Trusting the Dark

Luke 1:26-38     

John 19: 38 - 20:1       

New life starts in the dark. The preacher Barbara Brown Taylor writes this in her book called, Learning to Walk in the Dark. New life starts in the dark.

Growth happens in the dark. Right now, every day, I am watching so much growth happening in our yard – trees budding, leaf unfolding; liriope, hosta, lilies all bursting up from the ground, one day there is nothing there, the next day there is a green leafy plant.

Last summer I planted some sweet woodruff under a tree. “Grow,” I told it, “spread like you’re supposed to.” It didn’t respond last summer. But this week I Iooked out and saw how much more ground it is covering as it comes up out of the dirt. Clearly, it was doing some work, growing down there in the dark.

New life starts in the dark. Like the womb. Babies don’t just appear out of thin air – poof! They spend nine months developing, growing in the dark of the womb, the perfect environment for growing a human person. We have all seen amazing pictures of the embryo developing into a fetus, the fetus into a baby – but even though we have seen it we are awed by the mystery of it. the mystery of what happens in the dark.

New life starts in the dark of the cocoon, or chrysalis, when a caterpillar evolves into a moth or butterfly, an entirely new and different creature. Another beautiful mystery of life.

When the caterpillar is ready to move on to the next phase of its life, it becomes the chrysalis. Everything inside of it is transformed into this new thing, with an exoskeleton, protecting and covering the work that is going on inside, in the dark.

Eventually, the butterfly emerges from the chrysalis, like a baby coming out of the womb or a chick coming out of the egg. It’s wet, it’s weak, but it slowly acclimates to the outside world and then it flies.

What once was a caterpillar, then became a chrysalis, is now a butterfly. Transfiguration in the darkness!

New life beginning in the dark. like the tomb.

Jesus went into the tomb a broken human body. His friends carefully, tenderly removed him from the cross and they carried him to the tomb. Nicodemus with his hundred pounds of aloe and myrrh. They lovingly wrapped his corpse in the burial cloths and laid him in the tomb. They moved a large stone in front of the tomb like shutting a door. And they walked away.

That was Friday, just before sunset. No one knows what happened then. His body lay in the darkness of the tomb, behind the stone. And when Sunday morning came, the body was no longer there.

He appeared to Mary in the garden, although she didn’t recognize him. Only when he called her name did she, somehow, know it was him. He appeared to others, in other places, in the days that followed. And sometimes, like Mary, they didn’t recognize him. He was, somehow, changed in the darkness of the tomb.

Good and marvelous things sometimes come out of the dark, isn’t it true? Still, it is true that we fear the dark.

There are some practical reasons for that. We can’t see very well. When we walk in the dark we might trip over something or bump into something that we cannot see. We can get hurt in the dark by the things we cannot see.

But sometimes, in the dark, it’s the things that are not even there that cause fear.

In the dark all our worst thoughts come out to play in our heads. Who hasn’t lain awake in the dark of night, worrying over lost opportunities or difficulties ahead? Taunted by our doubts. We worry that we are not who we want to be, who we ought to be. We lament our failures. We feel the aching longing for loved ones who are gone. In the dark of the night there is nothing to distract us from all the things that are hard to look at. It is uncomfortable, to say the least.

And sometimes the darkness stays with us even after the sun rises. Sometimes, we go through our days, working and resting and being with others, all in our own private darkness. And perhaps you would never tell another soul about that darkness. It is uncomfortable. It is painful. And it can feel like failure.

But it is not failure. It is possibility.

The spiritual mystics found the secret gifts that live in the dark. They speak of the dark night of the soul – a place where you might, at first, feel utterly alone, afraid, abandoned by God. You might feel awash in confusion, loneliness, doubt. But then, you might discover the possibility of transformation that awaits you. The darkness is not the end. There is light on the other side and new life awaits.

There is a parable about two babies in the womb talking to each other about life after delivery. One of them asks the other, “Do you believe in life after delivery?” “Of course,” the other said. “There has to be something.” The first baby disagrees. There is no evidence of life after delivery. There is no reason to believe there is life after delivery, surely that is the end of existence. The two babies argue over the matter a little longer, then one says, “I don’t know what it will be like, but we will meet mother, and that is good.” And the other baby says, “You believe in mother?”

In the darkness of the womb, they cannot imagine what kind of life might be possible on the other side of birth. In the same way, we cannot imagine what lies in store for us on the other side of the darkness, the other side of transformation.

The truth is we are unfinished products, living in unfinished times. And some times feel a lot more unfinished and uncertain than others.  Times when we feel like we are losing something valuable, important, when we are afraid to let go of anything, just as Mary was afraid to let go of Jesus.

But in the Easter story Jesus shows us that there is no reason to fear. Darkness lies ahead of us all, but we need not fear the darkness. Our God promises us so much new life on the other side.

During this season of Easter, let us journey together: out of the darkness into new light, new life that awaits us. 

Photo by Walter del Aguila on Unsplash