“The
Darkness Shall Be the Light”
Mark
1:9-15
First
Presbyterian
The
Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
March
1, 2009
Lent
1
In the spring of the
first year of my ministry in the first church I served, Kim and I gathered the
high school seniors in our little apartment in
I thought about that
painful cry as I read our passage from Mark this week.
Jesus presented himself for baptism by John and as he came up out of the
water he saw the heavens torn open and the Spirit of God descending on him like
a dove, and simultaneously he heard a voice from heaven exclaiming to him, “You
are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
That must have been a pretty “heady” if also humbling experience
but Jesus was given no time to bask in the glory of it for, Mark tells us, “The
Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness and he was in the
wilderness for forty days, tempted there by Satan, and he was with the wild
beasts…” I wonder if there
was not at least a time or two while wrestling with the beasts and the demons
that Jesus muttered, “God, if this is
how you treat your friends, it is no wonder you have so few of them.”
I wonder why it is
that so many people across the years who “believe in God” have the idea that
doing so should provide an inoculation against trouble, calamity, confusion, or
loss. I wonder why it is that so
many people across the years who “believe in God” reason that life should be
easier than it seems to be. I wonder
why it is that so many people across the years who “believe in God” think
that there therefore should be a protective façade covering them from danger
and misfortune.
There is so much to
say. First of all, there are no
heavenly “brownie points” for “believing in God.”
The Bible’s first sentence begins with the words, “In the beginning, God…” Believing
in God is assumed in every word of scripture that comes after that opening
phrase. We live and move and have our being in God in a similar way as fish
live and move and have their being in water (and also in God).
There are no “rewards” for a creature “believing in” its Creator.
The issue is “what do you believe
about God?” Believing in God
as a personal insurance policy or as a cosmic concierge is a far different
matter than believing in God as “the
Holy One of Israel whom alone we worship and serve” and “who
leads us in paths of righteousness for the sake of his reputation” or, to
use the psalmist’s words, “for his
name’s sake.”
My experience across
the years, both pastoral and personal, is that when someone claims to have lost
his or her faith, it is usually a good thing because invariably it is faith in a
God who is much too small or a God of our own projections.
It is a good thing when we are disillusioned about a God we have
fashioned according to our whims and wisdoms so that we may have the opportunity
to encounter the God revealed in scripture and in Jesus the Christ.
It is not a sign of God’s disfavor nor are we being abandoned by God
when we are driven into a wilderness. It
may well be, as was the case with Jesus in the desert, that we are being given a
Spirit-led opening to get clearer about our lives and God and how we are to live
the next stretch of our lives. I
learned more about God and my own faith in the wilderness into which I was
driven following my daughter’s death than in all of the seminary classes I
ever took. I struggled with more
personal and theological demons than I could count.
But life happens as it does and either we lose faith or we choose faith.
Faith means trusting God in the tough and terrible as well as the
terrific times of our lives.
The wilderness can be
a scary place for us to go. But, in
the Bible, it is almost always a place of personal development and/or community
formation. It is, for instance, the
place where the ancient Israelites learned to live as free people after half a
millennium as slaves in
T.S. Eliot describes
the wilderness experience this way:
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
When we are driven
into in a wilderness experience in our lives, either because of a loss of some
kind or the need for change or the feeling that life is not working for us the
way we are living it, it is not that God has abandoned us, even if it might feel
like it. It is then that God has
come particularly close to us so that we do not stay stuck but rather are
afforded the opportunity to grow beyond where we presently are in our lives.
Jesus emerged from the
wilderness with clear vision and voice. He
said to all who would listen, “The reign
of God is near. Repent, and believe
in the good news of God.” So
let that be a sign of hope to us when we find ourselves in the wilderness.
God is in the midst of it. Do
not be afraid to struggle with your demons there, to wrestle with the hard
questions and the difficult choices. What
seems like darkness will become your light, as it did for Jesus, and whatever
comes to an end in the wilderness will give way to a fresh beginning, a kind of
death and resurrection.
Being driven into the
wilderness is never a time of God-forsakenness but a time when God is especially
close to us, a time when God has our well-being in mind and at heart.
Remember that when Jesus was in his wilderness, he struggled with the
wild beasts and demons but, Mark also says, “the
angels of God waited on him.” Wilderness
times, if we do not run from them, are teachable times, transforming times,
maturing times.
If in our wilderness
times it feels like we are losing our faith, then that is probably good.
Faith is given to us by God and we cannot finally lose it any more than
we can lose God, but faith can be, and indeed must be, ever deepened, amended,
and transformed to meet the challenges, contexts, and circumstances of our
lives. So our wilderness
times, if we do not give up on them, will become times for us in which to repent
which, as we have said in previous weeks, is about changing our minds –
perhaps about our previously held ideas about God or the way we think life
should work or the direction we thought our lives were “supposed” to go.
And then we are ready to believe ever more deeply in the good news of God
in which we find that life is not meant to serve us but we are meant to serve
life. And we shall find ways to go
on where we had thought there were no ways.
If you feel as if life
has it out for you or if things do not seem to be going your way or if your
faith is flagging, the good news is that you are being, if not exactly driven,
then at least nudged into a wilderness time that invites a rewiring and
reworking of your thoughts, your perspectives, of the ways you are living.
The wilderness is seldom a pleasant place to be, but the angels of God
will be waiting on you as you struggle with your beasts and demons, and you will
emerge more deeply in touch with your life and with God than you ever thought
possible. The darkness shall be the
light. I promise you.
Amen.
©
Copyright 2009 First Presbyterian Church