The sun set at 5:12 today. By the time you got off work, it was already dark. You drove home in the dark. You’ll make supper in the dark, help with homework in the dark, do chores in the dark. Or if you’re like me this week, you’ll call the furnace guy in the dark because it’s -25°F and your heat just quit. This is January in the Red River Valley—the month that asks the most of us. The cold we can handle. It’s the gray that wears you down. Some of you feel it in your bones, a heaviness that has nothing to do with laziness or lack of faith. The clinical name is Seasonal Affective Disorder, but that doesn’t capture what it’s like to drag yourself through another sunless evening.

Isaiah wrote to people who understood darkness. Not metaphor—real darkness. The northern tribes of Israel had been conquered, their land depopulated, their people scattered. Zebulun and Naphtali became a wasteland, a place nobody important remembered. And into that darkness, a promise: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light” (Isaiah 9:2).

Here’s what I want you to see: God doesn’t wait for us to find our way out of the dark. The light comes to us. And it comes first to the places that need it most.

The Reality of Darkness

When Isaiah mentions Zebulun and Naphtali, he’s not being poetic. He’s naming real places with real history. In 732 BCE, the Assyrian army swept through the northern territories and carried off the population. Isaiah says these lands were “brought into contempt”—made shameful, written off, forgotten. The darkness Isaiah’s first hearers knew wasn’t spiritual metaphor. It was empty villages and foreign soldiers and the slow realization that nobody was coming to help.

We know something about that kind of darkness. Not the same, but rhyming. January in Climax isn’t war or exile, but it is real. The weight of it is real. Our battles aren’t fought with swords—they’re fought against forces we can barely name. Monetary policies that squeeze the margins tighter every year. Technology that makes one worker do what ten used to. Young people who leave because the math doesn’t work anymore. The slow erosion isn’t dramatic enough to make the news. It just grinds on.

And beneath all that, there’s a deeper darkness some of us carry—the quiet feeling of being overlooked. Passed by. Irrelevant. Guilty.

Small towns know what it means to be “brought into contempt” by a culture that celebrates cities. Climax isn’t on anyone’s map of important places. We don’t show up in trend pieces or economic forecasts. The storefronts empty out. And you start to wonder if anyone notices. If it matters.

Notice what Isaiah doesn’t say. He doesn’t say “the people who climbed out of darkness.” He doesn’t say “the people who lit their own candles.” He says the people who walked in darkness—who were still in it, still stumbling—have seen a great light.

The light isn’t something we generate on our own. It comes to us.

Light That Comes to Us

When John the Baptist was arrested, Jesus made a choice that Matthew wants us to notice. He left Nazareth and “made his home in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali” (Matthew 4:13). Matthew then quotes Isaiah at length—the same prophecy from Isaiah 9. He’s not drawing a casual connection. He’s saying: this is it. This is what Isaiah was talking about.

The first place conquered becomes the first place illuminated.

Think about that for a moment. Jesus could have set up headquarters in Jerusalem, where the temple was, where the action was, where important people might notice. He didn’t. He could have stayed in Nazareth, his hometown, working among people who already knew him. He didn’t do that either. Instead, he moved to Galilee—the region everyone had written off centuries ago—and made it the center of his ministry.

God doesn’t come to Galilee because it deserved it. God comes because Galilee needed it.

Isaiah puts it plainly: “In the former time he brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and Naphtali, but in the latter time he will make glorious the way of the sea, the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations” (Isaiah 9:1). The same place that suffered first now receives light first. The overlooked become the starting point.

And notice the verbs. “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shone” (Isaiah 9:2). Passive voice. Divine actor. The people don’t generate this light. They don’t earn it. They don’t climb toward it. It shines on them while they’re still in the dark. That’s the whole point.

Here’s what I mean. Dawn doesn’t ask permission. You don’t have to be awake. You don’t have to be prepared or worthy or even looking out the window. The sun rises anyway. It rose this morning whether you noticed or not. And it will rise tomorrow even if you’re not ready for it.

That’s grace.

Jesus doesn’t commute to Galilee from somewhere more respectable. The Greek word Matthew uses is κατοικέω—he “made his home” there. He moved in. He became a Galilean. The Light of the World took up residence among fishermen and farmers, in a region known for nothing special, and started calling ordinary people to follow him.

For us in Climax, this matters more than we might realize. Jesus doesn’t just visit small towns. He makes his home with ordinary people in ordinary places. The light that shone in Capernaum is the same light that shines here—in your living room, in your kitchen, in your barn at 6 AM when you’re wondering if any of this matters.

It does. Because the light came for places like this. For people like us.

Living as People of the Light

So where does this light actually reach us? Not in a feeling. Not in a moment of inspiration. In water. In words. In bread and wine.

The light that shone in Galilee two thousand years ago isn’t a memory we try to recapture. It’s a present reality delivered through concrete means. In Baptism, you were brought out of darkness and into Christ’s marvelous light—not metaphorically, but actually. Paul says it plainly: “For once you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord” (Ephesians 5:8). Not “you were in darkness.” You were darkness. And now you are light. Something changed. Something real.

This matters for January. It matters for the days when you feel nothing, when the gray presses in and faith feels like a word other people use. Your feelings don’t determine your status. Your Baptism does. You have been named. Claimed. Joined to Christ’s death and resurrection. The darkness no longer owns you, even when you’re walking through it.

And every week, the light comes again. The Word read and preached. The Supper set before you. These aren’t religious rituals to make us feel spiritual. They’re God’s delivery system—the means by which the same light that shone in Capernaum shines now, for you, in your darkness.

Luther understood this. The Christian life isn’t climbing toward the light. It’s returning again and again to the font, to the pulpit, to the altar, where Christ meets us with gifts we cannot generate and do not deserve. “This is most certainly true.”

And having been made light, you become part of how it spreads. Jesus tells his disciples: “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden” (Matthew 5:14). Consider who’s listening. John’s Gospel tells us that Jesus’ disciples had been baptizing crowds in Judea before this (John 4:1-2). Many in that hillside audience had already passed through the water. And now Jesus declares over them what Baptism has made them: You are light. Not “try to be.” Not “you should become.” You are. It’s a declaration, not an assignment.

This light shines not by heroic effort, but through your ordinary callings. The parent, the worker, the neighbor. God serves others through you, His masks in the world. You don’t manufacture the light. You’ve already received it. Now it shines through the life you’re already living—in Climax, this little “city on a hill” that the world might overlook but God remembers. (Yes, I know—we’re flat as a pancake out here. But you get the point.)

Conclusion

The days are getting longer. A minute at a time. You might not notice yet.

But the light doesn’t depend on your noticing. It came to Galilee before anyone was ready. It came to you in water and the Word before you understood what it meant. And it keeps coming—every Lord’s Day, every time the Scriptures are opened, every time you receive Christ’s body and blood for the forgiveness of your sins.

This is how God works. Not waiting for us to find our way out, but shining into the darkness while we’re still in it. The overlooked places. The January seasons. The moments when faith feels like nothing more than showing up.

Show up. The light is here.

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. You are among them. Baptized into Christ. Fed at His table. Light in the Lord.

That’s not a feeling. It’s a fact.