The wisdom of light and shadow
When Jesus reveals himself to Peter, James and John on the mountain top, their first impulse was to build something to temper their experience. But a bright cloud overshadowed and overwhelmed them. We’re often left in the dark, searching for a light. And just like an Arkansas teenager hiding in the HVAC return, the only way to win is to weather the darkness long enough to be found.
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Transcript
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Some may have heard this story from out at LVE or another place, so forgive me if you’ve heard it, but I keep going back to it or keep being drawn back to it, this moment in my life, something that happened during high school that continues to teach me a lot.
So as you can imagine, growing up in the part of the world where I did, there wasn’t always a lot to do. So we would have to invent our own things to do. And so some nights we would go, one of our friends lived, her family had a farm way outside of town where it got really dark, and so we would go out with her to her house and we would order a pizza, watch a movie, and then after it got really dark, we would sometimes play this game called spotlight. If you’ve ever heard of this game, it’s wonderful. We should all play it here. Here’s how you play the game. So you turn all the lights in the house off. Everything is pitch dark. Someone is “it”, and the person who is it sits in the kitchen. And the rest of the people who were there, in complete silence, no one can make any noise, in the darkness, we have to crawl and find a different place in the house to hide. And then the person who’s it, being this own version of hide and go seek, they have to crawl silently all through the house and see who they can find. And they carry a flashlight to do it. So as they find each person, they flash the light in their face. And then that person has to silently crawl all the way back to the kitchen and wait for them to find everyone else.
One night when we were playing, I went to go hide and I was silently crawling down the hallway and I realized for some reason, I noticed that the grate cover on the HVAC return duct could easily be screwed off, unscrewed. So I silently unscrewed the cover off the HVAC grate and crawled inside the HVAC return duct, crouched and gently pulled it back and held it in place and waited to see what would happen.
As you can imagine, this went on for a while because there was no way that anyone was going to find me hidden inside the HVAC, hidden inside the walls. Person after person you would see a flash of light come from that room, a flash of light from this room, and you would hear them silently crawl back. And this went on until the person who was it sat there, crawled all through the house, started to mutter to themselves, “he is not in this house.” No one could find me. And that’s when the lesson hit me. In order to win this game, I have to sit alone in the darkness longer than anybody else does in order to win this game. I have to sit alone in the darkness longer than anyone else does. And as it went on, I didn’t want to be stuck in there in the darkness anymore. And I didn’t know how to get out. I was stuck in the wall waiting for someone to find me. So I did the only thing I could think to do. I waited for the person who was it to crawl back down the hall. And when I saw them getting closer and closer to me, I tapped on the wall and gave myself away so I could be found.
To me, it feels like a lot of where we find ourselves right now. I keep going back to that story, and there’s something in it that continues to teach me about what it means, what it feels like to be in the darkness, searching for the light and not knowing exactly how to be found, and wondering what that might look like. So that’s the story that came bubbling back up for me when I looked at the gospel for this morning.
Because in this gospel story, which we always read on the Sunday before Ash Wednesday, the proper feast day for the Transfiguration is August the sixth, but we read this same story on this day because it challenges us to reflect on the dynamic between light and darkness, how we understand it, how we engage with it, how we resist it. So if you look at the story, it tells us a lot about ourselves as humans. Peter, James and John are taken by Jesus up on the mountain. They go on the mountain and Jesus is transfigured before them. He is changed. He is revealed to be who he always is, but they have not seen. And there’s this bright, warm light. And they encounter something beyond themselves, something beyond the way they normally see the world. And what’s their first impulse? Let’s build a, let’s construct a dwelling and build something to contain it and try to control it, because it’s just a bit much. “Jesus, this is all well and great, but it’s a bit overwhelming. So let’s do what we can. And if it’s okay with you, let’s build three dwellings and each of you will get a dwelling you won’t have to even share. You can have one. Moses can have one, Elijah can have one. And I think we’ll all feel better if we can do that.”
But in the moment of saying that out loud, notice what the story says happened. The moment that Peter starts saying this out loud, the text says he was overshadowed by a bright cloud. That’s a fascinating image and a strange juxtaposition, if you will, of light and darkness. What’s happening in that moment? To be overshadowed by a bright cloud? Well, what we learn is what we’ve always known to be true. Those strict dichotomies between light and dark don’t always hold up.
We like light. We have a lot of prayers. We have a lot of hymns around light and seeking light and wanting to be wanting to walk as a child of the light in him. There is no darkness at all. All of these lines from really well-known known hymns. Light is a wonderful thing. The light of wisdom being illumined. But as we know, light can also be painful, and light can also burn. Light can hurt. And there’s a form of light on an existential level that leads us to start to think that we have everything figured out, and we’re certain and we feel in control. That’s the light of hubris. The light of hubris.
