary.

In the early 18th century, when the imperial English colonized the wild Welsh, proper English travelers who ventured from England to Wales used to close the curtains of their carriage to shut out the "horrid scenery."  They didn't want to be disturbed by the horrors of the outside world.

How many of our churches are using frosted glass for the same reason?  For us to see the outside world as it is rather than through our rose-tinted glasses would mean that we must come to terms with the fact that it's a different world out there.  How people see themselves, see life, see the world, and see the church has changed and is continuing to change.  Just look at all of the closed churches in Wilmington.  This is not the world in which most of us grew up.

It's time to open the curtains.  What realities are we hiding from behind our frosted-glass windows?  How can we offer light to the world when our view of that world is filtered through frosted or tinted glasses?

We need to make a new kind of “stained-glass window.”  The third new window for this world is a new kind of stained-glass window, the stained-glass window for the 21st century is the computer screen. We need to become relevant to our society.

Our new world will not get its inspiration from the Gutenberg Way.  We Protestants have had a love affair with the bound book ever since typesetting was invented in mid-15th century.  The mission to put a Bible in every hand, in every pew, even in every motel room pushed the church and Christ's gospel message out into the darkest places in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Today, however, the way people carry on the fastest communication and obtain their most important information is no longer from the pages of a book.  Instead, our postmodern culture is turning toward a new kind of stained-glass window for one of its sources of light.  There is a very good chance that you look at that "window" at some point every day.

Christianity is now undergoing a visual metamorphosis.  Our image must be altered.  The image, not the word, has become the primary unit of cultural currency.  I grew up in a world where texts were better and images.  Pictures were held in lower esteem; a book with pictures was inferior to one without pictures.  In fact, if you had a lot of pictures in your book you had written a "coffee table" book.

Christians of our century are hypermediated Christians who experience God in a variety of ways, including a sensory web made possible through powerful new visualization technologies.  One of the reasons why the generations born after 1964 are not in our churches and have not become Christians is that we have not made it easy for them to become hypermediated believers and metamorphic believers through multisensory worship and outreach.

As Yogi Berra put it, “The future ain't what it used to be.”

Will we be a church that pokes new windows in the tunnel at the end of the light?  Will we let our light shine into our world? 

Will you let your lights shine?