Tag: promise

God Comes to Us in the Dark: A Meditation

I offered this meditation at a service for The Longest Night at St. Anne Episcopal Church in West Chester, OH on December 20, 2023. It is a time of prayer, music, and stillness for those who are struggling in the holiday season.

God comes to us in the dark. This has always been true.

In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep. So says Genesis. So say our ancestors in faith, grasping back through time, back through the shadowy recesses of human memory, back to an original stillness, an original peace, an original fullness, back to when God, alone, was—and it was dark, and it was already good.

And all that follows—let there be light, and let there be all of this, and let there be you and me—all of it emanated from the darkness of love, where God dreamed and saw visions, where God composed the constellations, where God traced out the edges of the universe and imagined all that could be if there were such a thing as being. In the dark, God already knew both the price and the promise of being—what it would require—of God, and of us—and so God made a promise, from the very start, when our being came to be: 

And that promise is: I am here. I am here. And again and again, when you lose sight of me, I will come to you. In every season, in every hour. When the light is bright, I am here. When it fades, I am here. And when it is night—on the face of the earth, or in the depths of your soul—then I am still here. You will not lose me in the dark. No, in the dark you will encounter me as I was from before the beginning: hidden but present, dreaming but awake, tracing, now, the edges of your face, your flesh now holding a universe of meaning. I am here, gazing at the constellations in your eyes, reminding you that being, simply being, here and now, together, is enough. It is all I ever wanted. It always has been. Even in the dark. Especially in the dark

For God comes to us in the dark. And this has always been true.

…

Despite this truth, we have a complicated history with the darkness, for reasons both pragmatic and imaginative. Job calls down the darkness as a curse; the Psalmist yearns for light like the watchmen waiting for morning.  We understand this in our bones. 

Because, until recently, the night was, for most people, an inevitable and somewhat threatening feature of daily life. Before electric lights and heaters, it was a cold and dim and dangerous time when one had to gather in close to others for safety and warmth. For our siblings who have no home to go to on this night, for those who are alone, this is still true—the night is not always our friend. 

And yet there are other reasons we fear the dark, ways we have been formed to fear it in our mind’s eye. We have been taught, too often, that night metaphors are literal—that the light itself is somehow truer, purer, stronger, more moral, and that the darkness is a time of indolence, of deceit, of confusion and waywardness. And so when we find ourselves in a seemingly dark place—a place in our lives where we cannot see the path ahead, where we cannot understand what has happened to us and why—we might assume that we have been forsaken, that we have been forgotten, that we are at fault, or that God has left us to fend for ourselves.

We call this the dark night of the soul and think that we are talking about God’s absence. But we are wrong.

For we must remember, again: God comes to us in the dark. 

Not just in the beginning, but always. The darkness is when God chooses to appear. 

Consider how the Passover and the Exodus and God’s liberating work all began at night. 

Consider God speaking to Moses on a mountain covered in thick, dark cloud, amid thunder and lightning. 

Consider Jacob wrestling with an angel all through the night, claiming a blessing upon his wounded body before sunrise.

Consider the promise spoken by the prophet Isaiah: I will give you the treasures of darkness and riches hidden in secret places.

Consider the child, soon to be born in Bethlehem, in the silent, holy, starlit night.

Consider the Risen Christ, emerging from the darkness of the tomb into the predawn shadows of a garden.

And consider how the Lord promises his return when “the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light,” how he will reveal himself, in the end, as he was in the beginning, emanating from that deep original mystery, that unseen, unspoken, ageless night of dreaming, older than the stars. 

Yes, God always comes to us in the dark.

And if we consider this, then perhaps we will begin to realize that, indeed, darkness and light to God are both alike, because God’s presence and power and mercy are not dependent upon whether we walk confidently, whether we understand, whether we see clearly, whether we know exactly what to do next or how. God arrives in the night because God is at peace with hiddenness, with the unfolding mystery that God is to us, with the unfolding mystery that we are to God, and so we are invited, also, to make peace with that which is hidden—the reasons and the justifications and the certainties that elude us, and the ways that love endures regardless of what we know or do not know. 

And God arrives in the night because, in truth, the darkness has its own particular knowing—its own intimacies and surrenders and quietude that come precisely when we cannot see everything, when we let go, when we cannot strive or plan or rely on ourselves as much as we do in the light of day. 

The night engenders a deeper trust, if we will let it. If we will rest in it.

So whatever you carry with you on this night—a weariness, a fear, a grief, a bitterness, a question, a regret, a secret dream—what you must know is that God is still present to you in this place, God sees you and knows you, even if you cannot see God’s face, even if you don’t recognize who you have become.

Like a mother cradling her child, or like a lover in the darkness, God sees you, God gazes upon you tenderly, whispering gentle reminders of promises made and kept and renewed, of a covenant, of a bond deeper than eternity—one that will not break, even when we do. And we do sometimes.

But God comes to us in the dark, saying: do not be afraid, and saying, blessed are you who mourn, for I will make my home in the cracks of your shattered heart, and saying your pain will turn into joy—not because pain is holy but because I AM, and I am the one who offers you a joy that is deeper than fear — the joy that is my own self, that same self from before the beginning, a divine darkness bathed in the stillness of eternity and traveling, traveling, across the constellations and the cosmos to be here, right here, to hold you when your eyes are blurred with tears and shadows on this long, long, longest night.

And to tell you that even when it’s not ok, even when you are not ok, you are loved.

…

In a few days, we will celebrate a birth, and we will speak of the Light of the World, and on that day we will be talking, of course, about God. But remember, as we do, and as you go from this place tonight, that the Light of the World is not all that can be said of God. For before the light, God was. 

