Let There Be Light - Reprise

Dick Foth 00:00 Hi, this is Dick Foth. Pleased to be back with you again for Stories from the Road. We are doing a reprise again this weekend from times past of one of my old-time favorite podcast speaking to the theme of this Christmas season and light. And it's just simply called Let There Be Light. Thanks for listening. Well, hello, one more time. Dick Foth here. It is Christmas. twenty twenty one in just a few days. And recently I had a wonderful conversation with a good friend of mine. Her name's Mackenzie Matthews, and she has um great. gifts in a lot of areas, but I found out that one of them is question asking. Ordinarily on this program on stories to make sense of it all. Quite often I will interview people, talk to them, have conversations at their homes or out on their work site, or walking along near the Pooder River somewhere, or in Washington, DC. But this time Mac asked if she could turn the tables and ask me some questions. She knows that I like the subject of light and have talked about it quite a bit over the years. And so we did it. And so she's the one asking the questions. And during this season when we talk a lot about light coming into darkness. This is how she teed it up and the conversation she led. Here you are with Mackenzie Matthews and the old guy. Mac 01:48 All right, Dr. Foth. Thanks for being here. Dick Foth 01:51 Thank you, Doctor Matthew. I'm not a doctor. Mac 01:54 You are a doctor. I like to call you that. Well, thanks for being here. You said something recently and that's really stuck with me. It's been rattling around in my mind. And it was about light. And I want to talk more about that. You said that light is God's signature. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Dick Foth 02:14 Uh this takes me back fifty years. A lot of things take me back fifty years, but this takes me back, I think it would probably be the spring of 69 or the spring of 1970. When we were Ruth and I were church planters in Urbana, Illinois near the university, and one Sunday morning, this congregation of maybe 70 people, an older couple came and sat in the back row after the worship time had started. And by older, you're you're talking about a twenty-eight-year-old, and these folks were probably in their late forties, mid to late forties, so they were about gone. And very well put together couple if I can put it that way, in terms of just how they dressed and so forth. And so at the end of the service, uh, I prayed when I opened my eyes, they were gone. Well, in the congregation of 70, you notice how that works. And a young um man came up to me, married fella, who worked at the university. He said, Do you know who that was? that was here. I said, no. He said that was the Howard Momstead. I said, that's fantastic. Who is the Howard Momstead? And the Howard Momstead turned out, and I'll I'll cut to the chase here, turned out to be one of I think w one of the top five spectroscopists in the world didn't know what that was. Spectroscopy is a discipline within analytical chemistry that uses light for scientific measurement. Long story short, Howard and I became friends. He asked after some time if I would baptize him. They had a summer home in Lake Michigan. I drove up to Michigan, baptized him in Lake Michigan. And he became a wonderful part of the congregation, he and his wife. One day we were driving along and And I said, Howard, I have this question. Why do you think the first recorded words of God in Genesis, or in the whole book, if you will, were let there be light? And he looked at me very kindly, not like I had a third eye in the middle of my forehead or anything. He looked at me and said, Well, it's it's the basis for how th for life, Dick, uh on the planet. And one of the basses for the universe, I suppose. And he he went on to explain various things to me. About that time, maybe within a year of that, Ruth and I went to a a uh our first overseas conference. And Howard and his wife helped send us to it along with the congregation. And it was called Adventure of Living, sponsored by a group called Word Books and another group called Faith at Work. It was back in the time when there was a lot of uh people in the country, but there was also So sort of winds of renewal blowing in various denominational groups. And one of their speakers they had is a fellow named Dr. Helmut Tielica. And back during World War II there was a group called the Girdler Group that w was uh ended up Dietrich Bonhoeffer was part of it, that ended up trying to take out Hitler and all of them were caught and killed except two, and Telica was one of those. He was twenty-nine, so he wasn't well known. But he was a German Lutheran theologian, professor of Dogmatics, University of Tubrigen or someplace. And he wrote a book called How the World Began, and it had to do with Genesis. It's one of my favorite books. And in there he has a chapter. on light being God's signature. So I I learned this part from Howard Momstead and I learned that part from Helmetilica and I came along and sort of put 'em together and and grew from there. Mac 05:57 I mean we see the light. as a metaphor, right, all throughout scripture. So it's beautiful to think about those things or it's poetic to think about light being God's signature. But when you talk about the kind of that granular, the building blocks of the universe, I've heard you say before, like nothing exists without light. Like when you explored that further, what what parts of it stuck out to you the most? Dick Foth 06:21 Well as Howard explained it to me, he he said, Dick, you know Einstein's general theory of relativity, which is energy equals mass times square of the speed of light. He said speed of light is the constant in that equation. That's that's the