Tag: Light

A Light in Our Darkness

Darkness is not an actual thing. We can define it as ‘the absence of light,’ meaning we understand darkness primarily by what it is not, instead of what it is. So, when we talk about long nights and early sunsets, we are naming the ways the light is absent from us, more than we are naming this present darkness.

But though, darkness is a non-thing, it is something we each experience and know. We know it when we see it, or better, we know it when we can’t see at all. We know what it is too be a people who have lost their way. We know how a nation which once boasted about becoming a city on a hill, set up systems which enslaved African Americans, dispossessed native cultures from their land, and forced other people of color into indentured servitude. We know the darkness of a Christian church, which spoke of new life in Christ, while hiding and excusing abusers in our midst. On a more personal level, we know what it means to stumble in the dark, without a clue as to what direction we are heading or how we will get there. We know our own disconnect between enlightened words kindly spoken, and dark deeds and our murky, wayward thoughts.

And here we are in Advent, once again, remembering when Light came into the world and we watch, and wait, and hope for the Light of Christ to break into our darkness once again:

The people who walk in darkness
Will see a great light;
Those who live in a dark land,
The light will shine on them.

Isaiah 9:2

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.

John 1:4-5

Do we believe that Christ can be light in our darkness? Right now? Today? Too often we treat Christianity or spirituality as a means of coping with the darkness we find ourselves in. We treat Jesus as “this little light of mine,” as just a night light, so that when we wake in the night, we are not too afraid to go back to sleep.

Jesus is the Light that came into the world. The light of all people. He did not come and is not coming to be your little night light. He is coming to banish the darkness. When a light shines in the darkness, the darkness doesn’t overcome it, because it cannot. When light enters the dark, it is dark no more.

Jesus has come and is coming and with him, we can see our way through from darkness onto light. The systems of oppression, the deeds done in darkness, and the hidden sins of smooth-talking abusers, and charismatic charlatans are exposed for what we are. We can see clearly and live into new ways of being.

The Advent light that we watch and wait for, is not a way of coping with dark—a dim-watt bulb for the dim-witted. It the bright morning Son which illuminates a new way of being in the world and allows us to see new possibilities. A light in the darkness is the first step toward the social revolution of the Kingdom of God.

See the source image

Come Lord Jesus and light our way to a better way and a better world.

A Light Against Darkness

Yesterday marked the beginning of Advent, and this year, it was the start of Hannukah, the Jewish “Festival of Lights.” It is somewhat of a minor holiday in Jewish tradition, owing its prominence in our culture to the fact that it is celebrated around the same time of year that Christians celebrate Christmas. But the festival of lights recalls a dark period in Jewish history. Judah had returned to its land and had rebuilt Jerusalem and the Temple, but for centuries it was ruled and dominated by powerful neighbors (Babylon, Persia, Greece). In 167 BCE, a Seleucid monarch, Antiochus IV Epiphanies, set up an altar to Zeus inside the Jewish Temple. Apocalyptic Daniel refers to this event as “the abomination of desolation” (Daniel 9:27; 11:30-31). It was a dark time for the Jews

This event scandalized the Jews in Jerusalem and led to the Maccabean revolt. Jacob Maccabees restored the temple with an 8-day rededication ceremony, lighting the menorahs in the Temple courts (which is inspiration for Hannukah). The Maccabean revolt would lead to the formation of the Hasmonean dynansty (140 BCE-37BCE) which ruled for a hundred years before the Herodians rose to power. (1 and 2 Maccabees in the Old Testament deuterocanonical books tell this story).

I am not Jewish, I don’t celebrate Hannukah. The closest I come is a rousing rendition of Adam Sandler’s Hannukah song. This is not my tradition to appropriate. But as I began my reflections this Advent on Darkness and Light, I think there is something worth paying attention to. I respect my Jewish friends and they have lots to teach me.

The lighting the menorah at Hannukah, was about rededication, restoring what had been profaned when Antiochus IV desecrated the temple. For Jewish people, it a festival about maintaining their Jewish identity in the face of a dominant culture, that is often antagonistic toward their community. It is an act of political resistance.

