“Learning To Walk In the Dark!”
“Learning To Walk In the Dark!”
Job 42:1-6, 10,11,16,17; Mark 10:46-52
My Prayer for Illumination: Lord, You know when we rise up and when we lay down, whether we are in the Light or in the Dark or somewhere in between. No matter where, according to Your Word, there You will be. Lord, illumine the eyes of our hearts to see, unstop our ears to hear what Your Word is for us in the living of these times now. In the name of Jesus Christ, we pray. Amen!
It’s that time of year again. Next Saturday night…actually early next Sunday morning, 2:00 am to be exact, we “fall” back an hour and lose our Daylight Savings Time. I don’t know how all of this is figured as it seems to change every year as to when it happens. Any way we see it…this is the time of year that the days are getting shorter and the nights longer. It’s just that time of year for us all having to walk more in the dark than in the light.
And this year it happens to come on the heels of all Hallowed Eve, better known as Halloween. For me it is one of my earliest memories in learning how to walk in the dark. I can almost remember the feel of my hand being held in the dark by my father’s with his voice instructing us to take it easy while our eyes got use to the dark. It was the hand that kept me from falling as I went trick or treating with my brother and sister. Then, with another year or two of experience, my father would stand at the street as we went door to door. And finally we got old enough to go on our own to neighbors we knew.
But even back then as it is even more so today, there’s something about the dark that’s scary, dangerous that you have to be careful about. You learn it instinctively as a child when your mom calls you in…saying, “Time to come in, it’s getting dark.” Lights are turned on, doors are locked, and the blinds are drawn. Even in the middle of the night, the hall light would be left on or a nightlight in the bathroom so you could see in the dark and not trip or fall.
Being in the dark always made the imagination go wild with the shadows and sounds. You just knew there was a monster under your bed or hiding in the closet. You didn’t get up in the middle of the night for nothing—- only if you absolutely had to go. I had a childhood friend who once got so scared in the bathroom that she spent the night there, sleeping in the tub!
And if you did wake up in the dark from a nightmare or two, what were you taught to do… VOILA! Turn on a light to make it vanish away.
But as we grow in life at some point we learn that no matter how hard we may try— turning on the light does not make the darkness always go away. We learn that darkness is not just of the night or having no light.
It can be more than the physical …like doubt, danger, death, evil, despair, loss, depression, fear. That last one, fear, is the one that you hear over and over again as being a part of the Dark. No matter what age we are, nobody likes to be afraid and I’ve not found hardly anyone who likes being in the dark whatever it is. Being in the dark is a universal experience of being human; yet
it is up close and personal.
Like I have no idea of what it means to be in the pits of a chronic illness or in the pitch dark of losing a child. But I do know the hell of watching all the lights go out in someone I love to Alzheimer’s.
As much as I would eliminate all the darkness if I could—in my life and yours and those we love— by simply turning on the right night light to scare the boogie man away, I know that is not always possible or even in our control to do so.
And when such darkness has covered me to that desperate point of wondering whether there is a God or not, I find there are some things that can only be learned in the dark rather than all the light in the world.
Just look at Job who was bathed in the all the light of faith there could be: being blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from all temptation. He was blessed with a large family, numerous animals, and lots of people who served him and described “as the greatest of all people.” Yet suddenly in the midst of such, Job lost all he had, all he loved and his own health. The next 36 chapters in the story describe Jacob’s response to such tragedy, his struggle with such suffering. His three friends come to sit and comfort Job; but they end up concluding all has happened as punishment for some sin Job must have committed. With Job’s insistence of no wrong, he rants and raves in his anger towards God for “breaking him down on every side and uprooting his hope like a tree (19:10).”
A friend of my daughter is going through such a time, having never been through such darkness before. Amy had a miscarriage five months ago and it has left her questioning with no answers:
Why did this happen to her?
What has she done to bring such pain and sorrow?
Is God punishing her?
Why would an innocent child, yet to be born, never
be given the breath of life?
Is God even there?
There are no answers …even if you want to pat someone on the back with one, in the midst of such a black hole in that kind of a black hole.
But we, people of the faith, want to help, want to comfort just like Job’s friends. We wind up instead being too preoccupied trying to keep flood lights or at least a flashlight on rather than being okay to just walk and sit in the dark. We say things meant for light but are not in saying:
O, my dear, you know this is God’s will.
Now just know that God will not give you more than you can handle.
You’ve just got have more faith.
Truth be told, there has not been much said that’s very positive about being in the Dark…even in scripture…
God is light and in him there is no darkness (I John 1:5)
Be children of the Light!
Even in prayers, we hear such words,
Deliver us, O Lord, from the powers of darkness. Shine into our hearts
The brightness of Your Holy Spirit, and protect us from all perils
and dangers of the night.
The problem is that since half our life is in the dark, it gets a bad rap. And what does it lead us to believe about God…that God is only on the sunny side up and you are on your own for the rest?
Throughout history, people like Hitler and the KKK have taken this kind of thinking
further to separate people by color…..light skin versus dark
and people by sight….those who can see and those who can’t
as those who count and those who don’t!
Just ask blind Bartimaeus how his world was without sight.
People considered him as being worthless…not even human
Damned by God
Punished for whatever reason
Thrown out of town
To be on the street for his whole miserable life.
To embrace such a one sided view of the Light can lead us to a lop-sided faith that has to always deny a part of life that is universal to us all. To even talk about such makes most of us uncomfortable. I have been told literally to keep to the Light in my sermons.
Barbara Brown Taylor calls this kind of thought “Full Solar spirituality” since it focuses on staying in the light of God around the clock, both absorbing and reflecting the sunny side of faith.” But in her book. Learning to Walk in the Dark, she invites us to see the need for the dark as much as the light in our life and in our faith. For it is sometimes only by being in the dark that one can see.
Just look at who is really blind to the truth in our story of Bartimaeus trying to be silenced by the crowd in calling out to Jesus, “Son of David, have mercy on me.” Jesus is all the Light that the crowd cannot see right in front of them.
Remember other stories in scripture that happen in the dark:
God taking Abraham under the night sky to show him how he and Sarah
will be blessed more than all the stars he can see.
The children of Israel wandering in the dark, not knowing where they
were going for 40 years in the wilderness. But they learned what it
means to have to trust in the Lord and thus being shaped as God’s
Covenant People. And we are a part of those same covenant people today!
And then there’s this interesting part at the end of Bartimaeus’s story. He receives
His sight and Mark tells us that he follows Jesus on the way. Look where the way
of Jesus takes him next…..to Jerusalem and the darkest days recorded in history.
But what happens in the darkest of dark places, death itself…..resurrection!
Barbara Brown Taylor in the only religious book on the cover of Time Magazine in years, says that there’s just some things in life….and in faith that we cannot get or experience in the light as we can in the dark. And the first step in learning to walk in the dark is to not deny it but to turn and face it…and embrace it for rich fullness of all of Life!
I love these words from the book of Isaiah (45:3):
I will give the treasures of darkness and riches hidden
In secret places, so that you may know that it is I, the Lord,
The God of Israel, who call you by your name.
At the end, this is what Job knew in the dark, in the mystery of all life even that
which leaves us with unanswered questions…God is God and we are not.
So come now…together as God’s people let us remember who we are and whose we are
as we continue to learn how to walk in the dark!
Laurey H. Murphy
Spring Branch Presbyterian Church
October 25, 2015
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