“Navigating Darkness”

A Sermon Based Upon  Mark 15: 33-41

By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

Fifth Sunday of Lent,   March 22nd, 2015

"When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. (Mar 15:33 NRS)

“Come on inside, it’s getting dark!”   

With words like these mothers have coax their children into coming inside.  Why did our mothers want not us to play outside after dark?  They didn’t have to explain.  When it got dark the lights came on and the house was filled with light and warmth.  It just made sense to come in.  Besides, who isn’t somewhat afraid of the dark?

For the most part, the Bible does not speak very favorably of darkness.  “Let there be light!” are the very first words God speaks.   Even for God, darkness has to be overcome for life energy to flow.   Without light there is no life.   The absence of light invites evil.

It should be no surprise that when the gospel first began to describe the crucifixion of Jesus, it says that ‘darkness came over the whole land’ (Mk. 15:33).   Mark’s description includes, but implies more than mere physical darkness.   Mark gives no direct explanation to what kind of darkness this was and it can’t simply be explained as a solar eclipse or dust storm.  The darkness here is only described by Jesus’ own dark cry of dereliction: “My God, why have you forsaken me?” (15:46).    

Though it may seem that Jesus is completely alone in the dark, he isn’t.  Mark also tells us that “many women were also there, looking on from a distance…” (Mk. 15:55).   He tells us that first among those women was Mary Magdalene.   Here she is, still following Jesus when the world goes dark.

I cannot help but wonder what it must have been like for Mary.  It is one thing to follow Jesus when everything is bright, sunny, visible, explainable and understandable, but what would it have been like to keep following, keep loving, keep caring, and keep walking along side of Jesus as he was dying in the darkness of the cross?  Perhaps there is something we might learn from Mary for that day when we too must face the darkness that will come.

KEEP WALKING

One thing we can certainly learn from Mary is that faith does not always depend upon having a full understanding of everything.   I don’t think that she, nor anyone, especially those male disciples, understood why Jesus had to suffer on the cross.   When Jesus first mentioned how ‘the Son of Man must suffer’ (Mk 8: 31-33),  even the idea of it was wholly rejected by Peter and the others.  Everything God was doing was beyond human understanding.  What God might do in darkness seemed to be pure nonsense.    But what the disciples did not want to see and ran away from, Mary and these other women did not run away,  but they walking faithfully with Jesus even in the dark. 

What might it mean of us to learn to navigate and negotiate our faith when life gets confusing and everything goes dark?  Could we dare imagine such a moment of difficulty, discouragement, or darkness?

A couple of months ago, the news reported the tragedy of a private plane crash in rural Kentucky in the dark of a stormy dark night.   All the passengers on that plane were killed except for the 7 year old daughter of the pilot, Sailor Gutzler.  She climbed out and walked over a mile from the crash site, emerging out of the woods bloody and barefoot in freezing temperatures.  By finding and following a small light, she kept walking toward it until she reached a house, knocked on the door and then told the 71 year-old homeowner Larry Wilkins, that she had been in a plane crash, her mom and dad were dead and the plane was upside down in the dark woods.  “I just can’t imagine anybody that young going through that, especially to witness her parents dying.”  The elderly man added,  “It’s amazing that she held up as good as she did.”  (http://mashable.com/2015/01/05/7-year-old-plane-crash-survivor/)

None of us want to imagine how dark life can get.  But what this little girl did in those dark Kentucky woods and what Mary did as they put Jesus up on the cross, can teach us all how we too must remain determined to keep on walking in faith even when the dark comes. 

Mary Magdalene is a unique example of such simple, spiritual determination.  We don’t know a lot about Mary Magdalene, but we know more about her than most of the other women who were there at the cross.  While we are mostly familiar with those twelve male disciples who followed Jesus wherever he went, Scripture also tells us about seven women who also followed Jesus wherever he went.  Mary Magdalene was one of those seven.  Luke tells us that she became a follower of Jesus because she had been cured from having seven demons (Lk. 8.2).  Demonic possession did not mean that Mary Magdalene had been an evil person or was a prostitute as some have mistakenly interpreted, but it means that until she met Jesus, her life had been completely out of her control as evil and negative dark powers ruled over her life.

