November 30, 2008 First Sunday of Advent
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 80; Mark 13:24-37
The new church year begins on the First Sunday of Advent, and it is
profoundly meaningful that it starts in utter darkness and yet at the same time in
hope. Advent is designed not only to give hope to those who sit in darkness, but
to teach us to hope in darkness itself. If you or someone you love is struggling
with darkness right now, congratulations! Here is an entire season designed for
you—designed to turn your struggles into blessings.
We begin Advent by reading from what are known as the apocalyptic
chapters of the gospels. The first words of today’s reading from Mark 13 plunge
us into total darkness. Jesus has just warned about the “desolating sacrilege,” a
time of complete desolation, and now he begins today’s passage saying, “But in
those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened and the moon will not
give its light and the stars will be falling from heaven.”
This is just what we would expect in something apocalyptic. The word
apocalypse has the connotation of darkness and desolation and destructive end-
time. But that is only the connotation of apocalypse—the denotation, the actual
meaning of the word, is quite different. It comes from a Greek root not meaning
to cover in darkness, but to uncover and bring to light. Apocalypse means
revelation, as in the “the Book of Revelation”—“The Apocalypse” is
Revelation’s other name as you will see if you look in your pew Bible.
It is not that the connotations of the word are misleading. Apocalyptic
literature is full of darkness and desolation. At the same time, it is full of the
most brilliant light of revelation and hope. The darkness and light are not
contradictory, working against each other. The darkness is an essential condition
out of which hope and light rise, without which they cannot be seen in their full
truth and splendor. Paradoxically, the darkness enables our sight and our
recognition of hidden things.
The Kentucky farmer and writer Wendell Berry has a short poem about
this. It says:
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
Another poet says something similar. The 16th century Spanish mystic and saint,
John of the Cross, wrote in his book The Dark Night, “If you wish to be sure of
the road you tread, you must close your eyes and walk in the dark.”
Jesus says that when the world has entered total darkness, then we will
“see ‘The Son of Man coming in clouds’ with power and glory.” The darkness is
a condition for seeing. It is also a sign, like the sign of green spring leaves that
say that summer is near. Jesus says the darkness is not the time to go to sleep, it
is the time to keep awake and keep watch, because through the darkness will
come the great, transforming light that we most need.
Psalm 80 looks through its own darkness of desolation and out of it cries,
“Restore us, O God; let your face shine, that we may be saved.” Jesus is echoing
in today’s passage this same pattern that is repeated throughout scripture, that
when thick darkness covers us, the light of God will rise upon us. (Isaiah 60:12)
This promise is the best of good news to anyone overshadowed by
darkness. It is a powerful enough hope to move us to tears, if we dare to trust it.
Imagine how some people sitting in the pews of churches around the world today
may feel as they hear this promise. Imagine a soldier in a makeshift chapel in
Iraq, a young woman living every day in the midst of deeply traumatic stress, in
the bloodstained darkness of fear or hatred or loneliness. Imagine the hope she
feels as she hears the Advent promise of light coming through thick darkness. Or
imagine someone in the hopeless darkness of depression, or someone whose
doctor has just said the dreaded word “cancer.” Imagine the addicted or
obsessive-compulsive person whose life is captive to an uncontrollable force of
darkness within his or her own mind. Imagine each of them hearing the good
news that the darkness is the very condition needed for the saving light to come,
and is a sign that it is surely coming even now.
Maybe you have enough darkness in your life to feel as moved as they do
by that hope—the hope that your struggle is preparing you for the light of
Christ’s transforming grace. Maybe you can glimpse the beauty of the darkness
that the New Century Hymnal’s “Litany of Darkness and Light” praises—the
darkness as the womb of rebirth.
Our late neighbor, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, has been on my mind
lately. I have been thinking of the joy he would have felt to see an African-
American elected President. Bill Coffin was a leader of the Civil Rights
movement, one of the original Freedom Riders. He nurtured his hope for full
racial enfranchisement for half a century, until the day he died. He used to sign
his letters, “Lots of hope.” He said, “When things seem hopeless, don’t forget to
hope.” That is where we start the church year: in the desolation of hopeless
darkness, yet remembering to hope. Lives like Bill Coffin’s prove the spiritual
power of such hope. Surely some part of Barrack Obama’s election is due to the
hope Bill kept in hopeless times.
Right now I imagine there are thousands upon thousands of lives that are
trying to hope in the midst of hopeless situations. I would like to share one with
you that I know through the international network of Christian contemplatives I
am part of, but I am going to change some details to hide his identity. I’ll call
him Tim. Tim is a member of a United Church of Christ congregation in
California that is much larger, but still similar to ours—an active, progressive
church with a centering prayer group that he is part of, similar to our Prayer of
the Heart.
