Learning to Walk in the Dark
Sermon
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Cycle A Gospel Sermons For Lent And Easter
If we take away nothing new from the Passion story this year let us take away this: through it we can learn to walk in the dark and remember that the dark is as day to God.
Barbara Brown Taylor titled her 2014 book Learning to Walk in the Dark.1 In the introduction she pointed out, “From earliest times, Christians have used ‘darkness’ as a synonym for sin, ignorance, spiritual blindness, and death. At the theological level, however, this language creates all sorts of problems. It divides the day in two, pitting the light part against the dark part. It tucks all the sinister stuff into the dark part, identifying God with the sunny part and leaving you to deal with the rest on your own time.” So Taylor set about exploring the dark — in her backyard and on the crest of her land’s mountain, in a “wild” cave’s total darkness with experienced cavers, in the Chapel of Our Lady of the Underground far below the sanctuary floor of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, France, and within herself. In the closing pages of her book she writes, “Whether you decide to explore the dark alone or with company, your job is as simple and as hard as this: drop what you believe about the dark, or have been taught about the dark, to see for yourself what is true.”
Many congregations, given time to reflect on where they are along a spectrum from bright illumination to total darkness, would say they feel like they are groping in the dark. They are groping for the reasons their efforts to grow fail. They are groping for strategies that will work. They are groping for avenues of revenue. They are groping for a worship style, a music style, an advertising style that will attract new members without aggravating the current members. Groping for webpage and social media presence, though quite a few members may not use it much themselves. Mostly, the congregations and often their pastors grope for a way forward into today, tomorrow, and the next day. So far, no one person has been able to get a complete sense of how to handle this strange transition era into which the late twentieth and early twenty-first century thrust the Christian church. Thankfully, sign posts and walkways can be found here and there, provided by a pastor and congregation here, a congregation and pastor there. So there’s hope, but also an abiding fear that the way won’t be charted, the ‘fix’ won’t be found before it’s too late for numerous local churches to survive.
What if we learn to walk in the dark? What life-recovering discoveries can we make?
The author of the gospel of Matthew (who for simplicity’s sake I’ll simply call ‘Matthew’) recognized that his community struggled in an unexpected dark. More and more their conviction that Jesus of Nazareth was indeed the Messiah fell on deaf ears within their community. Their friends, families, and religious leaders said “It’s not so” and said it emphatically. [Note to preacher: The following is a hypothetical rebuttal to the claim that Jesus is the Messiah.]
Matthew’s faith community had landed in the dark. Their own religious kin did not become Jesus’ followers. Simultaneously Jesus the risen Christ had not returned. This was not what they expected. Now what should they do?
Matthew taught them to walk in the dark. With his gospel he created a manual for the church — a guidebook for how they must be in the world; how the church must be in the world; how it is to live with itself and with others; how to walk in the dark.
1. Love God, love neighbor (Matthew 22:37-40; 25:31-40)
2. Love neighbor (Matthew 25:31-40)
3. Drop the sword, literally and figuratively. It’ll come back to bite you, and it squanders energy and drive that you need for loving your neighbor (Matthew 26:51-52)
4. Fail Jesus miserably, weep bitterly, and show up to try again (Matthew 26:75, 28:10-16)
Reverend Stephanie Jaeger, reflecting on Matthew 26 and 27 wrote:
It’s not that we become masters of the dark. We could though become masters of walking in it. What if we learn to walk in the dark? What life-recovering discoveries can we make?
Near the US Southwest border, a group calling themselves the Samaritans gathers at a local church to fill gallon jugs with drinking water. Later they will drive to a stretch of desert on the US side of the Mexican border. They will hike into the barren, waterless terrain, leave the jugs of water where they will be found and hike back out again. This is a high traffic area for those fleeing from the terror and violence in their Central American countries. This is land where one can lose one’s way even in daylight, and certainly in the dark of night. It is where the “coyotes” — the hired guides — leave them stranded at the hint of border patrol. It is where children and parents, siblings or cousins can and do die of thirst, literally.
