“While it was still dark…”, Jeff Wright, 4/20/14, Easter Sunday
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https://heartoftherockies.org/wp-content/uploads/_file_mp3/340964-5bd19ac6.mp3“While it was still dark…”
A sermon preached at
Heart of the Rockies Christian Church
(Disciples of Christ)
Fort Collins, Colorado
Easter Sunday, April 20, 2014
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day… God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.
Genesis 1:1-5, 31
Texts: Psalm 100 & John 20:1-11
We live in a very strange world. I have no idea how my smart phone works, so it’s comforting to me to learn that over 95 percent of the universe is a complete mystery to the scientific community. I’m guessing that you’ve heard of dark matter and dark energy.1 Astrophysicists have coined the terms to account for two mysterious effects in the universe for which they can’t figure out the causes. For a time, it was assumed that the universe expands at a constant rate of speed. But physicists now know that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. They don’t know why. They hypothesize that dark energy accounts for the acceleration, although they can’t see or detect it. Let me be clear. A few scientists argue that dark energy doesn’t even exist and the rest, the majority who argue that it does, can’t say exactly what it is. They just say that there has to be a lot of it. They tell us dark energy accounts for roughly 68 percent of the universe.
To account for a second phenomenon, physicists have come up with the term dark matter. Scientists have measured effects of mass in the universe – gravity, for example, and its influence on planets and galaxies – but they haven’t been able to detect the mass, the physical matter exerting this force. They surmise it’s there and call it dark matter. According to their calculations, dark matter accounts for 27 percent of the universe. That leaves just under five percent for what is called normal or ordinary matter, the stuff we can see: babies, beach balls and aspen trees, on out to the most distant galaxies in the universe. In other words, our best minds have a pretty good understanding of how just over four percent of the universe operates. The rest, the nearly 96 percent? A complete mystery.
So what does this have to do with the extraordinary good news we proclaim today, that God raised Jesus from the dead? I’m not sure. But I thought of dark matter and dark energy when I read our Easter text.
Because of a detail John bothers to note in the record. John begins his account of Jesus’ resurrection by telling us that it happened in the dark. We spent the six Sundays in Lent unpacking John’s use of metaphor and other figures of speech, learning that John is more than an evangelist. He’s an accomplished author, an amazing story teller. He uses familiar words and turns of phrase to point to experiences and truths that words can’t adequately describe. So when John mentions the dark in this context, it’s like a red flag. We know to pause and reflect before we go running to shout that Jesus is raised from the dead. Not even Mary Magdalene comes to this conclusion when she first sees the empty tomb.
“Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark…” Archbishop N.T. Wright thinks that John is calling us back to the first day of creation,2 in the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth and the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep. Before God said, “Let there be light,” before God separated the light from the darkness, called the one Day and the other Night. Maybe John is suggesting that, in Jesus’ resurrection, God’s Spirit hovered over the chaos again, that Jesus’ resurrection on the first day of the week marks the beginning of the new creation. That’s one explanation for why John tells us that it was still dark when Mary headed out to the tomb. I like it.
One of the more common explanations builds on the Bible’s many references to darkness. For the most part, darkness is bad news in the Bible. Darkness is threat and loss and death – a synonym for ignorance, spiritual blindness, willful disdain, a sin-bent spirit. Especially so in John’s Gospel. So when you consider that, in spite of Jesus three times telling his disciples that he would be raised from the dead and not a single one of them was expecting resurrection, it’s a good bet that, when John writes that Mary headed out while it was still dark, he’s talking about her spiritual blindness. Jesus’ followers were still in the dark regarding resurrection. He says it plainly: “for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that Jesus must rise from the dead (20:9).”
But maybe for John, he’s pointing to something more in the dark. Something we’re missing. If over ninety-five percent of the created order is a combination of dark matter and dark energy and God raised Jesus in the middle of the night, I have to think there’s something more to darkness in the Creator’s scheme of things. Turns out, there is. While darkness is most often used in the Bible to speak of chaos and sin and spiritual ignorance, some of the most formative experiences of faith took place in the dark. You remember, the Word of the Lord came to Abraham in the middle of the night (Genesis 15:5ff), brought him outside his tent and said, “Look up into the night sky. Count the stars, if you can. That’s how many descendants you’ll have.” Abraham’s a hundred years old. His wife, Sarah, is ninety. Standing outside his tent, hearing the voice of God, Abraham had to forever after think of the night as a time of promise.
You remember Abraham’s descendant, Jacob, a total jerk – a deceiver and a thief, running from his brother Esau’s fury after he robbed Esau of his birthright and his father’s blessing. Years later now, longing for home, Jacob gathers his family and heads back to face Esau. They arrive at the ford of the Jabbok River (Genesis 32:22ff). As evening approaches, Jacob sends his family and all he owns on ahead across the river. Jacob camps alone. In the middle of the night, he is overtaken by a man. They wrestle until just before day breaks. As the darkness begins to recede, the man insists on breaking off the match. But before he’ll let go, Jacob insists on a blessing, which he is granted. Here’s how Jacob sums up what he experienced in the dark that night. He said, “I’ve seen the Holy One face to face, and lived to tell about it!” We’re getting closer to what John may be pointing to when he says that it was still dark when Mary headed out to the garden tomb.
