Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (New Beginnings UMC)

Before I really get started in the sermon, I want to let you

know that it's going to be a little bit different today.

Normally when I'm preparing sermons, I, I, I, I preach from

an outline, much of which is some of which anyway is on the

slides. And and that's that's how 99.9%

of the time I I preach when I prepare, I get ideas, I get

topics, I get, you know, illustrations kind of that that

seem to make sense. Arrange them an outline.

Sometimes when I sit down to prepare, not very often, but

every once in awhile happened this week.

I sat down to start typing and working on an outline and just

everything came and I and I typed it all out.

And so I'm preaching today largely from notes from a

manuscript, which I don't do very often, but I just was not

able to convert this into an outline.

And so, so I feel like, OK, I just got to preach it as is.

So I'm going to stand back here so I can keep an eye on my notes

because I'm going to be using them much more than I ordinary

probably do. The statement don't be afraid of

the dark. I have a very personal

connection with because it was the first horror movie I ever

saw and was not supposed to see. And I, I have this is such an

old memory from like when I was four or five years old somewhere

around in there that as I was thinking about this, I thought,

you know, I wonder if that's even a real movie or did I just

imagine all of this? It's a real movie.

I went on IMDBI found I had the title, right.

I had the the the nature of the movie right.

And it was actually a made for TV horror movie.

I think it was first aired somewhere in the early 70s,

which is that fits my memory as my age as well.

But any rate, I wanted to stay up and watch the movie with mom

and dad. Mom and dad said, no, you need

to go to bed. This movie is too scary for you.

It's like, I want to watch the movie, go to bed.

So I went to bed and then I snuck back down because, you

know, their backs were to the doorway into the TV room, family

room, whatever it was. And and I was able to peek

around the corner and around the edge of the couch and watch the

movie. Don't be afraid of the dark.

The title is a lie, and the movie is all about good reasons

to be afraid of the dark. And as soon as the little furry

creatures crawled out from the cupboard under the steps and

started terrorizing the family, I learned that my parents were,

in fact, wiser and smarter than I am, and I went back to bed.

I'm going to go get my coffee so I can have a drink as we go here

as well. The movie, as I said, was a lie.

They were trying to convince me to be afraid of the dark, and

they succeeded. I never liked horror movies

after that. That kind of did it for me in

horror movies. But part of the reality of our

life and living a life of faith is how do we live a life of

faith in the darkness? Abram, in the portion of Genesis

that John read this morning, was entering into a very common and

very human predicament, the dreadful challenge of trusting

God when we can't see. And this is the nature of living

by faith, following and obeying one that we can't see to a place

where we've never been in the company of friends, sometimes,

strangers, other times, and it's still other times utterly alone

and who also cannot see. Abraham was entering what I

believe Saint John of the Cross would have called a dark night

of the soul. I don't know if you've heard

that phrase before. Saint John of the Cross is not

the Saint John who wrote the Gospel of John.

He lived much later. He lived and wrote during the

1500s and he talked about the dark night of the soul, and he

described the dark night of the soul as a period in which God

strips away from us our faith in anything that is not God.

Darkness is the rule of the dark night of the soul, when we

cannot see that there are two parts, as John described it, of

The Dark Knight, or two phases, or two different aspects of it.

1 is what he called the Dark night of the senses, in which

all of those things that made us feel close to God, feel the

presence of God, feel the love of God, all of those things dry

up. You used to love your morning

prayer time and that quiet time you had with God, and it made

you feel so close to God, and now it feels like a wasteland.

It feels like nothing like a waste of time.

You used to love the feeling you got in worship, singing the

songs or hearing the message or gathering with friends and

family in that community and that singing and that music and

that. It made you feel so connected

with God and the Christian community.

And now it just feels like a waste of time, Meaningless and

empty. You used to love the feeling

that you got from doing good things in the community, good

things in the church, serving in certain ways, blessing in

certain ways, serving and and caring in those other ways.

And now it just feels like duty and there's no satisfaction and

there's no connection with God. It's just a pain.