When we light our Advent candles and wait for the coming of the Lord, we too are doing something counter-cultural designed to stave off the dark. To light a candle of hope for the coming of Christ, is to take a stand against the powers, the principalities, and rulers of this age.

It is the 21st Century, and we have seen our own abomination of desolation. We have seen so-called followers of the Prince of Peace beat the drums of war. We have seen those who proclaim Christ as healer and savior, turn their back on the oppressed widow, orphan and the aliens in our land. We have watched as followers of Jesus have chosen personal freedom and autonomy over compassion, care and community in ignoring mask and vaccine mandates. We have witnessed (and sometimes participated in) the desecration of the image of God in people we don’t see politically eye-to-eye with. And when people are called to account for ways in which they have victimized, bullied, and oppressed people, we denounce accusers for the political correctness and their counter-culture. We fight for the freedom of the abuser instead of fighting for the life of the abused.

Light the Advent candle. Light it in hope that the world we live in, is not the world we will live in. Light the Advent candle. Light it in hope that it doesn’t have to be this way. Light the Advent candle. Light the Advent candle and know: a light shines in the darkness and darkness has not overcome it (John 1:5).

A Light for Dark Days

My ten-year-old son, James sat at the dinner table one evening in late November. His siblings had all scarfed down their supper and had all retreated to their own corners of the house. James was still picking at his dinner. With a furrowed brow and a look of consternation, he said, “I don’t understand why it gets dark so early.” We talked about the time change and the winter solstice and how the days will keep shortening until the week of Christmas when the days will again lengthen, ever so slightly. 

 This is a hard time of year for lots of us, for lots of reasons. The dark and the cold seep into our bones and we feel poignantly the grief and the loneliness we carry (with us always but this time of year with us in a different way). As the December dark descends on us with its shortened daylight we fight the dying of the light with whatever light we can muster. We buy gifts and share our family newsletters. We make Christmas candy and cookies and string up lights and decorations. Our Christmas ornaments all hung on the tree, as we sing along to our favorite Christmas CD and watch our favorite Holiday movies. We feel the joy these things bring, but always too, the lingering, long dark.

The promise of Christmas is that those of us who have “walked in darkness
    have seen a great light; those of us who have lived in a land of deep darkness—on us light has shone” (Isaiah 9:2). The Roman occupied province of Judea in the first century (present-day Palestine) was likewise a dark place to live. Injustice and violence, grief and loss, sickness and death, were the lived reality of the day. But then Christ was born and a new light came into the world. Imperceptible at first—just a babe wrapped in swaddling cloth, laying in a manger—but the week of Christmas, the days began lengthening, ever so slightly. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

My hope for us this Advent and Christmas is that we will train our senses to watch for the light, and see the ways that Christ shines in us, even when the days are dark and the nights are long. May the light of Christ’s coming continue to pierce our darkness as we await the light!

Beginning Again: a book review

We all experience times we are overwhelmed by life circumstance when the Spirit hovers over the very chaos of our lives.  Steve Wiens, pastor of Genesis Covenant Church in Maple Grove points us to a resource for beginning (and beginning again)–Genesis 1.  The seven days of creation tell more than how the world was created; these days are a resource through times of transition and difficult circumstance. In Beginnings, Wiens inhabits the text and offers it up as Midrashim. The creation account re-stories us, plays midwife to us, and invites us into the process of becoming (xxii-xxv).

978-1-63146-400-3Each of the seven days  speak of God’s work in our lives. On Day One, God’s Spirit hovers over the chaos and darkness we experience, bringing light and hope. On Day two, an expanse (space) is created between the waters above and below. This symbolically speaks of how God creates space in our life to grow something new. Day Three we experience the growth of seeds in freshly broken ground. Day Four (the seperation of day and night, Sun, Moon and Stars) we are able to see seasons. On Day Five we confront the monsters in the waters which threaten to strike down our new beginning. Day Six we press into God’s creative work in fashioning us, healing our past and propelling us into the future. Day Seven we learn the power of stopping and nurturing ceasing.