One more. The defining story of the Jewish people: their Exodus from harsh slavery in Egypt as prelude to God’s shaping the people into a holy community. The account is marked by two moments of darkness. You recall that God told the people to get ready to leave Egypt quickly. Shortly after, in the middle of night, God moved to free them (Exodus 12:29-32). Forty years later, wandering still in the wilderness, God brings the Israelites to the foot of Mt. Sinai, where we’re told that a thick darkness descends upon the mountain (Exodus 19:16ff). Moses is called to ascend and enter the darkness – from which he emerges with the tablets of the Ten Commandments. There’s a unique word in the Hebrew language to describe this darkness, araphel.3 It carries the sense of terrifying and threatening yet pregnant with possibility. Because God is in the midst of this darkness.
I think this is what John wants us to know as we head out into the dark with Mary. God’s power and grace are at work in the dark – where we can’t see clearly. Like when Mary wondered who would roll away the heavy stone. Or when the funeral is over and you go back to an empty house. Or in a moment of deep moral failure, you face the cost. Or the doctor says, “Cancer.” Or you read in the paper before you get the memo at work that your company is downsizing. Or the phone rings and the voice on the other end says, “This is the Colorado State Patrol,” and you realize you fell asleep before you heard the garage door close and your teen creep down the hall. Most of us have experienced something of that dark night when nobody was expecting resurrection. John wants us to know that God works the night shift.
Listen, religion is something that you and I do in the light of day. We go to church. Read the Bible. Work to shape a healthy, holy life. Here, we have the support to practice patterns that will serve us and others well: how to make a good apology; how to forgive; giving the other the benefit of the doubt. We succeed and fail at them and keep trying. We gather for fellowship and encouragement and food – always lots of food. Religion is what we do together in the community: at Laurel Elementary; with Kids at Heart; for Habitat for Humanity; with the Dse de Kaan chapter in Shiprock; accompanying the staff and clients at La Puente Home in Alamosa; raising our kids through their missions to see God in the other, to love and to serve God in the other. At its best, religion is a good thing: the community, the ethics, the doctrine, the rituals that bind and inform and encourage us.
But faith, faith is something different. Faith is practiced in the dark, in the places of our uncertainty, wandering, brokenness, failure and loss. As another has written, faith begins with a lump in the throat.4 A door is unexpectedly opened. A way ahead is lit. We get a glimpse of something we’ve never seen before, something good, something promising. We decide not to dismiss or resist it. We allow ourselves to be drawn toward it. Then, to our surprise if not our understanding, we discover that a stone’s been rolled away.
Do you know the name Barabara Ehrenreich? She’s an essayist and author of books about politics and the social good. She wrote Nickel & Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America. She’s just written a memoir, Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth About Everything. That’s right, Ehrenreich is an avowed atheist and she’s titled her book, Living with a Wild God. Many of her fans are put off by the title and the guiding experiences in her memoir.5 She writes about what she describes as two mystical experiences she had in her youth – experiences she never talked about with anyone until now. “I have been a journalist and a writer for most of my life… I think I have a responsibility to report things, even if they’re anomalous. Even if they don’t fit whatever theory I had in my mind….”
Of the first experience, she said in an interview, “I was just staring at the woods… [when] something happened. It’s like a layer peeled off the world, the layer that contains all the meanings, the words, the language, the associations we have. Yeah, I was looking at trees, but I no longer could say I knew exactly what a tree was, with all the knowledge and experience that goes into our notions of a tree… I couldn’t tell anybody. I had enough sense [as a kid] to think that this would be seen as crazy.”
Of the second: “The only words I can put to it after all these years is… that the world flamed into life. Everything was alive. There was a feeling of an encounter with something living, not something God-like,” she insists, “but something beyond any of those kinds of categories, beyond any human categories.”
“Don’t ask me to believe anything,” she said. But “the religions that fascinate me and could possibly tempt me are… the ones that offer you the opportunity to know the spirit or deity.”
I won’t put words into Ehrenreich’s mouth. She speaks for herself, quite eloquently. But I have to say that she’s describing what we’d call an experience of the Mystery at the Heart of the Universe: the God of the Bible, wild, terrifying, beyond all human attempts to describe, not the tame one we often settle for when we do religion. This is what she’s writing about now, in spite of the criticism, in spite of her insistence that it can’t really be God. After all these years, those experiences still beckon.
I think most of us have had such an encounter with the Holy One, no matter how we’d label it. I think these moments, our experiences of God shrouded in thick darkness, are the reason those of us who stick around and keep at the religion thing, do so. We’ve discovered that resurrection happens. It’s happened to us. We’ve come to expect that God’s at work, as John says, while it’s still dark.
1 science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-is-dark-energy
2 The Challenge of Jesus
3 See Barbara Brown Taylor’s newest book, Learning to Walk in the Dark
4 Frederick Buechner, The Alphabet of Grace
5 The Fresh Air interview may be found here: npr.org/2014/04/08/300520210/a-nonbeliever-tries-to-make-sense-of-the-visions-she-had-as-a-teen
If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light around me become night,”
even the darkness is not dark to you.
the night is as bright as the day,
for darkness is as light to you. Psalm 138:11