“Darkness, darkness all around us!!”

Karen Sloan 13/03/2022

Readings - Psalm 27, Luke 13:31-35

What to write today, when all around us things seem pretty dark…

Much like what the psalmist was feeling…

I know Jim spoke last week of the crazy world we are currently in, war, floods, and inequality everywhere.

Often at times like these people say, where is your God now, why isn’t he doing something…

Maybe the God I believe in,  as Jim concluded, is in the shape of people, helping people.

But what happens when we are in the dark, and can’t find the God that we have followed for so long...

I recently went on my Tree of Life weekend, a spirituality program run by the Anglicans, a weekend where we looked at the Spanish mystics, from the 16th century.  Both Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross were the subject of the presentations. 

What’s a mystic? Well, it’s someone who seems to be at one with God.  As John of the Cross said, “it’s a person who seeks by contemplation and self-surrender to obtain unity with or absorption into the Deity or the absolute.  Who believes in the spiritual apprehension of truths that are beyond the intellect.”

If that doesn’t speak to you, then what about this from Mirabai Starr.

"A mystic is a person who has a direct experience of the sacred, unmediated by conventional religious rituals or intermediaries”

In other words, someone who senses the presence of the divine, in a deep and intimate way.  A  way that can lead us to do the same, for as Richard Rohr says, we can all be mystics if we open ourselves enough.

So, I want to share just a little. Particularly from St John of the Cross, because we seem to be in such dark times and he has a wisdom that speaks to us today.

John’s life was certainly not easy.  In fact, for most of it he was under arrest and kept in a prison for the things he believed and spoke of, dark, cold and without any comforts, physical, emotional and spiritual.  And in that time felt abandoned and lost.

Yet he finds that his experience of darkness, sometimes called the dark night of the soul, enables him to see the journey inwards is to one of love.  God’s love.  We grow into this union with the God of the universe, when we lose all our support and comfort,  because the union is already there, already exists.   It’s us who go missing or are somewhere else.  Sometimes our experiences of God are guided by our ideas of God, our intellectual and scientific images of God or what we think God should do and be, so God seems to go missing.  But as John finds out, the divine presence is never missing.

Let me read a little bit from him, found in the book, “Learning to live in the dark” P146

John, in his writings, calls us to let go or loosen our attachments to our own ego, to other people, situations and things so that we can be guided by the divine embrace, the divine love at the heart of all that is.  John wants us to let go of the things that control us, and that keep us from connecting to this inner presence, suggesting we should surrender to the movement instead of trying to force it. Surrendering to the divine breath, the divine voice, the divine life and light.

So, the darkness is not there because God has gone away, but that we have….

Or as Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk who was arguably the twentieth century’s greatest writer on Christian spirituality, says: 

Life is this simple. We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time. This is not just a fable or a nice story. It is true. If we abandon ourselves to God and forget ourselves, we see it sometimes, and we see it maybe frequently. God shows up everywhere, in everything – in people and in things and in nature and in events. It becomes very obvious that God is everywhere and in everything and we cannot be without God. That’s impossible. The only thing is we don’t see it.

I loved the talk of the inner journey, the inner call we have to go deeper to the heart of things, of who we are and who God is. Even when we cannot see much light. And things seem very dark, personally and globally

But I also loved that we are called to acknowledge the darkness we sometimes feel.  Because the darkness is also part of the journey of being human. And maybe also part of the God story. As Barbara Brown Taylor says..

“The good news is that dark and light, faith and doubt, divine absence and presence, do not exist at opposite poles.  Instead they exist with and within each other, like distinct waves that roll out of the same ocean and roll back into it again.  As different as they are, they come from and return to the same source.”

For God is found in the darkness as  well as the light

So, the weekend was a great time of reflection and growth. It opened up the idea that we can all become mystics in our own ordinary lives. Yes, we can, if we listen and let go. It may not be a direct line, but a feeling or an urge deep in our hearts that connects us to the mystery of life and to each other. If we listen… 

But the other thing I discovered about these mystics, when I looked closer, is that if we cultivate this divine connection, after dropping maybe a lot of what we hold dear, a lot of what we think we understand, they don’t just leave us there.  They don’t expect us to become a person totally focussed on the inner self and this union. To live in a cave.  Rather we are to take the divine’s calling and head out into the world, seeking to be what the life-giving spirit urges us to be. Life giving!

The goal is not to leave the world but to come back to the world, and in this way, we experience ourselves, as John would say, in love with God and in God’s love for the world.  Desiring what God wants in the world, unites us, transforms us,  and leads us to be a voice for compassion and peace for all those around us, close and not so close.

So we are to take that awareness, that depth of connection, that trust at the heart of life and go forward into the world. For the world is where God is found and where our brothers and sisters are also found.

