A sermon preached at Sacred Space at St Martin-in-the-Fields on April 7, 2024 by Jolley Gosnold
Reading: 1 John 1.1-2.2
Scripture, our traditions and liturgies are filled with the symbolism of Light and Darkness. On Easter Morning, our vigil brings us from the darkness of death and the tomb into the light of Christ’s resurrection. It’s a beautiful service, a powerful image, a theatrical event that tells the Easter story in a way that is both memorable and moving, but also engages our senses and speaks to our gut more than just our logical thinking minds. Naturally, this appeals to me as someone who has made a career for the past ten years as a theatre director. A liturgy like this doesn’t just tell, or even show the resurrection, we as a congregation experience the resurrection afresh as if for the first time as the Easter fire begins to illuminate the church until it is filled with sound, smells, sights, and light. We hold the light in our hands, we feel the fullness of Christ’s presence among us again. The darkness is overcome, and the light of Christ is with us.
While the image is powerful, it is not without complication. Too often, I believe, the symbolism is reduced to the idea that light is good and darkness is bad. An intensely problematic reduction, as it doesn’t take many leaps from this embedded belief, to understand how easily people make judgments about others in our world based on race and the colour of there skin. The obsession with light being good, and darkness being bad, is what underpins the horror of white supremacy. I have no doubt that God grieves the fact his resurrection, an event that was designed to unite the world and bring us together as children of God, can lead to such damaging and hateful ways of seeing our neighbours.
How can we begin to re-understand light then? And how can we stop being so scared of the dark?
It’s helpful to start with, to remember that our scriptures were written at a time when we couldn’t so easily walk into a room and flick on a light switch, when our streets weren’t lit at night, and when we didn’t have phones with blindingly bright torches on them to hand 24/7. But it’s not just this practical understanding that has significance, in Exodus 20.21 it says: “The people remained at a distance, while Moses approached the thick darkness where God was.” Our scriptures were written by and for those who believed God lived in darkness, that God was unknowable. Perhaps then it’s unsurprising that the very idea of light had more value two thousand years ago. And yet, at the same time I think it’s important to understand that light could not exist without darkness, and that all things begin in darkness. It’s even there in the poetry of our creation stories, that before the world was created there was first darkness. It’s in our very own creation stories, we all begin life in the safe, held, loving darkness of the womb. What if we began to think of darkness, not as a place of loss or emptiness, but as a place of growth, of life, of protection. What if God was no longer unknowable living in the darkness, but instead revealed to us in Jesus.
Jesus’ tomb, just like the womb, for those three days was a place of darkness, and we may associate that with our experience on the outside, one of grief and pain – and yet for Jesus it was the soil in which he was planted, the womb from which he emerged into resurrection life with an invitation to us to be with you. I wonder if I could invite you today, to look at the darkness in your life more kindly and live in the resurrection hope that it is a profoundly generative place, from which you will learn, create, grow, dream, imagine and live.
I don’t want to talk down light entirely, after all there is a reason this word, this image gets used so much in our tradition. In today’s scripture reading the writer talks about what can be seen, touched, and heard. It is a sensory and very human revelation of the presence of the resurrected Christ. Light enables us to see. Light reveals God. And if God is light, then perhaps God is also revealing us. He is the light of the world. Not just the believers. The Christians. The Jews. But the world. And if we open our eyes to his light, we will see him fully. And yet so often I have my eyes closed, I don’t allow the light in, because I crave the safety of my darkness, of that space where I neither see, or allow myself to be seen.
I find this monthly service of Sacred Space so special, and it’s undeniable that we lean on this symbol of light in the darkness. Shortly, I will pass you a candle and tell you “you are the light of the world” and later as we sit around the altar we will sit in darkness. Personally, I find the darkness comforting, and I’m scared of the light. I’m scared of what the light of God may reveal in me. I’m scared of what I may see in our world through the loving eyes of God. I will see people ignored, in pain, starving, suffering. The light will reveal the mercy filled love of our creator, and I will feel embarrassed and ashamed that I can’t measure up to that love. And so often I will sit in the safety of darkness, in the space of unknowing, of growth, and just wait – assuming a time will come when I will be able to cope with the light of Christ, when I will be enough to be the light in the world, when I don’t get too overwhelmed by the power of God.
But what if, this Easter, as we reexperience the fullness of the resurrection, and we are invited to see it afresh, to touch him again, to hear his voice and receive his peace – we could be brave enough to be the light of the world. Not because light is good, or darkness is bad – but maybe because light is revealing and darkness is waiting. Waiting in darkness for the light of Christ, we allow God to reveal Godself to us, to reveal our world to us, to reveal ourselves to us. As Paul writes in his second letter to the Corinthians, God “made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Christ”. So we can live, not afraid of the dark, or afraid of the light, but we can live in the dark, from the dark, as the light, our hearts fuelled by our ever-giving source of Christ revealed to us through his resurrection.
