05/27/2026
Christ’s Light Shining More Brightly
( I should say that we were only fixed to our mobile phone screens because we were praying the Daily Office in a wonderful App called Day by Day! I recommend it as it is with you wherever you are!)
One of the striking things Paul says in Ephesians is that Christians were not merely in darkness. He says they were darkness, and are now not in the light but actually themselves light. Christianity, then, is not simply a change of opinion, or even a change of behaviour. It is a transformation of being.
But where do we actually see that transformation in our lives?
The truth is, it is often very hard to see it in ourselves. I cannot really say what sort of man I would have been had I not married Lorraine. If you are married to someone for thirty-seven years, you are bound to be changed by them, and they by you. Yet because I cannot compare myself with the man I would otherwise have become, the change is difficult to measure. Still, I know this much: I am certainly not the person I was thirty-seven years ago or the man I would have been had Lorraine not married me. Something deeper than opinions or habits has changed. The transformation is indeed one of being. Over years of love, forgiveness, suffering, patience, and shared life, we become different people.
And perhaps the same is true of our life with God.
On this journey over these past days, I have found myself looking back over my life, trying to notice where I met God, or where I caught sight of him.
I saw him in my father’s preaching. There was something in the way he spoke that reached deeply into people’s hearts and experience. And I saw him in my father’s pastoral dealings with people. Even when he disagreed with someone, he could always find something true, good, and encouraging to say. There was a grace in that.
I met God too on a hilltop near our house as a boy, looking down over the landscape of my life: the light in our kitchen window, the church across the road, my school, the homes of friends. Those things became the substance of long conversations with him. My questions were no doubt childish and naïve, and I probably spoke a great deal of nonsense, but I remember a profound sense of his listening presence nonetheless. I would try to imagine what he might say to me, and speak for him as I imagined he might, and somehow, in the quietness, I think he may sometimes have used my own voice to say exactly what I needed to hear.
Later, I knew his presence not only in the worship of the Church, but also, and perhaps most powerfully in some of the darkest situations I experienced in the Army and elsewhere. It has often seemed to me that Christ’s light shines most clearly when the darkness is deepest. I think that is why I understand in part why Tiffany is drawn to Beruit. Christ is everywhere, but his light is so much more easy to see in the darkness of the darkest corners of human experience.
And now, here at Christ Church, after some hard and bitter years when not everything, or everyone, was what they first seemed to be, I sense his light and purpose more strongly than ever before in my life. Almost as though we had to pass through darkness in order to discover him afresh, and begin to see his light growing quietly in our church and in one another.
Perhaps that is how transformation normally happens. Slowly. Invisibly. Deep within us, and emerging out of darkness.
I remember once having a long conversation with a very thoughtful atheist. At the end of it she said to me, “I don’t really see that Christianity makes much difference. Are you a better person than me because of it?”
“I doubt it,” I replied. “I cannot possibly know that. I only know that I am a much better person than I would have been if I did not know Christ and tried to follow him.”
That, I think, is very close to what Paul means.
In Galatians, Paul speaks about the fruit of the Spirit:
“love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.”
There the emphasis is inward. What sort of person does the Spirit gradually create within us?
But in Ephesians the imagery changes. Paul speaks instead about light and darkness:
“the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true.”
Here the emphasis is outward and visible. What does a life shaped by Christ look like in the midst of a darkened world?
The inward fruit of the Spirit becomes the outward radiance of light. One describes the hidden source. The other describes what begins, often without our noticing it, to shine from us.
And perhaps that is the deepest hope of pilgrimage.
As we walk this final stretch toward our destination, we may not even be entirely sure what we hope to find there. But perhaps that is exactly as it should be. Because in the end, what awaits us is not what we seek, but what God desires to give.
What I hope for myself, and for each of you, is not that we return with all our questions answered, or with some dramatic spiritual certainty. I hope instead that, quietly and almost imperceptibly, the Spirit has entered further into us. That somewhere along the road our hearts have softened a little, our souls widened a little, our gratitude deepened a little.
And that when we return home, others may perhaps see what we ourselves cannot see: that Christ’s light shines in us more brightly now than before we set out.
