Epiphany Light and Dark   January 6, 2006

January, 2006

I will use the Epiphany imagery of light and darkness to explore what the Festival of Epiphany may mean for us today.  This exploration does not focus on the role of the Magi, and their gifts; rather, what can we take home with us as we consider the Light of the World, Jesus Christ, and the darkness of the world in which we live?

I want to challenge an assumption that we may have, consciously or unconsciously, we may hardly even know it, it is this: that we think that darkness is normal, and that you have to do something special to get some light into it.  For example, he sun has to rise up and then dispel the darkness.  Do something special; you got to get the sun to rise and get rid of the dark.  Or, another example, you turn on a switch and the light bulb starts to shine, and you did away with the darkness.  You put light in its place.  We think the darkness is normal, but the light is special.  But I suggest another way to look at life.

In the kingdom of God, God’s intention is that the light would be normal, so that the darkness is special, even if it is a wrong specialness.  This is what I want to say for us tonight:  That somebody is responsible for the darkness when it comes.  It doesn’t come naturally.  Somebody did it.  Listen, we always say you can turn on the light and turn it off and then darkness comes.  I’ll turn that around for you.  We have the ability to turn on the darkness,... turn on the darkness.

Here: an object lesson.  (John, hold up an imaginary object). Now, I could have a flashlight here, and I could pick it up and I could show it to you, ask you, “What is this thing?” and you, being very perceptive, would look at it and say, “Why, it’s a flashlight, dummy.”  And I would say, “Yes, that’s right, it’s a flashlight.”  But I don’t have a flashlight here.  The thing I

 have here, and I do have it, it is a spiritual thing, so you that’s why you can’t see it, but it’s here alright, but it is spiritual.  It is like a flashlight, only its exact opposite.  I call it a flashdark. 

Now, a flash light, when you turn it on and you shine it, it makes a small spot of light, wherever you shine it.  You shine it on somebody, then you can see the person, right?  But a flashdark is different.  A flashdark is when you turn it on and shine it, makes a small spot of darkness.  So when you shine a flashdark on somebody’s face, piff, the face disappears.  And you don’t know who it is there.

Here’s another thing here.  (John, hold up a second imaginary item).  It could be that I have this thing, hold it up, ask you, “What is it?” and you would see it and tell me, “why that’s a lightbulb, silly.”  But I don’t have a lightbulb, because that’s material stuff, and we are talking about spiritual stuff here; you can’t see it, so I have tell you.  It is the opposite: a darkbulb.  Now, a light bulb, when you turn on the switch, power comes through the wires and makes light.  General light for everyone.  It let’s you know who you are sitting next to in church.  I can tell who that is over there, because of the lightbulb.  But that’s not what I have.  I have a darkbulb.  It does the opposite.  You screw the darkbulb into a soul and the energy comes from the past and the present, and when you turn the darkbulb on, it spreads a general darkness over everything, and you turn to the person next to you and you say, “I wonder who that person is?  I can’t see the person.”  Are you getting the idea?

And one more thing here. (John: hold up a third imaginary object).   I  hold it up, and ask you “what is it?” , and you would answer me correctly that it is a spot light.  And you know what a spotlight does.  It shines one glorious glaring blast of light wherever you shine it.  So bright it makes people blink their eyes from it, even gives a headache, such brightness.  But you know by now  that I don’t have a spotlight, but I have a spotdark.  This spotdark uses energy, surges from the soul of human beings, and its darkness is like a great blot, that wherever you shine it, the thing you shine it on is gone, you blank it out; it isn’t there (pffift).  It makes the people go away.  Flashdarks. Darkbulbs.  Spotdarks.

I’m using kind of funny symbols, so that you keep them in mind, but my point is very real and very honest, people. Not only can we turn lights on, shine bright lights, but we have it in ourselves to turn flashdarks on other people, to turn on a general darkness, to glare spotdarks on people and they disappear. 

When somebody looks at me and does not see me, or somebody looks at a whole room full of people and they blank them out, they rub them out, erase them, and the people don’t exist for them, when someone looks at a child but does not truly see the chid, the child is disappearing, blending into the woodwork, then you have turned the darkness on and we have canceled other people out of existence.  We have made them not to be for us.  We have the power to turn on the darkness and to make other people disappear out of our lives..  Just to go away.          

Light is what God wants for us, that we might see and know one another.  Darkness is not God’s intention.  I learned this from the texts.

Isaiah talks about Zebulum and Napthali, that they lived in gloom and a land of deep darkness, and I know what that means.  Somebody did it to them.

The Assyrians did it.  About 740 years before Jesus, there came out of the east a mighty, mighty army, bloody, dreadful obscene army, and wherever they went, they made land to dwell in darkness.  They turned the darkness on.  Isaiah saw them and said, “My God, what they do to people!”           One of the Assyrian strategies was to scare the people so bad that they would not fight back, and they had ways to scare people.  They came to the cities and beat up the people, bloody and painful and wretched, that all the other cities around would quake and shake: “O God, don’t let the Assyrians come to our city!”

