Darkness and Light

Darkness and Light

Isaiah 9:2-7

Here’s a crazy thought:  since June 21st, every day has grown shorter.  There’s been less and less light.  The nights have grown longer and longer.  We hardly notice it at first.  It’s summer!  The days are long and fun.  Now, though, it’s dusky at 4:15.  It’s dark by 5:00.  The darkness seems for all the world like it is winning.

Now, imagine that you have moved to Barrow, Alaska.  The sun is going down and it is going to stay down.  You will not see the sun again for 65 days.  Well over two months will be spent in darkness.  Could you handle that?  How do you think your mood, your thoughts, your activity level would change?  On day 66, how excited will you be when you saw the first little sliver of sun?

You don’t have to move to Alaska.  In Northern Minnesota, most of the work for decades was either in logging or in the iron mines.  The miners worked in the darkness of the mines that was broken only by a hand held torch.  Here’s the thing, though—for months in the winter, they went to work in the dark and when they came out of the mines at the end of a long hard day, it was dark again.  Those were some tough people!

Of course, in our modern world, we have nearly mastered the darkness of winter.  The lights come on with the flip of a switch.  The only question is how bright would we like the light to be.  We can light candles to set a mood.  We can turn off the lights and turn on the fireplace (again, with a flip of a switch) and feel cozy.  Of course, every now and then, the power goes out.  Then, we rage against Commonwealth Edison until the power comes on again.

Now, imagine that you are one of our ancestors in faith.  The power is not going to come back on because the notion of a lightbulb is 1900 years away.  You light with oils lamps—which sounds romantic until you actually try it.  The lamps are smokey and smelly and they will never be mistaken for a 100 watt bulb.  Bottom line…our ancestors must have been super aware of the changes in light and darkness that led to very short days.

In truth, all the other creatures of this world live lives that are defined by light and dark.  Plants follow the sun’s path across the sky all day and close at night.  Birds’ feeding patterns are dictated by the start and the end of the day.  Whole species of animals are nocturnal because there are advantages to hunting when almost everything else is asleep.  (If the early bird gets the worm, then the night owl gets its pick, right?)

In truth, the animal part of us still wants to go dormant in winter just like the rest of creation.  So, in the summer, we are busy until 9:00 or 10:00 because there is just more day to enjoy.  As Fall comes, the default response is to adjust, to have less energy, to hunker down, to have our house become a kind of “den,” not unlike the ones that the bears have settled into for the winter.  What we call “seasonal affective disorder” may be the human response to long nights that has existed for centuries.

Before electricity, people wen to bed early and and woke up in the middle of the night.  There is a lot of evidence that our ancestors would all wake up in the middle of the night, have a meal together and then go back to bed again.  So if you’re awake in the middle of the night it may be that there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just living out the “inherited” behavior of your ancestors.  No one could sleep that long in one, uninterrupted sleep.  “Let’s get up.  Let’s have a snack.”

I want you to realize that the presence or absence of the sun in our lives has a profound impact on us, even if almost all of us ignore this.  We can be completely out of touch with our connection to nature.  However, if we are, we shouldn’t be surprised when things happen that we don’t understand:  “Why I am so sleepy, so down, so unmotivated?”

We should also realize that ancestors didn’t have hardly any of the scientific knowledge that we have.  They did not understand that the earth revolved around the sun.  They didn’t have the comfort of really knowing that after the longest night the days would start to lengthen.  Long nights had to be full of real hardship and fears.

This is why people worshiped the sun, offering it gifts, trying to please it.  This is why when the nights were at their very longest there were festivals to beg the sun to return. The days are going to start to grow longer again!” Imagine the joy that must have been there for them when they realized, the days are growing longer again! “Our worship worked!  The sun has blessed us! (I have to admit that there’s a primitive part of me that still feels a bit of that joy!)

Here’s the thing…beyond the literal darkness, there is the notion of “darkness” as a metaphor.  There are good times and bad times in life.  There are days in which life is full of happiness and joy and there are days that are so dark and challenging and grim that it seems like the “light” of this life—the things that make life worth living—have all but disappeared.  

