“Out of Darkness”

A Sermon based upon 2 Corinthians 4: 1-15

By Charles J. Tomlin,  DMin.

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

Transfiguration Sunday, Feb. 19^th, 2012

Delos Miles tells of the darkest moment of his life.  He was in the army during the Korean Conflict and the North Koreans had suddenly attacked and overrun his unit.   He was lying there in a foxhole, alive but frozen in fear.  Most all his buddies around him were dead.  The enemy soldiers were walking around shooting any they thought alive.  He lay as still as he could, as the enemy soldiers came toward him.  He played dead and prayed to God: “If you spare my life, I’ll serve you the rest of my life”.  

The soldier passed by and did not shoot.  Delos had to lie there for 18 hours, in the dark, with the enemy all around.   But the next day, when light came, he escaped.  Needless to say, young Delos kept his vow.  He became a minister of the gospel, and eventually became a well-respected professor of Evangelism at Southeastern Baptist Seminary.   Dr. Miles preached my graduation ceremony.  He preached from Hebrews 12, and he challenged us: “Lay aside all that hinders you.  Run the race with Jesus.”

THE DARKNESS THAT SURROUNDS US

The picture of young Delos Miles lying in that trench with darkness all around him, making his vow to serve God no matter what, is the kind of image we have in Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians.   Paul is also surrounded by darkness and death.  This letter was written as a defense of his ministry some were trying to discredit.  Some believed he was not a true apostle.  If his ministry were true, they argued, should it not instantly succeed?  Instead of immediate success, Paul was facing defeat after defeat, opposition after opposition.   He writes: “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair persecuted, but not forsaken, struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in our body the death of Jesus…. (4: 8-10a).   How could God be in the darkness and constant defeat and difficulty that surrounded Paul and his ministry?

The darkness surrounds us too.   In fact, the Bible claims that when God created the world the earth was “covered by darkness” (Gen. 1?1-2).   It was out of “darkness” that God said, “Let there be light”.   The light did not get rid of the darkness, but the darkness was overwhelmed by the light.  When the light shone brightly, the darkness fled.  But when and if the light does not shine, darkness returns.

The threat of spiritual darkness is as real as the return of physical darkness we experience at the end of each day.   Only light holds the darkness back.  Spiritual darkness returns too, when the spiritual illumination of God’s truth is hidden in our world.  Recently, an NPR Broadcast interviewed Charles Murray, author of a shocking report on Working Class, White America.   Murray claims that in the 1960’s, a divergent line of separation began to take shape between lower class and upper class, white Americans.  In his controversial book, Coming Apart, Murray believes that when working class white America became obsessed with affluence and prosperity started losing its spiritual soul.  He cites statistics to show that while the upper class remains stable in its virtues, the American working class is losing the 4 most basic “founding virtues” of marital morality, honesty, industriousness, and religious faith.  Murray insists that the US constitution was written with assumptions that are no longer true: that America is made of people who are faithful in our marriages, honest in our daily lives, hard-working, and true to our belief in God.  Now that these virtues are practiced by less than 12 to 15 percent of the white working class, he fears, we are headed into great socio-political, spiritual and moral darkness in this country. Is there any wonder the social fabric of our country is ripping at the seams? (http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/feb/3/when-founding-virtues-diminish/

There will be debate about Murray’s conclusions; but there is no debate about the uneasiness, confusion, divisiveness, and increasing moral darkness growing in our land.   Diana Butler Bass believes that we in the church will not escape this coming moral and social darkness.  As a Church historian, she believes that Church, as we have known it, is on the way out.  Christianity will survive, and some churches will survive, she says, but in a few years, it’s going to look very different.  Quoting a recent Times Magazine, she spoke of the decline and fall of institution after institution in our world, especially those of established religious expression.   It’s a dark thought, and we know from history, that when the great institutions are not upheld, things come apart.  If the lights of our institutions go out, we will be left in the dark. 

Most of us don’t want to take the warning signs seriously.  When it comes to facing reality, most of us are like those who were attending the Sugarland concert in Indiana last year.  The forecasts were calling for bad storms and winds, but the event organizers decided to go on with the show, without making any changes at all.  Then, when the winds came, the stage collapsed, and many people were killed or injured.   It was a tragic event that could have averted.   People were not injured because of the storms and the wind, but because they ignored the warnings and did not make plans, make changes, or adjustments.

