The Spectrum of Light
Light is a pretty big thing in the church. It’s one of the very first things mentioned in the Bible, in Genesis 1:3: And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. Genesis mentions light again when referencing the sun, the moon and the stars:
And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night” (Genesis 1:14); And God made two great lights – the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night – and the stars. And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth. (Genesis 1:16-17).
We haven’t left the first chapter of the Bible, and we’ve already seen light mentioned four times: that the light is good, and that it comes in different sources, in the day and in the night.
Keep going along and we get more:
Isaiah 42:16: And I will lead the blind in a way they do not know, in paths that they have not known I will guide them. I will turn the darkness before them into light, the rough places to level ground.
Then Isaiah 60:1: Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.
Then Ephesians 5:8: For at one time you were in darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light.
Then Ephesians 5:14: Awake you that sleep, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light.
Then 2 Corinthians 4:6: For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
And then, and then, and then. There are so many mentions of light in the Bible we could fill the entire post with verses and their theological meanings, but we want to go deeper than that, so we’ll leave it at these few examples.
There is one more verse that is particularly important for this conversation, and that is John 8:12, where Jesus says: I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life. Here is where we can really dive into what the Bible is trying to say about light. Jesus says right here that anyone choosing to follow Him will be with Him forever. That’s it. There aren’t any ifs, ands, or buts about that. If you choose to walk in light, then you’re in. I think that’s a place where some Christians are falling short these days. We get so wrapped up in our own misinterpretations of things written by men, that we sometimes overlook the words and intentions of Jesus Himself.
Now onto the more technical or scientific side of light. Light is a wide band of electromagnetic waves, and visible light makes up a very narrow span of that spectrum, only 400 to 700 nanometers. That’s really small! Of all the light there is, only a small portion is visible to us.
There are three primary colors of light:- red, green, and blue, and you need ALL of those colors to have true white light. Red light encompasses the 600-700 nanometer range, green light is 500-600, and blue light is 400-500. Those get broken down even further into the individual colors that make up the spectrum of the rainbow.
Red: 700 - 635
Orange: 635-590
Yellow: 590-560
Green: 560-520
Cyan (light blue): 520-490
Blue (darker blues): 490-450
Violet: 450-400
Now if you’re at all like me, you’ll notice that some of the ranges are smaller than others, for instance yellow light has a range of 30 nanometers, while red has a range of 65. There may be more frequencies of red than there are of yellow, but we still need both, along with the rest of the colors, to be able to make true white light. If you’re missing red, or excluding red, the best you can ever do when mixing color is cyan. That’s it. You lose all of your pinks and purples, you lose yellow, and most importantly, you lose true white.
Now take that color mixing theory and apply it to the church. If we exclude our LGBTQ+ siblings in Christ, we will never be able to fulfill Jesus’ calling to be light. What makes this exclusion worse is our LGBTQ+ siblings are actively choosing to follow Jesus, and to accept His light, yet some of our so called “brothers and sisters in Christ” are saying we can’t do so because of the people we love.
Take a look at 1 Corinthians 12:18-20: But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If we all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body. If we’re trying to show Jesus’ light to the world, how can we do that if we are removing an important part of our spectrum of light? The answer is: We can’t.
Amanda McDermott grew up as a member of Farmville UMC in Farmville, VA. Currently she works at Virginia Tech as the Production Services Coordinator, and lives in Christiansburg, VA with her wife, 2 cats and 1 dog.