Because the Assyrians would kill everybody, that was their job, to kill people.  They went into houses and found the old people who weren’t fighting, and kill them.  And they killed the women who couldn’t fight.  They would l take the tiny babies and toss them in the air and catch them on the ends of their swords.  Terrible things!  That was the darkness.  Dark with fear and terror and pain.  Isaiah looked and saw darkness some people did it to other people.  Turned on the darkness.  Light is God’s way, not darkness.

And folks, I have to tell you, we do the same thing.  We use flashdarks on other people, we wink they right out.  Dark bulbs , we switch them on.  And we use great big spotdarks.

Where do we get the energy to do it?  Not from the electric company.  I thought hard about this, where we get the energy to blank out other people.  I found these areas.  

The firsts one is our up-bringing.  The way we were raised, unconsciously, our parents and the previous generation.  Those people taught us not only how to see people, but how not to see people.  We were taught that all women are the same, and all men are the same, and all blacks are the same, and all whites the same, Norwegians, Germans, Italians, all the same.

And because of that teaching, we walk around with our little flashdarks.            

Do you understand?  Our prejudices put people in the dark; does not see them.  And when it gets really bad, we kill them from our sight.

You know what prejudices are: It means that we judge what the person is before we wait to find out what that person is.  We Pre-Judge, pre-judice, prejudice that person.

Another source of the darkness: Our present attention, what is on our mind right now.  This perhaps the saddest.  Home comes somebody from a rotten day at work, and on their mind is all the rottenness of life and how hard they have it, how worn out they are, and how much they gave of themselves to sacrifice for the job.  And home they come.

And here comes a child, or a spouse, and they smile, but inwardly you decide that they have no right to smile at you, they are probably out to get something from us anyway, so we say, “Get out of my way.  I am tired.  I just wanna rest, leave me alone, kid.”    And we don’t even know what we are doing, but walking through the house switching the switches, up and down the house, we switch on all the darkbulbs, and by the time we are done, t here is a gloom that has settled on that house, and we didn’t even know it, because of our present attention.

Understand, darkness is not the way of God; somebody does it, is responsible for it.

Or, someone has sinned against us; no mistake; it is a bad thing they have done to us, and from then on we say, “I am going to carry my spotdark around, and when I see that person, I am gonna shine my spotdark on them, and wamm, they just disappear from my life – rub them out – and how sad that is, because that other person may finally know how to make the gesture of apology, and seriously ask for my forgiveness, but I ; I wipe them out; I will not, cannot see this effort at forgiveness and love.  See, then, this is very dangerous, for we are the Assyrians.

Last Wednesday night, about 8 pm, darkbulbs went on all across NY.  People watched the Rose Bowl, playing for number 1 in the nation.  And others stand, dance around, shout “I’m here.  Look at me.  I am alive.”  But they are not really there at all.  The only thing is that game on the TV.

We laugh, but it is sad, and when I look at the people who are shut out, the children that are not seen, look at other races, so sad, when I look at someone who says, “I’m here, dad, Mom, wife, husband, friend of mine, boss, executive, I’m here, a living human being, and I am unique, and you will not see my uniqueness,”  and I am sad for this quiet murder that happens in the darkness.

Dear people, I am most sad for us when we do that, for those who put others in darkness, because when we do that, we place ourselves in a greater darkness.  Understand.  You may turn the lights out for those people, and they may not be there for you, you may shine the spotdarks and the darkbulbs and flashdarks, but they will go away and find somebody who will notice them.  The more we do that, don’t you know, the more we put ourselves in the darkness.  And that is the darkness that goes all the way down to the soul, and we are in the land of deep darkness. 

Now if you can sense that you are in some darkness, this is neat, that Jesus comes to you; he walks out of the past, out of the Bible, to bring light to our lives, in spite of ourselves.  Suddenly it is not up to us at all.  Remember what Jesus said in John as he was putting mud on a blind person’s eyes, and the blind person went to the pool of Siloam and washed off the mud and came back and could see: And Jesus said, “Yes, I am the light of the world.”  To anyone of the hearts here that dwell in darkness, for whatever reason, either because Assyrian did it to you, or because you did it yourself, Christ comes now!  And he is the light of the world.  He will love you into lightness.

This is the wonder: that the light lightens you; this lamp, when Jesus says “Follow me,” is a flashlight on you, a lightbulb for all of us; a spot light on you.  Jesus shines on you, that all the other things fall away, and then we see a marvelous thing: when the light comes, even the darkness of life put son a smile, and the smile shines with the light of the mighty God.  And you are bathed in that light.