April_8_07 Gerber

Sitting on the shelf somewhere in a store in your town is a common product priced at less than three bucks that will soon alter the fate of the entire planet. It's a product that will solve some of the most profound issues facing our world: rising gas prices, energy consumption, global warming, and dependence on foreign oil. It also looks kind of cool and will give the buyer a sense of selflessness and self-satisfaction all at the same time. At $2.60 a pop, just one of these products can save you $38 per year, which is a pretty good return on investment. Oh, and the product is good to last for about 10 years.

You may have guessed by now that it is a light bulb. No joke!

We are talking about the compact fluorescent light bulb or "CFL" for short. Unlike the typical bulb that we screw into our lamps and cartoonists use to indicate that someone is getting an idea, these bulbs look a little strange with a shape that one scientist calls "an ice cream cone spiral" or "swirl." That alteration of the traditional shape on the surface is just a taste of what this little wonder has going on inside.

Fluorescent light bulbs aren't new, of course. If you've been in a hotel room with really faint lighting in recent years you've probably experienced the old version of a CFL, which came on slowly and barely generated enough light to read the room service menu. These new swirls, however, come on quickly with bright, steady, quiet light that rivals your regular incandescent bulb yet uses 75-80 percent less electricity to operate and generates 200 degrees less surface heat than the traditional bulb, making it easier to change quickly ? which isn't really a big deal since you'll only have to do that about once every 10 years instead of every three to four months. You might notice that here at the church when a light bulb burns out we are replacing it with a CFL bulb.

The potential impact of using the swirl is staggering. If every one of the 100 million homes in America swapped out just one incandescent with a swirl, for example, the energy saved would eliminate the equivalent pollution of 1.3 million cars on the road, save enough electricity to power a city of 1.5 million people, or close two power plants. If that's not mind-blowing enough, consider this: The typical American home has between 50 and 100 light bulb sockets (go ahead, go home and count 'em!). What would the impact be if every home installed five swirls, 10 ? 50?

What's the downside? There really isn't one. Some people will balk at the price tag since each swirl costs three times as much as an incandescent, but when you factor in the huge savings in using them it should illuminate more interest. Then there's the "change" factor, getting people to overcome their old ideas about CFLs and their curiosity at the soft-serve shape. And they're not yet designed for every application, like decorative or recessed lighting.

But despite these cosmetic quibbles, chances are good that by this time next year you'll have at least a couple of swirls installed at your house and love them, and that's because one major retailer, Wal-Mart, is on a mission to get us to change the world by changing our light bulbs. In the next year, Wal-Mart's goal is to sell one swirl bulb to every one of its 100 million regular customers.

Sure, Wal-Mart has taken a lot of hits to its reputation in recent years, but the swirl CFL could change that. The company has decided to reposition itself as environmentally friendly, and sees a better light bulb as a great start. They also realized the benefits of the swirl first-hand. Chuck Kerby, Wal-Mart's vice president for hardware and paint, decided to test the swirl's efficiency by replacing all the lights in ceiling fan displays with them ? that's 40 bulbs per store in 3,230 stores. The savings? A projected $6 million a year in electric bills. "I couldn't believe it," says Kerby, "I didn't know I was paying $6 million to light those fixtures. I said that can't be right, go back and do the math again." But the numbers came out the same. "That, for me, was an ?I got it' moment."

Who would have thought that the transformation of one simple common item that everyone has taken for granted for more than 100 years would actually be a solution to some of the major problems facing the world? Who knew that a simple change in lighting had the potential to save us all?

God did. Call it the original lighting revolution.

There's an old story that works well with this treatment of the John text about Robert Louis Stevenson.

As a boy, Stevenson was intrigued by the work of the old lamplighter who went about with a ladder and a torch, setting the street lights ablaze for the night.

One evening in Edinburgh, Scotland, as young Robert stood watching with childish fascination, his parents heard him exclaim, "Look, look! There's a man out there punching holes in the darkness!"

If we dial back to Christmas Eve on this Easter morning we might remember that John called Jesus "the light that shines in the darkness" and "the true light which enlightens everyone" that was "coming into the world" in the form of a typical human being ? the Word and light of God "made flesh" (John 1:1-14). On the outside there was nothing to distinguish Jesus from the hundreds of other prophets and teachers who had been walking around Israel for centuries. Yet a unique energy seemed to burn within Jesus, generating a light for others to follow and enough heat to cause the self-righteous to get burned when they tried to change him.

