December 25, 2014

Christmas III
The Rev. Kimberly Reinholz
Cathedral Church of the Nativity

Are you afraid of the dark?

I am.  I always have been.  I used to leave all the lights on in the house when I went to bed and my father who worked the night shift would be mad as a hornet when he came home if I was the last one to go to sleep when I was in high school.  My husband knows that if there is a storm coming he should bring me a pencil and a book of crosswords or word searches to get me through the worst of it.   I do not like the prospect of being in the dark.  It has been a saving grace having a child so it’s not “weird” to have nightlights on in the house.

What is it about the darkness that is so frightening?  I think that the fear can be broken down into three kinds– physical, mental, and spiritual.

We are scared of physical darkness, because it is threatening to our bodies.  This is the kind of darkness that we can experience at night and during storms.  This is the darkness caused by clouds and hours.  This darkness enables us to stub our toes on end tables and coffee tables which inexplicably move from where they have always been.  This darkness casts shadows and allows us to see things that aren’t there, a man in the corner, where a coat rack usually resides, a slumping body, in place of a pile of dirty clothes, a sleeping dog into a monster under the bed.  In the darkness our imaginations get the better of us. 

Darkness is unsettling but we know in the morning the light will come, or if we get up enough courage after our nightmare we can swing our hand out from under the covers, hit the switch and instantly the coatrack will once again be a coatrack the laundry pile will still be waiting to be washed, and our beloved canine will be snoring away as usual.

We are blessed in our lives by physical light.  The sun, the moon, the stars, fire, and the ingenuity to harness electricity, for all this and more or this we give thanks to God.  Physical darkness cannot over take us. 

We are scared of the mental darkness for less obvious reasons.  In modern American society mental darkness isn’t really discussed.  We share stories of our happiness, of our accomplishments, of our hopes and dreams. 

But we suffer from our anxieties, depression and sadness in silence.  If not in complete silence we only express these feelings in the presence of the select few, close friends, family members and therapists.  We do not share these stories in our larger communities with our colleagues at work, with our acquaintances, and certainly not on social media.

After all social media is supposed to be an escape right?  Who wants to hear about how you are struggling with grief over the loss of a loved one, six or seven months after they have passed, confusion over a relationship that has ended, or is in the process of falling apart, losing a job because of personal or practical reasons, the loss of a pregnancy or dealing with infertility?  Who wants to share the bad news? Who wants to invite people into the dark corners of your mind, isn’t it easier just to say we are fine, and move on?  

Isn’t that the darkness which we live with silently, the fear that no one will care that we are hurting.  The fear that nothing can lighten our dark thoughts.  The fear that our sadness, our depression, our anxiety will consume us.

This is where the hope of the Gospel shines through though.  In the darkness that we think is all consuming we know that God is the light, and that the light is present with us.  We know that Jesus is God incarnate and in his bodily form he knew the same sadness, confusion and anxiety that we know. 

He experienced loss, his cousin John, the one who was sent by God to proclaim the light, is eventually arrested and executed.  His relationships were strained, in different gospel accounts we have stories of his mother and brothers coming to bring him home, believing him to be crazy. 

Even his friends turn against him, one of his closest followers betrays him to the Roman occupation.  Jesus knows what it means to encounter mental darkness, he lived it too.

We shouldn’t let the darkness win, we ought to be more open and honest in our expression- both virtually and in person.  It is not a sign of weakness that we struggle.  It’s a sign of our messy humanity.  It is a sign of our frailty, but it is not something to be scared of, it is something to share and allow to see the light of day rather than hiding it we need to share it in community and hold one another in the light of Christ when we are too frightened to share it with the world at large.   This is the place where the light of Christ lives day in and day out, this community, between those of us who believe the spark of faith and hope reside. 

We are blessed in our lives with the light of family and friends, relationships of blood and choice.  We are blessed to be part of a community to not be left alone, to again and again be invited back into relationship with God through our relationships with one another- this is the basis of the great commandment to the Lord our God with all our hearts and minds and strength and to love one another as ourselves.  Even in the darkest times of our mental anguish the darkness didn’t consume Jesus and it won’t consume you.  I know that it feels that way at times, but what we have to realize is that we shouldn’t be ashamed of this mental darkness in our lives.

Even within communities like this one, where we strive to bring one another into the light of Christ, to share the hope and faith in Jesus. We struggle with fear, what we as a community cannot even begin to express is spiritual darkness.  More than the physical darkness or the mental darkness we struggle to even name this deepest fear.  While there are those out there who proclaim their atheism and agnosticism proudly.  Announcing proudly or matter of fact-ly: “I don’t believe in God”, or “I’m not sure about God”, or “There is no God”.  Most Christians, struggle with periods of disbelief.  There are times when God seems to have turned away from us, when the light that Christ supposedly provides seems to be snuffed out.  Only you know the times when this darkness have encompassed you. 

I know for me it was when my grandmother died.  It was when a 6.5 year relationship ended suddenly.  It was when I lost my first pregnancy.  In these moments I longed for the light, I longed for proof that God was real.  I longed to know that the darkness would not overcome me.  But in those moments of spiritual jaundice I clung to the words in today’s Gospel.   

As an infant who is born needing, not just any light, but a certain light, I attach myself to the knowledge that in the beginning was the Word.  I cling to the belief that the Word was with God, and the Word was God and that what has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

When a child is born into the world with Jaundice they physically needs to be set up with special a Bilirubin light so that they can get rid of the toxins which have built up in utero.  Similarly when Christians are baptized in the sacrament of new birth they need to get rid of the sins which have built up in our lives, we need the light of Christ.  We need the light of the incarnate God, to dispel from us the physical, mental and most of all the spiritual darkness in our lives.

We can turn on the light in our bedroom in the darkness of storms and midnight terrors.  We can hold onto a flicker of hope in community in the midst of mental exhaustion, anxiety, stress, and worry.  We can turn to our spiritual practices in the moments of doubt when we are in spiritual darkness.  We believe that praying shapes believing.  We believe that what we do here, what we do together in worship spreads the light of God into the world.  We believe that we carry the light of Christ with us, that God is with us- Emmanuel, God is with us.  Even in the darkness.  God is with us. 

This is the blessing of the incarnation of God.  That we can turn to Jesus when we are scared: physically, mentally, or spiritually, when the darkness tries to overtake our lives it will be beaten back by the eternal light of Christ.  That in our most dark hours spiritually if we have honed our hearts and minds to listen for the still small voice of God, it will shine through any darkness.  In these deep, dark, scary and overwhelming times, when we wonder where God is in all the mess and the shadows, we can find him, in our hearts and minds, all we have to do is remember that God created the light – the sun, stars and moon to guide us, communities to strengthen us and support us, and he came to earth to be allow us to hear his voice and know that he knows what we know- the darkness will not over takes us. 

Thanks be to God. 

Amen