If you think this sounds like Elizabeth O’Connor’s inward and outward journeys of the Christian faith, from the Church of the Saviour, it is.

We are sent out into the world, to help the world…

And this is where Jesus really comes alive. Lives the example we need.

For Jesus was not only a mystic, with a total and deep connection to the divine, but someone who was in the world.

The profound spirit-person experiences of Jesus, his baptism, his times away in prayer and reflection, and his experiences of the sacred, fuelled and fed all that followed in his ministry. Jesus’ ministry as teacher and healer, movement-founder and social prophet, lover of the dispossessed and marginalised, critic of the religious, political and the social order which exploited and brutalised his people,

It seems so real in the reading from Luke’s gospel today. Jesus never shirked his responsibility to his fellow people, and he never shirked his responsibility to speak up for the marginalised an oppressed, and he never shirked from his responsibility to protest violence.  Particularly political violence.

It’s not that Jesus did not know that by going to Jerusalem he would be in trouble, deep trouble.  He knew what happened to John the Baptist.  But Jerusalem was the seat of power, the seat of corruption, and so he went, like any good prophet, to confront those powers, for the sake of those suffering and marginalised.  He had to go. Even though some Pharisees had warned him, ‘Get away from here if you want to live.  Herod Antipas wants to kill you.”

As David Cramer writes  ..

“Jesus is already prepared for the death that awaits him, so he’s not the least bit worried by this threat on his life. He’s going to keep right on doing what he’s doing—regardless of what some two-bit ruler has to say about it.

“Go tell that fox,” Jesus says, referring to Herod, “that I will keep on casting out demons and healing people today and tomorrow; and the third day I will accomplish my purpose” (v. 32).

If it seems like Jesus is dismissing King Herod, that’s because he is. In ancient Greek as in modern English, “fox” can indicate craftiness or cleverness. But for ancient Hebrew or Aramaic speakers like Jesus, it would mean something more like “insignificant, morally depraved poser.” It would be more like calling someone a weasel or jackass.

What gives Jesus the audacity to respond that way to a ruler who has the power to take his life—a power that he already displayed against John? Jesus continues: “Yes, today, tomorrow, and the next day I must proceed on my way. For it wouldn’t do for a prophet of God to be killed except in Jerusalem!” (v. 33).

It isn’t that Jesus doesn’t care about his life. It’s that he’s been sent on a mission by God, the God he is intimately connected to, deep and abiding, and he intends to see it to completion. He views his mission as in the long line of the Hebrew prophets, many of whom gave their lives for it as well—many in Jerusalem itself.

Go tell that fox: we’re going to keep doing what we do today and tomorrow and the next day whether he likes it or not.

Go tell that fox: we’re going to keep healing people today and tomorrow and the next day.

Go tell that fox: we’re going to keep loving our enemies today and tomorrow and the next day.

Go tell that fox: we’re going to keep caring for the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the stranger today and tomorrow and the next day.

Go tell that fox: we’re going to keep proclaiming release for the captives and freedom for the oppressed today and tomorrow and the next day.

Go tell that fox: we’re going to keep fighting racism and white supremacy today and tomorrow and the next day.”

In fact I can hear Jesus saying to Herod ….

If you have a problem with that, too bad, because I belong to someone else, not to you, and your corrupt and violent ways will not last.  I belong to the divine presence at the heart of the universe, which says, it may be dark for a while but it will not be dark forever, for the light of love will eventually shine forth, through me and those who follow me! And he calls the people of Jerusalem to do just that.  For he is prepared to die in order that they see the life way he embodies, the God way.

So take that!!!!

Mmm

So as I come to the end of this sermon, how do I finish, at this time in our collective lives.

We live in dark times no doubt.  But we also live with hope, and we see it every day. We have seen it in the music I have played and am going to play, and the stories of help, heroism, assistance, support, companionship and presence.

Jesus is our guide, our brother, our teacher, an incredible mystic. He saw the spirit that was in him was in all, and he called all to follow him and his way, to be of God and to be for each other.

So whether we sense the God of the universe or not, we must trust that this presence is real and life giving, and in odd moments may even present itself to us. A God found in each and every one of us.  A presence and mystery at the heart of life, as Paul says in Ephesians.

Which leads us to a faith of knowing and trusting and ultimately acting., in whatever way we can.  It means we keep working for peace, caring about injustice and showing kindness and compassion in our everyday ordinary lives.

Because Jesus did not just stay at home,  and he did not stay on the mountain, and he did not take the devils temptations and he did not just keep meditating and praying, he went out into the word, for the sake of the world.   And he encourages us to do likewise. For the world, our world, is calling!

Amen

I played this beautiful, haunting peice after the sermon, called “A prayer for Ukraine”