Remember, when Christ dies on the cross—when we’ve seen all the darkness that the world can throw at one person—betrayal and abandonment and torment and torture—it literally becomes like night in the middle of the day.  The sun disappears. It looks for all the world like the darkness has prevailed.  And yet, we remind ourselves and one another that the darkness does not win.  

Sometimes, though, it is so hard to believe that the darkness won’t win this time.  The phone rings and it’s our doctor calling us.  That’s never good!  The phone rings in the middle of the night and our heart nearly jumps out of our chest.  (Wrong number!)  Or, instead of a sudden, overwhelming darkness, the darkness just slowly creeps into us, the cumulative effect of absorbing the darkness of violence and hatred and greed and power-grabbing.  Though we may never experience such things firsthand, their presence in our world dims the light within us. Or, maybe grief catches up to us.  A tide of sadness and depression starts to rise.  

Our ancestors in faith, collectively, went through an incredible loss.  They believed that they were God’s chosen people and that nothing bad would ever happen to them.  Instead, after centuries of not living the faith that they were called to live, they were dragged away into exile.  The promised land was no longer their land at all.  (And really, every human being who has ever lived has had to live through that: “Here’s the one thing I thought would last forever and now it’s gone.  How can this be?”).  Our ancestors went through this incredibly dark time that lasted for a long, long time.  Everything was dark.

At some point, the prophets who could seem so hopeless, started to talk about hope. Isaiah for a long time, had been saying to the people who wanted to blame someone—anyone:  “You know why this happened?  It’s your own damn fault!” (In dark times, no one wants to listen to the call to personal responsibility, right?). At some point, though, fault-finding gives way to another question:  “When will this ever end?”

“The people who have walked in darkness have seen a great light: those who lived in a land of great darkness, on them the light has shined.”  Who are the people who have walked in darkness?  For Isaiah, it’s clear that he is talking to the people of Israel.  The truth, though, if we are honest, is that he is talking to every one of us.  If you’ve known grief and loss, if you’ve given your heart to someone and they threw it on the ground and stomped on it, right in front of you, if you have been betrayed, if you have been abandoned, if you have had the world, itself, swept from under your feet, you have walked in darkness.  Want to know the good news?  That darkness will not last.  There is a great light on the way.

Of course, here’s the problem.  What happens when you’ve walked in darkness and you see a great light?  You can’t see!  You’re eyes and everything else about you have adjusted to life in the dark.  If the darkness has been literal, you wince and shut your eyes in the presence of a great light.  If you are outside at night and a great light appears, you’re probably afraid:  “What was that?”  If the darkness is a lived experience, when a great light comes—good news, the presence of a long absent loved one—you don’t believe it.  If you’ve been depressed long enough, you may not even notice the great light at all. So, the great light comes anyway.  We cover our eyes.  

We cower in fear.  We come up with explanations.  We dismiss the light as some temporary thing or even as some torturous way that the fates are just setting us up to be plunged into the darkness again.  We deny it.  We dismiss it.  Then, one day, we have to admit:  not only does the world seem a little lighter but we’re feeling a little “lighter,” too.  Things have a bit of a glow to them again

Isaiah is a lot more famous for what he said next:  that a child would be born; that he would be called Wonderful Counselor, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.  We’re sure that he’s talking about Jesus.  What he was probably talking about was a new king.  I’m pretty sure that Isaiah would have been shocked by the Messiah that Jesus turned out to be.  Isaiah also promises endless peace—something this world can really never sustain.  There is, though, that nagging sense deep inside, that folks do mention every now and then, the “peace that passes all understanding,” the peace that is like a single candle in a sea of darkness.

Maybe Isaiah’s words can just open the possibility for us that the darkness won’t last forever, that the darkness never wins—not in the end.  Maybe in our darkest moments we need to hold onto the notion that something amazing might still happen, something that we can’t even imagine right now.  Maybe, even in the dark, it is possible to feel a little peace.  Maybe that’s what it takes for the light of Christ to shine with us and through us into the darkness of this world.