And here, in the night of the earth and, perhaps, in the night of your soul, God has not left you. God is still doing what God always has been doing, in that original, timeless, holy darkness: dreaming, creating, forming, loving. Remembering all the prices you have paid. Remembering the promises God has made. And reminding us of the one thing that is always true, the one thing God will never stop telling us, even in the dark: 

I am here. I am here. I am here.

Homesick: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, August 7, 2022 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary texts cited are Genesis 15:1-6 and Luke 12:32-40.

A funny thing happened while I was in England for a conference a couple of weeks ago. It was near the end of the trip, my very last night in the country, and I was staying overnight next to Heathrow airport. I decided on a whim to take the Tube, London’s subway system, into the center of the city to walk around for a couple of hours. But as I was sitting there on the subway, figuring out which stop I should get off to catch a glimpse of Buckingham Palace, I suddenly developed an urgent and intense craving for a Fort Wayne Coney dog. I don’t even get over to the Coney Island that often, but right then and there in the middle of London I wanted one so bad I could taste it—with extra mustard and extra coney sauce. I found Buckingham Palace, but needless to say no Coney dogs were in sight. 

That moment really made me smile, though, because after three years of living and serving alongside you here in Fort Wayne, I was blessed with the sense of feeling a little bit homesick for Northern Indiana. I had the most incredible time in the UK, but it was time to come home—to come back to the dense and verdant cornfields along the highway, back to the fireflies and fireworks in the late summer darkness, back to coffee and doughnuts in the Common Room and the familiar smiles of the people who don’t forget you when you’re gone.

It is good to be home. I missed you.

Homesickness is, in a strange way, a gift. Whether we experience it as kids on a hard day at summer camp, or as our families drive away on that first exhilarating and terrifying day of college, or perhaps later, in more subtle ways, when life’s chances and changes have led us far from all that we once knew, it’s that familiar pang in the stomach, that tremble of longing in the chest, which is in fact encouraging evidence that we belong somewhere, to someone—homesickness is the tightening of the tether of memory and feeling, calling us back to the people and places that have shaped us and held us.

And the longer we stay in any once place, the more it does its work upon us, imparting something of itself into our hearts, such that you might be lying awake some night in a far distant city, remembering the way the thunder rolls into town on an August evening, or the scent of your grandmother’s roses in the garden, or the way the organ music swells at the end of Mass, or yes, perhaps even the taste of a Coney dog.  To be homesick for such things is a reminder that somewhere, at some point, you were given the gift of knowing what home is. 

When you look for it, the question of home—where and what it is, how to get there, how to get back when you’ve drifted away—is a theme that shows up time and again in our faith tradition. It stretches all the way back to the beginning, really, when Adam and Eve stumbled out of Eden and knew for the first time what homesickness felt like. And in today’s reading from a bit later in Genesis, we encounter Abram, soon to be Abraham, the one who received God’s promise of a homeland that might endure through his descendants, even when he could barely hope to dream that such a thing was possible. 

Because although he’s already in Canaan, Abram is homesick, too—longing for the reassurance that God will be faithful, that he, Abram, will not simply die a stranger in a strange place, but that somehow he and his children might belong to the earth upon which he stands. That is what homesickness is, in the end, no matter where we are: our soul’s deep hunger to belong somewhere. To know and be known, to remember and to be remembered. 

In Abram’s case, of course, we know that God does indeed make a home for him and his descendants in Canaan. And even when they end up in slavery in Egypt, God hears their cries and leads them back. And even when they are sent into exile in Babylon, and the homesickness threatens to overwhelm them, he leads them back again. God, it seems, is very invested in leading us back home, no matter how many times we get lost. And just like the children of Israel, we get lost a lot, both literally and figuratively.

I don’t know about you, but I think the moments of truest homesickness I’ve felt in my life were not just during a long trip, but in those moments when the person who I used to be, and the people that I used to know, and the certainties that I used to hold feel very far away from me. When I look up from the path and see my life and wonder: where am I? How on earth did I get here? That’s when I really miss home. Have you ever felt that way? I hope not too often, but I suspect each of us does at some point. 

Because that’s the tricky thing about homesickness—it finds us even when we are stationary. Even if you live in one place your whole life, surrounded by the same people, things still change, and loved ones leave, and there is loss, and still we end up longing for peace and rest and the scent of our grandmother’s roses; and yet we know deep in our bones that Eden is no more, that the gates of the garden are barred to us, that going back is not really an option, and neither is clinging tightly to that which is passing away.

But there is an answer to our homesickness, in the end. A very simple one, elegant in its simplicity, yet earth-shattering in its implications. Something more enduring, even, than a homeland promised for a thousand generations.

It is our true home. The one that does not change. The one that we can always find. It is Jesus. 

God, with infinite mercy, perhaps, knew how easily we get lost—how our fear and our selfishness and our broken hearts leave us in a perpetual state of homesickness. And it seems God was not satisfied with just telling us how to get home. So instead, he simply came and made his home among us. As one of us. To live and die and live again in us so that our true home—the heart of God—is as close as our own breath. Never far away. Never inaccessible. Neither a faded memory nor a squandered hope. Simply home, here. And all we must do is be ready to welcome him. The only gate that is barred and must be opened now is the gate of our own heart, to let him in where he longs to reside. 

“Be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet,” Jesus says, “so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks…truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them.”

I know we are a frustrating and stubborn human family, and we make a mess of things quite often. But I have to hope that, perhaps, seated up at the right hand of the Father, our Lord—who himself has known the sound of thunder and the scent of roses—is maybe a little bit homesick for us, too. And that when he comes again to find us, to redeem all things, and when the banquet is prepared—whether it is Coney dogs or whatever else heaven tastes like—that we might look into the face of God and God might look into ours and we might say to each other, with simple joy, in one voice: It is good to be home. I missed you.