“God of the Dark and of the Light”

Karen Sloan 01/08/2021

Readings - Ephesians 4:1-6, John 6:28-35

Be kind!, wrote Philo of Alexandria, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.

Last week in the sermon  I focussed on the beginning of chapter 6 from the Gospel of John.   In today’s reading we pick it up from where we finished, but before I go on let me give a brief summary of what I said a week ago.  We began in Jerusalem but ended here and now, in our world and time. 

We looked at the bigger picture of John, written some 70 years after the death of Jesus.  We heard the writer was a Jewish mystic, who wrote in a less factual and more mystical fashion, about the relationship between Jesus and God.

John’s aim in his gospel is to point us to God through the words and actions of Jesus, the human Jesus. Jesus becomes for John, the bread and water of life, the way, the truth and the light, all a short hand way of saying, see Jesus, there you will see God. In fact Jesus is called by many the ultimate mystic.

As Paul Tillich writes, “the particularity of Jesus life and message points to the universality of God’s love and presence. 

So in the end, I concluded, the essence of who Jesus was to the writer of John was of a radical, inclusive, loving and compassionate man, who travelled around the Sea of Galilee, speaking, teaching and eating with his followers, surrounded by dust and dirt.  Jesus represented, reflects, embodies God in these characteristics, these qualities. 

A God found in each and every one of us.  A presence and mystery at the heart of life, and at the heart of the universe, as Paul says in Ephesians.

Yet that’s where I want to leave these readings today. They are  stories from our tradition, that many of us know well.  Experiences of those that have gone before. Which they attempt to put into words.

But what about our experiences.  Because sometimes words just don’t cut it, even if they come from the gospels. We have to find our own truth, and sometimes that can be a painful journey.

Last week, a profound and moving thing happened in church, when one of our own expressed feelings of being lost and alone, and that for them God seemed a long way away. Feelings many of us may relate to. Mother Teresa famously did.

What to do, how to help someone who is in this space?

I have been reading two books lately, one called “The bad Christians manifesto” by David Tomlinson, and the other, “Learning to live in the dark”, by Barbara Brown Taylor, and they both give a few ideas.

Yet talking about this is difficult, and I don’t want to give any platitudes, or simple clichés, or pretend I have lots of answers, or deny the reality that life can sometimes be so, so hard and so, so dark. There have probably been times for all of us when  what we are facing seems insurmountable, and the idea that the light might shine seems laughable. But I do believe, with all that I know and trust, and have experienced, that the light can eventually shine.

But the darkness is also part of the journey of being human. And maybe also part of the God story. Certainly both authors think so.

Mary Oliver has a beautiful poem

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. 

It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”

Our darkness may be sorrow and grief at the loss of a partner, or loss of a job or our health or a myriad of other things.  And in that space our tendency as people of faith is to search for God, to question God’s presence, to seek God!!  Often God seems very absent.  But what sort of God are we looking for, and where are we looking?  Maybe were looking in the wrong place….

For God is everywhere …

While I seem a very optimistic person, and I am, and not prone to down times, that belies some of my history.  My own period of darkness, real darkness happened when I was younger, in my teenage years and early 20s, a period of uncertainty and loss.  A time when many know I had no interest in faith, let alone Christianity.  Yet when I look back the spirit surrounded me without me knowing it.  People who loved me, supported me, encouraged me.  And within myself something stirred, initially just a stirring to explore and live, and eventually a stirring to examine what living really means. When I look back, its’ not that I saw a God moving pieces and people around, like an external chess master, but  rather as a spirit of connection and of light, that dragged me out and into the world.

It makes me think of the reading I used last week from Frederick Buechner,

 “Being a Christian is about living, participating in, being caught up by the way of life that Jesus embodied, that was his way.   Thus it’s possible to be on Christ’s way and with his mark upon you without ever having heard of Christ and for that reason to be on your way to God though maybe you don’t even believe in God.”

Maybe the darkness we all have at different times in our lives teaches something about what God isn’t.  And maybe what the spirit is.

As Dave Tomlinson says, the author of the “Bad Christians manifesto”….

“It is absolutely not the case that some things are intrinsically holy while others are inherently profane, or that some people are blessed with Gods presence while others are not.  God lurks in every atom of the universe, every creature on earth, every moment in time, every human experience. Nothing can be done in order to invoke the presence of the divine”, even if we think we need to.”

Barbara Brown Taylor, in her book, “Learning to live in the Dark”,  says much the same.  “When we are in the dark it sometimes tests our faith and our belief in ways that we are shocked by. We discover that God is not a person, not a thing that we can manipulate and not something we can hold onto, but can only be encountered, in ourselves sometimes, sometimes in those around us and often in the wider creation that surrounds us.” 

When we say God has disappeared, perhaps it’s our image of God that’s disappeared.

Does this help those rolling around in the dark, I don’t know. As I said before, I don’t have many answers.

But maybe it helps when we dismiss the notion of a person God, who may or may not attend to us, and discover that there is no separation and no words to describe the divine presence anyway. Perhaps by letting go of the need to name God we can find the spirit that is everywhere.

For Barbara Brown Taylor, “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

While we never want the lights to go out , if they do and we’re in the dark, we perhaps can start to see differently. And what we see, as so many others have found,  “is that we are no longer apart from what we seek, we are in fact a part of it or in it.” God in us and we in God and all in everything. Nothing is separate.

Perhaps then we can look for the God of love and light and compassion all around us, rather than in one place.  Certainly that was my experience.  God was in disguise surrounding me when I was unaware..

If we return to the Jesus we find in John’s gospel, seen by the writer as the ultimate mystic, we find he told stories about grain and grape, weather, barns, sheep and goats and flowers. Everything and anything for Jesus was a means of pointing to God, who is the deeper reality within ordinary objects, activities, events and people, all people.

We can sense the beyond in the presence. It tells us that grace and peace and compassion and kindness and love are transmitted through ordinary things and in ordinary experiences.  In ordinary people.  The spirit is disguised as you and me.

And its these things that help us remember, to reassemble that which feels absent or torn apart. 

Maybe this is where we encounter God in the dark. 

Perhaps we could go back to those things which in the past have given us comfort, church, community, communion, prayer, even singing those old hymns.

But there are other things outside the church equally valid.  Walking, going to the forest or lake or the beach front, spending time with those we love and who love us, music, poetry, even sitting in silence or in meditation can all lead us to the God we are in fact  immersed in.  In a song by Carrie Newcomer, called Sanctuary, she sings about resting here in a Brown Chapel, Or with a circle of friends, A quiet grove of trees, Or between two bookends.

All could be called a sacrament. Because they bring something to us, something deep and connecting. Something of the spirit.

In fact anything really that softens the darkness, without denying it, may ultimately take us into the light.

Mary Oliver in her poem  sees darkness as a gift because it forces us see God and ourselves differently, life differently. Of course It can be a potential destroyer of faith but it can also be a path, to a greater depth of life, and a deeper spirituality, if we can emerge into the light.  And if we emerge we may carry within us  a greater sense of gratitude for the divine presence  all around us.

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

Amen