Audio recording Sermon manuscript: The prophet Isaiah speaks about the coming Christ hundreds of years before he was born. Isaiah says in our reading tonight: “People walking in darkness have seen a great light. For those living in the land of the shadow of death, the light has dawned.” Walking in darkness is bewildering. You cannot see where you are going. You cannot anticipate problems or dangers. You might not get to where you are going because you don’t know the way. You might not even know where you are supposed to be going. This is a good description of us. What is life all about? You might get almost as many explanations for what life is all about as the number of people that you encounter. Everybody has different ideas of what happiness is. There are different goals for life. On good days people try their best to get to where they think they will be happy. On bad days people don’t even try. They make peace with the darkness, bide their time. Are they waiting for it all to be over? Since some people try more and other people try less, it might seem as though they should not be put into the same group. It might seem as though some people have their stuff together. They’re going someplace. But this is an illusion. We are all in the darkness. It’s like being in a cave where there is no light whatsoever. Whoever is in that place is in the darkness. It doesn’t matter if people are moving around a lot, or a little bit, or not at all. Perhaps it is nobler to be moving about. At least that’s trying. The thought is that if you keep trying, and you never give up, then maybe you will find the light. Maybe you will arrive at happiness. But this almost makes the situation worse. If everywhere you decide to go is necessarily going to be the wrong place to go, then you are always only busy getting to the wrong place. It’s like Sisyphus from Greek mythology. His punishment in Hades was that he had to roll an immense boulder to the top of the hill, only to have it roll back down to the bottom again where he’d have to start all over. Fighting against the darkness, looking for meaning and happiness, sounds like it’s the thing we should be doing. What good is it, though, if all the striving comes to nothing? In contrast to this dreary darkness, Isaiah’s claim, God’s claim, concerning the Christ, is just as stark and grand as it sounds. “People walking in darkness have seen a great light. For those living in the land of the shadow of death, the light has dawned.” There is darkness and there is light. All live in the darkness no matter how relatively successful each might be. The light—that’s Jesus. Jesus Christ is the light of the world. He is the light that no darkness can overcome. This sounds like it is automatically a good thing. Our problems are solved. In a place where everything is pitch black, to have the light suddenly appear, that’s marvelous. There’s no other way of getting out of the darkness than by this great light. This is true, but the light of Christ is not always welcome. Jesus says, “This is the judgment: The light has come into the world, but the people loved the darkness more than the light. They loved the darkness because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does worthless things hates the light, and does not come near the light, otherwise their works would be exposed.” This, at least, has to be said in defense of the darkness: Darkness seems to give us the freedom to pursue what we want. We do things in secret without really having to think about it, because nobody’s going to know. What isn’t known won’t hurt us. We learn this as little tikes. The darkness seems to give us the freedom to do what we want. So we should not think it is strange, that when this great light dawns upon us, that we can end up hating the light and loving the darkness. We don’t want to make a clean break with our life of doing what we want. There are things that we would like to continue to do in the darkness even after the light has come