DARKNESS TO LIGHT John M. Buchanan
Tsaiah 9:2~7 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
December 9, 1979 Columbus, Ohio

For us « the very, very fortunate, December is one of the most pleasant months
of the year. "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire... children's faces all aglow." We do
romanticize it a bit: it's been 4 while since I've seen 4 chestnut December, nevertheless,
is a warm and happy time of year, made even warmer and happier by crisp days and late
afternoons growing quickly dark. But it has not always been so. In fact, in the context
of the entire sweep of the human story, the reverse has been true, Ancient people feared
December in the Northern Hemisphere. It was a time of anxiety, dread, worry. They didn't
call it December, but at the time of year you and I are accustomed to throwing another
log on the fire and enjoying the warmth of our homes, most of the human race in the past
has been obsessed with the worst thing that could possibly happen ~ the sun was disappearing.

Those who developed careful observation skills noticed that it began in the middle of
the best time, the days long and hot, the nights comfortable, growing things flourished.
In the middle of that, the sun, source of it all, began to recede ~ to go away. The days
grew a Little shorter, and before long the air cooler and nights not so comfortable and
growing things began to die, and animals hibernated. It continued relentlessly: the
forces of chaos and suffering and death were obviously winning some kind of battle. The
process appeared inexorable: soon all would be darkness: cold, deep, black.

And then one day, the same careful observers who noticed its subtle beginning six
months earlier, recorded the end of the process and its reversal, Suddenly, one day was
a few minutes longer instead of shorter, and the next and the next and the observers
knew, even though the worst of the cold was still ahead, the sun was not going away any
mote, In fact, it was coming back.

Much human religion had its genesis around the dynamic of the winter solstice in
the Northern Hemisphere. People knew that it had happened before; the sun had always
returned, But there were no guarantees, There were no astronomers and mathematicians
to explain. There was no rational reason to believe anything other than the abvious;5
namely, that whatever gods there were needed to be persuaded to alter this awful process,
When it happened, there was profound gratitude, religious ceremony and sacrificial
offering.

By the time of the Christian era, the festival was structured and stylized. Nobody
much believed that the sun might actually go away, but the year-end celebration was re-
tained, That is why we celebrate Christmas on December 25, Early Christians needed
something to celebrate while their Roman neighbors pulled out all the stops, let their
hair down and enjoyed a week long bash, That is the main reason for the December 25
date, However, the early Christians were quick to realize that in many ways the coming
of Jesus Christ into the world was not unlike the event ancient people thought they per-
ceived in the sun's return: the birth of hope, warmth, life, Light...

Darkness is the elemental threat, the primal fear. In darkness, Life is not
possible, We may instill fear of darkness in our children for silly and superstitious
reasons, but at least part of it is deeply embedded in the human memory from generations
ago.

Darkness is also a metaphor, It is a convenient way to summarize a condition of
total evil, Tt represents ignorance, People can't see in the dark: knowledge is impossible.
When Barbarian hoards overran the Roman Empire and destroyed every vestige of civilization
the ensuing one thousand year period is known as the "Dark Ages".

~2-

Qur scripture lesson this morning, read all over the Christian world on this
Second Sunday in Advent, uses the idea of darkness both to describe a very real histor-
ical situation but also in a broader, metaphorical sense. The situation was this, It
was the middle of the Eighth Century B.C. and Judah was in trouble, threatened on the
one hand by former allies who wanted to organize a military alliance, and on the other
hand by Assyria, the dominant power in the region, Judean King Ahaz found himself under
siege by his former friends because he wouldn't join their alliance. And so he sent
emissaries to Assyria, promising loyalty and devotion, in essence surrendering independenc
in exchange for security.

Isaiah the prophet wrote the hauntingly beautiful words we heard this morning, "The
people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.” Tt was a message to the King
essentially. The prophet was suggesting that the right policy was neither to join the
coalition nor to rely on Assyria, but to be calm. God (Immanuel) is with us. All will
be well,

Biblical scholars tell us that these words may have been used ceremonially every
time a new king was crowned, And of course, George Frederick Handel has borrowed the
text for one of the most glorious choruses in the Messiah. "For unto us a child is
born...a son is given,..and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor..."

