Sermon 5/30/21 "Learning to Walk in the Dark" Pr. Ben Adams
Pr. Ben Adams
The Holy Trinity
May 29/30, 2021
Learning to Walk in the Dark
It’s so fitting that a church named Holy Trinity would teach me so much about mystery since the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is after all one of the greatest mysteries of our faith. One God in three persons? Make it make sense. And so with today being Holy Trinity Saturday/Sunday and my last liturgy with you as your Associate Pastor, I think it’s fitting then for us to reflect a bit on our time together in this place we call Holy Trinity, and the mystery we are invited to embrace and experience here.
Let me start by taking you back to the first season of Lent that I spent with Holy Trinity in 2016, we read a book by Barbara Brown Taylor called Learning to Walk in the Dark. Little did I know that that book would become a kind of metaphor for my time here at Holy Trinity. Now don’t think for a second that I take for granted the risk you took on me when you called me to be your pastor. Heck I was fresh out of seminary and I was unproven and idealistic. Not to mention, I had a hunger for justice and a penchant for getting arrested while protesting, yet you put your trust and confidence in me and even when I stumbled, tripped, and fell, you picked me back up and put me back on my feet.
I was, and in many ways still am, learning to walk in the dark, but thankfully this is a community that’s not afraid of the dark. You know the mystery of God is experienced in the unlikeliest, darkest places and you don’t shy away from them. And maybe that’s because you trust, as Barbara Brown Taylor writes in her book that, “new life starts in the dark. Whether it is a seed in the ground, a baby in the womb, or Jesus in the tomb, it starts in the dark.”
Growing up I was told nothing good happens after dark, but maybe it's exactly the opposite. Maybe that’s where the best stuff happens if we’re brave enough to venture into the dark, and in our Gospel reading we have a scene that takes place when Nicodemus does just that, he ventures into the dark. Now his reasoning for going out under the cover of darkness was probably because he didn’t want to be seen by his fellow Pharisees with Jesus, but either way, Nicodemus comes to Jesus in the dark and what Jesus reveals to him is mystifying.
Jesus tells Nicodemus that “no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” To which Nicodemus is understandably confused and says to Jesus, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus answers him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
One of the things I love most about this utterly confusing interaction is Nicodemus’s earnest question, “Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” I felt that when he said it. Sometimes when I am reading the news and getting overwhelmed I think to myself, oh how nice it would be to get back into my mother’s womb where it was safe. But then I have to stop and think was my mother’s womb even as safe as I imagine it was?
Tara and I are exactly two months away from our baby’s due date and let me tell you nothing feels safe about it. We anxiously question everything that’s happening with the pregnancy and even had a scare recently because Tara had eaten some bean sprouts that came in her pad-Thai. Little did we know that bean sprouts can sometimes carry listeria. And this is us in the 21st century with access to Google and University of Chicago doctors! Can you imagine how risky birth was in the first century when Jesus was using it as a metaphor with Nicodemus?
Yet that’s the image that Jesus uses to convey what it looks like to enter the kingdom of God. So in other words he’s saying that only through the vulnerable, mysterious miracle of birth can we enter the kingdom of God. And this is more than just passively being born, Jesus is troubling our idea of being born again by inviting us into the act of labor which by its very nature is risk. So to enter into the kingdom of God through the act of labor in the first century when the majority of women were dying in labor means that entering the kingdom of God requires trust in our most vulnerable of moments and a willingness to risk in order to experience the miracle of life in all its fullness.
This is a tall order with all that’s happening in the world around us, and we might desire to get back into our mother’s womb and stay there and not come out until things change, but there is a new world waiting for us just beyond the darkness if we just breathe and push and labor it into being just as God labored us into being.
Valerie Kaur, a Sikh activist and lawyer gave a speech during a watch night service at the Metropolitan AME Church on Dec. 31, 2016, in which she put it beautifully. She said,
Yes… the future is dark… So the mother in me asks what if? What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb? What if our America is not dead but a country that is waiting to be born? What if the story of America is one long labor? What if all of our grandfathers and grandmothers are standing behind us now, those who survived occupation and genocide, slavery and Jim Crow, detentions and political assault? What if they are whispering in our ears “You are brave”? What if this is our nation’s greatest transition? What does the midwife tell us to do? Breathe. And then? Push. Because if we don’t push we will die. If we don’t push our nation will die. Tonight we will breathe. Tomorrow we will labor in love, through love, and your revolutionary love is the magic we will show our children.
Powerful stuff from Valerie Kaur, and I have hope she is right that America is not in the darkness of our tomb, but rather the darkness of the womb. But even recognizing we are in the dark is a difficult confession in its own right, let alone believing that this present darkness is not the end, but just the beginning. But that’s the kind of honest hope that will give us the ability to put one foot in front of the other and begin learning to walk in the dark.
Each step will bring mystery, risk, vulnerability, and no doubt we will even stumble, trip, and fall, but we can trust that God who so loved the world, will pick us back up and put us back on our feet. This is the same God that created you and has called you saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Even in the dark when we cannot see, we can still hear God’s voice and we can answer, “Here am I; send me!”
I was talking with a friend whose child just turned one, and her child is already walking and has been for some time. I told her how amazed I was, and she said, the key is to let them walk without holding both of their hands. She said, “Sure, they’ll fall more, but with each fall they build more stabilizer muscles in their core and in their legs and feet.” In a mysterious way, that resonates with my experience here at Holy Trinity. You have given me so much freedom to try and fail and to walk and fall here, and because of that freedom, it has made me a more balanced pastor.
We often say that Holy Trinity is a teaching parish, as we have supervised countless Ministry in Context Seminarians and Interns, myself included in that list, but maybe given the way we teach we are more of a learning parish than a teaching parish. Like we know we can’t just take your hands and lead you since we’re all in the dark here, so instead we invite you to learn with us as we walk together in the dark, picking each other up when any of us stumble, trip, or fall.
The Holy Trinity is mysterious, and this place Holy Trinity will always be synonymous with mystery to me. And It’s precisely because of this openness to the mystery that we can be bold to learn about and dismantle racism together even when it implicates us, we can be bold to provide our confirmation students and our Life Together catechumens an opportunity to ask questions without trying to appease them with easy answers or cliches, we can be bold co-creators with God as we labor together and birth the kingdom of God here on earth as it is in heaven, and near or far we can be bold to risk another step together putting one foot in front of the other as we vulnerably, but bravely learn to walk in the dark. Amen
