Friends,

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about white light-emitting diodes. (If you’re an expert, I mean blue LEDs, which are required to make white light in conjunction with red and green LEDs invented long before blue LEDs.)

In my freshman or sophomore year of high school, I was assigned an elective I had no desire to take: introduction to electronics or something like that. The teacher was enthusiastic, not in an inspirational way or a cringy way. You could just tell that he was way more excited about this stuff than any of us. We learned why resistors matter and how to read the colored bands on each one. Don’t touch transistors, even if whatever they were connected to was powered down, etc.

We learned so much about light-emitting diodes (LEDs) in the last week of class, and he got super animated about the advent of white LEDs. This was the first time I remember hearing that energy use was an issue and that an imminent breakthrough in creating a white LED would be a game changer. Incandescent and fluorescent lights would become obsolete, replaced by much more efficient LED lights. Power costs would go down, and we would burn less fossil fuel for energy. Not long after I completed the class, the breakthrough happened, and you started to see new LED lights pop up everywhere. Car headlights started to look different, along with street lights and a bunch of other things.

So what happened? This was supposed to be a huge thing that would make the world more efficient and better. What went awry? Surely it wasn’t as good as they said, or there was some other catch, right?

Before I tell you my theory on why you and I think so little about white light-emitting diodes, let me confess to you my thoughts on recycling, plastic grocery bags, and why I try to remember my reusable bag and always recycle. I am agnostic about these things. I don’t know whether they do a lick of good, but I am highly skeptical. Recycling is objectively an effort by bottling companies to shift blame for rampant littering onto consumers when they transitioned from redeemable bottles to disposable plastic ones. Disposable plastic bags are problematic, but not in the way they are advertised. They require far less carbon to produce than reusable bags, so you would have to use a reusable bag hundreds of times to make up the difference. They do, however, reduce litter. So disposable grocery bags are good for carbon footprints, but bad for reducing litter. I am highly skeptical of these things, but I still faithfully recycle and try to remember reusable bags because I hope it does some good.

Paper straws are a whole other thing. I hate them and will not use them. I also don’t use plastic straws because I can drink out of a glass without them, so I guess I’m net neutral on this one. Unlike the previously described attempts at virtue, this is a disaster, because they just don’t work.

Unlike recycling, reusable grocery bags, and especially paper straws, white LEDs are completely different. You do not think about them because they work almost entirely as advertised. They didn’t solve all our problems because demand for electricity exploded in other areas, like computing, but this remarkable technological breakthrough means it takes significantly less energy to light our cities. If they were less effective, cost more to run, or were noticeably unattractive, only idealists willing to endure some discomfort would use them. And for those unwilling or unable to spend the extra cash? They would perceive the white LED users as elitists or virtue-signalers. Perhaps this happened a bit at first, but now they are so prevalent that they are assumed to be the standard.

A hallmark of the most effective, revolutionary changes in our world is our inability to notice them. They must work so well for everyone that they fade into the background and become noise of our shared world.

I can’t help but feel that Jesus is like white LEDs, and the Church is like recycling.

Jesus’s ministry was so incredibly radical, and it has shaped our shared thinking and beliefs, that it has sort of faded into the background. Even those in the Western world who profess no religion inherit a way of thinking undoubtedly shaped by our Savior's teachings. Even those who faithfully attend Church every Sunday take the idea of Jesus for granted. His sermons and sacrifice are so ingrained in our religious life that they feel like background noise, or even like an academic pursuit, much like how we all benefit from white LEDs, but only scientists understand how they work and why they’re a big deal.

Church and recycling vary differently. In Michigan, there is a built-in tax on each bottle of soda you buy, and you take the bottles back to redeem them and you get a nice bit of cash back. The machines don’t mess around. Recycling is super specific, and just because you see that triangle symbol on your bottle doesn’t mean it’s actually recyclable. If you put in a weird green bottle that they have no intention of recycling, the machine will spit it back out, and you have to throw it away. Goodbye inefficiency, and whatever iota of good feelings you’d get by recycling that weird little bottle. This is an honest system.

Like recycling, Churches wouldn't survive if we didn’t make people feel good. The more we are willing to ignore the truth to make people feel good, the more compromised we become. The task becomes balancing honesty, meaning, and joy. We cannot abandon honesty and let people think a plastic-lined pasta box will be recycled. In the best cases, the Church can embrace difficult truths, like our mortality, the fact that everyone is wrong occasionally, and our need for redemption, while also tapping into the genuine joy of God’s grace and our mutual salvation. Unlike Jesus’s perfect sacrifice, or LED’s near-perfect ability to produce light with electricity, our efforts to be God’s church will inevitably fall short from time to time. In the worst cases, Churches treat any nuance as a threat and mistake blind compliance for faithfulness.

Which is St. Luke’s? Let me start with this. We make lots of mistakes, and I would not have it any other way. There is no real joy or faithfulness in pretending we are perfect when we are not.

Below is a link to a documentary about how remarkable LEDs are.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF8d72mA41M

Blessings,

Nick