In its original context it is a word of assurance, to people who found themselves
in a very difficult predicament, It was a promise that even though things were going
very badly at the moment, God was still in control, Even though the darkness is descend-
ing, there is a source of unquenchable light, It is also an exhortation: peace and
justice and righteousness are here celebrated as characteristics of God's reign. It is
a vision of great poetic beauty, but also immediate relevance. Each age has its own
brand of darkness, In the Eighth Century B.C, it was Assyria: two hundred years later
Babylon was the definition of darkness, The Dark Ages point to ignorance: the great
depression was certainly dark - as was December 7, 1941, Today we think about Iran,
energy, nuclear escalation, We need a little light, frankly.

And yet, part of our national character is a cheerful optimism that simply cannot
admit to darkness, Part of our culture is a belief in progress, and positiveness, and an
undying confidence that tomorrow will be better than today if we work hard enough at it.
Douglas John Hall, Canadian theologian, calls us the "Officially Optimistic Culture",
and while there is certainly nothing wrong with optimism per se, when it becomes obsessive,
when it simply pretends that there is no darkness, it is a delusion, a very dangerous
distortion,

We are having a terrible time adjusting to the simple facts of life. We are using
up all the world's oil. The people who have it don't want to sell it to us ~ but even
if they did, it will be all gone in a very few years. We simply will not deal with that,
It can't be true: someone isn't telling the truth.,.Whatever problems the auto industry
is experiencing must therefore be the fault of the EPA or the labor unions - or somebody,
We keep dismantling the decrepit remnants of a mass transit system at the very moment the
oil producers are telling us they don't want our business, It is, I am convinced, part of
our national character to be so optimistic that we simply will not acknowledge the fact
that there may be some darkness to deal with.

Hall writes that we have "developed a kind of programmed indifference to the data
of despair, particularly that associated with the polution of the environment. We are
no longer shocked to learn that cormorants off the coast of California are now laying
eges with no shells at all..." (Lighten Our Darkness, p.65).

-3-

You cannot see a candle in the noon day sun, There is nothing more futile,
meaningless than a flashlight in the daytime, People will not remedy wrong until they
acknowledge that it is wrong. It is a deceptive, destructive ploy to keep assuring one
another that all will be well if we simply keep telling one another that it is well,

There is a function of honest religion which might be described as peinting te the
darkness, or leading us into the darkness - not for its own sake, not in some sick
masochism. There is anough religion already which seems to enjoy rather thoroughly
talking about human sin: there is enough religion playing on human guilt. Honest religion
leads into the darkness, not because there is something good or admirable about darkness
but precisely because you can't see the light until you know about the darkness. But,
Hall suggests that Christianity is the official religion of the officially optimistic
society: that we will rid Christianity of its honest analysis of the human condition if
necessary in order to preserve our cheerful optimism. Hall quotes a despiser of the
faith to the effect that going to most churches on Sunday morning is about like taking
a tranquilizer, a quick trip to never-never land where everybody smiles and is pleasant;
where everything is forward and up and progressing nicely. That would anger me, if E
didn't believe it was true. We even clean up our crosses, eliminate the word sin from
our vocabulary, keep our religion clear of all entanglements with messy controversy,
with politics, economics and social policy.

There is enough darkness in the world, Surely on Sunday morning we can escape from
it for a blessed hour or two, Every preacher who thinks and reads knows the power of
that sentiment. He feels it himself. He knows that religion that is popular, either
ignores darkness totally, or else simplifies and trivializes it so that becoming bern
again resolves it once and for all, which is somehow more of a delusion than not
acknowledging it in the first place,

There is something to be said, however, for acknowledging the darkness, The phil-
esopher Hegel once wrote, "Perhaps real faith, like real wisdom, can only occur at
eventide," And in our generation Elie Wiesel determined not to Let us forget that
dark moment in history, the Holocaust, draws frequently on the metaphor of darkness and
night. In The Town Beyond the Wall he wrote: "I know the paths of the soul, overgrown,
often know only the night, a very vast, very barren night...And yet I tell you, we'll
get out. The most glorious works of man are born of that night." (Hall, ob.cit.).

