Tend the Light
1 Corinthians 5:12-13 - “For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? God judges those outside. ‘Purge the evil person from among you.’”
Before automation, lighthouses depended on keepers. The thing about a lighthouse keeper is that he couldn’t calm a storm, steer a single ship, or pull a vessel off the rocks. He had no say over where the boats went or what the weather did. His whole world came down to one thing: the light. Keep the lamp filled, trim the wick before it smoked, polish the glass until it threw a clean beam, wind the clockwork that turned the great lens. Night after night, in fog and gale, the keeper tended one flame, because a clean and steady light was the one thing he could offer a world he could not control.
Paul draws that same line at the very end of First Corinthians 5. After a whole chapter of hard words, he tells the church plainly what its business is, and what it isn’t. “What have I to do with judging outsiders?” he asks. “God judges those outside.” The world beyond the church was never ours to police; the sea belongs to God, a far better and fairer Judge than we will ever be. But there is a place the church does carry real responsibility: “Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge?” Among those who have claimed the name of Christ, the family tends its own. Then Paul quotes Moses, the hardest line in the chapter: “Purge the evil person from among you.” Tend your own light. Keep it clean.
But our instincts run exactly backward. Left to ourselves, we love to judge the sea. We have strong opinions about the storms out there, the other ships, the way the world is steering itself onto the rocks. Yet we are strangely tender with our own light, quick to overlook the soot on our own glass. Paul flips it. Be slow to pass sentence on a world God never put in your charge, and be honest, even fierce, about the lamp He actually set in your hands. A proud church polices the sea and ignores its own light. A healthy church tends its light and trusts God with the sea.
And here’s the mercy in all of it: tending your own light doesn’t mean pretending the lamp is perfect. A healthy church is simply one that keeps turning back to the One who takes its sin away, letting His light do for us what we could never manage alone. We keep the flame burning by looking up, over and over, at Christ our Passover, already slain, already making us clean. The keeper’s job was never to invent the fire; he only had to tend the one he was given. So do we.
This is part of why we gather. In a couple hours the church will come together to worship, and that gathering is how we tend the light together, side by side, turning our eyes back to the Lamb who keeps us clean. We come to be made bright again, and then to be sent back into the dark as a people who live, and love, and give like Jesus. We were never asked to run the world’s sea. We were asked to keep one light true, and to keep it burning together, until the dark is full of people finding their way home by it.
Today: Soon you will gather with the church to worship. Walk in today with one resolution: tend your own light. Set down your verdicts about the world, the other churches, and the people you think are getting it all wrong. Let the singing and the Scripture and the faces beside you wipe the soot off your own glass. Then carry the light back out into a dark week.
Prayer: “Father, I praise You that You judge the world with a wisdom and mercy no human will never match. Thank You that You have given me something simpler and closer to tend: the light You lit in me, kept burning by the blood of the Lamb. As we gather as a church this morning, clean our glass, steady our flame, and fix our eyes on Christ our Passover, slain and risen for us. Then send us back into the dark to shine, until the lost find their way home. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”
-PK