Sermon: Lights in the Darkness

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Lights in the Darkness

By Charles Rush

December 12, 2004

r story begins in the dark. Dark has such fecund images for us and they run the full gamut. I think of tucking my children in when they were little in the two hundred year old house in Princeton. The snow falling, under a pile of blankets, I used to make the sounds of the north wind in their ear, covers pulled tight, warm with footy pajamas. Dark is security for most of us. I talked to more people on September 12th who said that the day before, they went home and got under their covers, probably pulled them up over their eyes. When we were kids if you got all the way under the covers, the monsters went away. Even if you could still hear them growling and snarling on your bed, there was a protective layer, a supernatural protection. Dark is security.

Dark is also the place most of us have our first stirrings of desire, at least the first ones we actually have the courage to act on. As a friend of mine said so wonderfully, "I'd been thinking about her for weeks to the point of aching, but it was only under the cover of night, with no one around, that I lost my inhibitions and finally kissed her. Robin Hittman… touching her face for the first time was like rounding a corner and coming home." Dark beckons desire.

The dark is enveloped in mystery. Some friends of mine were north of Calgary, up the range of the Rockies on the empty side of Banff, when one night they were lying out under a clear sky and the Aurora Borealis lit up above them, covering the night sky with an awe inspiring light display courtesy of Mother Nature. Transfixed, no one wanted to move lest the mystery and wonder of the night be missed. Warm faces gathered around the warming fire, surrounded by the blanket of night… Meteor showers that rain as quickly as they leave, stopping short our breath that we, yes we, actually saw it. Dark is mystery too.

And dark is wary. It is the realm where some operate with lethal effectiveness and we cannot see. We know that there is danger we cannot sense, pitfalls that we are naively immune to, predators lurking in wait, using the advantage of night to do us harm. My wife's cousins told us of being on patrol in the jungle in Vietnam at night, moving with stealth in the dark, sitting, sitting anticipating an attack. Feeling that sense of insulation that the night brings and suddenly smelling the pungent sweet odor of marijuana, realizing that the enemy was close enough to prod with a stick, unaware and most definitely aware also. That tightening of the stomach when you realize that you have woefully underestimated just how vulnerable you actually are.

And dark is dreams, visions of sugar plums that dance in our heads and anxieties and worries that we cannot control that either invade our subconscious or keep us from our rest tossing and turning. Dark is processing our conscious lives again, sifting for meaning and patterns, probing deeper architectonic issues that compel our full attention even if we cannot fully articulate them, and we usually cannot.

And dark is suffering that has no choice but to wait. It is the impoverished shanty town that electricity and the modern era have passed by. It is the back alley where contraband is exchanged in the metropolis anonymously. It is the end of the long corridor that leads to the I.C.U. with the respirator pumping a regular beat and drugs doing for the patient what the patient can no longer do for themselves, quiet, eerily waiting on the edge of life and death.

Our shepherds were waiting in the darkness… and, by and large, so are we as our headlines remind us daily.

A friend of mine, a journalist has a six year old daughter. She was walking across their living room when she looked down at one of his magazines and said "Who's that weird lady on the front of the magazine?"

"'Weird' is a multi-purpose word for 6-year-olds, so Molly's statement wasn't as harsh as it sounded. Still, it was an honest question that demanded an honest answer.

"'Honey, that woman's not weird,' his wife responded… 'She lives in a place called Somalia, and she's starving to death.'"

This answer led to more questions, more questions still at dinner about how people starve, why people starve, more questions still as they lit the daily advent calendar and read a little family devotion together. Finally, Dad was putting her in bed, tucking her in and she said, 'Daddy, how could Jesus make a place where girls and boys starve to death?'[i] These questions always seem to come right at the very end of the day… And maybe they should, especially for Christians. We sing, "Joy to the World" and at some point we need to explain exactly what starving Africans have to be joyful about. At a minimum we need to note the irony between our message and the world around us.

It is unquestionably the case that in this season there are a good number among even us that find not so much "tidings of comfort and joy but frustration and grief." There is a light of joy in our midst, to be sure, but it not the kind of light that dispels the darkness so much as it lives in and around it. It dwells together with the darkness. At its most profound level, as Jan Richardson has noted, "the Christ came not to dispel the darkness but to teach us to dwell with integrity, compassion, and love in the midst of ambiguity. The one who grew in the fertile darkness of Mary's womb knew that darkness is not evil of itself. Even darkness can become "the tending place in which our longing for healing, justice and peace grow and come to birth."[ii]

We Christians celebrate with Joy during this season remembering that the birth of the Christ Child answers the deepest longing of the human heart, as Bill Coffin has noted, "not for a Chef, nor an artist, not for a friend or a lover, but for a Savior."[iii] Because of that deep and abiding joy, we developed a festal season filled with good foods and good wine as a symbol of the coming Kingdom of God and we give each other gifts as symbols of grace and love.

No question this has become confused and distorted in our culture. Slick marketing has a way of corrupting every good intention. Joy is not happiness. It is much more profound than happiness.

Plato used to say that most people are motivated simply by the desire to avoid pain and to acquire pleasure. And most men's pleasures in ancient Greece were not that different from our primal pleasures today. Men were motivated to acquire comfort, sex, good food, leisure, and power. He didn't see anything wrong with these as such, but he only noted that they were for the most part external and fleeting.

And that is still pretty much true for us today. We desire great gifts, great meals, indulgent vacations, and the perq's of the privileged life. Most of us live our lives from the fleeting external intoxication that comes from one great gift to the next. It is easiest to witness this with our children. They get these extravagant gifts on Christmas morning and they are bored by the early afternoon. Really great gifts have a longer high, great cars, boats, jewelry, homes last longer. But they remain external and still with a limited tenure of effect.