You might think the Samaritans are all liberal social justice Christians or all Democrats championing radical immigration reform, or all from one historical peace denomination, you’d be wrong. They are Republicans and Democrats on opposite sides of the argument; they are evangelical Christians, mainline Protestants, and Roman Catholics. Some are proponents of harsher punishments and penalties for any crossing the US border illegally; others work to mitigate a fast-track judicial system that keeps for-profit jails at capacity.
But as Samaritans they have one goal, one mission, and they speak as one voice. “We save lives.”
This is walking in the dark!
Through one traditional hymn we pray that our eyes may be opened to the truths God has for us. Another hymn reminds us that new challenges call forth fresh responsibilities.
Here’s that same manual — the gospel of Matthew — ready to help us walk in the dark in place of groping in the darkness.
1. Focus on loving God —
2. Focus on loving the neighbor —
3. Focus on dropping the sword literally and figuratively. See 1 and 2 above!
4. Fail Jesus miserably, weep bitterly, and show up to try again.
Remember Jean Valjean in Les Miserables? He stole from the priest who gave him food and shelter, told the police the priest gave him the silver items he’d stolen, and was protected from his own lie by the same priest who told the police, he had forgotten to take these candlesticks as well.
Years later, a man wrongly identified as Jean Valjean was about to be executed for the real Jean Valjean’s original crime (stealing bread for his sister’s family). Jean Valjean faced a choice: stay silent, invisible to the law, and alive — or publically proclaim that the man they held was innocent, the prisoner could not possibly be the Jean Valjean they wanted because he himself was Jean Valjean. He chose a destiny in keeping with the saving grace of God shown to him by the priest. He went public and the man’s life was saved.
There’s a faithfulness to the process Matthew’s gospel provides. When we try to master the dark we’re trying for control. When we learn to walk in the dark we relinquish control for adaptability and faithfulness and acting regardless of the dark.
Jesus was not killed because he was called the Son of Man (Matthew’s term) or Son of God (John’s term). Jesus was killed because as the Son of Man/Son of God he did in deed what God had required from the beginning of creation: loved, cared for, protected, stood with, spoke up for, went to bat for, put himself at work and even risk for the neighbor, the foreigner, the sojourner, the disenfranchised, the under-represented, the maligned, the marginalized, the unpopular, the under-powered, disempowered, and the powerless. His deeds, his actions, challenged the religious and political status-quo. Jesus was killed not because he was called the Son of God but because he lived and acted as the Son of God he was. He walked in the dark, knowing the dark is as light to God.
News reports in the summer of 2015 carried heartbreaking reports of boat-load after boat-load of families fleeing war and terror in Syria and Afghanistan. Hundreds died daily in over-filled vessels from dehydration, starvation, and drowning. Passage slips or tickets in hand, refugees were sometimes simply loaded onto the boats, put out to sea, and told to sail “that way” and they’d reach Greece. One NPR segment included a conversation between NPR host Melissa Block and her husband’s cousin who was vacationing on a tiny Greek island. The cousin, Maria, explained that one of the first questions the refugees asked upon landing was “Where are we?” They were quickly assured they were safe, they were free; this was part of Greece, and no one was going to hurt them.
“At first we didn’t know what to do to help them,” she said. “But then we walked along the shore and we saw families and babies. The babies were wet through-and-through. Everyone was wet through and through. We asked if they had cell phones. Those were wet too.
“After a bit we got organized and did shopping. Brought back water, food, and disposable diapers — lots of disposable diapers. We helped hold the babies while the mommies changed them. I must have looked like a granny, so I did a lot of holding of the babies while moms and dads took care of other things.
“We help set up a camp for them there on the beach. We told them a man from the foreign office would come and talk with them. We knew him — a young man, kind and reassuring, always was the one who came. We explained he’d take down their names and any other information they could give him. You have to realize none of these people had official papers with them. They’d been lucky to escape with their lives. And when the officer came, he took down their names and treated them with respect, explaining what would come next.”
