"Lord, I am your servant, and now I can die in peace,
because you have kept your promise to me.
With my own eyes I have seen what you have done to save your people,
and foreign nations will also see this.
Your mighty power is a light for all nations,
and it will bring honour to your people Israel."

Somehow or other I can't help getting the feeling that the word of the day is 'light'.

We began in darkness, and experienced the coming of light with the lighting of candles. We shall end with a candle-lit procession to the church door, singing Nunc Dimittis:

A light to enlighten the gentiles and the glory of your people Israel.

So, how do we react to attending a special service like this?

The attractiveness of the familiar

On one level, it's all very comforting. We experience the soft glow of the candles within the confines of this lovely historic building, and it makes us feel good. We expect the familiar words of Nunc Dimittis, that we have heard and sung for years, and we think of peaceful evenings and rest to come.

Change and decay

There's nothing wrong with these experiences and thoughts and feelings. They express an important part of our faith. Where the world around changes, often for the worse, we who know God through Jesus have an unchanging reality to cling to.

Can we go back?

And the world around is certainly changing. I don't know if you have the same feeling I sometimes have: I think back to my childhood, and the way things used to be then, and I feel that that's the way things should be, and will be again, when the present madness comes to an end. I got that feeling when I visited Berlin a few months after the wall was breached. I stayed in former East Berlin, and I felt I was back in my childhood. Quiet streets, few cars, spacious gardens. I went to the opera, and it cost me £5. After being there for a couple of days, I took the U-bahn to the busy centre of West Berlin for an afternoon, and the brashness, the neon signs, the materialism of modern Berlin hit me so hard that it hurt. It was such a relief to retreat to my bed and breakfast house in the East, to what felt like reality.

But it was an illusion. The feeling that we can go back is a delusion. The changes are irreversible. The co-founder of the Street Society said to me a couple of days ago, as we went over the loss of one distinctive building after another, like the Tower House and Holmcroft, and the density of housing in the Houndwood development, "Street is being destroyed on our watch."

Refuges in a time of change

A great number of people, myself among them, take refuge in researching our ancestry. If the social ground is shifting under our feet, at least we have roots in our genealogy. It may even be true - and I don't want to tread on toes here - that we who choose to worship with the words we have known since our childhood are looking for an escape from the changes all around us, an escape into something from the past.

'Change and decay in all around I see'.
O words that alter not, abide with me.

Except that we know that's a misquotation. It should be a prayer to the living God:

O thou that changest not, abide with me.

Light for looking forward

So I believe that there's another message in this festival of light. And it's not so comfortable, in the modern sense. It's comfortable in the Elizabethan sense - helping us to be strong and courageous. Latin fortis means brave and strong.

What did the old man mean when he called Jesus:

A light to enlighten the gentiles?

It's an important New Testament image. St John's Gospel begins with "the true light that enlightens everyone ... coming into the world." St John writes:

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never mastered it.

And Jesus said:

"I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life."

What does it mean?

Light shows the truth

Light shows things as they are. Jesus saw things as they are, and wasn't afraid to tell what he saw. That was popular with some people, but decidedly unpopular with others, particularly the people in power.

It's clear that power pushes people towards rejecting the light, refusing to see and to say what is clearly true. Do you remember Margaret Thatcher saying in that confident way of hers that the Poll Tax would be very popular? A recent cover of Private Eye had a photo of Tony Blair with David Frost, after that television interview when Blair acknowledged that the invasion of Iraq had been a disaster. Private Eye has David Frost saying "You've just told the truth," and Blair replying "It was a slip of the tongue." Think of President Umbeke and AIDS. As for George W Bush and global warming - it made headline news around the world when he finally acknowledged that truth that the scientific community, apart from a handful in the pay of the oil companies, had been unitedly saying for years.

Light shows up evil

Light shows things as they are. And light shows up what is dirty.

Jesus was not afraid to call some people hypocrites, people who did not or would not see the dirt and evil in what they were doing.

And he said to them: "You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions! (Mk 7)

It is all too easy for any of us to drift away from the 'commands of God' and substitute rules or standards of our own. For those Pharisees the rules and standards were their traditions; for modern Christians the rules and standards can be the spirit of the age, the fashionable orthodoxy. How often have you heard people speak of 'toleration' as if it were an absolute Christian virtue? Are we to tolerate murder? Are we to tolerate dishonesty? Obviously not. We need the light of the Word of God to show us where right and wrong lie.

