12-9-12 - Get out of the dark!

Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has looked favorably on his people and redeemed them. ⁶⁹He has raised up a mighty savior for us in the house of his servant David, ⁷⁰as he spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets from of old, ⁷¹that we would be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us. ⁷²Thus he has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors, and has remembered his holy covenant,⁷³the oath that he swore to our ancestor Abraham, to grant us ⁷⁴that we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies, might serve him without fear, ⁷⁵in holiness and righteousness before him all our days.⁷⁶And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, ⁷⁷to give knowledge of salvation to his people by the forgiveness of their sins. ⁷⁸By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, ⁷⁹to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

            “By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”  How often is it that we can see ourselves sitting in darkness, in need of a light in our lives, in need of God? 

            It’s easy to see in some of our darkest moments, such as with the loss of a loved one.  This week we buried Betty Wolf, and for those who knew her we will be in a dark place for a while, even though she may have been prepared for this we still mourn her loss and our inability to talk with her and share our lives with her anymore.  In a time like this, we know that we need God and God’s promises to get us through and to see the light.  And when we are going through physical or mental pain in our lives, we can feel as though we are in the darkness.  I know that when I had Mono during my internship, and was banned from the congregation for fear of getting others sick, I was in a great darkness and I needed God in order to get through it, to stave off depression and self-pity. 

At the breaking of a relationship, we can also be stuck in darkness as well.  Whether it be a high school romance, or a marriage, or loss of a best friend, or moving away from home for the first time, the world can seem pretty dark without that light we had in our lives.  So in those times we can begin to focus on God again and the light that He brings to our lives, a light that is greater than any other.
            Those are very concrete and clear times when we are stuck in darkness.  And they are times that we are used to calling upon God to be with us.  But what about those other times in our lives when we are truly in darkness and we may not even realize it?  For each day we are in darkness, whether it be the darkness of Sin or of pain.  Each day we are in need of God’s guidance, but because everything becomes so ordinary and mundane we begin to fail to even realize that we are surrounded by the dark.  We can become lost in the darkness of this world, in its call to focus on ourselves, on the worries that the world brings, in the passions within us.  In our Sunday School class, we have been talking about different spiritual gifts and one that keeps coming up is deliverance, which is aiding Christians in their fights against demonic powers.  And demonic powers is not just possession, but instead is more focused on those mini-obsessions in our lives that draw us into darkness instead of seeing the light of God.  Mini-obsessions being those things that keep drawing our attention, things that might be beneficial but that we take just too far.  Things like organization, which is very valuable skill to have, can lead us into darkness when we begin to focus too much on it, when we focus on having everything in the right place at all times, even things that don’t belong to us but we might believe ourselves to know the best way to set up everything and to boss people around.  Very quickly this can take over our worldview, where everything has its place and nothing can be changed or adjusted or left a mess, and we lose God.  We can also become with obsessed with prayer or the Bible.  One could find the best way for themselves to pray, perhaps in mediation, and then decide that the only true prayer is through this type of prayer, because if it changed my life, then it must change everyone elses instead, and once again we become in control of things, as we insist that everyone prays that same way that we do, or reads the Bible the same way that we do, and then our interpretation or our experience leads us into darkness instead of light, because we forget where our experiences and where our understanding comes from. 

The same goes for our ministries, as we focus on our specific ministries and groups within the congregation, we can begin to create divides where we want to make sure that our thing has the most space and the most resources and don’t understand when other ministries need space and resources too.  All of this, all these things though, end up with us wrapped into ourselves, which is where true darkness is.  The darkness in our lives is that we keep looking at ourselves for the answers, ourselves for the inspirations, and caring for our own wants and desires.  And when we do that, we are never truly satisfied and all we do is end up arguing with each other over who gets to win and who gets what they want, everything is a competition and every perceived slight a person does becomes a devious wound.

And Christ calls to us and tells us that life doesn’t have to be that way. We don’t have to walk around trying to defend everything or trying to always be on top, be the best. We don’t have to keep separating ourselves with boundaries of our own creation or taking pain at every opportunity.  Instead, Christ calls us to a life that is filled with unity, with compassion, and with healing.  There is a reason that we have an advent candle besides the counting to Christmas.  It is because we are looking at Christ’s ever growing presence in the world, in the light that pierces the darkness and brings sight to our eyes and warms our bodies and spirits.  For Christ is the light that helps us to see beyond ourselves, that gives a liberating word to those are bound by the constraints of society and by poverty, who helps us to see the pain in each other and the ways that we might be able to help instead of seeing the ways that people pain us.   So praise the Lord, the one who breaks the darkness, who helps us to support and love one another, that we may have a joyful life instead of one filled with misery  and filled with friends and family, instead of enemies, and filled with hope instead of despair.

Amen.