solid piece, if you will. Um if you drive down the road and you see some people building a new section of road, they're They're using what is called laser transits. They they they ping light off of a marker held by somebody down the road because the wavelength is the uh most precise unit of measurement for distance. If you bombard any element, you know. It will each one will uniquely absorb or fluoresce light at a given rate. If you do that with cadmium, I understand, it emits what's called the cadmium red line. And this is all I know. So those folks who are listening don't call me exactly. Can't expand on it. But the but the cadmium red line is the basic uh the building block for the atomic clock, which is the most precise uh measuring device. So you have time and space all in that one statement. Any farmer knows that without light you don't have the food chain. Without photosynthesis, you don't have the food chain. So so you don't have that. Any artist, as you would know, being an artist yourself, knows that without light you don't have color. I used to I used to joke, sort of joke, that uh you know, my bright yellow shirt hanging in the closet isn't yellow. And so the next time somebody says, How do you know there's a God? You say, Well, because your shirt's yellow. You know, w whatever. But but that whole that whole construct And i if you go online and just type in electromagnetic spectrum, you will see the range of things that that light enables. And it's everything from what we're doing right now in terms of broadcast So you so you have television, you got shortwave, you got FM, you got AM, sort of on one end of the spectrum. And on the other end of the spectrum, you have uh all these other Things, everything for and I think I have this correct in terms of ends. Uh everything from radar to when you when they swipe your uh cheese across that little thing at at the grocery store and it tabulates from that code, that's light at work. And if you God forbid have a brain tumor and they go in and and they do uh gamma knife brain surgery on you. That's the use of light. So on one end you have gamma knife brain surgery and on the other end you got Dr. Phil In terms of what light does. We usually talk about light in terms of the visible spectrum of light. What we can see. But as we know by X ray and ultraviolet and infrared and all that, you've got all other kinds of wavelengths of And I didn't know any of that, and and I didn't r really think too much about it, except that that's the first sentence. Let there be light. And my my rhetorical question to that is always, do you think God knew? And of course The reason I asked that is, well, yeah, you know, he di he did. So uh and there have just been various other pieces of that that um It was interesting, I had a guy come to me one time when I said that piece about time. He said, um, I repair watches and clocks, and I always had the sense I was working with something connected to eternity. 'Cause I always see time and eternity as sort of two different qu uh qualities, if you will, but still there's there's something in that. And I think it in that same book by uh by Tielica. He he quotes a Dutch artist, and I th uh I think he's Dutch and and I think you say his name. Daubler or Doibler, D-A-U-B-L-E-R with that little umlat thing over the and and he describes color as suffering and structured light. When you see it in Scripture, when you when you see that signature, he signs in with it, then you go along and the and the world is destroyed, if you will. And when he signs back in it's this rainbow bow. You know, it's all the colors. It's what we used to uh do an acronym for in before we took that general science test or in a Royv is it? Red, orange, yellow, blue, indigo, violet. Do I have that right? Something like that. Close. Um And then, you know, you have the Israelites being led out of Egypt by Moses and you have the Pillar of cloud by day with that bright Egyptian sun shining off of it. I mean, white clouds with the sun hitting 'em are just st uh pristine, they're stark in in their beauty, and then a pillar of fire by night. And every time God shows up in any significant way, you uh glory this this Hebrew word kavod. It's uh it's a shining. So Moses comes down from the mountain, having spoken with God, and he got the Ten Commandments, and to put a bag over his head, they said his face was shining Mac 12:04 Yeah. Dick Foth 12:04 Right? Anyway. Mac 12:05 What you see at the transfiguration. Dick Foth 12:07 Yeah. Exactly the same. I get carried away when I get Bethlehem. Mac 12:10 I mean there are lots of those moments. Oh yeah. Dick Foth 12:12 Paul on the road to Damascus essentially gets knocked down by light. Mac 12:38 At Christmas time when we talk about the Jesus being the light of the world. You know, we're entering the Advent season when this is being recorded. Right. And it's something that we say. And even when you when you're talking about the science behind light and I'm like, it's all over my head. Granular. It's over my head. But it's one of those things where um you take light for granted. You have moments where you don't think I don't think about those things I don't see those things. The Advent season is an interesting one because there are the Christmas lights on buildings. There are the moments where you have a candlelight service for Christmas Eve. You have moments of looking um and experiencing and spending some time to intentionally see Jesus as the light of the world. It just shifts the the power of that or maybe the focus of that. When you think about all that that happened, what you said 50 years ago in the 70s, um, how has that impacted the way that you experience maybe the Christmas season or would there be any differences that you would say this