Preacher: The Rev. Dr. Valori Mulvey Sherer, Rector
En el nombre del Dios: Padre, Hijo, y Espiritu Santo. Amen.
“Arise, shine for your light has come and the glory of the Lord is risen upon you.” This beautiful Canticle from Isaiah is written about the people of Israel whose exile in Babylonia has finally come to an end. Their exile has been a period of great trial and difficulty. As one commentator said, “God, who made their return [from Babylonia to Jerusalem] possible, has not seen fit to make it easy and these new obstacles created for them a crisis of faith…” (Dick Donovan)
Crises of faith are often described as times of darkness. St. John of the Cross called this a “dark night of the soul.” Darkness, for most of us, is where monsters hide under our beds; where danger lurks in dark shadows; where evil lies in wait like Freddy Kruegger with a chain saw.
That’s a shame, because Scripture tells us, it is from within the darkness that God creates. In the first chapter of Genesis, the creation story says, “the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep…Then God spoke and there was light. And God separated the light from the darkness… And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.” (Gen 1: 2-5)
Notice that evening (darkness) always preceded morning (light) in the creation story. That’s because darkness is the womb of God, the place where new life is created. This is the action of God repeated over and over in our Scripture: God enters the darkness and births something new.
Remember the tomb of our Lord, where God broke in and new life, resurrection life, was created. Remember the star that broke the darkness and guided the Gentiles to God.
Darkness isn’t bad. It isn’t to be feared or avoided or judged. It is simply one part of the whole. Light and dark are a symbiotic unity. As we read later in Isaiah, God says, “I form light and create darkness;
I make weal and create woe; I the Lord do all these things.” (45:7)
But we have been conditioned to love light and fear darkness. Think about it… if we were to totally do away with darkness, the light would destroy us. Its heat would scorch the earth. Its brightness would eventually blind us. We’d lose our natural rhythms of sleep and wakefulness, which, studies have shown, eventually leads to insanity, and death.
We need the darkness. We need to sleep, to rest and restore our bodies, and to allow our minds to process the events of our lives in our dreams – where we also hear the voice of God. And we know that spiritually, it is in returning and rest we shall be saved, in quietness and confidence shall be our strength. (Prayer for Quiet Confidence, BCP, 832)
Not only do we need the darkness, we need to remember again how to love it and receive its treasure. In her new book, “Learning to Walk in the Dark” Barbara Brown Taylor says that we rarely experience darkness anymore. We have nightlights, street lights, and city lights that light up our nights. We have LED clocks on our bed stands (LED stand for “light emitting diodes”), and we plug these clocks along with our phone chargers into multi-taps with little red lights that indicate the power is active.
Nightlights softly illumine our hallways, bathrooms, and nurseries. All of these lights make it easy for us to get to the bathroom without stubbing our toes, but, as Barbara Brown Taylor says, it steals from us the “treasure of the night.” That treasure, she says, is God.
God knows our weaknesses and also how to help us trust and grow. As God said in Genesis, the light is good. It’s attractive, it’s warm, and draws us to it. Like moths, we are drawn to the light, but once we come close to it, we realize that the source of the light is God. It is God who draws us close. It is God who keeps us safe. It is God alone who is the source of our life. The closer we come to the light, the more realize that the light isn’t coming from God. It is God.
And when we know that, when we truly believe it, then God leads us into the darkness, just as Jesus was led into the wilderness, so that God can prepare us for the life we were created to live; so that we can accomplish the purpose God had for us from before we were formed in our mother’s wombs.
As beloved children of God, we enter the darkness willingly, knowing we are entering the womb of God, where new life, not death, awaits us! In the same way that a seed goes into the darkness of the ground and dies in order to sprout and grow new life, grow into its fullness, so we go into the darkness and die to ourselves, as Jesus told us we must do – dying to everything we think we know about God, ourselves, our church, and the world. Only then can the new life God is waiting to give, be born in us.
Today is my last Sunday at Redeemer until Palm Sunday. We are, priest and parish together, entering into a sabbatical time – a time of rest and spiritual refreshment.
The timing couldn’t be better. Like the people Isaiah was writing about, we too have been through a period of great trial and difficulty. And like the people of Israel, we have been delivered, but our deliverance has placed new obstacles before us and we are experiencing a crisis of faith. It’s OK, God’s done this before.
That’s why, during our sabbatical time, we will do the work of reconciliation set before us; work that will help us free ourselves from whatever has enslaved us and led us away from God rather than closer to God.
Then, in the quietness of our sabbatical rest, we will listen together for the voice of God who calls us to go deeper still into the darkness, into the womb of God, where we will be re-created, reborn, and grow into our fullness. As Christians we believe, we know that resurrection always follows death. Therefore, we don’t fear death.
In the same way, we know that the light, who is God, always breaks into darkness. Therefore, we don’t fear any darkness. Instead, we enter into it willingly, as Jesus entered his dark moment, trusting that in the redeeming love of God there is only one outcome for us – new life, resurrection life, promised and given to us in our Savior, Jesus Christ, whose revelation to the world we celebrate on this Feast of the Epiphany.
Let us pray… Lead us all, Lord God, to your presence, that your light may fill us and radiate from us so that all who see us see the light of your love and are drawn closer to you. Let our church become your womb; a place of rest and spiritual refreshment for all souls; a place where new life is created in us over and over; a place where your light eternally breaks into the darkness of the lives of those we love and serve in your name. Bless our sabbatical time. Renew us and make us whole; that we may arise, shine and live in the glory of the light of your love. In Jesus’ holy name we pray. Amen.