Asked how many had landed so far on their little beach, the cousin said, “Well about fifty came on each boat, and there were fifteen boats tied here so far. We’ll keep doing whatever we can.”3
This is learning to walk in the dark.
Learning to walk in the dark means we stop being frozen just because all we can see is what has been and what is, but not what can be. Learning to walk in the dark means not waiting for the huge problem, the immense issue, the overwhelming complexities to be figured out (US border immigration, war and terrorism against civilians in Syria and Afghanistan) and folks are comfy with the solutions.
Learning to walk in the dark means saving, comforting, interceding for the ones you find right there in front of you, right now. The ones suffering right now because of the huge issues.
Uncharted land? Probably. Populated by those with whom you disagree? More than likely. Concealing difficult challenges? Absolutely. The dark is the dark. But the dark is as day to God. Every one of you, every one of us can do this. Learn to walk there and your faith-eyes will adjust. You’ll see.
Amen.
__________
Barbara Brown Taylor titled her 2014 book Learning to Walk in the Dark.1 In the introduction she pointed out, “From earliest times, Christians have used ‘darkness’ as a synonym for sin, ignorance, spiritual blindness, and death. At the theological level, however, this language creates all sorts of problems. It divides the day in two, pitting the light part against the dark part. It tucks all the sinister stuff into the dark part, identifying God with the sunny part and leaving you to deal with the rest on your own time.” So Taylor set about exploring the dark — in her backyard and on the crest of her land’s mountain, in a “wild” cave’s total darkness with experienced cavers, in the Chapel of Our Lady of the Underground far below the sanctuary floor of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, France, and within herself. In the closing pages of her book she writes, “Whether you decide to explore the dark alone or with company, your job is as simple and as hard as this: drop what you believe about the dark, or have been taught about the dark, to see for yourself what is true.”
Many congregations, given time to reflect on where they are along a spectrum from bright illumination to total darkness, would say they feel like they are groping in the dark. They are groping for the reasons their efforts to grow fail. They are groping for strategies that will work. They are groping for avenues of revenue. They are groping for a worship style, a music style, an advertising style that will attract new members without aggravating the current members. Groping for webpage and social media presence, though quite a few members may not use it much themselves. Mostly, the congregations and often their pastors grope for a way forward into today, tomorrow, and the next day. So far, no one person has been able to get a complete sense of how to handle this strange transition era into which the late twentieth and early twenty-first century thrust the Christian church. Thankfully, sign posts and walkways can be found here and there, provided by a pastor and congregation here, a congregation and pastor there. So there’s hope, but also an abiding fear that the way won’t be charted, the ‘fix’ won’t be found before it’s too late for numerous local churches to survive.
What if we learn to walk in the dark? What life-recovering discoveries can we make?
The author of the gospel of Matthew (who for simplicity’s sake I’ll simply call ‘Matthew’) recognized that his community struggled in an unexpected dark. More and more their conviction that Jesus of Nazareth was indeed the Messiah fell on deaf ears within their community. Their friends, families, and religious leaders said “It’s not so” and said it emphatically. [Note to preacher: The following is a hypothetical rebuttal to the claim that Jesus is the Messiah.]
Your Jesus might be a prophet; he might have been a teacher to some extent — maybe. But he could not be God’s anointed. He wasn’t from the house of David — an absolute must. He did not get rid of the Romans or put Israel back on the map as God’s supreme kingdom. By your own accounts he had ample opportunities to flex his might, yet he got himself arrested. From the sound of the charges and his less than convincing self-defense, he got himself convicted (and rightly so.) Also, getting arrested and executed — and, this is an absolute deal breaker – he died! God’s messiah does not die!
Your Jesus of Nazareth is no Son of Man, no king of David, no messiah. Your Jesus of Nazareth is a fraud. Your own heritage’s traditional criteria of messiah — based in scripture and in David’s kingship — do not fit. Beware. You, can find yourselves charge with blaspheming the holy one of Israel. Remember the penalty for that!