The dark night of the senses and all of those things that made us

feel good about our faith and feel connected with God dry up

and go away and no longer have any feeling or parent meaning to

them at all. And as challenging and difficult

and painful as the dark night of the senses is, it's nothing

compared to the dark night of the Spirit, in which all of

those things within us that told us God is real and God cares and

God loves and God is there. All of that just evaporates or

disappears or gets covered up. And in the dark night of the

Spirit, we begin to wonder, is there even really a God at all,

much less a good God, A God that loves and a God that cares and a

God that can? I believe Abraham Abram, in this

chapter 15 of Genesis, is entering into a period in his

life that Saint John of the Cross would have called a dark

night of the soul. Abraham had been living with

tremendous faith, doing amazing things that that were done

simply out of faith in, in his hometown in Iran and his home

country. And he he heard a voice in his

head that said leave it all, leave it behind.

Everything you know, your hometown, your home country,

your home region, your home people go take your wife, take

your household. You can take your nephew lot go.

And and I'm not even going to tell you where.

I'll just let you know when you get there.

And Abram went, he went and he got there and we got to this

strange country of Canaan. And he looked around and God

said, this is it. Neighbor was like, all right,

all right. And he settled down there, sort

of settled down. They were nomads.

They were in tents. They had no fixed residence and

they owned no land and no property, but they were allowed

to graze. But what a tremendous act of

faith. And then as they were grazing

their animals and they were prospering and their wealth was

growing, and his nephew Lot was doing well and Abram was doing

well, and suddenly there wasn't enough land.

And Abram took another great step of faith and he went to

Lot. And even though Lot was the

younger, he said the Lot. Lot, you choose.

You pick the land. I don't want any more fighting

between us. I don't want any fighting

between your people and my people.

You, you pick the land you want. I'll take whatever's less left.

And Lot took the better choice, the better land.

And as soon as Lot left, God said to Abram, hey, don't worry,

don't worry. The promise still stands.

You're going to have descendants as numerous as the stars in the

sky above, the dust on the ground below.

You will have all of this land. You'll have all of this land.

And Abram believed. Abram took another great step of

faith when his nephew Lot, who moved in next to Sodom and

inherited Sodom's problems. And one of Sodom's problems was

that they had political enemies, and they were actually in

rebellion against the king that ruled over that Kingdom, that

smaller Kingdom, And they rebelled.

And that larger king took four, brought three other kingdoms

with them, and they conquered Sodom and five other kingdoms,

four other kingdoms. I'm getting the numbers messed

up. It was a lot of kings and a lot

of kingdoms, and Lot and his family were taken captive.

Abram, who was not a king, was not a warlord.

He raised his own private army. He got the help of some other

leaders in the area. They went to war against the

four kings that had just defeated 5 kingdoms, and they

won. And he not only brought Lot and

his family back and all the other people back, but all the

money that have been taken to all of the physical wealth.

And Abram gave it all away and he said to the king of Sodom, no

one will ever say that you made me rich, God made me rich.

God is my provider. You're not my provider.

Take it all. I'm going to give 10% to God.

You can have all the rest back. A tremendous act of faith.

And once again God reaffirmed the promise.

You'll have a descendant. Your descendants will be as

numerous as the as the stars above, as the dust below.

All of this land will be yours. But now it's been years since

God first made that promise, and the darkness is starting to

close in, and the doubt is starting to creep in.

And what seemed so clear in the noonday sun of Haran now seems

like maybe. Maybe he was just imagining

things, because now he and Sarah are very old and they still

don't have a kid. They don't even have a daughter,

much less a son who will be their heir.

And God says to Abraham, one more time, you can trust me.

I can and I will keep my promises to you.

Don't be afraid of the dark. Easy words to say and easy to

believe in the noonday sun. Harder when the darkness closes

in, but on a grand scale. This is what God says to us all

through Abram and Sarai and our fathers and mothers of faith

throughout the Scripture and church history.

A promise most grandly and eloquently and potently

fulfilled in Jesus himself, his life, his death, and his

resurrection. Jesus is the light of the world,

that light which shines in the darkness and which the darkness

has not overcome. And yet we, even as we truly

profess and genuinely believe in Jesus, often don't comprehend

this light and we struggle to live this life of faith.

As we walk through the darkness of this world.

