Fumbling for Flashlights (sermon, November 14, 2010)

Luke 21:5-19

One Saturday morning, the preacher Barbara Brown Taylor visited a colleague at his church. After looking at the newly renovated fellowship hall, her colleague led her to the sanctuary, where she noticed something strange on the communion table: a fat white candle sitting in a dish with rusted barbed wire climbing the air around it. “What is that?” she asked, thinking maybe it had something to do with the church’s prison ministry. “It’s a symbol I came across that really spoke to me,” her colleague said as he reached over and gently touched one of the steel barbs. “See, the light has already come into the world, but there is still work to be done. There is still darkness between us and the light.” (1)

There is still darkness between us and the light. This time of year, we begin to experience this truth in a very present way, as Daylight Savings Time ends and the days grow shorter and shorter from now until late December. It is an accident of our location in the world that this time of increasing darkness also corresponds both with the very end and the very beginning of the church year.

Today is the second to last Sunday in the church year. Now, I know that very few of us really live our lives according to the church calendar. We tend to mark time by the change of seasons or the cycles of the school year or which sports season it is or the dates on the calendar. Nothing is wrong with any of these ways of keeping time, of course; it’s only natural that the things that dominate our daily lives are the ones by which we keep track of time’s passage. But the church calendar is important because it focuses on the life of Christ and by doing so it helps us to focus on what it means to be Christ’s followers.

As we move toward the end of the church year, we continue our travels in the gospel of Luke, which we have moved through for much of the summer and fall. For the past few months in our readings, Jesus has been traveling toward Jerusalem, which is to say he has been moving closer and closer to the place and time of his trial and his death, closer and closer to the darkest days that he and his disciples will face.

But when Jesus and his disciples first arrive in Jerusalem, they aren’t focused on darkness. What catches the disciples’ eye is the magnificent temple built by Herod Antipas. During his reign over Jerusalem, King Herod tore down the existing temple and undertook a massive renovation and reconstruction project, one of the largest construction projects of the first century. The completed temple was a sight to behold, and the disciples are in awe of its beauty and majesty, as was anyone who had the chance to see it.

Anyone, that is, except Jesus. His perspective on the temple is different: “Don’t put your faith in these things that seem so amazing now,” he tells the gawking disciples. “They aren’t going to last.”

Such a prediction would have been unthinkable, even laughable, at the time. The temple had taken decades to build, in part because it was not made of local stone but of imported white marble that gleamed in the daylight and made the whole complex even more magnificent. As the disciples stood there admiring it, they simply could not have fathomed that those marble stones would soon be reduced to a pile of rubble.

The disciples couldn’t have imagined it, but the first people to hear Luke’s gospel knew otherwise. Less than ten years after it was finally completed, the temple was destroyed in the devastating Siege of Jerusalem. In contrast to the disciples, Luke’s original audience might actually have been relieved to hear Jesus predict that the temple would fall, because they had personally experienced it. They had lived the truth that there is still darkness between us and the light.

Luke’s Jesus doesn’t stop with the temple, either, when he begins to speak of destruction and suffering. He goes on to predict that there will be false prophets, wars, earthquakes, famines, plagues...and then Jesus takes it a step further. Because the dark times ahead are going to get personal. The disciples themselves will be arrested and persecuted and brought to trial, all because of their association with Jesus. They will be abandoned, betrayed by those closest to them; some of them will even die. All in all, it’s not a ringing endorsement of discipleship. The way Jesus describes it, discipleship is a state in which we are constantly reminded that there is still darkness between us and the light, and the darkness often seems like more than could ever be overcome; more like a blackout curtain than barbed wire.

Surely Luke’s first readers weren’t the only ones for whom Jesus’ words rang true: after all, haven’t we experienced it too? There seems to be no shortage of events in the world that make us wonder: is this how the world is going to end? 9-11. The earthquake in 2004 that triggered a tsunami which decimated Indonesia and killed more than 200,000 people across 15 different countries. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. H1N1. The Gulf Coast oil spill. If we were trying to predict the end of the world, there are no shortage of signs that could point to it.

Add to those events all the ways the world ends for individuals every day as their personal temples, the ones they thought could never fall, crumble: the death of a child, the diagnosis of disease, the dissolution of a marriage, the loss of a job, the devastation of addiction. Whether these things happen to us personally or to someone we know, we are constantly reminded: there is still darkness between and the light.

