by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given March 23, 2008

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning!

We come together this morning to rest for a moment

On the edge of our lives,

To resist the headlong tumble into the next moment,

And to claim for ourselves awareness and gratitude,

Wisdom and hope.

Come now, and let us worship together!

It all began with light — Creation, I mean, our dear earth.

Hear these words from the Hebrew scripture:

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.  And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night, and the evening and the morning were the first day.”

Since time began, people have sought to align themselves with the forces of nature.  Primitive people understood that without the sun, no life could exist; without the moon, they could not count the days of the month.  The first astronomers were in fact priests, and the first observatories temples.  One of the original meanings of the Latin word templum was “a place set aside for observing the heavens.”  And the Latin word religio means to “relink” or “rebind”—that is, the purpose of religion is to relink us to the universe, to maintain a proper balance between humans and the cosmos.[1]

Way before the time of the great religions—the time when the numinous broke through in various forms (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism)—way before this time, many cultures marked the rhythms of nature with ritual and festival.  Fertility celebrations such as May festivals came with springtime planting, and thanksgiving, with harvest.  For many cultures the winter solstice was the most significant seasonal festival.  It was marked in amazingly similar ways by societies as different and far removed as the pre-Celtic stone circle builders, the Chinese, and the Swazi of Africa.  Over and over again we see this common theme repeated—the relationship of light to humankind and to the earth.[2]

Life was created out of light, and all of life is sustained by light.  And yet we know that no light can be seen without its counterpoint, the dark.  The brilliance of the stars is ours because of the depths of the night.  Physicists tell us, in fact, that darkness is a birthing force.  They posit a huge dense darkness that expanded and then burst forth a great light from within itself.  

And so we come to see that the light and the dark, like yin and yang, are essences, each without which the other could not exist, each having its place and purpose in our lives. 

However, in our Western society, we have some serious problems with this concept.  You see many indigenous cultures move into mystery to find vision; the light unfolds from the root of darkness.  But here in the West we are in thrall to the scientific method, which is splendid for discovering certain kinds of truth—like the structure of DNA—but useless for finding wisdom; just dandy for learning how to split open a person’s chest and fix his heart, but useless for teaching him how to just open his heart.  And so we, who consider ourselves the most enlightened sons and daughters of the Enlightenment, learned how to make a hydrogen bomb but forgot to ask when and why we should ever drop it.  Our economists have developed elaborate mathematical formulas to explain how wealth works, how money moves, but we have not as yet understood how so many people could be hungry and homeless in a land of so much plenty.

So we have a problem with a too-narrow concept of where truth might be found.  We have chosen the rule of light—of knowledge, of facts, of technical know-how—and we have cast out mystery, intuition, whatever cannot be measured.  Understand, though, in this way we avoid the fecund and fertile ground that would make us deep and wise.

And another big problem for us is language.  Our language is dualistic.  We say large, we say small; we say happy, we say sad; we say God, we say the Devil; we say light, we say dark, and we assign value, one against the other.  We say what is most comfortable for us, what is easiest for us, is the way things ought to be and when the dark side—the shadow, in the language of Carl Jung—when darkness comes, we resist.  What’s with this darkness?  It ought not to be that way.

But what I am saying today is that unless we can accept, even welcome, the dark, the repressed, the unwanted and the uncomfortable, we will not be able to accept the invitation of light, either.  For you see, resistance to what is— to reality—leads to a shutting down, a turning away, a refusal of the beauty of life itself in all its glorious and terrible wholeness.

Through the ages, wisdom stories have been told of light and darkness, and of the friendship of the two: Icarus flies too close to the sun and the wax on his wings melts, and he plummets down into the sea, perishing. Australian medicine men journey through underground caverns strewn with bright light; in Egypt, the sun was believed to travel through a dark subterranean territory when it set each day, and there recreated itself in a womb to emerge reborn at dawn.

And here we are on Easter Sunday retelling just such a story from our own culture—a story of light, but also a story of darkness.  Consider: Jesus comes into the world not as a God, but as a man; a man given over to God, but not a God.  People kept insisting that he was God because he could do these miracles; he could help people rise up from their sick beds, get ordinary selfish people to share their loaves and fishes with others.  But when he was accused, “So I hear you are the Son of God?” he answered, “That’s what you say.” 

Jesus had a short ministry—just three years—and then it was time for the cross, Jesus’ descent into the darkness.  Consider the circumstances: The disciples—his closest friends and supporters—consistently misunderstand him and let him down.  They are having dinner in Bethany in the house of Simon, a leper, when a woman comes with an alabaster box—the scripture says, “of very precious ointment,”—and she pours it on Jesus’ head.  And how do the disciples respond?  With indignation! 

What a waste, they say, and they chastise the woman.  This ointment could have been sold for much and given to the poor, they say.  “Leave her alone,” Jesus says, “Don’t you understand?  Pay attention in this moment.  Be with me.  I won’t always be with you.”    He is trying to tell them that his time is near, but they don’t want to hear; they can’t hear.

And then there is the Passover Feast, the Last Supper, his final meal with his tried and true twelve.  He’s sitting down with them, and they begin to eat, and Jesus looks up and he says, “One of you is going to betray me.”  And because they know Jesus speaks the truth, they all look around at one another wide-eyed, and they ask him in turn, “Lord, is it I?  Lord, is it I?”  And Judas asks, “Lord, is it I?”  And not one to mince words, Jesus says, “You know who you are.”