This is a unique book in that Wiens doesn’t address any of the creationist/evolutionist debates, and instead focuses on what the seven days of creation tell us about our life. Writers like John Walton (The Lost World of Genesis One, IVP ACademic 2009) tell us that ancient near east cosmologies are more concerned about how the universe is ordered than they are about origins. If this is true (and I believe it is), a book like this which focuses on what Genesis 1 tells us about our life and God’s creative and redemptive work are truer to the message of scripture than many literal readings of the creation account. The focus  here is less on what happened, so much of what it means.

Wiens also brings the message of Genesis down to a personal level. He share of difficult seasons in his own life (vocational struggles, infertility, problems with physical health, etc) and names the way God was at work in his life. His discussion of the seven days invites us to reflect on God’s work in our own life. I read this book in the midst of my own difficult season of life. Wiens’s words give me hope and a vision of where God may be at work in this stage of my journey. I give this four-and-a-half stars.

Note: I received this book from NavPress through the Tyndale Bloggers Network in exchange for my honest review.

Easter week 3/ Earth Day 2012 poems

Having spent yesterday weeding and trying to ready a garden plot, for this years vegetables. I spent a good part of yesterday with my hands in the dirt, hunched over and seeing how much the soil teems with life–beetles and spiders, worms and slugs and the odd gardner snake warming herself on a stone. In the northern hemisphere Easter coincides with new life and growth. So I thought it appropriate to share some poems which reflect on this seasonal rising. Below are two poems taken from Luci Shaw’s The Green Earth: Poems of Creation and one poem from Wendell Berry’s A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997.

From Luci Shaw

Rising: the Underground Tree
(Cornus sanguinea and cornus candensis)

One spring in Tennessee I walked a tunnel
under dogwood trees, noting the petals
(in fours like crosses) and at each tender apex
four russet stains dark as Christ’s wounds.
I knew that with the year the dogwood flower heads
would ripen into berry clusters bright as drops of gore.

Last week, a double-click on Botony
startled me with the kinship of those trees
and bunchberries, whose densely crowded mat
carpets the deep woods around my valley cabin.
Only their flowers — those white quartets of petals —
suggest the blood relationship. Since then I see

the miniature leaves and buds as tips of trees
burgeoning underground, knotted roots like limbs
pushing up to light through rocks and humus.
The pure cross-flowers at my feet redeem
their long, dark burial in the ground, show how even
a weight of stony soil cannot keep Easter at bay.

—-

Stigmata

The tree, a beech, casts the
melancholy of shadow across the road.
It seems to bear the enormous weight of
the sky on the tips of its branches.
The smooth trunk invites me to finger

five bruise-dark holes where rot
was cut away. Years have pursed
the thickened skin around the scars
into the mouths that sigh,
“Wounded. Wounded.”

As the hurt feels me out,
wind possesses the tree and
overheard a hush comes; not that
all other sounds die, but half a million
beech leaves rub together in the air,

washing out bird calls, footsteps,
filling my ears with the memory of
old pain and a song of cells in the sun.
“Hush,” they say with green lips.
“Hush.”

From Wendell Berry

Another Sunday morning comes
And I resume the standing Sabbath
Of the woods, where the finest blooms
Of time return, and where no path

Is worm, but wears its maker out.
At last, and disappears in leaves
Of fallen seasons. The tracked rut
Fills and levels; here nothing grieves

In the risen season. Past life
Lives in the living. Resurrection
Is in the way each maple leaf
Commemorates its kind, by connection

Outreaching understanding. What rises
Rises into comprehension
And beyond. Even falling raises
In praise of light. What is begun

Is unfinished. And so the mind
That comes to rest among the bluebells
Comes to rest in motion, refined
By alteration. The bud swells,

Opens, makes seed, falls, is well,
Being becoming what is:
Miracle and parable
Exceeding thought, because it is

Immeasurable; the understander
Encloses understanding, thus
Darkens the light. We can stand under
No ray that is not dimmed by us.

The mind that comes to rest is tended
In ways that it cannot intend:
Is borne, preserved, and comprehended
By what it cannot comprehend.

Your Sabbath, Lord thus keeps us by
Your will, not ours. And it is fit
Our only choice should be to die
Into that rest, or out of it.