knowledge has impacted you um in your day-to-day life Dick Foth 13:45 I think that I think just the fact that you have um an understanding or an awareness of like, you know, John in the first chapter uh says and he was life and that life was the light of men, and the light came into the world and the darkness could not overwhelm it. I have a friend who was asked one time, how fast is the speed of darkness? And he he equipped it's it's slightly ahead of the speed of light, because light is chasing it away. And there is there is something about Light and darkness, just like light and chaos, when you have light You know how to arrange things because it brings order. That's Genesis 1. John 1, you know, the Gospel of John, it's that same sense that when you have light in a space, it brings clarity. I think that's what Advent does. W when you w and and it doesn't have to be a lot, just a little. Uh have a friend uh who's a retired three-star general who fought in Vietnam and he was in helicopters. And he said, um, and back in the day there was an iconic cigarette lighter, World War II in Vietnam. Korea. It's called a Zippo lighter. They probably still have 'em. And he said I have stood in a rice paddy and landed a whole flotilla of helicopters by the light, the single light of a Zippo lighter. You are, you know. That idea of something that brings shape and form to that which is murky and uh obscure That's a key piece. Uh light that brings with it a warmth, just in its comfort capacity. Ask any three-year-old. About what a nightlight does. On the one hand, the intimacy of comfort, on the other hand, the overwhelmingness of glory are all captured in at Christmas. And you know, we go and get trees and we put lights out and so forth. I think that came from the fell I'm not positive of this, but I think I read a story once about the fella who uh German fella who was coming late at night back uh to his home and he saw a tree framed by the stars behind it and it looked like lights on the on the tips of the branches and so that idea came forward. I think it's the it's the uh fellow who Franz Gruber, I think is his name, who who wrote the lyrics at least to s Silent Night, which was my grandmother's favorite. Song, yeah. I have a great story about her if you want to throw it in sometime. But but it doesn't have to do with light necessarily, but but it's just a good story. Mac 16:58 So well it's fun to think about Christmas and the things that make us think of Christmas particularly. And light. Dick Foth 17:10 Actually, Ruth is a is a white light. person. I think probably on the tree inside the house we'll have some colored lights, but but we have some bushes and little trees outside. And so those are all white lights. Mac 17:25 I regularly have marital disputes about this. He's a colored lights guy. Dick Foth 17:29 See, the these are the things they don't tell you in premarital counseling. Mac 17:33 White is classy. Dick Foth 17:34 You you bring you br y you bring your history to the table when you marry. Mac 17:40 You do. Dick Foth 17:40 Yeah. Mac 17:41 And it's fine. We have a we have an artificial tree, which that's just you know, it's nice, it's easy. Yeah. But it has a remote And we can go back and forth. So that's tends to be what we do, but but yeah, it's been so I have a son who's almost a year and a half. He's almost eighteen. months and it's been really fun to watch him or to experience the Christmas season particularly through his eyes. And we have things where we can go to the zoo lights or we can go to look at look at lights, look at the Christmas lights. But it's been fun to watch the wonder, some of what you talk about when you have the glory, the warmth um that you think of when you think of Christmas. That it's just such a dark like outside is so dark it's getting dark here these days. Like four thirty. You know, it feels like a dark time of like just the calendar part of the year. Um but to have the lights and particularly to drive down a street and see them there's something um magical about them always, but for me this year it's especially magical to see them through his eyes. Dick Foth 18:39 Well and and you think of how we use language. So Powell, your boy, looks at the tree and we say, and his eyes just light it up. You say something and I say enlighten me. And somewhere in their branding. you'll probably find a torch. This whole idea of this is about illuminating one's mind. That see that so Mac 19:22 the light um being the truth. Like there's someone see people say, hey, what's in the darkness will be brought to the light. There's some of that that is a secrecy and some of that that is a truth. Dick Foth 19:30 Yeah. Mac 19:31 And so to bring something in the light, meaning something to see as true. You know, I was, um well, you had mentioned that I'm an artist. I went to art school studying art in college and I spent a semester in Italy. I was in Tuscany. Um it was a dreamy. It was basically like a three and a half month vacation. But it was interesting. It was actually a pretty difficult season for me spiritually because I felt pretty alone in that time, um, but I remember being at the Vatican, which is a gorgeous and overwhelming place. And there's one tomb, uh, Pope Alexander the Seventh. has a a breathtaking tomb. It has lots of sculptures that represent different things, but one of the attributes that's represented is faith. And faith is represented by this woman. There's four different ones, but one of the women um and she's embracing the sun. Hmm. It's like holding the sun and it's to represent faith. It's representing holding on to truth. So it's interesting the the image. And I really latched on to that in that season. I bought a ring um that looked like a sun to re like to commemorate that season. But