Light of the World
This sermon reflects on John the Baptist’s witness at the Jordan as a moment of divine light emerging amid instability and change. Drawing on Scripture, art, and the embodied experience of life rooted in place, it explores how God’s presence appears not through force, but through gift, circulation, and belonging. In a world undergoing profound transition, the sermon invites listeners to recognize the Light of the World among us, calling us into a new way of living shaped by love.This sermon reflects on John the Baptist’s witness at the Jordan as a moment of divine light emerging amid instability and change. Drawing on Scripture, art, and the embodied experience of life rooted in place, it explores how God’s presence appears not through force, but through gift, circulation, and belonging. In a world undergoing profound transition, the sermon invites listeners to recognize the Light of the World among us, calling us into a new way of living shaped by love.
The Glimpses of Grace podcast is a ministry of Grace Episcopal Church in Gainesville, Georgia. We are passionate about supporting the spiritual growth of souls, and we hope these sermons and conversations meet you where you are and enrich your soul as we all continue to make meaning in the world today.
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Transcript
Imagine:
John the Baptist, standing in a river.
“Look, here is the Lamb of God!”
Standing in a place, formed by three main tributaries
fed by Mount Hermon’s snowmelt and springs,
flowing south through the Great Rift Valley,
merging into the Sea of Galilee and draining into the Dead Sea. A place of water named for its descending path through the Jordan Trough, changing over millennia due to flooding, earthquakes, erosion. Not in a temple.
Not in a stable structure, a symbol of power, of control.
But in the wilderness, where old structures no longer quite hold. That matters.
The light of God almost never appears when things are settled. It appears when systems are overheating,
when old meanings are no longer relevant and are dissolving,
when people are unsure of how to live inside the world they’ve inherited.
Physicists have a word for moments like that: phase transition — when heat and pressure push a system past what it can bear
and matter changes state.
Ice becomes water. Water becomes vapor.
Chaos rises — and out of that chaos a new structure forms.
This is where the Gospel enters.
Isaiah is writing to a people in exile, whose old certainties have collapsed. Paul writes to a fractured church in a morally and politically unstable empire. John stands at the edge of wilderness and history.
And I don’t even have to say that we live between worlds—
climate, politics, technology, meaning itself in flux.
Scripture doesn’t deny this instability. Today’s readings lean in.
“It is too small a thing,” God says through Isaiah,
“that you should only restore what was…
I will make you a light to all people.”
Light doesn’t preserve the old world.
It illuminates…it makes a new one visible.
The world likes to imagine that stability is normal.
But artists know better.
James Baldwin wrote, “a society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know…that there is nothing stable under heaven.”
John the Baptist is that kind of artist.
So are the prophets.
So is Jesus.
They feel the cracks before others do.
They speak from the fractured place, the borderland,
where one world ends and another is struggling to be born.
“Look, here is the Lamb!”
Vulnerable.
Unarmed.
Given.
The light of the world does not arrive as force.
It arrives as gift.
In response to my sermon a couple weeks ago (“By Another Path”), Bruce and Joan Leyton gifted me and asked that I read
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, The Serviceberry.
She tells us that in healthy ecosystems,
life runs not on scarcity but on reciprocity…interdependence.
The serviceberry does not hoard.
It ripens all at once, feeding birds, bears, children.
It belongs to everyone. Its power is in its giving.
This is what the Lamb brings: a new economy of life.
Paul hints at it when he tells the Church in Corinth:
“You are not lacking in any spiritual gift.”
Not because they are perfect—
but because abundance is not created by moral purity.
It is created by circulation.
The world says, protect what you have.
The Gospel says, give what you are.
Many of us are here because something no longer fits.
The stories that used to hold don’t quite work anymore.
The strategies we were taught no longer bring peace.
And we don’t yet know what comes next.
We know this in our bodies,
in our clenched jaws, in our shallow breath.
If that’s you—if that’s us—
then we are exactly where the Jordan runs.
When Jesus first speaks in John’s Gospel, he asks a question:
“What are you looking for?”
This is the question of a generation between worlds.
It is the question of artists.
It is the question of anyone living through a phase transition.
In response, the disciples answer a sense of longing:
“Where are you staying?”
They want to know where this new way of being human dwells.
Jesus. He says: “Come and see”…“Come and live.”
E.M. Forster wrote that when civilizations collapse,
art becomes “the lighthouse which cannot be hidden.”
Not because it is powerful,
but because it holds together when everything else is pulled apart.
That is what Christ does.
In a world driven by extraction, he offers gift.
In a world driven by fear, he offers belonging.
In a world fragmented, he creates a commons.
He offers a table.
Isaiah’s light to the people.
Kimmerer’s gift economy.
Paul’s abundance of grace.
John’s Lamb.
They are all the same story.
So when John points in the wilderness and says,
“Here he is,”
unfortunately, he is not pointing to a finished answer.
He is pointing to a new possibility —
a way for life to reorganize itself around love.
The world may be in a phase transition.
But that is not the end.
That is when light is most possible.
Take a deep breath,
maybe your shoulders will drop, even just a bit.
The Light of the World is still standing among us,
“Come and live.”
Amen.