The Anglican Communion, of which the Church of England is part, is at present deeply divided between the Episcopal Church of the USA (ECUSA) and the Nigerian Church - and the supporters of each side. The issue is sex. ECUSA argues that because homosexuality is a fact of nature and not a choice, and because homosexuals are of equal value in God's eyes, therefore it is right for all homosexuals, including even Bishops, to indulge in physical homosexual relations. The Nigerian leaders argue that because homosexual practice is forbidden in the Bible, it is wrong.

While the Nigerian leaders may have gone too far in condemning people merely for their sexual orientation, ECUSA seems to me to show the weakness of its case by its refusal to take the word of God as revealed in the Bible as its guiding light.

I don't know whether it is a symptom of this, that the Presiding Bishop of ECUSA recently replied to a question 'asking her how she feels about Jesus as Saviour and Lord'; she replied "I probably wouldn't use those terms." (To be fair, she probably meant that she would not use the terms when speaking to those who knew little or nothing about Christianity; she found that other ways of speaking about Jesus drew a better response.)

However that may be, it remains true that light shows up the dirt. As St John wrote:

This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.

Light shows the way

Light does not just show things as they are and show up the dirt. It has a much more positive function: It shows the way to go. Jesus said:

"I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life."

Bringing light into dark places

And Jesus does not sit around being idle and keeping his hands clean. He goes ahead of his followers, as we read in the gospels that he went ahead of the disciples. He is still a light shining in the darkness. Not in a cosily lit church, but in the dark places of the world. The England cricketer of a century ago, C.T. Studd, who went as a missionary to China, then to India and then to Africa, wrote:

Some want to live within the sound
of church or chapel bell;
I want to run a rescue shop
within a yard of hell.

He was a follower of the man who befriended prostitutes and collaborators. He brought light where it was dark.

Examples of bringing light

We can think of Jill and Jane from our own number who are bringing the light of Jesus' love, one to a society that has no tradition of caring for the disabled, the other to an area under Shariah law in a nation that hits the headlines chiefly for its corruption and kidnappings. Keep praying for them.

But I'd like to tell you of someone else, that I heard speak in Birmingham last year, and whose work was featured in The Guardian last week, Steve Chalke. The Guardian is not noted for its support of evangelical Christianity, so this report is all the more telling. First a summary from a Christian news agency:

Baptist minister and Oasis founder Revd Steve Chalke has outlined the vision behind the first Oasis city academy and other social projects to The Guardian. 'We need to rebuild active communities,' he said, and what Christian social activism has 'to offer is loads of energy, commitment and belief'.

And now an extract from the Guardian piece. (You can read the whole piece here.)

Chalke argues that all he is doing is picking up and renewing the tradition of Christian social activism that the welfare state commandeered in the 1945 government. "In 1921, my church had nine medical staff and ran a clinic, but the state took off churches their welfare role. The welfare state was set up slightly wrongly; it set up a division between government and citizenship that has led to the decline of the public realm. Democracy used to be about volunteering. Now it's only about voting.

"Everything was left to the state. The church was made redundant, and left us singing and boring ourselves to death. But the church is an agency of social activism. Jesus was an activist before he was a preacher.

"We need to rebuild active communities. In every pub, everyone has an idea of how to run the country, but no one lifts a finger."

Opposition to the light

That, surely, is about light for the world. It's a tough road, with plenty of opposition. St John wrote:

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never mastered it.

Mastered. That's a word with two meanings, both in English and in the original Greek. It means that the darkness has never got the hang of the light; the world misunderstands the light of Christ. And don't we see that happening all the time? But it also means that darkness has never got the better of light. And that's our encouragement.

One man's experience

Finally, a poem by Studdert Kennedy, about what light, in particular the evening collect 'Lighten our darkness' , meant in the trenches of the Great War, as near to hell as you can imagine.

LIGHTEN our darkness, Lord, in bygone years,
Oft have I prayed and thought on childish fears,
Glad in my heart that, when the day was dead,
God's four white angels watched about my bed.

Lighten our darkness! Kneeling in the mud,
My hands still wet and warm with human blood,
Oft have I prayed it! Perils of this night!
Sorrow of soldiers! Mercy, give us light.

Lighten our darkness! Black upon the mind
Questions and doubts, so many paths that wind,
Worlds of blind sorrow crying out for sight.
Peace, where is Peace? Lord Jesus, give us light.

Lighten our darkness! Stumbling to the end,
Millions of mortals feeling for a friend,
Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?
Flame through the darkness, Lord, and give us Light.