Not always, not always, but sometimes the way of faith seems

as bright and clear as a well worn path through a sunlit

woods. But at other times that path

disappears in the weeds, the fog and the night, and we find

ourselves in the darkness wondering which way to turn,

where to go, which light in the distance is the light of God,

and which is the light of deceptive flickerings or false

hopes and deceptions. Now I have over the years

encountered some in the churches, some people who have

never experienced the dark night of the soul, who seem always to

live in the noonday sun, who seem never to have been given a

reason to doubt, who are completely firm in their

confidence, direction, and faith.

If you are such a one, God bless you and thank God for the

blessing that you have received. But please do not chide, sneer

at, or judge as faithless those who seek to follow Jesus in the

darkness. As a friend of mine used to say,

just because you've graduated, don't burn down the school.

Those who walk in the darkness are prone to fears, anxieties,

worries and doubts. Doubts at first whether we're

still following God in his way, and then whether there really is

a God and a way and a true light.

They feel like all of this darkness is the result of sin.

They feel the repudiation of faith.

They feel the abandonment or faithlessness of God.

There are many who live in such darkness.

And some folks who live in that kind of darkness live in that

darkness, having been LED there out of faith, LED there by God,

out of the light. But there are others who live in

that kind of darkness that have never seen the light or never

recognize the light. And their their power and their

presence is painfully made known to us at times.

The shooter in Minneapolis, I think, is one of those.

An awful thing. What an abominable thing.

To kill another human being in cold blood is horrible.

To kill children is abominable. And we try to make sense of

these things. And one of the ways that we make

sense of these things is, is we look for for at least some

rationale, even if we disagree with the rationale, to know what

motivated the person, the ideology that drove them to

believe that doing this thing was the right somehow the right

thing to do. But here, in this instance,

there is no ideology. As best we can tell, the shooter

was acting simply to see the world burn.

No ideological agenda, no political objective, no message

to send. This appears to be someone who

just looked at the world and their life and said it's all

meaningless. It's all pointless, so why not

kill a bunch of children before killing myself?

Well, none of it matters anyway. That is a philosophy in and of

itself. You might have heard the name of

that philosophy before, or maybe not.

It's a philosophy called nihilism.

Some people pronounce it nihilism.

It's the same word. It's the same thing, just

different pronunciation. And at the core of nihilism is

the belief that there is no meaning, there is no purpose.

We are not going anywhere as individuals, as a race, as a

species, as a universe. We're here by accident and it's

all going to come to a fiery end one day.

And the only thing that really matters at all is power.

The power to crush others, or the power others have to crush

you. And whether you know it or not,

the studies and the surveys and the research show that nihilism

is on a very dramatic upswing as a philosophy of choice for many.

But dark nights, whether we enter them having seen the light

or never having seen the light, dark nights need not end.

And mindless, meaningless death and destruction.

Because dark nights, Dark Knights are God's good gift to

us. The slow and painful stripping

away of our reliance on all that is not God.

That feeling that you get or used to get when you prayed,

that feeling isn't God. That feeling you got when you

worshiped? That feeling isn't God.

That feeling you got of closeness to God in connection

with God when you're with family and friends, that feeling is not

God. That feeling you get of of

divine insight and supernatural presence as you read the Bible,

that feeling is not God. And if we live searching and

pursuing and chasing that feeling, we will inevitably end

up very far from God. So God leads us into the night

and strips away the feeling and all the senses, internal and

external, that we depend upon other than God.

When we walk in this kind of dark night of the soul, the best

thing that we can do, sometimes the only thing that we can do,

and sometimes we can't even do this, but the best we can hope

to do is to remember the light, the light that we used to see.

Remember and choose to believe that it was real and not

imagined. Amy and I have a friend.

She was really as much or more a mentor than anything else to us

years ago. Her name's Kimberly Butler and

she shared her wisdom and insight and understanding and

experience and and things like, you know, marriage,

relationship, spiritual growth, spiritual struggles that we face

in this world. And that's my phone on and

dinging. Oh my goodness, I made it three

services without muting my phone.

That is embarrassing. Now it is muted.

And we, we spent a significant amount of time with her one

time. And, and it was one of those

mountaintop experiences. You ever had a mountaintop

experience that that, that time and experience and event, a

thing, a connection, a relationship, a place, whatever

it was where you felt it just can't get any better than this.

