Sermon: IN-Lightenment

Date: May 13, 2007

Dee Eisenhauer, preacher

Texts:  Psalm 36:7-10; Isaiah 42:5-7, 16; Luke 11:34-36; 1 John 2:3-11

(Date: May 4, 2007, for the PNW Conference UCC Annual Meeting)

            I have a new toy called “Mr. Rogers in Your Pocket.”  Listen: I like you just the way you are.  Doesn’t that sound good?  Want to hear it again?  It says a few other things, too.

            The friend I was shopping with when I discovered this marvelous device and I each purchased one.  I got it because I thought it was funny; she got it because from beyond the grave Mr. Rogers was speaking a gospel word that she really needed to hear.  I mean this hunk of plastic was ministering to her in a way no hunk of plastic ever had before.  This is why: her partner of eight years left her without warning recently.  The painful effect of this abandonment was that she had an immediate crisis in self-esteem.  She started to question whether she was loveable at all.  In her rational mind she knew she was still the same capable, intelligent, caring person she had been before; but the experience of rejection so darkened her perception that she was having a hard time believing in her lovability.   Listening to the soothing voice of Mr. Rogers assure her that she is ok has been helping her see herself as ok.  I suppose it’s a little goofy, but you know what they say—“Whatever gets you through the night.”  I like you just the way you are.

            This isn’t, of course, the saying for which Mr. Rogers was most well known.  When I say Mr. Rogers, what do you think of first?  It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day for a neighbor…Is that gospel the same way as I like you just the way you are?  Is it true?  Is it a beautiful day in the neighborhood?  Well, I suppose the answer depends on how you define neighborhood.  It might be a beautiful day in the tranquil and prosperous neighborhood where I live on BainbridgeIsland.  But if I stretch the idea of neighbor as far as Jesus stretched it, and consequently stretch the geography of neighborhood as far as Jesus would have stretched it, by golly, it might not be such a beautiful day.  Is it a beautiful day in the neighborhood of our partner church Little Farms UCC where people are still struggling to clean up and rebuild many months after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina?  Is it a beautiful day in Blacksburg, Virginia where the wounds of grief following the Virginia Tech massacre are so horribly raw?  Is it a beautiful day in the refugee camps of the Darfur region where starving folk hanging on by their fingernails live in fear of marauding militias?  Is it a beautiful day in Bagdhad where…well, you know.  Curfews, colonels, car bombs, corpses.  Is it a beautiful day there?

            Can you imagine playing Mr. Rogers’ little neighbor ditty over loudspeakers in any of those places I have named, or a thousand other places where suffering overwhelms humanity—wouldn’t it sound like the bitterest kind of irony?   It’s not a beautiful day in the neighborhood, you could say it’s not daytime there at all. One way to describe our era would be to borrow Eli Weisel’s one-word title for his memoir about the Holocaust: Night.  Our generations are, in some ways, the people who dwell in deepest darkness.  There are times we feel the weight of that darkness so acutely it’s hard to get out of bed in the morning.  I talked to the minister of a big urban church recently who said she’s spending an awful lot of time lately just weeping over the state of the world and feeling helpless.

            And yet…the apple trees are blooming.  Babies the world over are blurting out their first words to the delight of their mommies and daddies.  Eagles are building nests.  Fathers and sons, long estranged, are being reconciled.  Gardens are being planted.  Hugs are happening.  Young people are organizing movements and marches to stop global warming.  Generous offerings are being received for a million compassionate reasons.   Bread is broken, and Christ takes form in communities here, there, and everywhere.  “Amazing Grace” is being sung all over by people who believe it.  The world is by no means completely shrouded in darkness.

            The thing is, the darkness gets so much better publicity than the light.  You can tune in your radio, for example, any hour of the day or night, and hear angry people from every political and religious angle bemoaning the way our nation is going to hell in a handbasket.  If you don’t agree with the viewpoint of the furious commentator or preacher you are listening to, you turn the dial up to another station to find a person whose rants you can say “amen” to.  Woe is all over the airwaves, and I’m not just talking about the whoa, whoa, whoa of pop songs.  And that’s just the radio—cable news and skadzillions of enraged bloggers on your computer just add to the grim view of the world being sold to us 24/7.

            Sold.  A dark and deeply pessimistic view of the state of the world is being sold to us around the clock.  Fear, in particular, sells.  Do you know what I mean?  Fear sells S.U.V’s—it’s all about the safety of the kiddies.  Fear sells wrinkle cream and botox—you don’t want to lose your job or your spouse to younger competitors.  Fear sells newspapers.   It sells political candidates.  It sells alarm systems and handguns.  Fear sells wars.  I am convinced that fear is one of the engines of our economy, and it is therefore in the interest of those who are selling fearful images and ideas to just keep cranking them out.  It’s done with such great skill and volume that we’re not always aware of what’s being sold to us, leaving us vulnerable to buying it.  

