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Sermon - November 30th, 2008
Holy Darkness
Rev. Gwen Drake
Scripture: Isaiah 64: 1-9, Mark 13
When the Christian community moved from the Hebrew culture into the Greek world in the first and second century, it met dualism. Dualism is about opposing natures, opposite realities, competing entities. In Greek thought if you wanted to meet the divine, you would not turn to the world, you would turn to the heavens, away from the world. You would turn from the material, the physical to the spiritual, the unseen. The spiritual reality was good and the physical reality was evil. Dualism was a conflict between the spiritual world of light and the material world of darkness.
The divine and the human were at opposite poles. It was as if the Greeks took a vacuum cleaner to the Hebrew view of reality and sucked all the goodness, all the wonder, all the glory, all the divinity and holiness and presence of God out of the world and put it in the spiritual realm called heaven. What was left after that was the base, the physical, the material, and the evil as the domain of the world. Greek philosophy influenced early Christianity enormously. The goal of early Christianity became, not the transformation of the world, but life beyond the world. The world became a place to be escaped, not engaged. Christianity has been recovering from dualism ever since.
So, today is about engaging the darkness and discovering the holiness of darkness. We know today that darkness in and of itself is not evil. It is just darkness. It may be scary to be in the dark. However, without darkness, there would be no light. Annie Dillard wrote, “You want to look at the stars you will find that darkness is required.” The Talmud, which is a record of the rabbis discussing the Hebrew Scriptures says, “The days of our lives properly begin with the darkness and move to daylight. And thus all genuine creating must originate in the darkness. All transformation must commence during the night.”
Two dimensions move across the land. Light and darkness. The light gives us order to the universe—we are able to see the lines, the shapes, colors, textures. The darkness takes away the order and the world becomes a strange and puzzling place. The ruler of darkness seems to be chaos. We humans do not handle chaos very well. Chaos represents uncertainly. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like uncertainty. I want reliability. I want clarity. I want order. I want to move out of confusion as quickly as possible.
We yearn for someone to provide answers, order our world, make sense of our lives. We do not like to be “left in the dark.” This is that dualistic thinking taking over and telling us that there is something wrong with darkness and the last place we will find God is in the darkness. If you recognize that kind of thinking in yourself—I want you to consider throwing it out because believing in God, having faith, being a Christian is not about certainty, it’s not about escaping the dark, or looking to the heavens. It’s about embracing all of life.
There is a parable about an old farmer. Each time something bad happen the farmer would reply to his waiting friends, “Let’s wait and see” and his fortune changed. Each time something good would happen he would reply to his excited friends, “Let’s wait and see.” The wisdom of this parable is that nothing stays the same, good and bad times come to an end. All of life is uncertain.
Darkness can be a holy place, a creative place, a restful place, a life-giving place. We are able to live in the dark as well as the light, both literally and metaphorically. We are here to be in all of life, as active participants. God calls us to muddle our way through it all, through the dark and the light, through the terrors of the unknown as well as the joys of deep recognition.
How did we manage this? The way I muddle my way through all of life is to always be open to learning. I am never the expert. I am still learning. Learning to live with uncertainty, learning to live in the dark is a gift. Darkness becomes our teacher. Chaos becomes our opportunity. So it is with all of life because solutions and answers are really only temporary. Life is always both questions and answers, problems and solutions. Life is always both darkness and light, chaos and order.
The Hebrew writers and prophets knew this. In the darkness, in the chaos, Isaiah cried out for God to be tangible and begged for God to come out of retirement. “Tear open the heavens and come down,” shake up the earth, make the mountains quake. Isaiah spoke because of the chaos and darkness. The Hebrew people were in the midst of exile. The world as the they knew it had fallen down all around them and they were carried off to the godless city of Babylon. Isaiah saw what this had done to his people. He told the people that they were responsible, “You sinned,” Isaiah said. He told God, that God was responsible, too. “You were angry,” Isaiah said. Isaiah was yearning for a loud and noisy advent of God.
Then history repeated itself in the 1st century, when the Romans destroyed the temple again and once again the world fell down around the Jewish people. The gospel of Mark was written in the midst of this darkness for those who were followers of Jesus. The gospel writer was calling for the advent of God, a tangible God, for Christ to come again. Mark was describing a loud and noisy advent of the Son of Man, the Christ.
Oh how we yearn for a loud and noisy advent, for God to come and set the world right. “Tear open the heavens and come down.” The world is messy, come clean it up. The world is scary, come and comfort us. The world is falling down around us in an invisible way, come to us, God and grant us a secure future. But do we really know what we are praying for? We pray for God to be tangible. We cry out for answers and solutions. But the message of advent, the message of the prophet, the message of the whole Bible is be careful for what you pray for and hope for and yearn for. Martin Luther wrote, “Do you think God is sleeping on a pillow in heaven? God is wholly present in all creation, in every corner, behind you and before you.”
God answers us. God is present with us. God is active in the world; but not for the sake of bringing order out of chaos, answering our questions, or giving us solutions to our problems. Those are our wants and our desires and our creations. What God yearns is for us to realize that all of life is sacred. Ruth Ostrow wrote, “We just have to open our eyes and recognize the treasures buried in the everyday and let our foibles, mistakes and difficulties heal and transform us.” The Gospel of Mark is telling us is to “be aware,” “keep alert,” “be on the watch,” and “keep awake.”
Kathleen Norris wrote, “…it’s only after a crisis, with the stars falling from our sky and the ground shaking beneath our feet, that we see clearly—that we remember what is worth caring about and what is not.” We need the darkness so we can see the light. We need chaos so we can see order. I know that most of you here have been through some kind of crisis in your life. And those of you who haven’t, your time will come. Crises are opportunities. Crises can be God moments. Crises can wear us down until we are ready to be re-built from the ground up. They command our full attention to the here and now. And that is where God is.
I know, as hard as we try, we tend to slide off into what happened yesterday or what we have to do an hour from now. It is a huge challenge to live our lives while they are actually happening to us. When are cut off from the present, God cannot get to us. There are too many layers of regret and expectation that we have swaddled ourselves in.
So, when we come to this Sunday every year, where the Scriptures that the lectionary committee chose are about the Second Coming of Christ, I don’t preach about the Second Coming of Christ, because we have been waiting a long, long time, nearly 2,000 years for Christ to come again…that was Plan A. Plan A doesn’t seem to be working out. So, I am living Plan B, that Christ is here, Christ is in the here and now and the only thing we are required to do is to notice. Elizabeth Barrett Browning said, “Earth is crammed with heaven…”
Live like there is no tomorrow. Live through the darkness, embrace it, welcome it. All of life is our teacher. Go ahead and make the decision, write the letter, get the help you need, find someone to love, give yourself away. Live a caught-up life, not a put-off life, so that whatever happens next, you are ready for God, you are wide awake. Jesus calls us to re-order our priorities, be alert and sharp, and to tingle with expectation.
God never tires of coming into our world. God is always here. But be awake and aware, for God isn’t doing the same old thing. God is doing a new thing, something imaginative, something glorious, something simple and unique, something beautiful—even more beautiful that we can imagine. It started in the darkness, with a tiny spark in a tiny baby. All of life starts in the darkness—holy darkness. Amen.