Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (Chester UMC)

All right, I'm, I'm going to be standing at the pulpit today

because most of the time when I'm preparing sermons, like like

99.99% of the time over the law seems like a lot of years I've

been doing this now I get chunks and phrases and sentences and

ideas, which I then put in an outline and then I can speak

from the outline without looking at my notes.

Every once in a while it kind of drops into my head or spirit or

heart like word for word. And when I went down to start

writing my outline the other day, everything just came out

and I thought, well, I'll just use it as an outline.

But I've tried and I can't. So I'm I am going to go out of

my normal pattern today and kind of stick very close to a

manuscript for the preaching. So if you're wondering what's

going on with that, so am I. I have no idea why it happened

like this this week, but occasionally it happens like

this and I find it irritating. But God doesn't seem to care.

So first horror movie I ever saw, I was not supposed to see.

It's called Don't Be Afraid of the Dark.

It has stuck. Images of that have stuck in my

head since I was a little child. I was probably about four, 5-6

years old, somewhere around there.

And it was, I had to look it up because I've had this memory in

my head for years and and I never actually checked it out to

see whether I was remembering it correctly, but I am.

I remember I checked on IMDb there it was a made for

television horror movie called Don't Be Afraid of the Dark that

was first came out somewhere around 1973 or 4.

Somewhere around in there. My parents were watching it.

I was told to go to bed. I, of course said I want to

watch the movie and they said this movie is too scary for you.

They were right. I snuck out of bed, the couch

that my parents sat on its back was to the doorway.

So I kind of snuck around the doorway and was watching the

movie. Right up until the little furry

men crawled out of the stair the the door under the stairs and

began eating the children or doing whatever they were

supposed to be doing. At which point I decided my

parents were in fact smarter than I was and I went back to

bed. Did not sleep much that night

and I've had nightmares ever since.

But that phrase, don't be afraid of the dark has had special

meaning for me ever since. I can kind of relate.

Then in in, you know, some ways that experience was trivial

compared to what Abram was about to go through in his life.

And we see him entering into this period of darkness.

I preached on that some over the past couple of years here.

But up to this point, we have seen Abram behaving for the most

part in very faithful ways to God, trusting God in very

difficult circumstances. Family conflict with Lot over

territory, lots of sheep, lots of goats, lots of herds, lots of

conflict because there's not enough arable ground to to to

graze the animals. And so Abram and an act of great

faith and great humility and strong leadership gives Lot the

choice. Lot chooses the Jordan Valley,

the better land to grace his flocks on, and Abram takes the

less good land. And God says, don't worry Abram,

it's all going to be yours one day.

Lot, partly because he chose that better land, found himself

in an even worse situation where he was taken captive because

having chose to live near the city of Sodom, he inherited

Sodom's problems and Sodom had a real big political problem.

They got conquered and Lot and his family got carried off as

prisoners of war. And Abram and a tremendous act

of faith raised his own private army, recruited some other local

leaders to send some people along and went to war with the

king that had just defeated 5 kingdoms united.

And Abram defeated them and rescued Lot and his family.

And had such faith in God that God was his provider.

God was his source and God was his hope that even when he

reached the point of being offered all of the loot, all of

the booty that he had captured in that war, he said, no, I

don't want any of the money. I didn't go to get rich.

And no one will ever say that you made me rich.

God is my provider. I just went to save my family.

Lot went to or Abram went to war and he won and he refused to

profit from it, gave away all of the money.

A tremendous act of faith, trusting that God was his

provider. God again renewed his promises

to Abram. Abram and all of this began when

God went to him and his home country and said to him, already

a man pretty well advanced in years.

I think he was somewhere around the age of 70 at the time.

Leave your country. Leave everything you've ever

known. Leave your family of origin.

Go to a place that I will show you.

You don't even know where you're going when I'm going to tell you

where you're going, Abram, till you get there.

When you get there, I'll let you know.

And Abram left all that was familiar.

He left his country, he left his land.

He left his family of origin. He took his wife.

He took his household, including his nephew Lot, and he found

himself literally a stranger in a strange land.

When God said this is it, look around and over and over and

over again God renewed that promise.

And over and over and over again, Abram acted faithfully,

trusting in God. And then I don't know what

happened, but we can see the shift taking place here in

chapter 15. In Abram's mind, we're suddenly

where everything with the road before him, even though we

didn't know where he was going, the road before him seemed clear

and bright and open. And now suddenly Abram seems to

be drifting Into Darkness and saying, God, what's going on

here? It's been years and I still

don't have a son. I still don't have an heir.

God do something and God says I will don't be afraid.