So light is a complicated thing, and it turns out so is darkness. The darkness of ignorance should be named for what it is, and dealt with in the ways that we can deal with it, the darkness of ignorance. But what this text this morning teaches us is that there are different forms of darkness. There’s this dynamic of being overshadowed by this bright cloud. Well, that’s the cloud of unknowing, which is the antithesis to the light of hubris. So the light of hubris we want to avoid in the cloud of unknowing, we want to nurture. So those strict dualisms that we set in place, light is good, dark is bad, start to break down, and we’re challenged to reflect on just what it means to engage, just what is happening when we have these moments of encountering God’s presence in our lives, how we know, we learn more about ourselves, we learn more about God, we learn more about what it means to be truly human. All on that level, all in this tension between light and darkness, between illumination and shadow.
We are living in a time of enormous corporate projection of shadow. That’s what’s happening. We are seeing things about ourselves that we have not wanted to face. We are challenged to name things about ourselves that we have not wanted to name. We don’t know what to do with it. We don’t know what to do. We want certainty. And so let us create three dwellings to control and contain what we can so that we feel better. Let us revert back to those more base instincts of what it means to be a human. Let’s control, let’s grasp. Let’s hold on to. Friends, that dynamic, that’s the work that we’re called to do as the church, on that level. That’s the work that we’re called to do. As we keep saying, we’re called to stretch those spiritual muscles in our lives that maybe we haven’t used. We haven’t needed to use them. We’re called, we’re challenged to name things that we need to name, to be uncomfortable and to recognize that in moments of discomfort, the spirit is at work. And to ask ourselves, what is our obsession with comfort? What is our obsession with it? Is it rooted in control? Where does that come from? What does that mean?
Now, there was a time many, many moons back where “church” quote was seen as a genteel civic organization whose aesthetic align with our own personal sense of style and taste. And we could go throughout our entire lives, and our sense of aesthetic style and taste was consistent. Whether we were in our homes, whether we were at the club, whether we were at church. Everything around us was geared toward creating a comfortable, stable aesthetic environment that reinforced the value systems that we wanted to nurture. And if anything deviated from it, it was suspect. If we were made uncomfortable, that was suspect. So all of this fit, part and parcel, in the church. The clergy were expected to look and act a certain way, and if they didn’t, they… well. The hymns, we only wanted to sing the ones that made us feel good. We had no idea what to do with the season of Lent, because the entire season of Lent somehow is geared and structured toward pinching us, and we don’t know what to do with that. So I’ll just not come until Easter Sunday, because Easter Sunday will make me feel much better.
So we neglect this opportunity to do the deeper soul work that we’re called to do, and we’re the poorer for it. And we find ourselves struggling to make sense with the world that we live in, because we haven’t used the muscles that God’s called us to use. That’s why this reading is on this day. That’s why this reading is on this day. Because it is a linchpin, a liminal point, if you will, between the incarnation cycle, which, if you think back, started all the way on the first Sunday of Advent when we were preparing for the light to come into the world. Then the light came into the world, was born, came into the world. Then we reflected on what that meant, how we traveled, what we gave up, how we participate with the light through Epiphany and all that comes with this season. And now we’re shifting from that cycle to the Paschal cycle, and we’re stepping into Lent to be challenged and ask ourselves, “what do we need to name? What do we need to do?”
And living in the days that we live in, we all feel pulled. We feel pulled to take sides. And I hear that a lot. We can’t take sides. Well, maybe we can. We just have to define what sides that we’re taking. We act as though there’s only one line on the chart. There’s only the x-axis. We act as though that’s the only one that’s on there where it’s either this or that, right or left, whatever categories that we try to impose. But there’s another axis on that chart. There’s another one, the vertical, which forces us to ask ourselves which side we are taking when it comes to shallow and deep. And that’s where I feel drawn. I do want to take a side. I want to take the side of the deep and name that part of myself that wants to compel me to go to the shallows and where that comes from. Let us build three dwellings. It’ll make us all much easier, feel much, much better if we can create this, to control it where we feel more certain.
So as we step into this season, this is the work we’re called to do. Like it or not, on one level it’s going to be there, sitting there waiting on us. So I encourage you to take full advantage of what Lent has in store for you, to come on Ash Wednesday, and keep coming and reflect on those parts of all of our lives, those muscles that are being stretched as we continue to grow more and more into the dream that God has for all of us.
Amen