            The challenge is to keep that dark, fearful view of the world from completely defining our world view.  How to stand against the well-financed forces of darkness?  There’s an old story about a rabbi whose pupils came to him complaining about the prevalence of evil in the world.  They asked the rabbi how they might drive out the darkness.  The rabbi gave them brooms, and asked them to sweep the darkness from a cellar.  The pupils tried this, but they were not successful.  So the rabbi gave them sticks and told them to beat the darkness until it was driven away.  Again they tried, and when they failed, the rabbi asked them to try shouting at the darkness.  The pupils did this also, but the darkness remained.  “Then let us try this,” the rabbi said.  “Let each person challenge the darkness by lighting a candle.”  The pupils descended into the cellar.  Each one lit a candle.  When they looked around, they discovered the darkness had disappeared.

            I’m intrigued by the idea that the candle that needs to be lit against the darkness is in the eye.  Listen again to what Luke’s gospel says: “Your eye is the lamp of your body.  When your eyes are good, your whole body also is full of light.  But when they are bad, your body also is full of darkness.  See to it, then, that the light within you is not darkness.”  I realize that the meaning of these verses is not entirely clear.  You need to know that they are based on an ancient understanding of the eye and sight.  According to the New Interpreter’s Bible, “We know that the eye responds to light from outside the body, but in antiquity the common understanding in both Greco-Roman and Jewish literature was that the eye emitted light and that sight was possible when the light from within met light from outside. [repeat] The Testament of Job, for example, contains the following statement: ‘My eyes, acting as lamps, looked about.’   Therefore, the eye, that sparkles and flashes, is the lamp of the body.”[1]

            The commentary goes on to say that the lamp the verse refers to is not Jesus but the light within the disciple.  The light on the outside—the light that came into the world at Creation and was reflected anew into the world in Christ—is met in this ancient understanding of sight by the light within the disciple.  The light within the disciple is a sign of faith, of ethical purity, of spiritual health. 

            It seems to me that we are susceptible to the light in our eyes going out from time to time.  You know how a natural gas powered stove has a pilot light?  And how the pilot light can get extinguished, so it can’t, in turn, fire up the burners on the stove?  Someone needs to bring a match and re-light the pilot light in order for the thing to work again.  I have seen the light of faith in a believer’s eye go out, blown out by tragedy or illness or what  have you.  A person can become suddenly unable to see the light of God’s creative love abroad in the world because the lamp of their own eye has gone out. 

            When that happens, congregations have a vital opportunity.  We can be the ones that relight the pilot light in the believer’s eye, steadily carrying the torch of faith in the face of loss.  It’s an essential ministry of the community of faith to lovingly embrace those whose eye of faith has gone dark for any reason until the lamp of the eye can be re-lit from the light of the one God.  Then, we hope, the one who was temporarily blind to God’s radiant grace can see it again.

            An even more common challenge than the light of faith in the lamp of the eye going out altogether is the light being dimmed or distorted by darkness seeping in.  Darkness can get in your eye.  Think again about they eye being the lamp of the body.  Do you ever get little squiggly lines or spots inside your eye that distract you from what you’re trying to see?  These are known by the highly technical scientific term “floaters.”  They come from little bits of your own eyeball goop solidifying and floating around inside your eye.  Essentially, lint in your eyeball.  Mostly harmless, but irritating.

            I actually had a terrifying experience with floaters once, before I knew that such a thing existed.  I was about 5 years old, living on a ranch in South Dakota.  I had heard someone talking about black widow spiders—probably my brothers, who liked to try to scare me.  Anyway, I had never seen a black widow spider, but I had seen plenty of ordinary spiders, and the idea that a little black one could sneak up on you and bite you and kill you was pretty frightening.  Just when I was in a heightened state of anxiety I had my first experience of floaters, a bunch of little spots in my eye.  Naturally I concluded a gang of black widow spiders was stalking me.  I did what any kid would do—panicked!  I ran as fast as I could, but lo and behold, that gang of spiders followed me no matter how fast I ran.  I ran into the barn, thinking I would go up into the hay loft because I was pretty sure spiders couldn’t climb ladders.  Guess what?  Those killers kept right up with me.  I looked down at the ladder, and there they were, and when I looked at the loft planks I was standing on, they leaped right up next to me.  It’s a wonder I didn’t become the nation’s youngest heart attack victim before some calm adult explained seeing spots to me.  I’ve still never seen a real black widow spider in the wild.

