“In the Dark”
Isaiah 9:1-4 and Matthew 4:12-23
January 26, 2020, Boeuff Presbyterian Church
Darkness can look like many things: the time before the sun rises. Hopelessness in dark nights of the soul. Fear of an uncertain future. Or simply the deep darkness at night that allows you to fully see the beauty of the stars. Many of those definitions are at play in our scriptures today and each worthy of an entire sermon focusing on them. But for today, I want to focus our attention on the type of “in the dark,” we are when we simply don’t know what is going on.
Our passage in the New Testament points us to the prophecy in our Old Testament text. The understanding in their correlation is that Jesus is the light dawning on those who have been in darkness. But this Jesus of Nazareth was not so easily understood as the fulfillment of prophecy in his time.
So much of Jesus’ ministry to those around him left them in the dark. Scripture tells us over and over that the disciples rarely, if ever, fully understood what Jesus was trying to tell them. Even when Jesus told them exactly what was going to happen. Even as prophecies such as our text today spelled it out for them precisely what Jesus was doing. They so often have no idea what Jesus was talking about.
Also, so much of Jesus’ ministry happened out of sight of mainstream culture and society, in the homes of those on the margins, among tax collectors, and on seashores off the beaten path. Our text today occurs in Northern Galilee, which in Jesus’ time was largely composed of poor people involved in the fishing industry. Not exactly the place one would go to network or schmooze with the well connected.
Jesus often spoke in parables. And I guess when you’re speaking about the counter-cultural realities of the realm of God, sometimes stories approximating the nature of the thing are the closest you can get. In a way, he’s utilizing the tradition of his culture. So much of rabbinical teaching comes not in the form of answers, but in the form of questions, ever unpeeling layer after layer to discern what is true. And my goodness did Jesus frustrate those around him by responding to questions with questions of his own.
But this Jesus of Nazareth was the light who came to those in darkness, and it took his death and resurrection for those around him to know that more fully.
Throughout time, those who have followed God have sought the clarity of God’s full revelation, frustrated with the unknowability of God. It was once believed that were God fully revealed, such power would kill you on the spot.
There’s a poem by Emily Dickinson on this theme:
Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
Truth, Emily Dickinson infers, is too great to be understood all at once. In that way, it was a small mercy that those around Jesus didn’t fully comprehend all of his identity in his lifetime. The concepts of Christ’s humanity and divinity have been studied, analyzed, and debated through the centuries. But those followers of Christ in his time were spared the discomfort of fully understanding every little detail about Christ’s nature, so they could be in actual relationship with this man, who was also God. Christ’s divinity wasn’t hidden exactly but was certainly not fully known.
But God doesn’t intend to keep us in the dark, sending the Holy Spirit to give us as much clarity about God’s love, grace, and mercy as we are able to receive. Through the Holy Spirit, God’s revelation alights the darkness, providing a path for us not just to know the Christ who has come to save us, but to follow Jesus out of that boat and into the world. May we greet the dawn of Christ’s revelation. Amen.
God’s love endures forever. God’s love endures 
What about when the pain of this world seems all too much; when pain, death, and destruction can be found under every headline?
However, as someone called to preach the word of God, I am not speaking on my own behalf. Thanks be to God. And so today I strive once again not to speak my own message, but, by the Holy Spirit, to speak God’s message of hope. I am here to preach God’s word, and so today, as each of us takes a break from the 24 hour news cycle and from our social media feeds, that is what I will do.
Bookending today’s Psalm we hear our refrain: “give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; his steadfast love endures forever!” 
Rev. Lisa Horst Clark writes, “The true horribleness of any tragedy cannot be held by us. The depth of feeling required to fully contemplate any tragedy, let alone the big ones, is not the kind of thing a mortal can do. At least for me, emotionally, it breaks me. Thinking of all of that fear, and horror, and violence. The depth of sin in this world, and all of those broken hearts, are held by God—and even the tiniest fragment, could be too much for any of us to bear. I do not believe that contemplation of violence is redemptive unless it seeks to heal a wound—to sit beside those in pain.”
This Psalm does not say that we will never encounter darkness or that we will never have enemies. It does say that God will be with us in the darkness and among us when we encounter enemies.