Next is the Garden of Gethsemane.  Jesus asks the disciples to go there with him to pray, for he knows he will be taken soon.  He says to them, “I am so, so sad—stay with me, won’t you stay with me just for a while?”  He doesn’t want to face what is coming.  He knows what the Romans do to their prisoners; how they beat them and then hang them on a cross for days to let them die slowly; they do that all the time to so many, lining the roads to Rome with crosses.  He knows.  And he falls on his face there in the garden and he prays, “Father, all things are possible with you; if you can find a different way to do this, to bring your message, please, let’s consider something else. Let this cup pass from me.  But if the cross is where I must go, then I will accept that.”  Filled with dread, he finds his disciples sleeping, and he says to Peter—his right-hand man—“Simon, are you asleep?  Could you not watch just one hour?”

And of course, then, Jesus is betrayed by one of his best friends for a little cash, and is taken by the Romans: beaten, taunted, spat upon, interrogated, a crown of thorns pressed into his head, and hung on the cross.  The disciples, afraid that they too will be taken, deny that they even know him—and so he is left there to die, with a thief on either side, and of course his mother and two other Marys, two faithful female followers, beneath the cross.  Could the darkness be any deeper when Jesus cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

So this was the crucifixion.  Friends are gone.  Love is gone.  Mission has collapsed.  Meaning has disappeared.  And yes, it had to happen this way.  It had to be this dark, this empty, this full of despair, this human.  Because it is our story—your story and my story—and we needed a new ending; we desperately needed a new ending for our story.  And that is what the Jesus story—and all deeply true stories about the nature of things—that is what the story gives us.  After Good Friday, but only after Good Friday, comes Easter Sunday.  The earth turns.  Light returns.

And this is how the scripture tells it, in the Gospel of Matthew:  

“In the end of the Sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulcher. And, behold, there was a great earthquake, for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it.  His Countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow:

. . . .

And the angel answered and said unto the women, Fear not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified. He is not here: for he is risen...”

Up from the grave, up to new life.  Don’t mistake me now—this story is not about a dead man coming back to life.  This is about new life for us—for the disciples.  The disciples were transformed.  They were able to take up their own cross and follow Jesus, and many of them suffered and died as martyrs as they brought the word of Jesus’ radical love to the people.  They were no longer controlled by their fear, and they spoke of a love so powerful that it transcends even death.  They moved from absolute despair, from thinking that their leader would be an earthly king and seeing him executed like a common criminal, to understanding that earthly power is not what Jesus was all about; is not what life is all about.  But you see, Jesus had to go to the cross, to show them, to teach them this truth.  Jesus had to die for their sins.  Not to take their place, no; I’m not talking about atonement.  Jesus had to die to show them how to live; to show them how to love.

When we are in that dark place, that place of death and loss, a new degree of helplessness, of nakedness, seems to be required of us.  We feel forsaken, and we grow more and more bare.  We are stripped down, reduced to tears, and we will not be comforted.  We move into the tragic sense that we have in common with all human beings, for all are destined to walk in both the darkness and in the light.

And if this is indeed the nature of our living, if in fact the light exists only in relation to and in counterpoint with the dark—how is it we are to live, to endure, during the dark times? 

A beginning is to accept helplessness, to accept our absolute dependence—relinquishment, it is called in religious terms, and this is not an easy lesson for Unitarian Universalists, for we are so very clever and smart and competent.  We don’t like that word relinquishment.  But if we live long enough, we inevitably arrive at the conclusion that we are really not much in control of the universe—or for that matter much of anything else, including our own lives.  When we decide, and we can decide, to accept the world just as it is, just as Job had to do, in all of its unfairness, in all of its pain and disappointment, then the radiance of the present world, the radiance of what is, can enter our being—when we have the courage to be present with life as it is.

We come to understand that waiting has a dynamic quality to it; is not static.  During these times of abeyance, we might rightly see ourselves as a woman big with child, preparing for birth.  While we are resting, dreaming, contemplating, playing, and yes, running into dead-ends one after the next, we are working through things—or rather, things are being worked through us.  Like Jacob, we wrestle with our angel all through the night, insisting, insisting that we be blessed.  And with the dawn, though we may come away with wounds, we are blessed. 

We have been faithful, and we are blessed.

The bridge from the dark to the light is compassion.  It’s something we gain only by giving up, giving in, by allowing the dark to penetrate to the depths of our very being. 

It’s interesting to note that when we completely let go of hope, when we completely invite our fear inside, a great tenderness emerges from within: a tenderness towards life itself, towards others, towards ourselves.  We understand that we are a fish caught on a hook and yet it is our hook, our life, and we really can’t ask it to be other than what it is.  We really can’t ask reality to be other than what it is.

When we get to that place we give up our pride, our comparisons, our excessive wanting, the distinctions and the destinations what formerly seemed so important.  And in that emptiness we become a vessel that can be filled with the new, with the God-stuff.  Compassion stirs in us, and our capacity to love grows deeper and stronger.  Nothing is foreign to us.  All is part of the whole.  And everything neglected, ruined, stained, and torn—everything so resistant to the light—comes to glow with surprising intensity and purpose.  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

God of Darkness and God of Light, let us be satisfied.  Let us want for nothing.  In our times of waiting, give us a sense of fullness and promise.  Let us know that we are never forsaken.  Let us know that your bounty includes all that is, and let our love be large enough to encompass it all.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

What new life awaits you? 

Be not afraid of the turning of the earth—go now in love and go in peace.

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Copyright 2008, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.