it really is the it's it's everywhere in in there's so many different ways you can take that that metaphor, but how much more powerful that is to think about light in that way, particularly in this season. I want to ask for you to be pastoral. I mean, not that it's hard to do. When I think about particularly where we are 2021. Um for many people walking into the Christmas season, um, it feels like it's been a really heavy season. It's been a dark season, maybe. There are more empty chairs at holiday gatherings. There is a lot of stress when it comes to the idea of pulling off the holidays. It just feels like a heavy time for us culturally and for many people also heavy personally. And I would just be curious what you would say to them, what encouragement you might have. for anyone listening who feels like they resonate with that or particularly would say, yeah, it feels like a darker Christmas time, a darker Advent time for me. What what encouragement would you have for those folks? Dick Foth 22:03 I think when times are difficult, we have this tendency to look at what we don't have, as opposed to what we have. And there is some sense in which if we have one relationship One friendship, one thing, that to um capitalize, if you will, leverage maybe that that's Those are sort of both economic terms, but but to but to be able to to understand that as we um as we embrace those friendships and those relationships, those connections, that that does in fact bring light into our into our lives. I mean we f for for many people the idea of uh Jesus is the light of the world Um they might even see that as branding or or so well that's what you say or whatever it is. But I think the idea that when I When I think about what I can bring to a friendship, what can I do to bring light to the other person? Either by my listening, or probably most particularly by my presence, i it takes me out of why do I feel such darkness? And allows me, probably unwittingly, unknowingly, to bring light and to to use the language in a different way to lighten the burden. It's not the same word. But I just I just think for me, the loneliest Christmas I ever spent was when my parents' marriage was starting to unravel. And it was too tense at home. I lived ninety miles away. The college I went to was ninety miles away from my home. And that Christmas I stayed on campus, small college. I was essentially by myself. And that's a time at which I really felt the darkness. But it wasn't long before a couple of friends came back and that changed it. I think things tend to get darker when I focus on myself. And there's always someplace else to focus, always somebody else to focus on. And that that helps bring the light of the world to them. And um without getting too cheesy, I think I'll stop there. Mac 24:48 I have one other question that made me think of that. You know, when we talk about hope and particularly the light of the world coming and the hope like I had known like when when Jesus came the first time. that there had been 400 years of silence from God before No prophets. Yeah. And Jesus coming and the hope that came with that. Just be curious what you would say when you think about hope. or moments when it's been easy to have it, or moments it's been harder to have it, what would you, what would you say? What comes to mind for you when you think about hope? Dick Foth 25:25 Do you have an easier question than that? No, that's a good thing. But it does I think well and part of what Mac 25:35 When I think of the darkness or moments when you're sitting in the darkness, and some of what you said of where you're placing your attention, where you place your focus, um, how we walk through moments like that, hope can be hard. Hope can be tricky to grasp onto. Right. Um, or there's been times in my life when hope felt really dangerous. Cause I'm like, man, hope only leads to disappointment. I've said that before. Like when I'm hopeful, I can be disappointed. Dick Foth 25:59 Right Mac 25:59 Um, which, you know, that maybe says more about where my heart space was at at that time. But the idea of clinging clinging to the light of the world being the thing where hope Hope is birth, a different kind of hope, maybe. Dick Foth 26:12 There's this there's this very interesting verse in the scriptures. Paul says, Christ in you, the hope of glory. He connects his presence, your life. Hope and light. Glory. I don't know that I've ever said that before, but he can that thread tragic words in the Old Testament. is Ichabod Ichabod. You know the story of the legend of Sleepy Hollow Ichabod crane and all of the Ichabod literally means the glory has departed. There was this time in Old Testament where God's presence went away. Paul comes along and says, When you have received Christ, when you have when you have embraced him, let him embrace you, you get his glory. You get and and with that you get the hope that is attached to it. So I think to have a verse or an idea like that that connects them all is a is something to ponder. Ponder's a good old fashioned word that means mull or m mulch or muse on something. Mac 27:33 Mm-hmm. So gosh. Well thanks for um making time to rift. And talk about this idea. Dick Foth 27:42 This is good. Mac 27:43 Light, hope, the advent season. He really is the light of the world. Dick Foth 27:47 He is the light of the world. Mac 27:48 Cool. Thank you. Dick Foth 27:59 light that even in the speaking of it or speaking about it warms the heart, encourages the mind. And gives us hope for the future. Jesus is the light of the world. And that's all I have to say about that. Thanks for being with us. Thanks for those of you who subscribe. And we pray in these next few days that it will be a good time and an encouraging time. And we'll catch you next time.