Out of Darkness

Easter Sunday

April 8, 2007

Presented to the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Huntington

Rev. Paul Ratzlaff

“Little Sally came back from her UU RE class and told her mother that the teacher told them the story of Moses leading his people out of Egypt.

“Her mother asked her to tell the story.

“’Well,’ said Sally, ‘Moses led his people away from Egypt and the Pharaoh started chasing them.  When they got to this big sea, Moses called his engineers and they built a pontoon bridge.  When the people got to the other side and the Pharaoh’s army was on the bridge, Moses called out his helicopters and artillery and they bombed the bridge and blew up the army and they all drowned and Moses and his people got away.’

“Sally’s mother was horrified.  ‘That can’t be what your teacher told you!’

“’Well, no,’ said Sally, ‘but you would never believe it the way she told it.’”[1]

In the stories of Passover and Easter, there are some parts that “you would never believe.”  But one of the things I love about Jewish and Christian scripture is this: mixed in with the unbelievable are the all too human stories.  The stories are not just about cardboard, stereotyped perfect heroes who always do the right thing, but about humans with all the glory and shortcomings that characterize each one of us.

Isn’t it all too human, as I told the kids, that in the middle of the desert some Israelites wanted to go back to Egypt and to slavery?  Better the horror that they knew than the horror they could imagine lost in the desert!

There’s a part of the Easter story that also captures some of the feeling of being in this lost place – a place without a clear way through, a time, if you will, of feeling yourself lost in the dark without a clue about finding your way home.

Many of you will remember the figure of Peter.  Peter was brash, impulsive.  When the soldiers came to arrest Jesus, Peter slashed off a soldier’s ear, which Jesus, as the story goes, calmly healed.  As Jesus was anticipating the terror that was coming, he predicted that one of his disciples would deny ever knowing him.  “Tonight you will all fall from your faith on my account,” Jesus observed.  Peter, good-hearted Peter, proclaims, “Everyone else may fall away on your account, but I never will.”  To which Jesus replies, “I tell you, tonight before the cock crows you will disown me three times.”  Peter protests, “Even if I must die with you, I will never disown you.”  “Nor me,” the others murmured their agreement.  (Matthew 26:31-35)

If you remember the story, you will remember that while Jesus was on “trial” then tortured and mocked, Peter waited in the courtyard.  Here’s how Matthew describes what happened.  “Meanwhile Peter was sitting outside in the courtyard when a serving-maid accosted him and said, ‘You were there too with Jesus the Galilean.’  Peter denied it in face of them all.  “’I do knot know what you mean,’ he said to the people there.  ‘This fellow was with Jesus of Nazareth.’  Once again he denied it, saying with an oath, ‘I do not know the man.’  Shortly afterwards the bystanders came up and said to Peter, ‘Surely you are another of them; your accent gives you away!’  At this he broke into curses and declared with an oath: ‘I do not know the man.’  At that moment a cock crew; and Peter remembered how Jesus had said, ‘Before the cock crows you will disown me three times.’  He went outside, and wept bitterly.”  (Matthew 26:69-75)

In the evangelical Christian church that I grew up in, that story was used to remind us how sinful we humans are, and to buck up our courage to never betray Jesus in witnessing to our heathen friends.

However, in reflecting on Peter’s story, I think it captures a very human moment, much like the story of the Israelites wanting to return to slavery.  Here’s Peter a man who has given up his old way of life enthralled with the charisma of this exciting and deeply inspiring rabbi Jesus.  He’s witnessed a person who loves so deeply and completely that it’s as if God has come to earth to demonstrate how inclusive God’s love is.  This love is not restricted to the powerful, the successful, but to those who proper society considers throw-aways – the prostitutes, the tax-collectors, the Samaritans – like so many around us  consider undocumented workers the throw-aways of our time.  Peter has witnessed the healing that Jesus brings to every life he touches, not only physical healing, but a deep spiritual healing so profound that people speak, like Nicodemus, of being freshly born.  They speak as if the old self has been discarded and a new self, directly enthused by God, has been born.  They speak of a new wholeness that has turned their lives around.  Wow!  Peter, as I said, is enthralled.  He leaves all the familiar, but unsatisfying patterns of his life, to be in the presence of this amazing teacher.