The word of hope found in our text today is that the darkness comes, but it does not have to destroy us.  We can avoid the worst, even if the dark comes.  If we will learn how to respond to the challenges together, by accepting our failures together rather than placing blame and attacking each other, as people were attacking Paul, then we can keep the lights on, even in the dark.  Listen again to Paul’s words from our text in verse 8:  We can be afflicted, but not crushed.  We can be perplexed, but not driven to despair. We can be stuck down, but not destroyed.   In other words, we do get hurt, but we can survive.  However, to survive the dark we must also develop a different level of faith and commitment.   We must be ready to, as Paul says, “carry in our body the dying of the Lord Jesus, so that the life of Jesus might be made visible in our bodies” (4.10).

Paul is declaring his readiness to deal with the darkness by staying in the true light.   Paul recognizes that his “ministry” is “by the mercy of God” and depends upon God, not upon himself.   None of us have the energy or skill to keep things going and keep things alive when the world is changing around us.  But God does.  When we stay alive in God, God keeps things alive in us too.   Just as Paul decided not to join the dark, hidden, shameful dark ways of ministry, he keeps the darkness out of his own soul.  Paul’s front-line of defense against darkness is that he will continue to work “by the open statement of the truth” and he will continue to “commend himself to the conscience of everyone in the sight of God” (2).  Paul will not run, Paul will not hide, and Paul will not give in to darkness surrounding him.  Like Delos Miles, it is in the midst of the surrounding darkness he makes and keeps his promise to God.   We must do this do.

THE DARKNESS WITHIN US

How we make our promise to God is very important.   The greatest “darkness” in this world is not the darkness “out there” somewhere, but it is the darkness that can be in us, in our hearts, even among the community of faith, blinding our own spiritual eyes.  Paul declares that spiritual blindness is the worst darkness of all.  He writes: “Even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing.  In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ….” (4.3-4).  

At the very center of the gospel story of Jesus was the blindness of many to Jesus’ own teaching, preaching and miracles.   When Jesus faced this growing blindness to his message of healing, hopeful love, he warned his opposition of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit (Matt. 12.31); which the prophet Isaiah named specifically as “calling good, evil and calling evil, good” (Isa. 5.20).  This is the kind of spiritual blindness that not only darkens the land, but worse, darkens the human heart in ways that it can never recover.   Think of some of the worse forms of evil in western human history; the crucifixion of Jesus; the inquisitions of the Catholic Church; the institution of human slavery, Stalin’s Communism, Hitler’s Nazi Germany and the Holocaust,  and today, the Rise of Islamic Terrorism.  Right in the center of every single worst form of evil imaginable in this world is the spiritual blindness within human hearts.

Where does such spiritual blindness begin?  Not where we might think.  The “Unbelievers” Paul mentions are not just out there in the world.   At times, we can be “unbelievers” too.    I came across an Interview the late Peter Jennings, ABC News Anchor had with John Wimber, the founder of the Vineyard Church Movement, which gave birth to a spiritual movement a few years back.  In the interview, Wimber described the first time he ever went to church.  He said: “I went to church and expected something dramatic, but nothing happened.  I went to the pastor and I asked him, “When will we start the exciting stuff?”  

“What do you mean, the pastor asked him.

“When will we get to turn water into wine, multiply the loaves and fishes, feed the hungry, and give sight to the blind?  Don’t you still believe in this kind of stuff?

The preacher responded, “Oh, yes we believe it, we just don’t do it.”

Remember the Wendy’s commercial, Where’s the beef?  That’s what John Wimber was wondering.  Jesus himself said that his disciples would do “greater works”.   So, where’s the beef?   Is there any more subtle place for darkness to begin than among those who say they believe in God, but cease to live their beliefs?

According to Paul, preventing the darkness from getting blinding our hearts demands this twofold response:  (1) The main focus is not on “me”, “We do not proclaim ourselves”, Paul says.   We do not have all the answers.  (2)  Secondly, “we preach Jesus Christ as Lord and make ourselves your slaves for Jesus sake.”   The focus is on proclaiming Jesus and meeting the needs of others.  Paul’s logic for keeping his own heart in the light is confirmed later in John’s letter: “But if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. (1Jo 1:7 NRS).  Spiritual blindness has no chance in us when we prove our faith in Jesus by serving each other.  In other words, we can’t just say we believe, we must “be-live it”.   We must actually be “slaves” to each other “for Jesus sake.”

LET LIGHT SHINE OUT OF DARKNESS

Finally, we all know that you can’t get rid of darkness.   Fortunately, Paul does not tell us that we have to get rid of all the darkness.  What we must do is determine to live and walk in the light.    When people live and walk in the light, the darkness does not have a chance.  This is spiritually true, just as it is physically true, because, as Paul reminds us from the original creation story, “For it is the God who said, Let light shine out of darkness, who has shone in our hearts to give the light….” (4.6).  These Biblical words, “Let there be light” are not just words about God and the world, they are words are empowered to say against the dark.

