Light and Dark

Sermon

Lord, make us instruments of your peace:

where there is hatred, let us sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

where there is sadness, joy.

O divine One, grant that we may not so much seek

to be consoled as to console,

to be understood as to understand,

to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive,

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

This is not a bad prayer for the beginning of Holy Week, when all the paradoxical words are at play in the story of the last week of Jesus’ life—hatred, love, despair, hope, darkness, light. Light and dark are at play in this story of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, and the good and bad of light and the good and bad of the dark create an image filled with the play of shadows, what art folks call chiaroscuro, an image that is unsettling and beautiful and horrific.

One word of caution as we begin: let us not assume all the light is good and all the dark is bad. In a beautiful children’s book, God’s Holy Darkness, the authors note that “Darkness and blackness and night are too often compared to lightness and whiteness and day and found deficient but let us name the beauty and goodness and holiness of darkness and blackness and night.” (Sharei Green and Beckah Selnick)

So while our guiding prayer encourages us to sow light where there is darkness, today I want to consider what it means to let the light be light and to let the dark be dark, and to consider how those two forces are seen in the story of Holy Week.

I find this story of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem a strange and not very inspiring one, but I invite you to delve into it with me and notice what’s weird about it and what may be inspiring in these words.

In this account, Jesus fulfills a scripture from a prophet of ancient Israel, when Zephaniah foretells a time when the rightful king will return. “Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” When Jesus comes in on the colt, the people assume their messiah has come, ready to conquer Rome and win the game and rule in peace.

Now maybe it’s because we know how this story plays out, but there’s something a little off in all of this. It’s as though the lights are on, but they are too bright, a harsh, unfriendly light, the kind of a light a cinematographer would use when making a horror film that takes place during the day.

And then there’s all the weird rigamarole about the animal Jesus is going to ride into town on. It’s all a bit unbelievable, what with, “Yeah, we’re taking this colt because Jesus needs it and he’ll be sure to send it right back” to how well this colt, never before ridden, let this stranger ride him without saddle or reins. Strange. It’s as though hidden forces are at play, as though someone wants that ancient prophecy fulfilled.

But it’s the excitement of the crowd that is most off in this scene, because we know what will happen in a matter of days. The crowd will turn, and they who shout, “Blessed! Hosanna!” will soon be screaming, “Crucify.”

If it is too bright a light shining on this scene, then that light is casting great shadows—the shadowed hearts of the people in the crowd who go along with whatever popular sentiment is at play, whether it be “save us” or “crucify him”; the shadowed whispers of the religious authorities, threatened by the power and popularity of this Jesus; the blotchy light that describes the faith of the disciples, who aren’t sure they will be loyal when push comes to shove and the beams of the cross are nailed together.

But are we that different when our own faith and its traditions and rules are challenged?

Just as those crowds on the side of the road mistook Jesus for a conquering warrior king, we too can mistake Jesus for who he really is. Sometimes we cast him as a wizard who will wave some invisible magic wand and disappear all of our troubles. Sometimes we call on him to be that conquering warrior king who will vanquish our enemies, dispatch the heathen to hell, and claim, if not the world, then at least the United States, as the new Jerusalem. And sometimes we diminish who he is, say that he was just a prophet or just a teacher and not the beloved child of God who, in some mystery we struggle to grasp, created healing and reconciliation in his death and resurrection.

We have fickle loyalties and our fidelities change when we sense that taking a particular stand is not only unpopular but may be dangerous. We have responded in both disbelief and apathy. And still God illumines our way, and still God grants us holy rest.

Where there is light, and some sort of object, there is always a shadow unless it is high noon. High noon is a tough time—for folks at the O.K. Corral, for photographers, for that dying prophet on a hill called Golgotha who waits for his God to rescue him. I wonder if Jesus, hanging there in the heat of the day, longed for the night. I wonder if he remembered when he and his disciples gathered for their evening Passover meal as they retold that ancient story of liberation. I wonder if he remembered all those nights he sat outside, after a day of healing and teaching, gazing at the stars, giving thanks for rest. I wonder if he remembered just a few nights before, after coming into the holy city on a colt, returning in the evening to his friends’ home in Bethany, getting ready for all the hell that was about to break.

There is goodness in the dark—a seed opens underground in the dark; we get our best rest when there is no light pestering us; there are few things quite as beautiful as being out in the middle of nowhere on a cloudless night and looking up and seeing the array of the heavens above us.

As Jan Richardson reminds us, “Christ came not to dispel darkness, but to teach us to dwell with integrity, compassion, and love in the midst of ambiguity. The one who grew in the fertile darkness of Mary’s womb knew that darkness is not evil of itself. Rather, it can become the tending place in which our longings for healing, justice, and peace grow and come to birth.” (Night Visions)

And so here we are on Palm Sunday, reflecting on a hundred-year-old poem and a two-thousand-year-old story. Here we are, getting ready for Holy Week, wondering if anything in these sacred stories will move our souls this year, wondering how these stories say anything to us about the destruction and death in Gaza, about the terrorist attack in Moscow, about our beloved who was diagnosed with something terrible, about any number of things which some would say are signs that there is no God, and if there is, that God checked out long ago.

Perhaps, but I choose to see God in the darkness and the light and at dawn and dusk and high noon.

As I mentioned earlier, this is not my favorite story in the Bible, and next year I need to remember not to schedule myself to preach on Palm Sunday. I wrote this sermon about four times and couldn’t really find my beat, so I resorted to a method that’s worked before.

A few years ago, in a week of continuing education, I learned of the four-column structure of sermon writing—outline the sermon in these categories: problem in the text, problem in the world, grace in the text, grace in the world. Problem in the text: Jesus dies, parade is a sham, fickle crowds; problem in the world: we are fickle or worse, apathetic; grace in the text: Psalm 139, “the darkness is not dark to Thee”; grace in the world: we are not alone. You are probably not aware of those columns, as I’m pretty sure I didn’t always hit my mark. Except for that last point: we are not alone.

That’s always the grace, isn’t it—that we are not alone? Except for those terrible minutes on the cross when Jesus demanded to know why God had forsaken him—the worst anguish in faith—Jesus knew he was not alone. He knew he was in God and God was in him. He had the disciples, and those fickly crowds, and the people he healed, and the people he taught. He probably had nieces and nephews. He had friends, Mary and Martha and Lazarus. He had a mom. He was not alone. Even as he died, those faithful women gathered at the foot of the cross, bearing witness, keeping vigil, keeping company.

We are not alone. In life and in death, we are not alone. In our joys and our heartbreaks, we are not alone. God is with us, always. And we have other people too. Just look around.

Recently on my Facebook page a memory came up, and it caught me by surprise. I had posted it in late March of 2020, and I’d written, “What if at 7:00 every night we all stood outside our front door with a candle, just to let each other know we are here?”

As the saying goes, better to light one candle than curse the darkness. So may we sow light.

To the glory of God.

The Reverend Beth Neel

Westminster Presbyterian Church

Palm Sunday

March 24, 2024