We might say that Christmas is the Promise and Easter is the Proof.

The kingpins of the religious marketplace saw him as being too out of the box, too dangerous to elevate over their expectations of a Messiah, so they decided to switch him off permanently. They couldn't imagine the change of shape that Jesus had been talking about ? a transformational design for the whole world called the kingdom of God. They continued to waste their energy in seeking power and maintaining the status quo while Jesus called for a renewed environment of love. Because he burned a lot brighter than they did, they finally decided to switch him off altogether. The darkness of Good Friday found his body hanging from a cross and then put in the blackness of a borrowed tomb.

It was still dark when Mary Magdalene found that tomb empty, followed by Peter and "the other disciple" who came running after her report (John 20:1-8). When they left, Mary was alone until she was confronted with the message of angels and the strange figure of a gardener, each asking her in turn, "Why are you weeping?" (vv. 11-15). Through her tears she could not have imagined that the gardener was the risen Jesus ? transformed so as not to be immediately recognized by his human shape, but known by the power and light that burned within. "Do not hold on to me" was Jesus' response to her embrace of joy (v. 17). His body of death had been transformed, which was great news that needed to be shared. The old way of life was done for Jesus and it was time to declare a new one to his "brothers" and through them, to the rest of the world (v. 18). The light had not been extinguished, just transformed ? the light that changed everything.

But like consumers in a rut, we tend to come to church on Easter looking for meaning of this story in its familiar shape and packaging, usually in one of two configurations.

On one shelf there's the "Jesus is alive and went to heaven, so that we can go to heaven when we die" product, in which the resurrection is seen as proving the prospect of life after death.

On the second shelf, the resurrection is a simple metaphor for new life. After all, the thinking goes, modern science knows full well that bodies generally stay dead so it's not the disposition of the body in the tomb but the idea of Jesus being alive in spirit that really matters.

The problem with both of these packaged epistemologies is that they have a tendency to quickly burn out once the chocolate bunnies are consumed. If the resurrection is simply about knowing there's a life after death or just feeling good about Jesus and spiritual things in general, it doesn't illuminate much about our present lives.

When Paul wrote his treatise on the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15 he was marketing the bodily resurrection of Jesus as the moment when God had

replaced death, represented by Adam, with the new prototype or "first fruits" of a new design for life ? a life shaped and illuminated by the risen Christ (vv. 20-22). Jesus himself had spent much of his energy talking about this life called the Kingdom being "at hand" (Matthew 4:17) ? an "already and not yet" understanding that God's plan, God's rule was even now coming upon the world to transform it. Paul understood the resurrection as being the catalyst for God's "order" of fully converting creation from the dim and darkness of sin to the light of God's reign. While we look forward to the "end" when Christ returns to complete the work of the kingdom, when we are also resurrected to new life and death itself is defeated (1 Corinthians 15:23-26), we are not to merely wait for it. Given the reality of Christ's resurrection in the past and our resurrection in the future, we are to begin living that resurrection life in the present by "excelling in the work of the Lord" (v. 58).

In other words, we are called to plug that new shape of life into all of our spiritual sockets so that we can be, as Jesus said, "the light of the world" that cuts through the darkness with a soft, steady, bright, long-lasting and world-saving light (Matthew 5:14-16). It's the kind of light we should be marketing with our lives right now!

Easter matters because it is God's announcement that there is, indeed, a solution to the world's rampant over-consumption of sin and self. One life, redeemed from death, can save the world. As God's people, we can begin working that solution right now by making earth look a bit more like heaven every day.

Imagine if every one of us plugged that reshaped life into our homes, our workplaces and everywhere else where the old shape still dominates the market. How many inner cities would be lit with the light of love instead of despair? How would our economic focus shift from consumption to generosity? What light would be shed on the issues that divide humanity?

It only takes one light bulb to save the world. And that's nothing compared to a risen Lord!

Source:

Fishman, Charles, "How many light bulbs does it take to change the world? One. And you're looking at it." Fast Company, September 2006, 74-83