How are we empowered to say no against the darkness?   Think about something Len Sweet recently told:  We have just celebrated Valentine’s Day.   People often celebrate the warmth and softness of love with something cold and hard---a diamond.   Diamonds are forever, the advertisement reminds us. That’s why they cost so much.  Diamonds are expensive because they are rare, elusive, and found only in tiny bits and pieces. Yet if you could travel 50 light years away from Earth, to star BPM 37093, located in the Centaurus constellation, you would arrive at “Lucy” — a burned out sun, a “white dwarf,” whose entire central core is a planet-sized chunk of crystallized carbon — a diamond.  That burned out star is valued at 10 billion-trillion-trillion carats worth of a diamond.  This “space diamond” was named “Lucy” after the Beatle’s hit, “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.” By comparison, the largest earth-diamond, the Golden Jubilee Diamond, is 545 carats — by comparison only a sandal toe full of diamond “sand” from one of Lucy’s many dunes.

Diamonds are cherished because they give off a sparkle and glow and they ignite with a kind of inner fire when the light hits them.  However, that star named “Lucy,” even with her solid diamond core is unremarkable and unassuming as any other stone, without a source of light.  You could take a drawer full of exquisite diamond gemstones and dump them in a drawer and — without the gift of reflective light—-you wouldn’t know you had anything different than a box of rocks.

We too, are unremarkable people, nothing much more than a bunch of dull rocks on the ground, unless we let the light of Jesus Christ shine through us.   It is the miracle of the divine light which “transforms” and “transfigures” us into brilliance and purity, as we reflect HIS true light.   In the dark, a diamond is nothing, just another stone, but give that “stone” some light to reflect and it is miraculously transformed  (From a sermon by Leonard Sweet, “Let Your Diamond Light Shine”).

We cannot shine brilliantly by shinning our own light.  We have no light by ourselves.  The reason the darkness sometimes overtakes us is because we forget this. It is not our light, but the light of Jesus that we must shine, we must show and we must continue to reflect.  Without the light of Christ we are in darkness, but if we shine and reflect his light, even into this darkening world, we might be amazed what we can overcome.  Remember I told you how Diana Butler Bass told of the end of church as we know it.  She speaks of how things as they used to be are ending, but she has not given up on the church.  She says that in this day of looming darkness, the church has new potential and possibilities to shine.   But if we want to shine, we can’t hide our light under a bushel basket or in a church building.   As she ended conversation on the website, DayOne, she told of a Bishop in Chicago, who recently visited a pastor of a large inner city church, where the building was practically empty of worshippers.  It was Ash Wednesday.  This is a time most mainline churches reflect on their mortality and display an act of repentance before God by having ashes placed on their forehead.  It’s a time to make a vow, a promise to serve God in a dark world.  The problem was that nobody was going to come into that church to repent and to have ashes placed on their forehead.   So what did they do?   Instead of offering a service in the church, they went out on the street in front of the church and stood there, fully robbed with ashes in hand.   At once, a Taxi driver crossed three lanes of traffic to stop and receive the ashes.  Then another passerby came up, saying “I haven’t received the ashes in years, thank you.”  Before you knew it, all kinds of people were stopping to receive the ashes to confess their sins, to repent and to renew their faith in God.   Not a single one of them would dare go in a church, but they all were ready when the church came to them (http://day1.org/3667-diana_butler_bass__ day1_ conversations_with_peter_wallace From a Video on Day1.org).  

So finally, we are all in that spiritual foxhole with Delos Miles.  We are surrounded by darkness around us and even the threat of darkness within us.   To overcome this spiritual darkness, we must promise to reflect the light--we must shine the light, and we must take the light to those living in the dark.   What we cannot do is keep the light hiding in a church building, or the world will keep growing darker.   But if we reflect the light and “do not lose heart” the same God who said “let there be light” can say through us: “let light shine out of darkness”.   The promise of God is that everywhere the light shines, the darkness will flee.   “The light shined in darkness,” says the gospel, “but the darkness did not overcome it” (John 1.5).   His light can shine brightest even in a dark world, and he will shine even through broken, cracked, “clay jars”.   But the light cannot shine, if we hide it.   We must find ways to openly “proclaim Jesus” and “not ourselves”.   He is our only true source of light.  Amen.


© 2012 All rights reserved Dr. Charles J. "Joey" Tomlin, B.A., M.Div. D.Min.