Matthew’s faith community had landed in the dark. Their own religious kin did not become Jesus’ followers. Simultaneously Jesus the risen Christ had not returned. This was not what they expected. Now what should they do?
Matthew taught them to walk in the dark. With his gospel he created a manual for the church — a guidebook for how they must be in the world; how the church must be in the world; how it is to live with itself and with others; how to walk in the dark.
1. Love God, love neighbor (Matthew 22:37-40; 25:31-40)
2. Love neighbor (Matthew 25:31-40)
3. Drop the sword, literally and figuratively. It’ll come back to bite you, and it squanders energy and drive that you need for loving your neighbor (Matthew 26:51-52)
4. Fail Jesus miserably, weep bitterly, and show up to try again (Matthew 26:75, 28:10-16)
Reverend Stephanie Jaeger, reflecting on Matthew 26 and 27 wrote:
The core revelation of Palm/Passion Sunday is this: God doesn’t save in the ways we might expect. God doesn’t rule the way humans do. God dominates with love, not violence. God overpowers through sacrifice, not by taking away. God wins by suffering, not humiliation — suffering and aligning God’s self with those who suffer.2
It’s not that we become masters of the dark. We could though become masters of walking in it. What if we learn to walk in the dark? What life-recovering discoveries can we make?
Near the US Southwest border, a group calling themselves the Samaritans gathers at a local church to fill gallon jugs with drinking water. Later they will drive to a stretch of desert on the US side of the Mexican border. They will hike into the barren, waterless terrain, leave the jugs of water where they will be found and hike back out again. This is a high traffic area for those fleeing from the terror and violence in their Central American countries. This is land where one can lose one’s way even in daylight, and certainly in the dark of night. It is where the “coyotes” — the hired guides — leave them stranded at the hint of border patrol. It is where children and parents, siblings or cousins can and do die of thirst, literally.
You might think the Samaritans are all liberal social justice Christians or all Democrats championing radical immigration reform, or all from one historical peace denomination, you’d be wrong. They are Republicans and Democrats on opposite sides of the argument; they are evangelical Christians, mainline Protestants, and Roman Catholics. Some are proponents of harsher punishments and penalties for any crossing the US border illegally; others work to mitigate a fast-track judicial system that keeps for-profit jails at capacity.
But as Samaritans they have one goal, one mission, and they speak as one voice. “We save lives.”
This is walking in the dark!
Through one traditional hymn we pray that our eyes may be opened to the truths God has for us. Another hymn reminds us that new challenges call forth fresh responsibilities.
Here’s that same manual — the gospel of Matthew — ready to help us walk in the dark in place of groping in the darkness.
1. Focus on loving God —
- Yes, that means having a prayer life.
- Yes, it means having a worship life.
- Yes, it means having a giving-away life: your money, your energy, your free time, your wants for another’s needs.
- Yes, it means having a seriously studied scripture life.
- Yes, it means wrestling with your own will to decide if you can, actually if you will, get in step with God’s will as interpreted by Jesus.
2. Focus on loving the neighbor —
- Yes, that means looking beyond your own wants and needs.
- Yes, that means re-evaluating your household and church economics so that “the others” are served at least as well if not better than you serve yourselves.
- Yes, that means reassessing your politics so they press an agenda that seeks the welfare of all people of the world.
3. Focus on dropping the sword literally and figuratively. See 1 and 2 above!
4. Fail Jesus miserably, weep bitterly, and show up to try again.
Remember Jean Valjean in Les Miserables? He stole from the priest who gave him food and shelter, told the police the priest gave him the silver items he’d stolen, and was protected from his own lie by the same priest who told the police, he had forgotten to take these candlesticks as well.
