Sublime Sunrise

Many of us feel nervous about sharing our faith with another person. Do we imagine that we must have at our fingertips all the answers to the mysteries of the universe? The missiologist Michael Frost invites us to envision a more empowering perspective from which we might love more loudly, to share God’s love in word and action with more freedom and confidence. 

Frost asks us to imagine that we are in a darkened room with a single window in the corner, not unlike finding ourselves in a room after fire and smoke have swept through a building. The single window is encrusted with grime and allows no light to penetrate. We know that right outside this room the most beautiful, sublime sunrise that we might ever see is breaking. What could anyone perceive in that darkened room? Perhaps it would be just the faintest amber glow coming through the soot-coated window. Now imagine that in the room’s darkness our eyes begin to make out another person, huddled in the corner, head in hands and knees drawn to their chest. 

Our task now is to help the person inside the dark room see the sunrise. We cannot do anything to make the sunrise any more glorious, and neither can we make the sun rise. Thankfully, we are not called to do either of these things. What we are called to do is much simpler, though it does require a little humility and a servant’s heart. 

Our job is to take a rag and begin cleaning the window. Maybe the grime is so hard-baked that all we can manage on a day is to unveil a quarter-inch of clear glass. Yet even a quarter inch is enough for the person in darkness to press his face against the window and begin to see with his own eyes the spectacle of the sunrise. Our job was never to make dawn break, but to clean windows so that people can see it more and more clearly. As we clean windows, we reveal His love and presence. 

We are being sent out to clean windows, confident in the sublime sunrise of the sovereignty of God’s love. In the mercy of Jesus, the words that were first spoken by Zechariah over his infant son are now ours: “And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare His ways, to give knowledge of salvation to His people in the forgiveness of their sins, because of the tender mercy of our God, whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.” (Luke 1: 76-79).