Years ago, I was invited to go caving in West Virginia. The cave we visited some of you may know – it was called Organ Cave, though it does not have the Stalagpipe Organ that’s found in Luray. The trip was not just a tour through well-lit caverns full of stalactites and stalagmites and other cave formations – though that kind of tour was available there – but instead it was six hours underground, exploring a living cave with two experienced guides. We wore old, old clothes, heavy gloves to protect our skin and headlamps and helmets. We entered the cave through the caverns, through that official tour route, following that for a little ways until we took a detour, stepping off
the clearly marked path, past a metal fence and into a creek bed, which we followed back into the mountain, flipping on our headlamps and leaving behind daylight and the familiar world of trees, sky and electrical outlets.
In those six hours, we were told we covered a mile, maybe a mile and a half of cave – a
fraction of the 45 miles that have been mapped so far in a vast network, portions of which are still unknown. We saw fossils and annoyed bats. These caves weren’t as beautiful as the caverns closer to the surface – they were muddy and wet and hard to maneuver through – but they were beautiful and mysterious in deeper ways. We scrambled and squeezed and climbed our way through tunnels and rooms. At one point, we paused to rest in a large hall – a vast, circular room that I remember as
something like a cathedral – and then our guides invited us to turn off our headlamps. We did, and the darkness was utter, complete. You could not see your hands in front of your eyes, or anything above or below. We sat on boulders in that darkness for a few minutes, perhaps, and then one of our guides lit a candle. Our eyes gradually readjusted to this new, not-quite darkness, and after some time in that flickering beauty – that light shining out of darkness – we turned on our headlamps again and
kept moving.
It was humbling, that time in the darkness, realizing that our guides knew these
passageways and halls and cathedrals – to them they were familiar pathways, familiar journeys – but we would have had no way of knowing how to get home from that beautiful, scary, underground labyrinth that felt like another world.
So this morning’s Epistle reading, from Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, resonated with me this week. I’ve been reading a book by Episcopal priest and author Barbara Brown Taylor, titled Learning to Walk in the Dark, and I have Tom Howell to thank for introducing me to that particular book. It’s been a good book to read over these last few weeks while I’ve been out for medical reasons and away from church.
In her book, Taylor explores the idea of darkness – metaphorical, theological, actual
– and our modern-day aversion to darkness, to night. In fact, in the course of writing the book, Taylor visited that exact place, Organ Cave, where I experienced complete darkness and the light of a single candle. Early on, she writes about people’s responses when she tells them what she is working on, and she is surprised by the questions she hears back, and s she asks this:
“How [have] so many people arrived at the conclusion that darkness [is] something to be feared, fought, gotten through, or avoided? … What explain[s] their apparently universal agreement that the best way to deal with any kind of darkness [is] to turn on a light?”
We have, in such a short amount of time, done our best as a civilization to push back the darkness. Electricity has disconnected us from the cycles of light and dark, day and night, wakefulness and sleeping, that are built into our bodies and into the world. We’ve come to equate darkness with fear or danger or uncertainty. Taylor points out how many important things in scripture happen at night, giving examples from the Old Testament: God showing Abraham the stars; Jacob wrestling with the angel; Joseph’s dreams in Egypt; the raining down of manna from heaven during the Exodus.
Biblical events at night are often complicated, holding both fear and hope, disappointment and forgiveness – I think of Jesus’ first conversation with Nicodemus, his last supper with his friends, his vigil in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Resurrection happened in darkness, before the tomb was opened, before morning broke.
“Mysterious things happen in the dark,” Taylor writes. “Sometimes the mystery is frightening … Other times it is redeeming.” Sometimes, perhaps often, it is both.
This morning, we read Paul’s words to the church in Corinth, and two paradoxical
images stand out in particular – the first being that pairing of light and dark. Paul writes: “It is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”
Let light shine out of darkness.
Not
Let light chase away darkness, or let light obliterate the darkness.
But
Let light – the glory and love of God in Christ – shine out of darkness.
What Paul is suggesting, and Barbara Brown Taylor is pointing out, is that light and dark are not adversaries – they are not opposites. They are held together; they are both essential to our living, to our healing and to our faith. The darkness that is part of life – whatever that darkness is for each one of us – is also where we find God, and the light of God’s love and promise of new life in Christ.
Which brings me to the second of those two images that stood out to me in Paul’s letter, another seeming contradiction –“We have this treasure in clay jars,” he writes. We are holding treasure in clay jars – which are maybe kind of the Tupperware of the first century. Not in fine porcelain, or in crystal, but in clay jars, which, if they’re broken, you just make another one. They’re everyday vessels.
We are the clay jars – almost literally, really – our bodies, like clay jars, come from the
earth, from the dust of God’s creation, and return to dust. In between, as Paul writes, we are afflicted, perplexed, persecuted, struck down – and yet we are not crushed – we are not destroyed – we are not forsaken, or driven to despair. We carry in our bodies Christ’s death and Christ’s life. Darkness and light, suffering and joy – we hold Christ in our humanity just as Christ held our humanity in himself. We hold treasure.
`“When we can no longer see the path we are on,” writes Barbara Brown Taylor,
channeling John of the Cross, from the 16th century – “when we can no longer read the maps we have brought with us or sense anything in the dark that might tell us where we are, then and only then are we vulnerable to God’s protection.”
One of the hardest things is to see the beauty in that darkness, to recognize that no matter how breakable, how vulnerable, how lost we feel, we will always find Christ, in a world that holds together both day and night and all the beauty and the unknowns that each of those holds – and that is enough for us and for those around us.
These dust-built bodies are fragile and temporary, and also sacred and beloved. And in traveling through the darkness and the light, carrying Christ’s death and life in us, treasure in clay jars, we are traveling through resurrection.
Amen.
Sermon by The Rev. Cara Ellen Modisett, June 2, 2024, the second Sunday after Pentecost.