Years later, a man wrongly identified as Jean Valjean was about to be executed for the real Jean Valjean’s original crime (stealing bread for his sister’s family). Jean Valjean faced a choice: stay silent, invisible to the law, and alive — or publically proclaim that the man they held was innocent, the prisoner could not possibly be the Jean Valjean they wanted because he himself was Jean Valjean. He chose a destiny in keeping with the saving grace of God shown to him by the priest. He went public and the man’s life was saved.
There’s a faithfulness to the process Matthew’s gospel provides. When we try to master the dark we’re trying for control. When we learn to walk in the dark we relinquish control for adaptability and faithfulness and acting regardless of the dark.
Jesus was not killed because he was called the Son of Man (Matthew’s term) or Son of God (John’s term). Jesus was killed because as the Son of Man/Son of God he did in deed what God had required from the beginning of creation: loved, cared for, protected, stood with, spoke up for, went to bat for, put himself at work and even risk for the neighbor, the foreigner, the sojourner, the disenfranchised, the under-represented, the maligned, the marginalized, the unpopular, the under-powered, disempowered, and the powerless. His deeds, his actions, challenged the religious and political status-quo. Jesus was killed not because he was called the Son of God but because he lived and acted as the Son of God he was. He walked in the dark, knowing the dark is as light to God.
News reports in the summer of 2015 carried heartbreaking reports of boat-load after boat-load of families fleeing war and terror in Syria and Afghanistan. Hundreds died daily in over-filled vessels from dehydration, starvation, and drowning. Passage slips or tickets in hand, refugees were sometimes simply loaded onto the boats, put out to sea, and told to sail “that way” and they’d reach Greece. One NPR segment included a conversation between NPR host Melissa Block and her husband’s cousin who was vacationing on a tiny Greek island. The cousin, Maria, explained that one of the first questions the refugees asked upon landing was “Where are we?” They were quickly assured they were safe, they were free; this was part of Greece, and no one was going to hurt them.
“At first we didn’t know what to do to help them,” she said. “But then we walked along the shore and we saw families and babies. The babies were wet through-and-through. Everyone was wet through and through. We asked if they had cell phones. Those were wet too.
“After a bit we got organized and did shopping. Brought back water, food, and disposable diapers — lots of disposable diapers. We helped hold the babies while the mommies changed them. I must have looked like a granny, so I did a lot of holding of the babies while moms and dads took care of other things.
“We help set up a camp for them there on the beach. We told them a man from the foreign office would come and talk with them. We knew him — a young man, kind and reassuring, always was the one who came. We explained he’d take down their names and any other information they could give him. You have to realize none of these people had official papers with them. They’d been lucky to escape with their lives. And when the officer came, he took down their names and treated them with respect, explaining what would come next.”
Asked how many had landed so far on their little beach, the cousin said, “Well about fifty came on each boat, and there were fifteen boats tied here so far. We’ll keep doing whatever we can.”3
This is learning to walk in the dark.
Learning to walk in the dark means we stop being frozen just because all we can see is what has been and what is, but not what can be. Learning to walk in the dark means not waiting for the huge problem, the immense issue, the overwhelming complexities to be figured out (US border immigration, war and terrorism against civilians in Syria and Afghanistan) and folks are comfy with the solutions.
Learning to walk in the dark means saving, comforting, interceding for the ones you find right there in front of you, right now. The ones suffering right now because of the huge issues.
Uncharted land? Probably. Populated by those with whom you disagree? More than likely. Concealing difficult challenges? Absolutely. The dark is the dark. But the dark is as day to God. Every one of you, every one of us can do this. Learn to walk there and your faith-eyes will adjust. You’ll see.
Amen.
__________
1. Barbara Brown Taylor,
Learning to Walk in the Dark (New York: HarperOne, 2014), pp. 6-7.
2. Stephanie Jaeger, “Living by the Word: Reflections on the Lectionary” in
Christian Century April 2, 2014, Vol. 131, No. 7, pp. 21-22.
3. As Migrants Wash Ashore, Greek Island Residents Come to Their Aid, All Things Considered, National Public Radio, August 10, 2015.
