Lent week 2

The liquid edge between day and night

            Barbara Brown Taylor has a book called:  Learning to Walk in the Darkness.  In the introduction to this book, she shares that in our modern world, we as Christians focus a lot of our beliefs and understandings on what she calls Solar spirituality.  She explains what she means by that, we know and believe that Jesus is the light and being in the light is good.  We want the light, and in so doing, we push away the darkness as much as we can.  If light is good, then darkness must be bad.  Personally, one of my favorite passages is from the opening of the Gospel of John which states that Jesus is the light and the light shines through the darkness and the darkness does not overcome it.  In my own faith journey, knowing that the light always shines has been my anchor during hard times. 

            In her book, she wants to explore this dualism that we find ourselves within.  If the light is good, where is God in the dark?  How many times do we hear when a tragedy occurs, where is God?  How did God let this happen?  Or even, is God punishing me?  So, instead of focusing on Solar spirituality, the bright light of the day, she decides to explore what she calls lunar spirituality which she says:  “in which the divine light waxes and wanes with the seasons.  When I go out on my porch as night, the moon never looks the same way twice.”   Her aha moment is she begins this process is to ask herself, what if she trusts God even in the rhythms of life just as she trusts the changing pattern of the moon.  So, as we journey through her book this Lenten season, we will ask the same question, does our understanding of God wax and wane through the seasons of our life, and do we trust that God is there, whether we can fully sense the divine presence or not? 

            I love her description of what we call the sunset, she writes:  the liquid edge between day and night.  Here we have the blending of the end of day and the beginning of night.  It is not one and it is not the other it is the blending of the two.  When we want to separate things, when we want to easily define this is good and that is bad, in our own modern language we think in black or white, we don’t want the grey, well, the sunset is the grey, it is the merging together of what we try so hard to keep separate.  And yet, people are drawn to sunsets.  I think about all of the places I have traveled and how people flock to various spots at that particular place to watch the sunset.   Up in Maine, we were at Arcadia National Park and we were basically forced to stop as we tried to come down off the mountain, as everyone pulled off the side of the road to park in order to watch the sunset.  In Key West it is a party every night at Mallory Square for the sunset. 

            If only we could celebrate our faith in the same way, if only we could stop what we are doing and pull off the side of the road to attend to our spiritual selves.  Other than the sunset, how many of us even pay attention to the night sky anymore?  There is so much light pollution where we live, that we don’t get the full glory of the sky full of stars, but during the day, do we even stop and think that the stars are still out there, that they are still a part of the sky, even though we cannot see them?  Some of my favorite memories of visiting my cousin on the farm in the summer involves laying out on the lawn chairs at night and looking at the stars. 

            In our own spiritual metaphors, we have created the understanding that light, therefore day is good and dark, therefore night is bad.  I remember having the curfew fight back in high school and being told:  Nothing good happens after midnight.  Cinderella has to get home by midnight or the magic wears off.  It’s like whatever might be protecting us is only good until a certain time.  If we are not safe after dark, or after midnight, how do we interpret that spiritually?  Are we safer during the day, are we safer in the light? 

            I mentioned this on Thursday night, I wish by being a person of faith that we had some sort of forcefield over us, keeping us safe all the time.  And some people do believe that through faith God gives them extra protection.  Yes, spiritual protection, but there is no force field keeping us healthy from the flu, or from a car accident, or from any other illness or tragedy that might befall us.  And that is often when people give up on their faith, when they give up on the church and even give up on God.  How could this happen to me? 

            And so we enter Lent in the time between the day and the night, the liquid edge, where we cannot define one clearly from the other.  Where we believe God has created the world and created it good.  Where we believe God is in the darkness, and yes, that God shines through the darkness, and where we acknowledge that the darkness exists but does not overcome the light of God.

            As Paul writes in his letter to the church in Corinth – he lists these things that we could define as the darkness.  He states:  We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; ⁹ persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; ¹⁰ always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.  Paul has an amazing foundation of faith and writes to others to give them strength and hope that even despite the challenges and struggles that they are facing, they are not facing them alone, but in and through Christ. 

            This is a challenging text but Paul begins with the statement – so that we do not lose heart.  He hears the doubt, he hears the suffering, he hears the challenges people are wrestling with but he encourages and offers hope to those that will hear his message, do not lose heart because we are in this ministry through God’s mercy.  If it was just a human concept, a human response to each other, then we would not have the power to overcome these things.   But it is more than just people gathering together as a cause, it is God working through people, frail people, clay jars that can easily break. 

Last year, during Lent we use the book – the Gifts of the Dark Woods and through that discovered that we can grow in our faith and understanding of God even in the darkness.  Barbara Brown Taylor agrees with this understanding, insisting that if we look deep within the Biblical Story we will see how important the darkness is within the work of God and the calling of God’s people. Just think about Christmas Eve and how we are drawn to gather in the darkness of the night to worship and celebrate God’s love for us born into the world.  And then again on Easter with the sunrise service, gathering just as the night transitions into the day. 

