Light and Dark

Karen Sloan - 04/05/2025

Readings - Reading – John 21:1-19

Psalm 139:1-7

Poem

I’ll Go On…

By: Rainer Marie Rilke

Extinguish my eyes, I’ll go on seeing you.
Seal my ears, I’ll go on hearing you.
And without feet I can make my way to you,
without a mouth I can swear your name.

Break off my arms, I’ll take hold of you
with my heart as with a hand.
Stop my heart, and my brain will start to beat.
And if you consume my brain with fire,
I’ll feel you burn in every drop of my blood.

 I was at home the other day, supposedly doing work on my never ending phd.  And yet, what was I doing, I was reading a book that I just purchased.  A beautiful book that leads me to this sermon.

It is called Memorial days by Geraldine Brook and it’s a memoir of her time after her husband, Anthony Horowitz, collapsed and died far from home at aged 60.  But not just that time, but the time on Flinders Island where she went to grieve what was lost and to rediscover who she was without him.  It’s a journey from darkness to light, that many of you here have travelled, and it’s so beautifully written.

Dark to light.   It’s really a theme from our scripture passage today, but more of it later.

Because firstly I want to say somethings about the dark, when we find ourselves there or when our community or our world finds itself there….When we can’t feel or sense the God that we have followed for so long...  Maybe it’s how we are feeling today..

There is  a  Spanish mystic, from the 16th century, who had a profound effect on me, in a good way, St John of the Cross, and who has much to say about this darkness. 

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 definition 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.  And this includes us. As Richard Rohr says, we can all be mystics if we open ourselves enough.

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 love the talk of the inner journey, the inner call that takes us deeper to the heart of things, of who we are and who God is.  Even when things seem very dark, personally and globally

But I also love 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

And this is what Geraldine’s Brooks book is, in part, about. Even if she doesn’t see it in quite the same way.

……

So, 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….

Yet, that’s not all.

Because the other thing I have discovered about these mystics, not just John of the Cross, but Teresa of Avila, Hildegarde of Bingin, St Francis of Assisi, Julian of Norwich and others  ….. 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. Or maybe Nev’s call to us all over the years.

But it also sounds like Jesus, the greatest of all mystics.

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, all of those things stemmed from his deep connection to the God of love.

This is who we follow, this is the one the disciples followed and this is the one Paul followed, after his Damascus road experience, which changed his life completely.

So finally, after all of that, let’s now take a look at the gospel reading from today.

Remember light from darkness and despair.

What we hear today is quite late in the tradition, as John is the last gospel and many believe these passages have been added.

It speaks to us of thin places that the celts speak of.

 “Thin places” are places where the veil lifts between the visible world of our ordinary experience, and God – the sacred or the Spirit, however you want to call the divine presence.  There are places or times when the sacred and the human become very, very close; when one briefly seems to inhabit two worlds at the same time. The places the mystics and all of us can experience that I talked about before.

This is happening to the disciples.  Remember in the passage it is just after daybreak on the sea of galilee, its misty and that mist is rising.  Close your eyes and imagine the scene……

Some of the disciples are in the boat trying to catch fish, when Peter sees a figure on the shore line.  But they don’t recognise him.  He is shrouded in mystery.

Then Peter does, and wonderfully jumps into the sea to go to him.  The rest, after following his instructions catch a mountain of fish which they bring to shore.

Jesus becomes a chef, surprisingly, and makes them breakfast, then dialogues with Peter on the nature of discipleship. A meal together with Jesus that leads to a feeding of others.

It is a deeply meaningful, life changing moment for the disciples. 

As Bruce Epperley says, “Loving Jesus is not just an inward journey to God, but leads to feeding God’s sheep, and here we are talking about both in a physical and spiritual way. Those who encounter Christ are called to reach out to the world sharing good news for body, mind, and spirit. Followers of Jesus are intended to be both on an inward and outward journey such that  the fulfillment of the spiritual experience is found in the love of Jesus and God’s children, whether citizen or non-citizen, Christian or non-Christian”.

So It’s more about experience, rather than doctrines and dogma, and church committees, and even churches. It’s about disciples whose leader has been killed, executed for challenging the empire, for wanting to transform things.  It’s about a vision of something new that transforms them as well, and leads them to change the world. It’s about a depth of divine connection both inward and outward that seems unimaginable to most of the world..

But again I say, it’s not just about the disciples but about us as well. For Jesus says, follow me, for you can be spirit people, you can be mystics too.

Because as Frederick Buechner writes,

“Thin places” are not the preserve of special people, set-apart people, holy people; all are holy and all have the God of the universe within them. Through our own commitment to the call of Jesus and we are all invited here and everywhere to unlock our hearts, to see the ‘thinness’, and experience the otherness”. 

The spirit is everywhere, we just have to see it, believe it and yes follow it.

 “We are all mystics” as Dorothee Solle asserts, and our mysticism can guide us to world-healing actions. Feed my lambs, says Jesus, be brave, be merciful, be kind.

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, maybe personally but definitely globally.  But we also live with hope, and we see it every day. In 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. 

Because Jesus didn’t just stay at home,  and he didn’t stay on the mountain, and he  didn’t take the devils temptations and he didn’t 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!

In every moment of every day we have choices to make, and in those choices the spirit of God can and is sensed, if we are willing to wait, watch, listen and then act.  This is the miracle of faith, a faith that sees a shimmering just below the surface of things.

A faith that transformed the disciples and I believe can transform us.  Amen

Let’s just sit with that for a minute or 2 as we list