What makes Mary Magdalene’s faithfulness at the cross so significant is that here, the darkness threatens once again.  Here again, evil had gotten the upper hand.  Here again, she is about to walk into a dark hole and she does not know where it will lead or how it will end up. 

To be a person of faith, even someone who has once experienced the saving power of Jesus Christ, does not guarantee we will be spared from having to walk into the darkness again.   Just as living in the daytime will not keep us from having to face the coming night, also living by faith does not mean that we will not still have to face crushing moments of disease, disability, doubt or discouragement.   No matter how hard we pray or how hard we believe, the day of faith will not keep the dark night away.    “When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land….” (Mk 15.33).   This is what Mary had to experience, and the whole world does too.

While we cannot prevent the darkness from returning, but we can learn to navigate it, and we must.  Like that little girl climbing out of that crashed plane and walking in barefoot in the freezing darkness searching for whatever light she could find, we too have to find a way to climb out of what has crashed in our lives and we must keep walking until we can finally see  light again.   What do you think motivated that little girl Sailor Gutzler to keep on walking?  She came from a good family.  Her family owned a furniture business up in Illinois. Her father was a good pilot and a flight instructor.  She must have had a good family and a good upbringing.  Is that part of what gave her the strength to keep walking through the dark?

Whether it was her family, her upbringing, or her sheer will to survive, what she did teaches us all what we must do.   It also makes it even clearer to us what Mary Magdalene did as the return of darkness threaten her.   Mary did not run away giving into her worst fears, but Mary resolved to remain close to Jesus.  She kept following, even when everything fell apart and even when they hung him on the cross.  What else could she do?  Because of her love for Jesus, Mary remained close and kept walking; even if it meant walking straight into the dark.

LETTING GO

In her recent writing about the dark, Barbara Brown Taylor says that before the time of Enlightenment and before the Printing Press could put the Bible into every hand or every home, the Christian faith was not made up of complicated doctrinal belief systems.  Then, faith was more ‘ a disposition of the heart than it was about the specific furniture in the mind.”  Taylor goes on to remind us that originally ‘to believe’ did not mean having it all figured out, as much as it meant ‘setting your heart upon’ something or ‘to give your love to’ someone.  (Learning to Walk in the Dark,  Barbara B. Taylor, Harper One, 2014, p. 143 ).    

There are no set of beliefs that can take the place of daily walking with Jesus, especially when you have to walk with him in the dark moments of life.   It would be especially good for people who struggle with religious belief today to know that true faith has always been more than memorizing or affirming the ‘letter of the law’, or deciphering the exact meaning of words, or living by certain rules, but belief should be more about knowing who you are with whatever you have to face or figure out.

This is why the great teachers of faith, have always encouraged belief, even before understanding comes.   “I believe that I might come to understand”,  Augustine wrote before the Middle Ages.   His statement was not some trick to get people into church or to encourage religious power instead of brain power, but this is how life always works. 

 Even the greatest discoveries of Science and Reason still begin with belief.  I can recall how, as a child, I used read about Dick Tracy in the comics and his amazing telephone he had in his wrist watch.  Now, some 50 years after I was introduced to that 1930s comic book character,  the very innovative computer company comes out with an Apple Watch you can phone with and so much more.   All this incredible science and high technology did not begin as a fact, but it all begins as an faith in an idea.   Faith never rests on how things are, but it rests on what could be.  In the same way, having faith, especially when life gets dark, is how we must position our hearts toward God even when we don’t have everything figured out.  Because faith is more of the heart than in the head,  we can keep walking with God, we can find a way to keep believing, keep learning, and keep walking by faith, even when we can’t see or find our way at the moment.  Just like we learn to find our way in our homes at night, we can find our way through the dark moments of life when the way is written in our hearts.

But to follow the heart, requires something more from us.  Mary had to learn yet another powerful lesson about navigating her life in the dark.   Remember her encounter with the resurrected Jesus only John’s gospel records (John 20:11-18)?    As she followed Jesus even to the grave, she stands weeping ‘outside the tomb.’   There, Mary encounters two angels, but even angels do not bring her comfort, as she answers them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.”  