            Now, I’ve never seen a terrorist either, as far as I know.  And yet, it looks to me like we’ve got terror in the eyeball in this country.  A few months ago I saw a couple of women discussing with each other whether they should call the authorities because a young man who looked vaguely Arabic was standing around on the deck of one of our ferries, watching the cars get on—they considered calling the authorities not because he was doing anything suspicious, but because they had brown-skinned terrorist killers floating around in their eyeballs.  1 John says, “Whoever hates his brother is in the darkness and walks around in the darkness; he does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded him.”  Fear and hatred can blind us.  The fear that is being constantly marketed to us can seep into our eyes and distract us from seeing what’s really going on.        

            How do we keep from being distracted and unnerved by fear?  We need the spiritual maturity to recognize that not all that we fear is real; some of it is manufactured in the interest of political or financial profit.  When unreasonable fear distracts, if we can’t defeat it right away, we need to try to see around it, just as we do when a floater in the eye won’t disappear right away.  Don’t let a fleck of floating darkness distract from the light.

            The light in which we see things can make such a difference.  I was thinking about this after I went to a meeting in our high school’s band room one night.  It was dark out and the lighting in the room was just atrocious.  The lights buzzed and flickered and cast a yellowy-greenish hue on everyone.  Every person in the room looked positively sick and haggard in that light.  I wish we had been sitting around tables with candles lighting the room instead of those sick, dim fluorescents.  Inner beauty somehow emerges in candle light.  I bet the conversation would have gone better if we could have seen ourselves and each other in a better light. 

            How’s the lighting at our church?  Do we see each other in the kindly light of love in our meeting rooms and sanctuary, parking lot?  Biblical scholars point out that when the writer of the epistle of 1 John wrote about loving the brothers and sisters, he was really focusing on loving those in the church.  At first blush that doesn’t seem like much of a test; why not talk about loving the whole world?  But in real life, if we’ve hung around churches long enough, we know that loving those who are closest to us is often the biggest challenge.  C. Clifton Black points out that it can be much easier to love the homeless and the stranger, those with whom we have brief encounters, than to love those whom we know well and have promised to uphold over the long haul.  Ivan Karamozov mused fictionally, though truthfully, “I could never understand how one can love one’s neighbors.  It’s just one’s neighbors, to my mind, that one can’t love, though one might love those at a distance…One can love one’s neighbors in the abstract, or even at a distance, but at close quarters it’s almost impossible.”  I’ll wager that if I ask you to picture someone at church who has irritated or offended you, you won’t have to think too hard.  It’s not always easy to see our close neighbors in the light of love, especially if we are in conflict over something we care about.  Maybe we should start having all our meetings in candlelight to remind us to carry the light in our eyes.

Keep in mind that the light we carry in the eye meets the light God shines into the world.  We are to see the world in the light of God’s creative love, and interpret the world in the light of God’s creative love.  I would not deny that there are real forces of evil casting a shadow over our world.  I would not deny that there are real terrorists seeking to do harm to others.  There is real darkness—but believers focus on the light.  I believe we disciples are called to see the unfolding story of history with sparkling hope, not with overshadowing terror.  We see all the forces of death arrayed against humans in the dazzling light of the resurrection.  We are the ones who see that once light came into the world, the darkness has never overcome it nor will darkness ever overcome the powerful light of God’s creative love beaming into our world.  We are the ones who see signs of hope and new life busting out all over, and are to tell the good news of our chapter of the gospel story to those who sit in darkness.  We are called to open the eyes of those who are blind to God’s active, gleaming grace.  Hope says, “I will turn the darkness into light before them.”

            Wouldn’t it be lovely if we were always able to have the light of God’s creative love burning in our eyes as we looked out on whatever scene is unfolding before us?  What if we looked inwardly with that gentle and forgiving light bathing the dark corners of our souls we try so desperately to keep hidden? (I like you just the way you are.)  What if the pure light of love shone onto our assessment of everything and everyone we see, as if we had an undying flame in our eyes? (Please won’t you be my neighbor?) 

We can’t carry candles around wherever we go, to all our meetings and negotiations and so forth, and that’s not the point.  We can carry the light of love in our eyes as if a lamp were burning there that casts all God’s beloved world in the best possible light.  It’s not that we create this light; we’re simply being called to see it and reflect it in our own shining eyes.  I love the line in Psalm 36, “In your light we see light.”  It’s God’s light that continues to bathe our planet in creative, vital, life-giving love.  Insofar as we can see it, absorb it, and let it light the pilot light in our souls, we will see—and BE—more and more light in even the darkest night.

[1] The New Interpreters Bible, Volume IX  Nashville: Abingdon Press, p. 244