imprenetrable darkness: meet inextinguishable light

 

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

and St. Martin’s, Duntroon

FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT (March 19^th) 2023

 

READINGS:

1 Samuel 16: 1b, 6-7, 10-13a

Psalm 95

Ephesians   5: 8-14

John 9: 1, 6-9, 13-17, 34-38

 

According to my flash new watch, which came I might add as a freebie, I am afraid of the dark. Now in my day – I’m not sure when that was or maybe will be – but in my day a watch was designed to tell us the time. The time appears on my watch to be a quite minor and unimportant function. However it does tell me my pulse rate, and I know that it is completely wrong when it attempts to tell me that my pulse rate soars disturbingly on the long dark section, about 17 minutes, of my pre-dawn morning walk. It tries to tell me that during that 17 minute section my predawn pulse reaches the same heights as it does on some of the steeper sections of my walk. The 12% gradients in fact, though I have to admit that I made that bit up because working out a gradient is way beyond my pay scale mathematically speaking. But the bit about the pulse is absolute truth, er, more or less.

Now I know that this new watch is spouting total nonsense, because I’m a big tough bloke, and a big tough bloke does not harbour secret fears. So of course my watch is wrong when on the flat bits of my walk it tells me that for 17 minutes my pulse, my pulse which normally rests around the mid-80s as I saunter along in the daylight, soars to the levels that it reaches on a reasonably steep hill, and hovers taunting me from the low one hundreds. I think the reality is that my watch knows that I am really very brave but wanted to provide me with a sermon illustration about humanity’s instinctive relationship with the darkness, formed back in the times when we were dwelling in forests and caves surrounded by tigers and bears. It, the watch that is, just wanted to remind me of those times, and of course I wasn’t scared at all because I’m tough and brave and modern.

Though I must admit I remember with some distress the dark, creaky dormitories and rattling sash windows of my preteens prep boarding school. I’m told one or two of my friends found those a little creepy. Not me of course. Although I am glad that I didn't have an irritating watch that measured my pulse and told me lies.

There is as some of you will know a prayer in our prayer book, in the late evening compline service, that draws a link between the darkness of the coming night and the darkness of the world and indeed of our own lives. Perhaps I’d be fibbing if I did not confess to a few darkness fears, which of course I don’t experience on my predawn walks as the shadows dance and loom and leer and I hear footfalls when no one follows me. 

But I’ll confess to some more serious fears nurtured by the images that I often mention, beamed into us on our internet news feeds and old fashioned television news services. Fears of global warming, of toxic sludge, of exterminated species, and of what French GP cum novelist Louis Ferdinand Céline called, somewhat poetically, “the insidious cancer cell even now crawling through the pathways of our body.” Except he used less polite terms.

For the mediaeval monks night was preparation for death, and each dawn was a celebration of resurrection. Earlier still the church fathers and mothers found in the rites of Lent a minidrama, an enactment of the slow human journey from birth to death to rebirth and resurrection. They knew that lifelong journey towards the light to be a journey towards the inextinguishable light of resurrection. They saw that resurrection light, the light that according to the author of the biblical book that we call Revelation, that resurrection light that shines on the coming City of God with such penetrating clarity that that city has no need of any other light. They saw that resurrection light pre-enacted in the experience of the blind man who encountered Jesus as he waited, sightless, by the side of the road. They saw in the anointing of that man by Jesus, anointing with dirt and saliva. They saw in that scene both an echo of God’s own creation of human beings from the dust of the earth and an echo of the rites of anointing at baptism that marked our entrance into the coming eternal New Heavens and Earth.

And so this passage came to be read at the more or less midpoint of Lent, reminding us and those who were preparing for baptism that the light of Christ penetrates and overcomes all darkness of human experience just as John, the author of the Fourth Gospel foreshadowed in his opening 18 verses.

The message for us is that this man is brought from blindness to sight, from darkness to light, that same journey on which we are called by the patient voice of God. The invitation that to us is to trust God in the darkness of an uncertain world around us, the uncertainties of our own life and the life of our communities, and to surrender our fears and any other darknesses of our life, to the searing and inextinguishable light of the risen Christ, the Lamb who is the light of the world.

AMEN.