And Abram believed God. But we see now Abram making some

decisions that show that his faith is wavering, that doubt is

creeping in, that the what was once bright and beautiful and

clear before is now becoming dark and dreary.

The This is the nature of living by faith.

It's a very human predicament, this dreadful challenge of

trusting God when we can't see. But it is the nature of living

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

where we've never been. And the company, sometimes of

friends, sometimes of strangers, and sometimes, it seems utterly

alone. Abram was entering what,

millennia later, Saint John of the Cross would describe as a

Dark Knight of the Soul. I want to get a cough drop.

Excuse me? This might be even shorter than

I expected. This dark night of the soul,

periods of testing that Saint John again, Saint John of the

Cross was not Saint John from the Gospels was a follower of

Jesus in the Middle Ages, and he talked about periods of testing.

One period was a testing of the senses.

When God will remove from followers, His faithful

followers will remove from them all external verification and

satisfaction that comes from following Him.

He used to love time and prayer. Now time and prayer feels

meaningless. He used to love gathering and

worship with family and friends. Now gathering and worship feels

like toil and drudgery and pointlessness.

You used to love doing acts of service in the community.

Now acts of service in the community feel like a duty that

produces no fruit and no good. And it's difficult as this dark

night of the senses is. What is even harder is the dark

night of the Spirit when God himself seems less and less

real, less and less present, and at times totally absent and

completely unbelievable. I think Abram was entering into

that kind of period. And God reassured Abram.

He said you can trust me. I can, and I will keep my

promises to you. And this on a grand scale, is

what God says to us all through Abraham and through our fathers

and mothers of the faith throughout Scripture and

throughout church history. God certainly is faithful.

God certainly does keep his promises.

He can do it and he is able to it.

And the promise most grandly and eloquently and potently

fulfilled is the promise, and was the promise of Jesus our

Savior, our Messiah, his life, death, and resurrection.

Jesus is the light of the world, that light in the darkness which

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

profess and genuinely believe in Jesus, often do not comprehend

this light and struggle to live this life of faith as we walk

through the darkness of this world.

Not always, not always. Sometimes the way of faith seems

as bright and clear as a well worn path in the sunlit woods in

the summertime. But at other times the 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 deceptive flickerings of false hopes and

deceptions. Now, I've encountered some folks

in the churches over the years who have never experienced a

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, and who

are completely firm in their confidence, direction, and

faith. If you are such a person, thank

God for the blessing that God has given you, but please do not

chide or sneer at or judge as faithless those who seek to

follow Jesus in the darkness. Those who walk in the darkness

are prone to fears, anxieties, worries, and doubts.

And doubt is not the opposite of faith.

Some would argue that without doubt there is no room for

faith. Doubts at first whether we are

still following God in his way, and then doubts as to whether

there really is a God and a way and a true light.

They feel like this is the result of sin.

They feel like that it's a repudiation of faith.

They feel like the abandonment that they've been abandoned by a

faithless God. Or perhaps there was never

really any God there at all. There are a lot of people living

in that kind of darkness, some who have come out of faith and

have been led by the Spirit into this dark night of the soul, and

others who have never seen the light of faith.

The shooter in Minneapolis here a few days past is one of many,

many disturbing types of events, not just for the violence, but

for the apparently total absence of any ideological motive for

the violence. Just wanted to see the world

burn. Just believing there's really no

point and no direction and no purpose.

So why not kill some people? The philosophers call it

nihilism or nihilism, depending on which they spell it the same

way they pronounce it differently.

I don't get that. But once again, they didn't ask

me. The nihilists.

The nihilists relish in the dark night of the soul, and they say

there is nothing but the darkness.

There is no meaning, There is no purpose, there is no direction.

Our existence is an accident, if it's even real at all.

There is nothing to look forward to except toil and misery, or to

the extent that we can grasp power and use it to make

ourselves feel better by doing whatever to the people around

us. You may have not heard the word

before. Maybe you have whether you know

that word and know that philosophy or not, you don't

have to look long at the news to realize that nihilism as an as a

consciously accepted philosophy of life is on the rise in some

very dramatic ways. And there are some that live in

that kind of darkness, where they see and believe that there

is only power and those who seek it or those who are crushed by

it. But dark nights don't need to

end in mindless, meaningless death and destruction, because

dark nights are God's good gift to us.

As surely as the sunshine of noon is slowly and painfully

stripping away our reliance on everything that is not God, What

we learn in the dark night of the soul that that warm and

wonderful feeling we get as we sit in prayer is not God.

That the passion that we feel as we stand and worship is not God.

That that sense of self or that sense of righteous, empowering

purchase purpose that we feel in our hearts and our souls and our

minds when we see the truth and when we see the direction, that

feeling is not God. And that if we chase the

feelings, we will inevitably lose sight of God, and we will

lose our way and be truly in the dark.