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is good news; it is a very optimistic statement about
the human prospect, Its optimism, however, is not constructed on a denial of evil,
darkness, sin, but rather on the faith that there is a light in the darkness. That
statement is meaningless if you don't believe there is any darkness, Optimistic religion
has real trouble with forgiveness and grace because it knows no need for it,

The God of Christian faith, however, takes darkness very seriously. He enters into
it and promises that He will be present even in the darkest of nights,

Light in the darkness remains one of the richest and most suggestive symbols with
which to discuss God.Thus, the Psalmist, "Even though I walk through the valley..,.!''
The author of the Fourth Gospel used it eloquently in his prologue,.."The light shines
in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.' And when, in several weeks we
wish to do something to express the joy we feel at the mystery of the incarnation we
will light candles and tegether dispel darkness in a ritual that is both lovely and
theologically honest,

God's people are at their best when they are doing that. When they stand together
and defiantly light candies in the darkness; when in the midst of political oppression,
for instance, they keep alive the light of freedom and human dignity; when they hear
about hungry people and then move to feed them; when they insist that poverty and

m= of

disease and injustice are not necessary, but stains on God's creation, placed there by
us and therefore our responsibility to remove. God's people have always been at their
very best - when they were lighting candles in the darkness,

We believe in a God who takes darkness seriously. His coming into the world, His
Incarnation after all, did not happen in the brightly lighted throne reem of the palace.
That is how official optimism would have orchestrated it; at least in the royal nursery.
What we celebrate happened at night - in the darkness, and for that I am profoundly
grateful,

That means that God enters our darkness, It means that He enters those places in
life which we regard as God-forsaken. He enters your darkness and mine: darkness of fear
fear of inflation, fear of tomorrow, fear about getting older, fear of retirement, fear
of death, God enters that darkness, The darkness of doubt ~ of the long nights of un~
certainty when reasonable men and women wonder if, in fact, we are not alone in this vast
empty universe; the darkness of pain, when we stand by someone with whom we've lived and
laughed and cried and loved and watch pain take its devastating toll: God is in that
darkness. Wherever you hurt: your relationship with your husband or wife, your children,
your friends: your loneliness, your grief, your incessant anxiety: your frustration because
your life is slipping through your fingers, Your pain is your darkness. God is in it
with you and for you, And guilt = that darkest of all valleys which we traverse alone,
into which we would introduce no one else; that place where we have hidden away our
secret betrayals, the hurts we have inflicted on those we love: the unfaithfulness to
ourselves and to God, that place we would be ashamed to have amyone else see - God is
in that darkness,

That's where we need Him to be. We don't really need a celestial cheerleader who
tells how fine we are and how much better we are becoming if we will simply keep smiling.
We need a God who knows about darkness; who enters our darkness; who meets us in
our darkness,

All of that is summed up in a lovely passage from Dorethy Sayers' nativity play
That He Should Come, At the beginning the Magi come on stage and express their hope as
they set out to follow the star, One of them says...

"A1] E ask is the assurance that I am not alone, some courage,
some comfort against this burden of fear and pain.
I look out and see
Fear in the east, fear in the west; armies
And banners and garments rolled in blood,
Yet this is nothing if only God will not be indifferent,
Tf he is beside me, bearing the weight of his own creation;
If I may hear his voice among the voices of the vanquished
Tf I may feel his hand touch mine in the darkness..."
(The Presbyterian Outlook, 12/10/79
Two Piays About God and Man).

God is in the darkness, Because a child was born in the darkness of a stable we
dare to believe that God enters our darkness, that there is a hand reaching for ours in
the night,..That is the Good News,

"The people who walked in darkness hava seen a

great light...

Fer te us a child is born,

To us a son is given,” Amen.

Almighty God, come into the darkness of our lives, Show us the truth. Give us
courage to be honest with ourselves. And, our Father, in these days of Advent, help us
to see the light, to trust in Your love; to be warmed by the grace and mystery and
beauty of Bethlehem, Amen,