Tim was more of a Buddhist back when he was pioneer computer wizard
in Silicon Valley. He made a lot of money, but after an accident that almost took
his life he went through a major mid-life adjustment. He returned to the Christian
church of his birth, and he decided to quit his Silicon Valley job and pursue his
dream of running a store selling cutting-edge, high–end gadgets and appliances
for the home—mostly computer and entertainment technology.
Tim put everything he had into the first store in Marin County, and as it
became profitable he reinvested in the business, growing eventually to a small
chain of stores in wealthy suburbs. He bought a nice home in one of those towns
and raised his three children there, one of whom is in business school and hoping
to come back and work with Tim and expand the business. The twins are
freshmen in college.
Tim has lived by two kinds of faith. One is in God. His church, spiritual
life and contemplative prayer practice have become increasingly important to
him over the years. But he has come to realize that the other faith has influenced
his life even more until recently—the faith in his own skills and mind and ability
to control his destiny, and a related faith that the American economy would keep
steadily growing, carrying him along in its flow. All that faith started crumbling
several months ago as the flow dried up, sales plummeted, and his skills, mind
and control could do nothing to prevent his ruin. He had no idea he was driven
so much by his materialistic faith until it started to fail him.
In recent weeks Tim has entered a darkness of despair. He is on the verge
of losing his business, his home—everything including his ability to send his
children to college. Lying awake at night Tim feels as if he is sinking into dark,
bottomless waters, watching the little bubbles of all his worldly hopes rise up to
burst on the surface as he goes down.
Not long ago Tim reached the point where he felt he had no hope left. He
could not envision a future for himself that had any light in it. It occurred to him
to wish that he would just die. But in that utterly hopeless place that he had
reached by giving up on all his usual ways of generating hope through his skills
and mind and control, Tim found something surprising. He felt his other faith,
his faith in God, begin to stir unbidden within him. He heard Christ tell the
disciples that you have to lose life to gain life. He heard Paul saying to God,
“your strength is made perfect in my weakness.” His training in Buddhist and
Christian meditation encouraged him with the spiritual wisdom that detachment
and emptiness and darkness—a place of desolation—could be the place of
transformation. It occurred to Tim that though he no longer had a hope of his
own, God might still have a hope for him.
Tim has started using his sleepless nights to pray the way that he has
learned in his practice of meditation and centering prayer over the years. He
intentionally lets go of all his thoughts and desires, voluntarily entering the
darkness of his old self’s desolation, where he returns over and over again to a
simple openness to God’s presence and transforming power. And something
amazing has been happening to him. He has found that the more he embraces his
material hopelessness, the more he feels welling up from within him a different
kind of hope, a hope that he feels certain comes from God, a hope that is part
peace and part love and part joy as well. It may not last long when it comes, and
he has absolutely no control over it, but it is enough to change his life.
Tim still has huge problems to work out and deeply painful choices ahead.
That has not changed. What has changed is that he is looking at the darkness
differently now in a way that enables him to endure it more calmly. He sees the
darkness as an agent of change in him that is leading him to a hope that does not
depend on material wealth or success, a hope that can be found only when a
person lets go of the strain for material gain or control or even survival itself.
“To be sure of the road we tread we must close our eyes and walk in the
dark.” Tim has learned what John of the Cross meant by that. He meant that we
need to walk in the darkness of self-emptying, of turning away from our
dependence on our own faculties, of giving up our faith in material light as our
source of hope, in order to find in that darkness the source of the true light and
true hope of God.
This Advent I hope that others like Tim who are floundering in
hopelessness will heed the invitation to close their eyes and walk in apocalyptic
darkness. I hope that we all can enter that night of letting go of our materialistic
faith. I hope that we can follow Jesus’ advice and keep awake and keep watch in
the dark night of our soul.
As I said at the beginning of the sermon, if you find yourself there,
congratulations, because apocalypse means revelation, because human
hopelessness is the place where God’s hope may take over, because the light of
Christ is coming wherever there is utter darkness. The light that shines in the
darkness that the darkness cannot overcome is approaching and is here even
now.
So let us go now into the darkness of our own innermost soul. Let us pray
in silence, letting go of each thought or feeling that arises. Let us open ourselves
to what lies beyond, hidden in the darkness. Let us open to the hope and light of
God. Let us pray without straining, just resting and trusting in the Spirit, waiting
and watching…
Sermon 11/30/2008