Honoring the Darkness
Series: Advent
Speaker: The Rev'd Emily Griffin
“Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” It’s an Advent question, if ever there was one. And if anyone’s earned the right to give Jesus a little push back, it’s our season’s Anti-Santa, John the Baptist. Let’s be honest. A fat and jolly joy maker John is not. No one really hopes that John the Baptist, with all his locusts and camels’ hair, will come down their chimney this Christmas. But for once, John isn’t playing to his audience in today’s Gospel reading. No – this is the honest question of a man who finds himself living in the dark.
Personally, I find it misleading that we hold most of our Advent celebrations in the morning. It’s false advertising. We’re down to less than 9 ½ hours of daylight these days; that leaves a lot of time to ponder in the dark. This season of waiting and hoping we call Advent, by definition, occurs more in darkness than in light. I wonder if it’s possible somehow to honor the darkness of these days – to find the gifts in it and not just wait for the light. I suspect that it is.
John the Baptist in today’s Gospel asks his question from the darkness of a prison cell. It’s no shock that he landed in jail. He did what prophets do. He spoke truth to power one too many times, and you can’t call your religious leaders “broods of vipers” or call out the king in public for his unseemly marriage without getting into some hot water.
But this PK (aka priest’s kid) who shook off his father’s Temple long ago for the open sky and freedom of the wilderness has been caged for a while now. He who spoke with such certainty about the kingdom of heaven coming near now wonders what happened if he, the one who prepared the way, is left behind in the dark. What happened to the LORD setting the prisoners free? John promised a baptism with the Holy Spirit and fire. But he’s not seeing fire. Jesus doesn’t seem to be doing enough to bring about justice, to make what’s wrong right. John is frustrated and disappointed and wants to know if it was all in vain. So he sends others to ask Jesus directly: “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”
Jesus’ answer takes the poetry of prophets like Isaiah, like John seriously. He tells them to relay what they’ve seen: that in Jesus, “the blind receive their sight,” the sick are healed…“the poor have good news brought to them.” In other words, the seeds of the kingdom John helped to plant have borne fruit – albeit somewhat inefficiently. Why heal one person, we might ask, when Jesus could conceivably heal all of us at once? Why allow anyone to continue suffering in the dark, much less a good and faithful servant like John?
Honestly, I’ve never found answers to the “whys” of suffering all that sufficient or helpful – particularly when I’m in the dark night of the soul myself. Sometimes, as in John the Baptist’s case, we suffer because we want justice, because someone has to speak up against wrong – and if we don’t, who will? Other times though, we suffer because we’ve chosen to love, and love is by its very nature messy. Our suffering may be the result of a foolish choice or the simple fact that we live in frail bodies that don’t always match up with our minds or hearts. And sometimes, there’s no answer to the why that we’ll ever understand. It just is. We don’t need anyone to tell us that we’re lost and in need of a way home. That’s not news. What we need to know is that we’re not alone in the dark and that while weeping may remain for a night – and that night might last a while – joy can and does come in the morning. Who knows? We may even find songs in the night.
Those of us waiting around in the dark long for tidings of great joy, and that’s what we’re given today from Isaiah – a vision worth walking toward, even if it is still beyond our sight. “Say to those of a fearful heart, ‘Be strong! Do not fear! Here is your God…For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert.” What does that mean practically? Well, on one level, it’s an invitation to take the long view, to not get tripped up by the pain of the moment.
No matter how long the dry spell has been, we’re told, no matter how long we’ve had to wait, rain will come eventually. It’s as sure as the dawn.
But there’s another invitation here, I think. We don’t know exactly when this text was written, but supposing that the exiles in Babylon had at least some knowledge of it, these images held particular weight. The desert wasn’t just a metaphor for them. You see, the route from Jerusalem to Babylon and back was not a direct journey from A to B. They’d been marched the long way up through Syria and then back down along the Euphrates to Babylon. Going straight through the desert to get back home was considered too dangerous an option. There wasn’t enough food or water, for one. Besides, that particular wilderness was full of predators. You had to avoid it, sidestep, go around such dangers; it wasn’t possible to just go through, was it? Yet here Isaiah is promising that someday, when there is no choice but to go through the mess together, we’ll find what we need along the way.
It’s interesting to me the order in which Isaiah makes his promises. It’s only after he tells them not to fear that the next lines come… “Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped.” Perhaps letting go of our fear of scarcity, our fear of loss, our fear of the unknown, is part of what it makes it possible to see and hear more clearly, to sing again for joy. Perhaps it’s our fear, in part, that blinds us to the streams that are already in the desert, to the signs of joy and life that are already here. Our job is to look for what makes that kind of joy and growth possible. And one of those things, believe it or not, is darkness.
The truth is, we need the dark as a time of rest. We need time sometimes to do nothing, to stop trying to earn the love that can only be offered as a gift. We need seasons for stillness and silence, time to slow down and listen to our own breath for once, time to remember that for all our problems – we are alive in this beautiful world. We need time to dream of a different future when the future we’ve hoped for has been taken away, and it’s the darkness that gives us the freedom to do that.
Some of us need the dark as a time of healing. Darkness can give us the opportunity to try leaning on our other senses: hearing, tasting, touching. We can learn in the dark, those times of openness and not knowing, what it really means to walk by faith and not by sight. I realize this is a privileged thing to say for those of us who have no trouble seeing, who can choose to turn on the light or just put on our glasses. I am not romanticizing physical blindness; I know there are true losses there than cannot be “metaphored” away. What I am saying is that there are other senses we can use when we find ourselves stumbling around in the spiritual dark.
In the dark, without the distractions of all the blinking Christmas lights, we can perhaps hear God’s Word to us in a new, less judgmental way. We can taste the bread and the wine in a new way because we know our spiritual hunger all too well. And we can be brought within reach of those who love us. Darkness has a way of forcing us to acknowledge our dependence on others – our families, our friends, our community, our church. That reliance is there in the day too, of course; we’re just blind to it in the light.
Whether we like it or not, we need times of darkness if we’re ever going to grow. As Jan Richardson in her book Night Visions writes: “we require darkness for birth and growth: the seed in the ground, the seed in the womb, the seed in our souls.” Maybe the seed that is trying to grow in you is a compassion you’ve never known before because you’ve never walked this road before, or a wisdom you wouldn’t have gained except by going straight through. It might even be a joy grown deeper and stronger this time – because of the space that suffering has carved out along the way.
As today’s reading from James reminds us, just as the farmer waits for the early and the late rains, so we too are called to be patient- with God, with ourselves, with each other. If we pull up our roots too quickly for better light and fairer weather elsewhere, we could, in fact, do greater damage to ourselves and those we love. And we need time to develop roots if we’re newly planted, don’t we, time to deepen our roots and grow strong again when we’ve been beaten down. All of this growth happens primarily in the dark. We can, of course, outgrow where we’ve been planted and need to be planted again somewhere else, but perhaps the darkness is what helps us to know when this is true as well.
In the meantime, to those with a fearful heart today, who wonder how long we have to wait, I say, “Be strong! Do not fear!” Why? Because fear only blinds us to the good things that are already here, that are waiting for us. Because, like with John the Baptist, the seeds we plant as people of faith take a long time, even generations to grow. Just because we might not see growth right now doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Healing, like anything worth waiting for in our lives, can take a while. But primarily, I say do not fear today because “here is your God.” Not out in the light while you wait in the dark, but here and now. God is here with us in the darkness as well as the light of Advent, allowing us time for rest, for dreaming, for healing, and yes, for growth. In the Name of the One for whom darkness shines as brightly as the day – Amen.