Scripture: Luke 1:68-79
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Scripture: Luke 1:68-79
I had to go back to the scriptures and check something out this week. You know there are things that people think are in the Bible that really aren’t. For instance, the idea that there were three magi. Actually the Bible doesn’t say how many there were. It says that there were three gifts, and maybe that implies three givers. That’s open to discussion, but it doesn’t specifically say.
What I wanted to check on this week was what time of day Jesus was born. I have always had the image that the story says he was born in the nighttime, but when I thought about it, I wasn’t so sure that the Bible actually said that. And when I checked, sure enough I found the Bible doesn’t exactly say that. It says—after describing how Mary gave birth and wrapped her son in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger because there was no room for him at the inn—it then says that in that region there were shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night…and you know the rest of that story. But it doesn’t say that the angels appeared to the shepherds at exactly the time Jesus was born. It could have been several hours later and Jesus could have been born in the daytime. It just doesn’t quite say.
Well, I don’t want to make too much out of this. Biblical stories aren’t meant to be looked at in this way and analyzed in such detail. They have different kinds of things to say to us than this, more important things. But I was just curious. I wasn’t looking for facts. I was looking for imagery, the imagery of daytime and nighttime, light and dark, and although I found that that imagery is not used in the account of Jesus’ actual birth, that imagery does surround his birth, both in the biblical language that is connected to it, and in the ways we think and talk about it, at least in the ways I think and talk about it, and I often find a need to reflect on that interplay between light and darkness in the story and in our own lives.
You are familiar with some of the Biblical verses. “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them has light shined.” (Is. 9:2) “What has come into being in Jesus was life, and the life was light for all people. The light shines in darkness and the darkness does not overcome it.” (John 1:4-5) “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 in the ways of peace.” (Luke 1:78-79)
In these scriptures, and in much of our language and songs at Christmas, there is this contrast between light and dark. And in our ways of using these scriptural images, I think there is often the assumption that darkness is bad and light is good. There is this contest between the light and the darkness. Our job is to dispel darkness as much or as quickly as we can. Our job is to believe in the light, to bring light, to be light. Darkness is what we’re trying to escape. Darkness is the enemy.
It seems like this is true in both our religious and our everyday language. Darkness is associated with ignorance. When we are don’t know something we are in the dark about it. And it is always helpful when someone is able to say something that will shed light on a situation, to help us be enlightened. We may speak of the darkness of despair. When a person has a dark view of things it probably means he or she is gloomy or pessimistic or cynical. When we talk about the dark side of ourselves or the shadow side of our personalities, we don’t usually mean that side of us that we are most proud of or that we hope will govern how we act. In all these ways and many others, “the dark” seems to be often something negative. I don’t think I have to argue that at great length; it seems pretty deeply ingrained in our ways of thinking and speaking.
In fact, I know I have given another sermon where I was sort of struggling with this and I remembered that and remembered saying that I wanted to try to speak more positively of the dark. But when I went back and looked at that sermon, I realized, somewhat to my dismay, that although I had suggested that it would be good for us to be more comfortable with the dark, not to be afraid of the dark, to confess the dark, and if necessary to be able to live in difficult places, places of sadness or grief, places of uncertainty, places of regret and guilt, places of loneliness and need—although I said that we should not be afraid of such places, and tried to say nicer things about darkness, so that it wasn’t just seen as an enemy, still when all was said and done, I realize that I was still speaking of darkness if not as an enemy, then as at least some state or condition that we hoped one day to get to the other side of, preferably sooner rather than later, and in that sense it was still, in spite of my own intentions, still something basically negative.
So let me try again. Let me do what I thought I was going to do before, what I wanted to do but failed to do, and speak of darkness as a symbol of things that are much more than things we need to learn to live with and live through. I still believe darkness can be a symbol of things that might well be our hearts desire. If you have been listening to me preach for very long at all, you know that I am not the kind of person who has three points to make in every sermon. So I surprised myself when I realized that I have three ways in which I want to suggest that darkness can be a symbol of our heart’s desire.
First of all, darkness is associated in a positive way with creativity, with gestation and birth giving. Human life grows in the darkness of the womb. Plants prepare themselves in the darkness of the soil. Quite often some new idea, anything that is not easy or obvious, needs to sit somewhere inside us until it is ready to be expressed, put to words or music or canvass. Also such things as love grow in the soil of our inner lives, out of sight, as do a whole bunch of things crucial to our existence: courage, mercy, endurance, belief, forgiveness. All need to grow from the darkness of the soul in order to be strong and lasting. Darkness is a place where things that are life-giving are given life.