God is so clear and so wonderful and life is so good and there's

so much joy and there's so much purpose and there's so much

meaning, and it all seems so real and it all seems so clear.

Like Peter and James and John on that mountain when Jesus started

glowing and Moses and Elijah showed up and they're like, Oh

my goodness, how could we ever doubt after this, a mountaintop

experience? And Kimberly said to me as we

were finishing up that she said, there's going to come a time

when you're going to be tempted to believe you just imagined all

of this. Not the events themselves, but

this that you're experiencing in your spirit right now, that you

just imagined it, that it wasn't real.

When that happens, before that happens, choose now to believe

that it is real. It is real.

I smiled and nodded. It like, yeah, there's nothing's

ever going to shake this. It was such a good day, such a

good day. And then the darkness came and

the feeling left, and I began to wonder, Was it real?

I mean really real? Or did I just imagine it?

Did I just imagine it? Part of the problem with walking

in the darkness is that we stumble and we fall.

Abram and Sarai stumbled and fell in some awful ways in fear,

no longer feeling the truth of God, no longer feeling the

presence of God, no longer feeling the power, no longer

feeling the trustworthiness of God.

They started making decisions to try to fix things and correct

things and make it happen and work it out on their own,

because how could they really believe that in their age and

that state of life they were ever really going to have a

baby? They needed to work something

else out, and they did some awful stuff.

They made bad decisions and did bad things in the name of hope

and of faith. We'll do the same thing.

We'll make bad decisions in the name of hope and faith.

We'll hurt others like Abram and Sarah hurt others in the name of

God and by the grace of God. By the grace of God, we will

become aware of those bad decisions and just how bad they

are. And we'll become aware of how we

have hurt others and just how much pain we've caused not just

then, but long before as well. And that pain and that hurt and

those bad decisions will seem so real and so much more real than

God ever did. And they will cause us to sink

into deeper darkness. And shame will wrap its cloak

and blinders around us until all that seems to exist is darkness

and despair. And we will wonder even if there

is a God who is good, and if such a good God exists, how

could a good God love a Wretch such as me?

But it is in the deepest darkness that God will whisper

into our darkness. This is why I died.

This is why the cross is necessary.

You too need my grace. You have no hope without it, no

hope without me. All of your goodness, all of

your deeds, all of your works, all of your plans, all of your

intentions, all of your efforts. We're only paving the road to

your hell. But for God, a light such as

this is so faint and so ethereal that it is easily missed.

A light such as this is easily drowned out and out, shone by

the dazzling lights of self help, church work, praise, glory

and admiration of the world and the church.

So many dazzling lights that the real hope and light of God and

Jesus often cannot be seen except in the darkness.

So I'll give you the comfort that God gave Abram the wisdom

and truth and advice that God gave to Abram and Sarai as the

darkness was closing in around them.

Wisdom, truth, and advice that are absolutely true, absolutely

right, absolutely necessary, and almost absolutely futile.

Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid of the dark.

God is Lord over the darkness as well as the light.

God is Lord over the chaos as well as the order.

God is Lord over confusion as well as clarity.

God is Lord over fear and anxiety as well as peace.

And though we are unfaithful, especially in the dark, God is

faithful. And though we, like Peter and

Judas, are unable to keep our promises, God always keeps His

promises. So may we not despair like

Judas, but instead repent like Peter, turning and returning to

the light, acknowledging our weakness and failures,

acknowledging the harm that we have done ourselves and others,

individually or collectively. And let us dispense with our

pride and acknowledge that the very best we can ever really

hope to do is to love Jesus and let us humble ourselves and hear

from Him what he spoke to Peter. If you love me, then feed, tend,

and care for my lambs all around you in this world.

If we take up that task as our mission of faith and love, we

can know this. That the work that we have been

given to do in faith has not been given to us because we've

earned the job. Not because our resume is

spotless. Not because we did such a

stellar performance in our last position.

We're given that work because God in His wisdom and mercy

knows that we need that work, that if we are not working in

His Kingdom by His grace, we will find ourselves rotting in

hell by our own efforts, decisions, and righteousness.

Sometimes we'll be working in the light, other times we'll be

working in the dark. But when the darkness falls, May

God help us remember the light in Jesus name, Amen.

Amen.