Plato and Aristotle taught that permanent happiness comes from doing things that are intrinsically worthwhile. They said that the moral point of our life was reorienting our pleasures from external things to internal things, so that we no longer did compromised or banal things for a big external reward. Instead, we need to retool our pleasures so that we take pleasure in doing things that intrinsically develop stronger character. We have to replace pleasures that are merely appetitive with ones that produce excellent character. How do you know what these are? That is the role of philosophy to think out for us. The two of them made an enormous step forward morally speaking.

But even intrinsic happiness that produces excellent character is not quite the joy that the Bible speaks of.[iv] Joy is that sense of being blessed, of having God draw near to you. In some ways, it is more transcendent than intrinsic happiness and in other ways it is simply different.

It is the ordinary joy that farmers in the ancient world felt when they finally harvested the crop for the year after a great, long spring and summer of work.

It is the genuinely profound elation that you feel at the birth of your children. In scripture, we have the wonderful words from Simeon, after seeing the birth of Jesus, who said, "Lord, now I may depart in peace." Now that I have seen this, everything else from here on out is extra. It is that kind of privilege.

And I am quite sure that same feeling will be compounded with the birth of my grandchildren and holding them for the very first time.

I know that when my son was married last summer, there was a point in the reception that I caught sight of my wife. We didn't actually say anything but we both had that feeling of grateful joy at that moment that we had birthed this kid, gotten him through school, kept him off parole, and we've really lived to actually see this day. You do all the planning, all the details, and there comes this moment where you are really in it. This is your life. It is a deep, almost inexpressible joy.

It is what you feel when you watch your children graduate. It is the sense that you did your job, that they are actually flapping their own wings, and you know that you won't walk this way again- and all of the exasperation and the achievements, all the tensions and the laughters, all the boredom and the wonder that you have experienced together are compressed in the fullness of the moment.

Joy is also about rescue. The bible uses military images, not too different from the last scene in Saving Private Ryan when the American G.I.'s are being overwhelmed by a superior German tank division. They are dying left and right, falling back, taking cover, losing so badly, all they even hope for is to blow up a bridge before they die themselves to prevent the Germans from advancing. Running away as fast as they can, they turn to see one of the German tanks blow up, how they have no idea because they have no armored division to back them up. Just above American planes come roaring by. Joy is that weak kneed sense of being plucked from sure death and destruction.

Joy is the sense of recovering from an illness that threatens to cut short your life, perhaps with the proviso that 'known medicine cannot explain' the spontaneous nature of your shrinking tumor. It is that sense that you are now on borrowed time, that every day from here forward is 'plus one'.

Joy is that sense that you have been blessed by God. "Joy is actually a by-product of faith. In this regard, "joy is something you have, no matter what the circumstances. No matter, even, how you feel."[v] Once Christians had that fundamental sense of being blessed, they learned that they could any manner of hardship and difficulty because they carried with them a sense of joy and hope that was not dependent on external conditions. It was a sense that they were loved and cared for and rescued. They worshipped a God that was concerned with a peasant teenage girl and the birth of her little baby on the back side of civilization at the outer edge of history. They were important to God, blessed by God.

Having that sense with them, they realized that they were not exempt from the sufferings of this life. There would be starvation, injustice, arbitrary violence, humiliating degradation, failing health, and death. They could stand against these things, in some cases pray and act that they would come to an end. But they did not need a magical exemption from the vicissitudes of human existence. They were light in the midst of darkness. As the Gospel of John puts it so eloquently, "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God… In him was life, and the life was the light of all humanity. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it… The true light that enlightens every person was coming into the world… And the word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. (Jn. 1:1,5,9,14).

This is why St. Paul could say, towards the end of his life, that he had learned in all things, in all circumstances, to be content. That contentment, that true peace that passes all understanding, is not so much internally generated as it is a gift of God to us that no one can take away, no cruel person, no suffering circumstances.

And it is that hope that resides in each of us that impels us to do what we can, where we are, with what we have. It impels us to be risky to make a difference, to pass the blessing on to others. That is the gift, the real gift that we have to give this season. That is why Jesus said, "Who is it that having such a light would put it under the lamp stand?" No, this is a gift we can generously share with everyone around us. As Jesus said, " Even so, let your light shine before men; that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven (Mt. 5:16). Pass on the blessing. Live out of your light. Let the blessing direct your gifts this season that those around you might feel the shining acceptance, the hope, the joy that God wants to fill them with. Amen.

[i] See Marv Knox's article "Joy to the World: A hopeful word this Christmas" in the Western Recorder, December 22, 1992, p. 5

[ii] Richardson, Jan L. Night Visions: Searching the Shadows of Advent and Christmas (Cleveland: United Church Press, 1998), p. xvi, xvii. The idea for this sermon was nurtured by Rev. Julie Yarborough who shared with me this wonderful devotional book that picked up the theme I wanted to develop so very well.

[iii] This quote is not exact as I can no longer find it. However, if memory serves, I've actually improved on it a bit.

[iv] What follows can be found in the Anchor Bible Dictionary, The Interpreter's Dictionary, and The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. The two principal words that I refer to both roughly translate to mean 'to make glad', 'to hearten'. They are not only nearly synonymous, neither of them figures prominently in any Greek philosophical school. In fact, they appear to be fairly unique to Christianity. At least we can say that only Christians really developed the idea of spiritual joy to such an extent that it figures in our parlance today in a significant way.

[v] Knox, op. cit.