Receiving An Explosion of Light
Late one night, a burglar broke into a house that he thought was empty. He tiptoed through the living room but suddenly he froze in his tracks when he heard a loud voice say, “God is watching you!” Silence returned to the house, so the burglar crept forward again. “God is watching you,” the voice boomed again. The burglar stopped in his tracks again. He was frightened. Frantically, he looked all around. In a dark corner, he spotted a bird cage and in the cage was a parrot. He asked the parrot, “Was that you who said ‘God is watching me?’” “Yes”, said the parrot. The burglar breathed a sigh of relief, and then he asked the parrot: “What’s your name?” “Clarence,” said the bird. “That’s a dumb name for a parrot,” sneered the burglar. “What idiot named you Clarence?” The parrot said, “The same idiot who named the pit bull over there, Devil.”
What we do in the dark will always come to the light especially if we are doing wrong. What we need is a special light, a light comes from within. Many of us have a hard time receiving the explosion of light that comes from Jesus Christ as our Savior. We struggle with the concept of Jesus as light in the darkness of our lives because we love night more than day, darkness more than light. But when we become aware of who we are in God and who He is in us we follow Him all the way. Following Christ as light is not a doing thing (we do need to repent and be baptized), but a being thing. When we become one with Christ we receive the explosion of light that is our heritage and inheritance.
There are two ways of receiving this eruption of light. First we receive a flood of brightness when we see God the Creator and creation as one. What do I mean? Many of us believe that God is the Creator and this universe is the created, and the created can never become the creator. How can a painting become the painter? How can a poem become the poet? Impossible! If the poem tries to become the poet, the poem has gone mad; if the painting claims ‘I am the painter,’ then the painting has gone wrong. We believe we are the creatures and God is the Creator. This is the base of our Judeo/Christian heritage. I say God is both creation and creator which is the reason Jesus in human form (created) and Christ in spirit (creation) says, “I am the light of the world.” We too are the created (human form) and being born again in the Spirit connects us with this light of the world.
Second, we receive a flood of brightness when we see the part of life that we call humanity as the whole of life that we call God. This is another way of saying our goal in life is to discover who we are in God and who God is in us. The explosion of light hits us when we discover that following our baptism, we need only accept the fact that we are connected to God in a new way. We are human beings, not human doings! We are no longer the part looking for the whole we are connected through this new awareness with this new light which is the living God. This is what Jesus meant when He says, “Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” Our problem is we think of following Christ as doing something and not being something. Jesus has already died for our sins, we need only accept Him as Savior and become who He intended us to be.
In order to follow Christ we must accept our self as part of the whole of creation and not separate from the Creator. We are a drop in the ocean but there is also ocean in every drop of us. This realization is an explosion of light and from this light we become aware of our connection with God as the whole of life including our universe and beyond.
