Advent Sunday, 30 November 2020
Part one
The Advent Sunday liturgy is wonderfully dramatic, sadly not possible with a physical congregation this year. You will no doubt have experienced it in previous years. The liturgy enacts a central theme of Advent - moving West to End, from darkness to light. And of celebrating the light shining in the darkness.
It got me thinking about the relationship between darkness and light. It’s pretty clear that eliminating the darkness is a key theme for humanity. It’s a theme that came up in several of the Exploring Faith conversations with those from other religious traditions. And there’s a lot of positive things that can be said about it – of allowing the light of love, compassion, justice to flow in and through us. But what about meeting God in the dark?
From earliest times, Christians have used “darkness” as a synonym for sin, ignorance, spiritual blindness, and death. Our Bible and liturgy is full of it – ‘Deliver us, O Lord, from the powers of darkness. Shine into our hearts the brightness of your Holy Spirit, and protect us from all perils and dangers of the night.’
God is light and in him there is no darkness at all (1 John 1.5).
About 140 years ago the lightbulb was invented, providing us with good, cheap light. It allowed us to make huge advances in many areas of life. We could now handle anything with just a little more light. The only casualty was darkness.
I’ve been reading the book, Learning to Walk in the Dark, by Barbara Brown Taylor. She describes the sort of churches that only focus on the light, as full solar church. They emphasis the benefits of faith, which include a strong sense of God’s presence, certainty of belief, divine guidance in all things, and clear answers to prayer. Those who attend strive to be positive in attitude and unwavering in faith.
This sort of Christian faith thrives on dividing reality into opposing pairs: good/evil, church/world, spirit/flesh, sacred/profane, light/dark. Such spirituality attempts to eliminate darkness—not just physical darkness but also metaphysical darkness, which includes psychological, emotional, relational, and spiritual darkness.
If you’ve experienced life in a full solar church, the trouble starts when darkness falls on your life. This can happen in many unsurprising ways: you lose your job, your marriage falls apart, your health fails, you pray hard for something that doesn’t happen, you begin to doubt your faith. A worldwide pandemic plunges us into lockdown.
Barbara Brown Taylor started looking again at the Bible and she began to notice how many important things happen at night in the Bible. Jacob wrestles an angel all night long, surviving the match with a limp, a blessing, and a new name. His son Joseph dreams such dreams at night that he catches a pharaoh’s attention, graduating from the dungeon to the palace to become the royal interpreter of dreams. The exodus from Egypt happens at night; God parts the Red Sea at night.
Then there is Moses who is the only one who is allowed to survive a direct encounter with the divine, this encounter revealed in a dark cloud.
What about the NT? Growing up, I always thought of the stable in Bethlehem as a wooden hut filled with straw. But then I went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and to the Church of the Nativity in the West Bank. There I learned that caves made the best stables in Jesus’s day. Jesus’s birth is thought to have taken place not in the Church of the Nativity but under it, in a small cave under the altar.
And the cave in which he rose from the dead is long gone. It’s now covered over by the huge Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. There were no witnesses to the resurrection. Everyone who saw the risen Jesus saw him after. But whatever happened in the cave happened in the dark. Resurrection is always announced with Easter lilies, the sound of trumpets, bright streaming light. But it didn’t happen that way. If it happened in a cave, in complete silence, in absolute darkness, with the smell of damp stone and dug earth in the air. In short, new life starts in the dark. Whether it is a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb, it starts in the dark.
There is a lot more to say about this. So I’ve split this sermon into two – and I’ll say more on this next week – so try not to miss the sequel!
I would like to finish with a quote from an episcopal bishop, Stephen Charleston, who comes from a Native American background, and he puts this theme we’ve exploring tonight rather poetically:
Darkness is not evil, but a realm of mystery and imagination. The day is constant, but the night is creative. The stars dance. The moon dreams. The comets write poetry of fire. Without the night there is no dawn or twilight, no moments of sacred ambiguity, no subtle changes of perception…we need that glorious darkness, that obscure beauty, drifting on wedding gown clouds of white across an obsidian sky.
Reference: Learning to Walk in the Dark, by Barbara Brown Taylor