And so God, in His grace and in His mercy, will give to those

faithfully following Him at times a darkness that leaves us

as His followers, with nothing to depend upon with except God

Himself, who at times withholds even the very sense of His

presence and His power and His purpose.

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

can do, the very best that we can do is to remember the light

that we used to see, remember and choose to believe that it

was real and not imagined. The first time I encountered

this particular teaching was, was decades ago.

And, and Amy and I met a woman named Kimberly Butler.

I'm not going to give you any details of it other than that

with Kimberly's help. Now I'm just going to, it's

going to sound mysterious. And then we're going to, we're

going to, you know, like what was going on with the

sacrificing goats or something. Not a single goat was involved,

but Kimberly was guiding and teaching, Amy and I mentoring us

a bit and our relationship as a married couple and in the realm

of spiritual growth and spiritual conflict and those

kinds of things. And Amy and I had a, a

tremendous connection with each other and, and a very sense of

strong sense of kinship and friendship with Kimberly.

It was one of those mountaintop experiences.

If you've ever had a mountaintop experience, whether it camp or

school or church or family or whether, wherever this was for

US, one of those mountaintop experiences.

And Kimberly, as we were sitting and basking in the glow of the

noonday, Son of God on the top of the mountain, said this won't

last forever and you will reach a point where you will be

tempted to believe that you imagined all of this and none of

it was real. You have to decide now that when

that happens, you will choose to believe that this was real and

not imagined. And we knew at that point it was

real and not imagined. And I thought, I'm Kimberly

smart. That's not going to happen.

Well, that happens and it happened.

And I remember those days going did it?

Was it? Did I really did?

I just imagine all of that. And there are times when that is

all that we can do is to choose to believe that the memories we

have are memories of what was and is real, because it no

longer feels real in the darkness.

As we walk in the darkness, we will stumble and we will fall as

Abram and Sarai stumbled and fell over and over and over

again, each of them making bad decisions in the name of faith

and hope. Bad decisions that hurt

themselves and hurt other people around them.

And we will do the same. We will make bad decisions in

the name of faith and hope. And we will hurt others in the

name of God, just as they did. And by the grace of God, we will

become aware of just how much we have hurt others.

By the grace of God, we will become aware of just how bad our

decisions have been, just how weak our faith has been, and

just how much our behavior, our decisions have caused pain and

harm and hurt to others. And when we realize that, we

sink deeper into the darkness, shame will wrap its cloak and

it's blinders around you until all that seems to exist is

darkness and despair. And then you'll wonder if there

is ever a God who is good. 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 was

necessary for you. You need it too.

You need my grace. You needed my sacrifice.

You have no hope without it. You have no hope without me.

All of your goodness, all of your faith, all of your deeds,

all of your works, all of your plans, all of your intentions,

and all of your efforts. With all of those things, you

are only paving your road to hell, but for God, but for

Jesus. Now a light like that is so

faint, so ethereal, and so easily missed.

A light such as that is so easily drowned out and out,

shone by the dazzling lights of self help, church, church work,

praise, glory, admiration of others in the world.

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

Jesus often cannot be seen except in the darkness.

So I want to give you the same comfort that God gave Abram.

The wisdom, truth, and advice that God gave to Abram as the

darkness was closing in around him.

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

right, absolutely written, necessary, and almost absolutely

futile. Don't be afraid.

Don't be afraid of the dark. I say futile because it's nearly

impossible not to be afraid at times in that darkness.

But in the darkness, God is Lord.

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 the confusion as well as the clarity, the fear

and the anxiety, as well as the 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 let us not despair like

Judas, but let us repent like Peter, turning and returning to

the light, acknowledging our weakness and failures,

acknowledging the harm we have done.

Whether it's individually or collectively.

Let us dispense with our pride and acknowledge that the best

that we can ever really hope to do is to love Jesus a little bit

and love our neighbors ourselves as best we can.

Let us humble ourselves and hear from Him.

Hear from Jesus the same words that he spoke to Peter.

If you love me, then feed, tend, and care for my lambs that are

all around you in this world. If we take up that task as our

mission of faith, as our mission of 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 we've got such a stellar resume, not because we

did such great work in our last position, but because God is

merciful and God is wise and He knows that we need the work that

we're not. If we are not working in His

Kingdom by His grace to share His love, then we will find

ourselves rotting in hell by our own efforts, decisions, and

righteousness. Sometimes we'll be working in

the light that other times we'll be working in the dark, but when

the darkness falls, May God help us to remember the light and not

be afraid of the dark. In Jesus name, Amen.

Amen.