It’s a kind of a trivial thing, but in this regard when I come to some place in my sermon writing where I get stuck—have a thought I don’t know how to say, or don’t have a thought, just seem to be staring blankly at the computer screen—I have often found that the only solution is to go take a nap. Of course nap can sometimes be another word for procrastination, but sometimes it really is part of a necessary process, and when I tell Ava that I’m going to go “think” she knows what I mean. And more often than not it works, just as when we find ourselves troubled or unsure about something and we decide to “sleep on it”…quite often when we do we’re in a different or better place by morning.
In a similar, but perhaps more profound, way, our daylight world is the world as it is with all its harshness, violence, competitiveness, and injustice. If we want to begin to imagine a better world, if we want to see the new dawn the scripture speaks of, we need to seek out some dark place where the world as it is is not so much with us and where dreams of a different world can begin to take shape. Darkness is a place of dreaming and of beginning to imagine the world not as it is but as it might be.
Which leads me to the second positive association I want to speak of. In our daytime worlds, in our lighted worlds, it tends to be that things just are what they are. It is a world of appearances. What you see is what you get. And it is a world full to the brim of things, and of noise, all the clutter of our lives. In the darkness, in our nighttime lives and nighttime selves, there are fewer things to see or deal with. The things fade away, some. The noise dies down, a little. There is more room for the imagination. More room to be alone with ourselves. More time for reflection. More—if we allow it to be—more of a place to be alone with ourselves. More room for wonder—if we allow it to be. More for reverence. More of a place for God.
The way I’m thinking this morning, we need more darkness in our lives because we need to be less cluttered, less noisy, less frantic, less combative, more quiet, more dreamy, more willing to be alone with ourselves, more tuned to wonder, more reverent, all things I associate with darkness. We need to be more aware of the holiness that is within things, that is not visible to the naked eye, not so visible in the full light of day but that is more available in the deeper light of the night.
The third thing I want to mention as being associated, from where I sit, with the dark is a sense of being gifted. It is the receptive side of ourselves, in contrast to the active, aggressive, ambitious side of ourselves. Our daytime selves are our striving selves always trying to get somewhere or accomplish something, produce something, do what’s expected of us, make the world a better place—I don’t want to suggest that all of these things are bad things.
I do want to suggest there is another side of us that needs recognition and attention. It is the side of us that knows that we are blessed people, blessed for having been placed in this miraculous universe not of our own making, blessed for having been given the capacity to love and to be loved, blessed by the faith that somehow this journey we are on is a holy one. If I am not mistaken one of the reasons the story of Christ’s nativity continues to resonate with so many people, even with many people who can’t or don’t care to be very specific about what they believe about Christ, is that it awakens in us and renews within us that sense of being recipients, people who have been blessed by gifts from beyond, holy gifts. To me all of that is associated with the nighttime. Daytime is when we can be active and productive and proud of ourselves for what we can do. Nighttime is more when we are able to receive things, when we are not in control, when we know how blessed we are to be…just to be.
So you see it is important for me to imagine that Jesus was born in the darkness of nighttime, even if the scripture doesn’t use that exact image. It is not so much at all that the darkness that surrounds Jesus is a symbol of the darkness of our world, and Jesus somehow represents the light that comes into that darkness to dispel it and to lead us through it. It’s not the darkness of our world that bothers me. It’s the daylight, the daylight where we can see all to well the realities of our world, though we would prefer not to, where the killing, the crushing of spirit, the enormous gaps between rich and poor are all too apparent. That is our daytime world. I pray for the night…where new love and courage and mercy may be born and grow, where dreams of a beloved community may become as real as what is, where angels songs may be heard, where wonder and reverence have a home, where we know that we are gifted grace-filled people, know ourselves to be blessed.
For me, wherever any of those things happen, Christ is present, and Christ is born. I don’t insist that other people think in that way or use that kind of language. It is possible to sincerely and truly pray for the dawning of a new day, to be loving and merciful, to be reverent and filled with a spirit of wonder and blessing—it is possible to be all those things and not feel the need to make any explicit connection to Christ. But for me the connection is there. Christ. The creative power of God. The holy reality of God. The blessing of God. God with us.
It is not about what happened a long time ago. It is about what needs to happen now among us, within us, within me. In a world of failed striving and broken dreams, in a world of false promises and phony visions of happiness, in a world deeply and sorrowfully divided between rich and poor where peace seems a very distant dream and both poverty and privilege weigh heavily upon us, may we find the gifts we most need, the gifts of our heart’s desire, and when we do, Christ will be born. Amen.