Author and activist Eve Ensler writes about our particularly American perspective of security in her book, “Insecure at Last.” She writes: “All this striving for security has in fact made you much more insecure. Because now you have to watch out all the time. There are people not like you, people you now call enemies. You have places you cannot go, thoughts you cannot think, worlds you can no longer inhabit…Your days become devoted to protecting yourself. This becomes your mission…Of course you can no longer feel what another person feels because that might shatter your heart, contradict your stereotype, destroy the whole structure…. There are evildoers and saviors. Criminals and victims. There are those who, if they are not with us, are against us.”
There are very real fears in this world, but we are to keep in mind that they are 
Think of a time in your life when you felt lost. That will look like different things to everyone of you. Perhaps it was being separated from your parent or from your child in the grocery store, that panic of not knowing where they’d gone. Maybe it was shortly after getting your driver’s license, or coming back to a place you hadn’t been in a long time, and where you thought you were is not where you are. Maybe it was following the loss of a loved one, when all the dependable patterns of your life seemed to disappear, and you weren’t really sure where to go from there. Perhaps it was in a season of mental or physical illness, when your body or mind were betraying how you were used to looking at the world, redefining what it was you could do, how it was you could go on.
Pastor and professor Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “Wildernesses come in so many shapes and sizes that the only way you can really tell you are in one is to look around for what you normally count on to save your life and come up empty. No food. No earthly power. No special protection–just a Bible-quoting devil and a whole bunch of sand.”
I remember one of the first times I read this passage and I did a bit of a double take when I heard how Jesus got into this wilderness predicament. Did you catch it?
So what does this mean for us? It means that God does not leave us in our wildernesses, but that the Holy Spirit accompanies us, strengthening us with the knowledge and the hope to get us through. Perhaps in those times when we thought we were the most alone, we were indeed surrounded by angels.
I recently read Jenny Lawson’s book, “Furiously Happy.” In it she speaks extensively about her struggles with mental illness and how her vulnerability has enabled her to connect with and help so many. She writes this to the readers of her blog, “When I came out so many years ago about my depression and anxiety disorder I was afraid you’d all run away screaming. But you didn’t. Instead, thousands of you said 
‘Me too,’ and ‘I thought I was the only one,’ and ‘It’s not just me?’ You gave me the strength to be honest about my flaws and the support to realize that I was more than the broken parts that make up me. And you did something else you might not even realize…
“‘The Folder of 24.’ – It was called that because it contained 24 letters from people who were actively planning their suicide, but decided to get help instead. And not because of what I said…they did it because of you. Almost every single one explained that what convinced them that depression was lying to them was the amazing response to my posts. They could look at a single person like me and think it was still a rare illness or something to be ashamed about…but when thousands of strangers shout out into the darkness that they are there too, it makes ripples. And those anonymous strangers saved lives without even knowing it. If you ever left a comment or a kind word you may have been the cause of someone’s mother or daughter or son being alive. Being thankful to be alive.
I believe that this is the work of the Holy Spirit, transforming wilderness into community, vulnerability into hope, through the empathy of others. Being the beloved community together requires us to be a people of vulnerability, honestly allowing others into the fractured part of our lives, but being in community means that’s not the end of it. A gift of vulnerability offered by another requires response, and it is important what that response will be. If our response is one of judgement or discomfort it can widen our wildernesses and increase our isolation. Vulnerability is an invitation to extend our own “me too”s. Not that we should ever pretend to know the complexities of the hurt of another, but that vulnerability should be met with our own vulnerability, extending empathy rather than sympathy, so that we may meet people in their wilderness and journey alongside them.
This empathetic response is part of the very fiber of our Christian story. Our God is a God with us, a God of “me too”s, not keeping at a distance in our wilderness, but walking through the dark valleys with us. When we kept God at a distance through our sin, God sent Jesus to become one of us to truly empathize with the human experience. When he was on earth he didn’t avoid the wildernesses of this world, but entered right into them, extending a hand to lepers, befriending prostitutes, sharing wells with Samaritans, and going toe to toe with the devil itself. He could have rightly claimed his place as a king among kings, but instead chose to be a human among humanity.
And in the ultimate act of vulnerability Jesus met the brokenness and pain of Judas, Pilate, and throngs of the disenchanted with his willing innocence. He met the brokenness and sins of this world with his very life. In the pain of his death our pain is met, matched, and healed.
Presbydestrian 