Amanda McMillen, “God Works in the Dark”
Perhaps it would seem weird to start this first Sunday of Advent, this first Sunday of December with the greeting “Happy New Year!” - but in fact that is what today is! We have entered a new liturgical year today. The church year begins not on January 1st each year, but with the first day of Advent. This is the time when our Sunday lectionary readings change to a new cycle of readings, from Year A (the year of readings we have been in this past year) to Year B (the year we will be in from now until Advent next year). Pretty exciting stuff. It is indeed a new year, at least in our funny church world that seems to take pleasure in doing everything slightly off from the rest of the world. We begin our new church year, as we do every year, with the season of Advent, these four weeks before Christmas Day.
Advent is a season of darkness - literally but also spiritually. Literally, because the clocks have turned back and it is now dark at 6pm each night, as we spend more and more time inside curled up on the couch maybe in front of a fire. And spiritually, because it is a time of longing for the coming of Christ - and not just the coming of Christ in a manger, the Christmas coming of Christ, but also the second coming of Christ, when a new heaven and new earth will come, and all tears will be wiped from our eyes, and all that has been made wrong will be made right. But Advent is not the time when we celebrate that having already happened, because it has not yet happened, as we all very well know from looking around at our world today, from reading the newspaper or checking in with our friends and family. Rather, it is a time when we long for it to happen. Advent is the season when we dwell in our longing, when we dwell in the sin of our world, when we dwell in anxiously awaiting a coming Savior. Lest we think that the Christian faith is some kind of “opiate for the masses”, as Karl Marx famously called it, we begin our church year in the dark night of the soul, the season of longing called Advent.
Why do we call this season a season of darkness? Not because darkness is inherently bad - in fact, I must admit, I love this time of year. I love when we turn the clocks back each November. I love when it’s dark at 6pm. It’s this kind of excuse for hibernation that I’ve been longing for all year round. Sometimes the eternal brightness of summer is so exhausting because I feel like I always should be out and about and active and happy happy happy all the time. The darkness of winter gives me permission to be home, to read a book, to stay inside, to exhale for a second and catch my breath.
No, we call this the season of darkness because there is so much in it that we cannot see and do not know. We do not know when or how Jesus will come to us again. We do not know why the world is so full of suffering and pain. We do not know why our hearts are so full of despair, or perhaps why we have this nagging feeling of sadness even as we reflect on our happy lives. We do not know why. In many ways, we are left in the dark.
Our passage today from Isaiah for this first Sunday of Advent, is a plea for God to come to earth - a supplication for an advent, a coming, of God. In this passage, we are met with God’s people, the Israelites, who have been handed over from one dominating empire to another. They were exiled to Babylon, taken over by the Babylonian empire, and now have been subsumed into the Persian Empire instead. They go from despair to despair. Where is God, they say? We have seen you intervene before Lord, we have seen you make yourself known by fire to Moses in the burning bush, and by water in the parting of the Red Sea - so why not now? Where are you God? Where is your goodness in this world of destruction? It is too dark here and I can’t see you.
Perhaps you are beginning this season of Advent with similar questions to these Babylonian refugees. Where are you Lord? Where were you when my life fell apart? Where are you in the dark night of my soul? Where are you in my depression, which feels somehow like an even deeper pit this time of year? Where are you in my anxiety, which holds me tightly in its grip of fear of the future? Where are you in my grief, as I look down the barrel of another Christmas season of someone I love missing at the dinner table? Where are you in all the unknown of the world, where are you in Israel and Palestine right now God? In your own holy land, where are you? It is too dark here and I can’t see you.
In the sin of the world, in the despair of all that is not as it should be, we are a lot like those Israelites coming home from Babylonian occupation to find their homeland destroyed by war. They say to God - “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.”
“Our iniquities like the wind take us away”. To be human is to be floating on the wind. Taken anywhere by our despair, by our unknowing, and by our own sin, meaning all the ways we are humanly selfish and unable to see beyond ourselves.
But Isaiah didn’t stop there, in the despair. He writes, “And yet, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are the potter.” It is dark here and we cannot see what God is doing in the midst of the suffering. But something is being formed in the dark. God’s own hands form life from the earth. God’s own hands take what is shapeless, what cannot be understood, what cannot be fully seen, and form something out of it. Your pain, your despair, your mental illness, your fears, your ignorance of the future, your addictions, your bruised and broken relationships, all of it rests in the hands of God, who holds it in this darkness and seems to be fiddling with it.
When I was a little girl, I was terrified of the dark. It made bedtime very frustrating for my parents. They would put me to bed and I would try to stay there for a couple of minutes before I just couldn’t take it anymore, and I would take a blanket and bring it out into the brightness of the lit hallway, next to their bedroom door. This was my routine for years as a young child.
But one way I realized that I could eventually fall asleep in my own dark bedroom, was if I made sure that I always went to bed before they did. The idea of my parents downstairs watching tv together, just the idea that they were down there awake, allowed me to feel safe enough to finally rest. To finally fall asleep in the dark. So I started sending myself to bed when I knew that they’d still be up for awhile (which is such an eldest child thing to do by the way), and I’d fall asleep to the sounds of them moving around downstairs. My parents were awake, aware of what was going on in our house, and so I knew I was finally safe up here in the dark.
When we feel consumed by the darkness of our world, or the darkness of our minds, or the darkness of our circumstances, when we cannot see what’s ahead of us, well God is right there. God is awake so that we can rest. Not only that, God is doing something in that unknown darkness. God is working the clay of our lives, and with it he is forming something new.
What we know about God from Scripture is that just because it’s dark, just because we can’t see God, doesn’t mean he isn’t there. Not only that, but it is in the darkness, in the despair of our lives, that God is doing something we can’t even imagine. It is in the darkness of night that God came to us as a baby, in a manger, in a stable. And some 30 years after that, the clouds covered the sun, darkening the landscape, as Jesus drew his last breath. As far as we knew, this was the end. God was dead. But in that darkness, God was still the potter working the clay, and making all things new. What was unknowable before was finally understood, as hope dawned anew in resurrection brightness. Amen.