Jim Bundy
December 19, 2004Toggle panel: Sections
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I had to go back to the scriptures and check something out this week. You know there are things that people think are in the Bible that really aren’t. For instance, the idea that there were three magi. Actually the Bible doesn’t say how many there were. It says that there were three gifts, and maybe that implies three givers. That’s open to discussion, but it doesn’t specifically say.
What I wanted to check on this week was what time of day Jesus was born. I have always had the image that the story says he was born in the nighttime, but when I thought about it, I wasn’t so sure that the Bible actually said that. And when I checked, sure enough I found the Bible doesn’t exactly say that. It says—after describing how Mary gave birth and wrapped her son in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger because there was no room for him at the inn—it then says that in that region there were shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night…and you know the rest of that story. But it doesn’t say that the angels appeared to the shepherds at exactly the time Jesus was born. It could have been several hours later and Jesus could have been born in the daytime. It just doesn’t quite say.
Well, I don’t want to make too much out of this. Biblical stories aren’t meant to be looked at in this way and analyzed in such detail. They have different kinds of things to say to us than this, more important things. But I was just curious. I wasn’t looking for facts. I was looking for imagery, the imagery of daytime and nighttime, light and dark, and although I found that that imagery is not used in the account of Jesus’ actual birth, that imagery does surround his birth, both in the biblical language that is connected to it, and in the ways we think and talk about it, at least in the ways I think and talk about it, and I often find a need to reflect on that interplay between light and darkness in the story and in our own lives.
You are familiar with some of the Biblical verses. “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them has light shined.” (Is. 9:2) “What has come into being in Jesus was life, and the life was light for all people. The light shines in darkness and the darkness does not overcome it.” (John 1:4-5) “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 in the ways of peace.” (Luke 1:78-79)
In these scriptures, and in much of our language and songs at Christmas, there is this contrast between light and dark. And in our ways of using these scriptural images, I think there is often the assumption that darkness is bad and light is good. There is this contest between the light and the darkness. Our job is to dispel darkness as much or as quickly as we can. Our job is to believe in the light, to bring light, to be light. Darkness is what we’re trying to escape. Darkness is the enemy.
It seems like this is true in both our religious and our everyday language. Darkness is associated with ignorance. When we are don’t know something we are in the dark about it. And it is always helpful when someone is able to say something that will shed light on a situation, to help us be enlightened. We may speak of the darkness of despair. When a person has a dark view of things it probably means he or she is gloomy or pessimistic or cynical. When we talk about the dark side of ourselves or the shadow side of our personalities, we don’t usually mean that side of us that we are most proud of or that we hope will govern how we act. In all these ways and many others, “the dark” seems to be often something negative. I don’t think I have to argue that at great length; it seems pretty deeply ingrained in our ways of thinking and speaking.
In fact, I know I have given another sermon where I was sort of struggling with this and I remembered that and remembered saying that I wanted to try to speak more positively of the dark. But when I went back and looked at that sermon, I realized, somewhat to my dismay, that although I had suggested that it would be good for us to be more comfortable with the dark, not to be afraid of the dark, to confess the dark, and if necessary to be able to live in difficult places, places of sadness or grief, places of uncertainty, places of regret and guilt, places of loneliness and need—although I said that we should not be afraid of such places, and tried to say nicer things about darkness, so that it wasn’t just seen as an enemy, still when all was said and done, I realize that I was still speaking of darkness if not as an enemy, then as at least some state or condition that we hoped one day to get to the other side of, preferably sooner rather than later, and in that sense it was still, in spite of my own intentions, still something basically negative.
So let me try again. Let me do what I thought I was going to do before, what I wanted to do but failed to do, and speak of darkness as a symbol of things that are much more than things we need to learn to live with and live through. I still believe darkness can be a symbol of things that might well be our hearts desire. If you have been listening to me preach for very long at all, you know that I am not the kind of person who has three points to make in every sermon. So I surprised myself when I realized that I have three ways in which I want to suggest that darkness can be a symbol of our heart’s desire.
First of all, darkness is associated in a positive way with creativity, with gestation and birth giving. Human life grows in the darkness of the womb. Plants prepare themselves in the darkness of the soil. Quite often some new idea, anything that is not easy or obvious, needs to sit somewhere inside us until it is ready to be expressed, put to words or music or canvass. Also such things as love grow in the soil of our inner lives, out of sight, as do a whole bunch of things crucial to our existence: courage, mercy, endurance, belief, forgiveness. All need to grow from the darkness of the soul in order to be strong and lasting. Darkness is a place where things that are life-giving are given life.