But then, as we know, this teacher is arrested and abused and tortured, and ultimately killed like any other common criminal.  What does Peter make of Jesus now?  Is he totally disillusioned?  Everything that was good has suddenly vanished?  I can imagine Peter thinking, “He’s not different than any other hero…when he gets caught up in the military-industrial complex, he gets ground up just like any other jewel and thrown on the bone-heap of Golgotha.” All of Peter’s hopes and dreams are dashed!  Can you understand his wishing he had never encountered this Jesus, and his wishing to return to the way things were before he ever knew Jesus?  Can you understand his wanting to go back to slavery?  Everything that he thought offered promise has been lost; “Better I go back to what I was, even in its “slavery” than stay in this God-forsaken desert!”  Is it any wonder that he denied ever knowing Jesus?  He just wanted to get away.

These stories of Peter, and the story of Israelites, are not just stories of long ago.  You can treat them as ancient stories irrelevant to today’s world.  But I invite you to consider them as teaching stories that relate to our lives even in the year 2007.  They offer us insight into our own process of change and deepening, if we allow them to work in our spirits.  I love the invitation of the Seder to make this ancient story relevant to who we are living in today’s world.  I invite you then to consider these stories and your own spiritual journey.

How many times have we felt lost in the desert?  Lost in the darkness without a path forward?  A loved one betrays our trust; we get a diagnosis of life-threatening disease; we’re fired; our home burns down – suddenly we find ourselves lost, ungrounded, unsure of how to proceed.

Often even when we choose to strike out in a new direction, we find ourselves experiencing this darkness, this lostness.

A spouse decides that for her own self she must dissolve a marriage and rend apart a family.  So she begins the process of separation.  Months in, in the middle of the desert, she begins to wonder, “Were things really so bad?  Maybe I should go back?  At least I know what was there, but I have no idea what’s ahead?”

You quit a job that stifles you.  In the middle of the search, you feel yourself overcome with doubt.  “Maybe that’s all I could be.  Maybe I shouldn’t have been so foolish to think things could be any different.”

You begin to act on those inner stirrings that tell you that all these years you’ve been living a lie.  That the sexual orientation, or gender expression, you’ve been trying to fake isn’t authentically you.  You begin tentatively to ask questions, to explore, to begin to learn about the BLGT community.  At some point, you may feel totally lost.  “Who am I really?  Is this all an illusion?  Should I go back to the unsatisfying but familiar ways I used to be?”

Any spiritual journey has these desert moments, what have been called the “dark nights of the soul.”  You wonder why you ever fell for the promise that you could be more spiritually alive.  Give it all up, all the spiritual discipline, the exploration, the reading and studying, and just go back to being the good American consumer that we are all encouraged to be.

My point is that many of us know this desert time, when we are so, so tempted to go back to the old familiar, but deeply unsatisfying, indeed enslaved, ways of being.

So how do we live in these desert times?  What sustains us?

On the one hand these old stories can offer us sustenance.  In the Passover story, it’s the story of arriving at the Promised Land, and the assurance that God provides even in the desert.  Yes, we know, the Israelites wandered around the desert for forty years, but that desert time was not wasted time.  Sure it was hard; it was disheartening, but unbeknownst to the people in the thick of it, they were being refashioned into a people capable of freedom.  They were being transformed from a people with slave mentalities to a people with the consciousness of a free people.  It was not enough to physically leave Egypt.  They had to leave Egypt spiritually – to find their own identity as a free people in a “promised land.”