We will all stand there with Mary.  We will stand at the darkness of the tomb and wonder where and why our loved ones are gone.  But there is more to this story.  For as Mary turns around she thinks she sees the gardener.  She even asks him if he knows where the body is.  It is only when Jesus called her by her name that she recognized him as her Rabbouni, or Teacher.   But just as Mary reaches out to embrace him, Jesus surprisingly and strangely says, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father….” (Jn. 20.17).

A lot of ink has been spilt trying to figure what Jesus means.   Whatever mystery lies behind it, one truth remains.  If Mary or we want to walk with Jesus through the darkness of our lives into newness in life, we will have to learn to let go, even more than we have learned to hold on.  We cannot learn to walk with Jesus into the new light of what can be, or will be, or must be, without letting go of how things have been.  If we are going to grow in Christ, both spiritually and emotionally, and if we want to move beyond the darkness we have experienced, we will have to learn to let some things go so that what is new will be able to grow.

But letting go is not easy either.  It is so human and natural to want to hold on.  Especially when the life we have been given has been such a blessing, or when the love we  have shared has been good and gracious, it can seem like a curse to have to let go.  There is an initial shock to all of this, for it may have first seemed to Mary, as it might also feel to us, that when we are asked to let go, that it’s because God does not care or Jesus does not want to embrace us.  What Jesus does want, however painful it can seem in the moment, is to take Mary’s life to a whole new level of living.  Jesus wants her to walk out of the dark she has known into the new God has to give.  But this newness of life will not take hold in her life, unless Mary first learns to let go.

GIVING ALL

How will Mary learn to do this?   How will we also learn to navigate the dark with a Savior who will not allow her or us to hold on to life as it was too tightly?   Amazingly, John’s retelling of it implies that Mary didn’t hesitate to let go and move on.  Without any hesitation, Mary moves on to announce to his disciples how she has “seen the Lord!”   Yet this Lord she has seen is no longer an earth-bound, buried Lord, but is the risen, living and ascending Lord!  How was she able to let go of what once was so freely?  How will we also be able to ‘let it go’, as the popular song says, so that the new can grow in us?

The answer could already be seen in Mary before the cross and even before the resurrection.  How we all find strength to walk with God in the dark is already available to us, as well.  What is it?   Although all four gospels tell us how a woman broke a jar of expensive perfume and anointed Jesus’ feet, none of the gospels tell us that this woman was Mary Magdalene.  But in spite of that, she has been the woman who traditionally, if not mistakenly, has been thought to be that woman.  How did this happen?  No one knows for sure, but when the gospel of John named Lazarus’ sister Mary as the woman, somehow in the tradition of the Roman church, Lazarus’ sister, Mary of Bethany became confused with Mary of Magdala  (From Anchor Bible Commentary on John, 1-12, by Raymond Brown, Doubleday, 1966, p. 452).   

Sure, these are different events and according to the Bible, and they are different women, but their hearts are much the same.   What both Marys did is what we all must do, before life gets dark.   It is only possible to let go and to keep going when you have already given yourself fully and completely to Jesus.   It is this fully abandoning love for Christ that we must fully give now, while it is still light, if we want to keep faith and find strength to navigate our hearts through the darkness that will come. 

I can’t out of my head the image of that little seven-year-old girl, Sailor Gutzler, who crawled out of that crashed plane, watched her parents die, and then found the strength to walk about a mile in the dark to find help.   “It’s amazing that she held up as good as she did,”  repeating again what the elderly 71 year-old Larry Wilkins said.   It is amazing, but it was no accident.   Her life before the crash gave her the strength to walk through that darkness.    And it will be much the same for us.  How much we give to faith now will determine how much strength we can receive from our faith when the darkness comes.  If you’ve never walked this way before, you certainly can’t easily learn after it gets dark.  So, now, walk in the light as He is your light, so that when darkness comes, you will already know the way to get through.   Amen.