It’s a kind of a trivial thing, but in this regard when I come to some place in my sermon writing where I get stuck—have a thought I don’t know how to say, or don’t have a thought, just seem to be staring blankly at the computer screen—I have often found that the only solution is to go take a nap. Of course nap can sometimes be another word for procrastination, but sometimes it really is part of a necessary process, and when I tell Ava that I’m going to go “think” she knows what I mean. And more often than not it works, just as when we find ourselves troubled or unsure about something and we decide to “sleep on it”…quite often when we do we’re in a different or better place by morning.
In a similar, but perhaps more profound, way, our daylight world is the world as it is with all its harshness, violence, competitiveness, and injustice. If we want to begin to imagine a better world, if we want to see the new dawn the scripture speaks of, we need to seek out some dark place where the world as it is is not so much with us and where dreams of a different world can begin to take shape. Darkness is a place of dreaming and of beginning to imagine the world not as it is but as it might be.
Which leads me to the second positive association I want to speak of. In our daytime worlds, in our lighted worlds, it tends to be that things just are what they are. It is a world of appearances. What you see is what you get. And it is a world full to the brim of things, and of noise, all the clutter of our lives. In the darkness, in our nighttime lives and nighttime selves, there are fewer things to see or deal with. The things fade away, some. The noise dies down, a little. There is more room for the imagination. More room to be alone with ourselves. More time for reflection. More—if we allow it to be—more of a place to be alone with ourselves. More room for wonder—if we allow it to be. More for reverence. More of a place for God.
The way I’m thinking this morning, we need more darkness in our lives because we need to be less cluttered, less noisy, less frantic, less combative, more quiet, more dreamy, more willing to be alone with ourselves, more tuned to wonder, more reverent, all things I associate with darkness. We need to be more aware of the holiness that is within things, that is not visible to the naked eye, not so visible in the full light of day but that is more available in the deeper light of the night.
The third thing I want to mention as being associated, from where I sit, with the dark is a sense of being gifted. It is the receptive side of ourselves, in contrast to the active, aggressive, ambitious side of ourselves. Our daytime selves are our striving selves always trying to get somewhere or accomplish something, produce something, do what’s expected of us, make the world a better place—I don’t want to suggest that all of these things are bad things.
I do want to suggest there is another side of us that needs recognition and attention. It is the side of us that knows that we are blessed people, blessed for having been placed in this miraculous universe not of our own making, blessed for having been given the capacity to love and to be loved, blessed by the faith that somehow this journey we are on is a holy one. If I am not mistaken one of the reasons the story of Christ’s nativity continues to resonate with so many people, even with many people who can’t or don’t care to be very specific about what they believe about Christ, is that it awakens in us and renews within us that sense of being recipients, people who have been blessed by gifts from beyond, holy gifts. To me all of that is associated with the nighttime. Daytime is when we can be active and productive and proud of ourselves for what we can do. Nighttime is more when we are able to receive things, when we are not in control, when we know how blessed we are to be…just to be.
So you see it is important for me to imagine that Jesus was born in the darkness of nighttime, even if the scripture doesn’t use that exact image. It is not so much at all that the darkness that surrounds Jesus is a symbol of the darkness of our world, and Jesus somehow represents the light that comes into that darkness to dispel it and to lead us through it. It’s not the darkness of our world that bothers me. It’s the daylight, the daylight where we can see all to well the realities of our world, though we would prefer not to, where the killing, the crushing of spirit, the enormous gaps between rich and poor are all too apparent. That is our daytime world. I pray for the night…where new love and courage and mercy may be born and grow, where dreams of a beloved community may become as real as what is, where angels songs may be heard, where wonder and reverence have a home, where we know that we are gifted grace-filled people, know ourselves to be blessed.
For me, wherever any of those things happen, Christ is present, and Christ is born. I don’t insist that other people think in that way or use that kind of language. It is possible to sincerely and truly pray for the dawning of a new day, to be loving and merciful, to be reverent and filled with a spirit of wonder and blessing—it is possible to be all those things and not feel the need to make any explicit connection to Christ. But for me the connection is there. Christ. The creative power of God. The holy reality of God. The blessing of God. God with us.
It is not about what happened a long time ago. It is about what needs to happen now among us, within us, within me. In a world of failed striving and broken dreams, in a world of false promises and phony visions of happiness, in a world deeply and sorrowfully divided between rich and poor where peace seems a very distant dream and both poverty and privilege weigh heavily upon us, may we find the gifts we most need, the gifts of our heart’s desire, and when we do, Christ will be born. Amen.
Jim Bundy
December 19, 2004