Of course in the Easter story, the story doesn’t end with the trial and crucifixion of Jesus.  Peter is not left in the courtyard denying he ever knew Jesus.  On Easter Sunday, they went to the tomb where the dead Jesus had been laid out, and discovered that it was empty.

Then they had such intense experiences of the presence of Jesus’ spirit that the stories tell of his miraculous coming again to life.  Some believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus.

As a religious liberal, I take that story as a metaphor to mean that nothing can kill the spirit embodied in the life of the man Jesus.  His example and his teaching live even today, nearly 2000 years after his death.  Resurrection can be understood in a many different ways.  I understand it to mean that nothing can kill the loving spirit of Jesus, which so demonstrated God’s love, that we today can be inspired to live our lives in imitation of that inclusive, non-judgmental love that welcomed all, even the outcastes, to join him in a meal together – that made them “companions,” which means that they would break bread together.  These ancient stories, then, can assure us when we feel lost, when all we can see is darkness about.

No one of us wants to be lost.  We want clarity.  We want certainty.  We want to know the path we should follow.  We don’t like being confused – being in the dark.  Yet that very experience of being in the dark, in the desert, may be a critical part of our transformation.  That is, there’s no going to the spiritual depth, to transformation, without going through a time of darkness.

In the Passover story of the Exodus, the value of the time in the desert may be apparent, as I’ve just said, but what about Peter’s denial and his bitter weeping?  Was his denial a critical time in his own deepening spiritual faith?  I would offer this possibility.  For Peter, his moment of denial, his time of despair, was critical in the transformation of his ego.  From his ego-filled self, the brash self that advertised his heroics, to the much deeper self that could follow the example of Jesus’ love he may have had to go through the desert in the courtyard, the self-discovery that his ego couldn’t sustain him, and that he needed to rely on something much more profound than his ego-self.

I find that Buddhist teaching, especially that of Pema Chodron, helps me appreciate that being in the desert, being in the dark, is critical to spiritual deepening.  It’s not something to avoid, although it’s not something my little self wants.  Chodron writes of “groundlessness,” those times when we feel that everything we depend on is no longer reliable.  “Groundlessness” is one way to describe the experience of the Israelites in the desert.  Nothing could be counted on.  Nothing was familiar.  And “groundlessness” might capture Peter’s experience in the courtyard.  The foundation of his faith was shaken.  He didn’t know where to turn now.  “Groundlessness” is the anxiety that we feel when we get a diagnosis that reminds us that our bodies are aging, and eventually will die.  It’s the anxiety we feel when our old tricks to earn love and respect no longer work.  It’s the empty feeling when were in the middle of a transition, unsure of where to turn.

She says we have choices in those precious moments of feeling groundless.  We can choose to try to resolve them in the old familiar, but ultimately dissatisfying, ways.  This is what most humans do in this moment.  We can steel ourselves, rigidify and go back to the old ways of being – like returning to Egypt, or Peter returning to his old ways of making a living.  But to do that means making ourselves hard and disconnected.

But there’s another way.  We can choose to lean into the feeling.  We can experience the groundlessness as it is.  When we do that, she suggests, we soften, and we may expand into a sense of connection with every being.

In other words, sinking into the feeling with compassion for ourselves in this place of darkness, we may experience our connectedness with all of being the very process of life in its ongoing flow, which can also be expressed as living in God’s love.

The darkness then can be part of the liberation.  It’s part of the path that leads to the grand experience of life, which celebrates that glory of each moment.  Out of darkness, the little self drops away and we experience our oneness with all being.  It’s the mystic moment when we see with freshness as if we have new eyes, as if we are re-born into this marvelous world.

Out of darkness we come to Easter glory, to the Promised Land, to the field that Rumi speaks of, “….when we lie down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about….”   We come to sing praise, because we are so filled with gratitude for all that is, not because it serves our little needs, but because it is, illimitable you. Like e.e. cummings we praise most this amazing day.  Out of darkness comes praise!