And so we find ourselves on the liquid edge between day and night, sorting through what is allowing us to be present with God and what is blocking how we feel and connect with our loving Creator.   In closing I share this passage from Barbara Brown Taylor, some have read it on facebook – but she writes:  God does not turn the world over to some other deity.  Even when you cannot see where you are going and no one answers when you call, this is not sufficient proof that you are alone.  There is a divine presence that transcends all your ideas about it, along with all your language for calling it to your aid, which is not above using darkness as the wrecking ball that brings all your false gods down, but whether you decide to trust the witness of those who have gone before you or you decide to do whatever it takes to become a witness yourself, here is the testimony of faith:  darkness is not dark to God, the night is as bright as the day.  

Lent 1: Wilderness

The season of Lent is upon us.  And the traditional text that starts this forty day period is that of Jesus in the Wilderness for forty days.  The text in the Gospel of Mark is very brief and leaves out the three temptations of Jesus that are included in Matthew and Luke.  Mark summarizes this wilderness experience into three statements:   And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. ¹³ He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him. 

            This story happens right after Jesus is baptized by John the Baptist, a story that we examined in early January.  Jesus is baptized, the Holy Spirit descends upon him as a dove and the same Spirit drives him into the wilderness.  From baptism to wilderness, what does that mean? 

            If we take a step back into the scriptures, the Hebrew people are in oppressed as slaves in Egypt.  God liberates them, they cross the Red Sea and enter into the wilderness for forty years.  Oppression to liberation with water defining the exit from one into the freedom of the other. 

            What is the wilderness?  Is it a bad place or a good place?  When we think of wilderness, we might think of camping, or going to one of our national parks to hike and enjoy the beauty of the undeveloped landscape.  The wilderness might be a place where we expect to see wildlife, where we look for Moose, or bear, or buffalo, or elk.  In our modern world, we have created rather clear definitions of what is our territory, our towns, our neighborhoods, and what is wilderness and we struggle a bit when a bear or other wilderness wild life find their way into our space.  Now, I don’t mind the cute little red fox and we actually think it is rather cool to see the bear, but I draw the line with the coyote and her pups living under our back porch. 

            So, Jesus is baptized, and the Spirit drives him into the wilderness for forty days.  Jesus is not in the wilderness as a punishment, and although he seems to be there alone, he is not there alone.  The Spirit of God is with him and, in Mark, the angels are there as well.  This is actually a sacred place, a place filled with God’s presence, a place that seems to be defined differently than the regular life of Jesus, but not a sinister place.  We often define the wilderness as a place of suffering, but this is not the case.  Yes, Jesus faces temptations, but let’s again go back to Moses and the Israelites in the wilderness.  They too face great temptations.  They are full of fear of the unknown and wish feel it would be better to be slaves in Egypt than to die in the wilderness.  They are hungry and cry out to Moses and complain against him.  They worship the golden calves.  And yet, God is with them.  God journeys with them.  Yes, their complaints and lack of faith and trust in God seem to make God rather upset, but God does not desert them, God remembers that there is a purpose for these people and God continues to mold them into the people God is calling them to be.

            Sometimes, when I am on a retreat, we are asked to go and spend time by ourselves, to take time to think about what might be holding us back, or what might be weighing us down.  Retreats are spiritual times, they are geared to feel connected to the Holy, and I have never thought of a retreat as being in the wilderness.  But, it is.  When we attend a retreat, or when we really spend time examining our inner most being, when we decide to name our own temptations or own moments of weakness, and are willing to take the next step in moving forward, of seeking ways to let go of a bad habit or to stop a certain behavior or move into emotional or spiritual healing, we have faced what the scriptures call Satan and are strengthened by God’s love within us. 

            Is Jesus having a spiritual battle in the wilderness?  I think he is participating in his true humanity.  In order for him to move forward into the ministry that God has called him into, he has to prepare himself for complete obedience.  He has to truly understand his call, he has to let go of his own agenda and ideas of what he might be able to accomplish.  When I entered ministry, I went full force towards youth ministry.  That was it.  I knew my calling and didn’t even consider anything else.  So, when I entered into a very hard time, a time that I called my wilderness, I had to do some serious soul searching.  What was God calling me towards?  What was my purpose within the body of Christ? 

            We can feel that way.  We can come to church, we can worship, we can serve on a committee, and we can still feel unfulfilled, we can still wonder if we are truly using our gifts to the purpose that God is calling us.  Lent can be that season of the church year where we dig a bit deeper into our own soul, our own spiritual selves and listen deeply to the Holy Spirit.  Instead of season of fasting or a season that is often connected to the temptations of Jesus, we can enter this season as a spiritual spring a time of renewal of our own inner being a time of asking what do I have to change in order to move in the direction that God is desiring me to move into? 

            Who knows what Jesus might have had to let go of, we hear in the other gospels that there is the temptation of food, the temptation of power, the temptation of testing God.  Maybe, just maybe, these are three things that Jesus has to release from his own inner being to move fully into the ministry that God calls him into. 

            If only we could call the whole world into the wilderness, into the season of Lent, into a deep soul searching of what we, as a human race need to let go of in order to live fully into God’s calling.  If only, if only we could let go of greed, of abundant waste, of corruption, of bullying, of discrimination, of harassment, of over development, if only.  If only we can find a way to be in the wilderness of God and not the wilderness of brokenness.  Forty days, Forty years, the number forty calls us into change, it calls us to listen and respond to God.  Let this be a season of our own spiritual spring.  Amen.