January 16, 2007 - One Too Many Sunsets

Genesis1315

Ladies
One too many sunsets
By John Fischer

Have you ever looked at the sunset with the sky mellowing red?

And the clouds suspended like feathers?

Then I say: You’ve seen Jesus my Lord.

I wrote these lyrics in 1969 while working at a camp near Santa Cruz, Calif., after spending a number of afternoons watching the sun go down over the Pacific Ocean. The resulting song, “Have You Seen Jesus My Lord?” has lived on to enjoy widespread usefulness, including certain Catholic and Lutheran traditions that have adopted it as a theme song for spiritual retreats.

I remember receiving some criticism over the message of this song being pantheistic – an Eastern belief that God is in everything. My meaning was that God is in the sunset to the extent that Vincent Van Gogh is in “Starry Night,” his most well-known painting. “Starry Night” tells us a good deal about Vincent – his love of color, his view of the abstract, even his turbulent emotional nature. If you’ve seen Vincent’s paintings, you’ve experienced him to a certain degree. He’s not in the painting, but his nature can be experienced through our enjoyment of the painting. It is the same with God and the sunset, and by this, I don’t mean God, as a concept, but Jesus Christ, as intimately involved in the creative process.

John says that Jesus was “in the beginning with God. He created everything there is. Nothing exists that he didn’t make. Life itself was in him, and this life gives light to everyone.” (John 1:2-4 NLT) It was this intimate, personal involvement with creation that gave me the confidence to state that if you have seen the sunset, you have seen Jesus, its Painter.

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