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The Feast of the Epiphany (transferred) Almighty God, the breeze of your love and grace is ever blowing; may we set our sails to capture that breeze, and may it inspire these words and those who hear them. Amen. It was a dark and stormy night. This phrase has become something of a cliché, a parody of the beginning of the “Great American Novel,” found in countless skits and jokes and even Peanuts cartoons in which Snoopy sits on his doghouse, typing out what will be his great novel, always beginning with those words. Perhaps in a play on that parody, one of my favorite books, Madeleine L’Engle’s well-known children’s classic A Wrinkle in Time, actually does begin with those words, “it was a dark and stormy night.” It was a dark and stormy night when the Murry children first encounter the enigmatic Mrs Whatsit, who along with the loquacious Mrs Who and the ethereal Mrs Which, leads them on an epic quest through the universe. Their mission on the surface is to rescue the children’s father, but this mission in reality is but one small skirmish in a great cosmic battle between good and evil, a battle in which evil is embodied as darkness. Early on in their quest, Mrs Whatsit takes the children to the top of a very high mountain on a planet in a far galaxy, and from the top of that mountain the children gaze upon a dark cold shadowy cloud of nothingness, a nothingness that nonetheless blots out the light it encounters. And then the children are shown their own planet, earth, with the dark shadow circling around it, encroaching on but not yet obliterating the earth’s light. In this way the children come to understand the power of evil in the universe and the fierce battle between good and evil—between light and the darkness—a battle playing out on earth, their home, and throughout all creation. This struggle between light and dark is a primordial one. In Genesis we hear that on the first day, God moved over the darkness and said, “Let there be light” and there was light and God saw that the light was good, and ever since light has heralded the presence of God, the presence of good, in an otherwise dark and stormy world. L’Engle’s depiction of the dark shadow of nothingness circling around through the universe obliterating the light when it can, for me, captures the essence of something that we experience, something we feel, something that we struggle to understand and to come to grips with, this primeval clash between light and dark, between good and evil. Perhaps it was a dark and stormy night as the magi approached Jerusalem so many years ago. Evil certainly lurked, evil in the person of Herod, evil in the oppression imposed by the Roman Empire. The magi, the wise guys, had started out in the light, the light of a newly risen star, and beckoned by its call had set out on the long and arduous journey to find the king that the light of the star portended. But now the light was no longer visible to them, and they stopped in Jerusalem to consult the king who must certainly know of such a momentous event. Herod of course didn’t know of this birth, but consulting his advisors, he sent the magi towards Bethlehem, where scripture foretold that a messiah would be born—sent them on after extracting a promise that the magi would return to him with information about what they had seen. As the magi left Jerusalem though, a funny thing happened. The darkness lifted, the star was before them again, radiant, moving ahead of them until it stopped over a certain house in Bethlehem, the house in which Mary and Joseph resided with their infant son, Jesus. And the star shone with a dazzling light, like nothing the magi had ever seen before. Centuries before, the prophet Isaiah had written, Arise, shine; for your light has come, The magi though were foreigners, not Jews, and they wouldn’t have known of those words. They did, nonetheless, recognize the light—its brilliance cutting through the darkness, and they recognized the import of that light—of the ultimate good that light accompanied into the world. These magi, strangers in a strange land who had come following the light, rejoiced with exceeding great joy and then fell prostrate before the infant, the unlikely king, the one who would be light to the people. So here we are, starting a new year some two thousand years later. We’re here together in this place because of that infant, because of the light Jesus brought into the world. And yet, the cosmic struggle goes on. We live in a world caught in that dark shadow of nothingness, that shadow of evil that would obliterate the light. We live in a world torn by war—in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Israel and Palestine; we live in a world where children die from hunger and preventable disease, where poverty wears people down with its grinding burden; we live in a world filled with hate and jealousy and mistrust and xenophobia. It is indeed a dark and stormy night. Yet in the darkness, we still have the promise of the light—a light that even now shines brightly if only we dare to look for it. We’re here because we know that light, we’ve seen and felt it and been guided by it, we’ve known it, know that it is good. We’re here because that light gives us hope. The poet Gerhard Frost says it this way: If I am asked Of all the facts I daily live with, ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ At the conclusion of A Wrinkle in Time, the Murry children discover that the power that can defeat the darkness, fill the nothingness of evil is love. And it is love, too, that we will encounter when we open ourselves to the light that beckons, the light of Christ. Wrapped in that love—the love and goodness and mercy and grace that are God—we will also find hope—hope for ourselves and for the world., hope that the dark and stormy night will break into the dawn light of a new day where we, like the magi, will rejoice with exceeding great joy in the Kingdom of God. Amen. |
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