We find our attention riveted to such things in the same way the disciples were riveted by the sight of Herod’s temple. Whether it is something so magnificent or so terrifying that we can’t turn away, the point is, we get sucked in to these global and personal events. We become consumed by them, whether by grief of fear or amazement. And when that happens we risk forgetting who we are, we risk focusing on the darkness, and fearing that the light itself no longer exists.

“Things are not as they seem,” Jesus tells his followers. “Be careful that the false prophets and the natural disasters and the personal trials don’t distract you from what is real.” Instead, Jesus promises, all of these things, these dark moments when temples crumble, are, in fact, opportunities to testify...to testify that even when it looks otherwise -- perhaps especially when it looks otherwise -- the light is still there. God is still with us.

Now when Jesus speaks to his disciples about testifying, he means it literally, for many of the original followers of Jesus would indeed be arrested, persecuted, and handed over to authorities. The trials we face will probably look very different from this, but they are no less challenging. And what Jesus says to the disciples is true for us to: in our darkest moments, no matter how bleak things may seem, we can cling to the truth that God is with us, that Jesus himself is giving us words and wisdom to endure, that ultimately, in some sense, not a head of our heads will perish. We can testify to the light.

One problem with this word “testify,” though, is that for most of us it implies using words, and, as any of us who have experienced times of deep suffering know, at those times, words can often do more harm than good. Just as Jesus advises the disciples against trying to read signs and make predictions, so we should avoid trying to figuring out exactly what God might be trying to teach us through various events. Darkness and suffering are simply a part of life, every life. Even the most carefully constructed temples we have built may unexpectedly fall. And when they do we do not need anyone to explain the meaning of the darkness to us. What we need is for someone to point past the darkness to the light.

Pedro’s life was full of persecutions and dreadful portents. As a young kid, caught in gang life on the streets of LA, Pedro was filled with rage and resentment that he covered up with heavy drinking and eventually an addiction to crack cocaine.

Whenever Father Boyle saw Pedro on the streets he would offer to take him to rehab, but every time Pedro would gently decline. “Thanks, G, but I’m okay.”

Well, one day, Pedro changed his answer and got in the car with Father Boyle and began his long, hard journey of returning to himself.

Thirty days into Pedro’s rehab his younger brother, caught up in similar demons, did the unthinkable. He took his own life. The world around him was just too much to handle. When Father Boyle called Pedro with the news, of course, Pedro was devastated, but now that he was thirty days sober and thinking with a clear head and feeling with a clear heart he allowed the pain to settle into his core, instead of putting it in some corner to fester.

When Father Boyle arrived at the rehab center to take Pedro to the funeral, they didn’t speak. Before Father Boyle can figure out what to say, the silence was punctured by Pedro’s intense retelling of a dream he had the night before.

In the dream, Pedro and Father Boyle are in a large empty room, alone. There are no lights, no illuminated exit signs, no light creeping in from under a door. There are no windows. It is complete, total darkness.

But despite the darkness, Pedro knows that Father Boyle is there in the room with him, even though no words are spoken. Suddenly, in the dark silence, Father Boyle retrieves a flashlight from his pocket and turns it on. Slowly, deliberately, he shines the flashlight around the room until its narrow beam illuminates a light switch on the wall. No words are spoken, no explanation offered, no promise of a better tomorrow, just a beam of light revealing a switch on the wall.

Pedro stands up, realizing that he is the one who has to turn on the light. Slowly, with some trepidation, he makes his way to the switch, takes a deep breath, and flips it on. The room is flooded with light.

At this point in the retelling of is dream, Pedro is sobbing. With a voice of astonishing discovery, he said, “And the light...is better...than the darkness.” As if he did not know this before. Then he said, “I guess my brother....just never found the switch.”

Father Boyle concludes this story with this: “Possessing flashlights and occasionally knowing where to aim them has to be enough for us. Fortunately, none of us can save anybody. but we all find ourselves in this dark, windowless room, fumbling for grace and flashlights. You aim the light this time, and I’ll do it the next.” (2)

I can’t think of a more powerful way to testify to God’s presence with us than that. Amen.

1. Barbara Brown Taylor, Gospel Medicine. Cowley Publications, 1995, p. 133.
2. Boyle, Gregory, Tattoos on the Heart, Free Press, 2010.