Sometimes it’s possible to buy technology a bit too early. I made this mistake when I bought a digital camera before they got really good. It captured pictures with a full one megapixel, as the marketing pointed out. But it just didn’t let in enough light when you took a photo indoors.

The result was that the photos, unless I was shooting outdoors, usually had lots of unpleasant noise. Not like the beautiful grain of old film photography, but something just undesirable.

What I was actually after, in those days before I understood photography at all, was something more like an iPhone, which exposes pictures effectively in low light conditions without needing to lug around professional lighting.

That word “exposes” appears in Ephesians 5. Paul is talking about exposing the sense of letting light in, just like a camera exposes its digital sensor or its film to the light.

So, let’s dig into the text.

Right in the middle of this passage, in Ephesians 5 verses 8 to 13, Paul makes a seemingly complicated argument about avoiding activities that lead to sin. He writes (NIV):

For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth) and find out what pleases the Lord. Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. It is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret. But everything exposed by the light becomes visible—and everything that is illuminated becomes a light.

Is Paul here actually saying that no one should even ever talk about the existence of sin, or some types of sin, because it is shameful to mention it? He isn’t because, of course, Paul is happy to give lists of sins elsewhere – and the gospels show that Jesus was quite willing to talk about sin.

To understand the text really requires us to look back at the chapter before. At the end of chapter four, in verse 29, Paul made the argument that Christians should help build up other Christians “according to their needs” and therefore avoid letting “any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths”.

So I take this passage, with its hyperbole about not even mentioning sins, to be about what we glorify in our lives. There are rabbit holes that people fall into – like watching videos on social media that focus on minor grievances and, boosted by algorithms that feed viewers with more and more related content, end up breeding obsession and hate.

So Paul makes the point that rather than getting distracted by such things, we need to bring the centre of our lives back to God. He says, in verse 15, that we should be “very careful” how we live so that we are wise.

That’s why regular confession and communion should be important in the life of churches. They have the effect of recalibrating us away from darkness, with all the distracting noise of the world, into the light.