TREASURES OF DARKNESS
October 20, 2002

TEXT: Isaiah 45:1-7 Matthew 22:15-22
I don’t know if it’s because we are approaching Halloween, but there seems to be dark clouds gathering again on the surface of this planet. An ominous dread, unnamed and undefined, defying words and hinted at in muted whispers, fills us with fear and the realization that the world has become a dangerous place.

In the past few weeks the Washington area sniper has radically altered the social habits of millions of people, cancelling school events, modifying the behavior of ordinary citizens, and increasing the anxiety level of not only those who live in the area, but of family members living throughout the world. Fear is rampant.

Terror has also struck again with the bombing in Bali, the Indonesian paradise, where nearly two hundred people were killed, mostly Australians. The C.I.A. declared that Al Qaeda could strike anywhere, anytime in this country. North Korea has announced that it has a nuclear arsenal. The Bush administration continues to marshal support for the invasion of Iraq. It is no wonder that today’s New York Times editorial is titled "The Week of Living Dangerously." If only we had nothing more to occupy our interest than the Kutztown Council-Mayor soap opera.

Those who occupied the land of Iraq more than two and a half millennia ago were also inflicting terror upon Israel, and the Jews were looking to the Iranian’s ancestors to deliver them. The prophet Isaiah, in the only place in scripture where the term "Messiah" was applied to a non-Jew, says that God had chosen Cyrus the Persian to deliver Israel from their Babylonian oppressors. As a reward for executing divine justice, God says that he will give to Cyrus the "treasures of darkness and riches hidden in secret places," the wealth of Babylon concealed in hidden vaults beneath the city (and perhaps the dark treasure of vast amounts of oil that remained hidden until the last century).

There is another meaning to the "treasures of darkness" that may be helpful to us as we seek to discern the meaning of these days and find some direction through the night and fog of this present darkness. God gives darkness so that we may see the stars. God gives darkness so that we may appreciate the light. God gives darkness so that when we feel the absence of God we will know that God is truly present.

There have been other times in our nation’s history when we have felt the abandonment of God, when we felt as though the entire world was conspiring against our personal happiness. We have forgotten many of those dark days because we had emerged into the light once more. The "good old days" are good because we have lived through them; we have survived. We do not remember the time in the tunnel of despair when all seemed hopeless, because life has moved on.

Last week some people remembered the Cuban Missile Crisis of forty years ago when the world felt it was poised on the brink of nuclear annihilation. You cannot convey that feeling to subsequent generations who only know about it from history books. For a few days in October of 1962, there was deep fear that the world would not see another year. And then the following year John F. Kennedy was assassinated and the fears returned. The Sixties were filled with racial tension, urban wars, threats of environmental catastrophe, and the increasing war in Southeast Asia. Paul Simon reflected that in his song, "The Sounds of Silence," when he wrote:

Hello, darkness my old friend,
I've come to talk to you again,
Because a vision softly creeping,
Left its seeds while I was sleeping,
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence.

Simon says that he wasn’t quite sure what the words meant, but that he was articulating the sense of abandonment that his generation was feeling—abandonment by the older generation, abandonment by society, abandonment by God. He was searching for a prophetic voice in the darkness, and found it hidden on "subway walls and tenement walls, and whisper'd in the sound of silence."
Darkness is a friend that conceals the gifts of God that are present in the times of our deepest need, but which we cannot see because of the crises that seem to engulf us. God gives us gifts in disguise. Disappointments and tragedy, failures and setbacks can lead to new opportunities, spiritual growth, and the strengthening of our character and our relationship with God.

Matthew Fox says that we should "befriend the darkness" and recognize it as a gift of God. He calls it the via negativa, the dark way of emptiness and pain. We Americans will do anything to avoid pain and despair. Millions of our citizens have taken Valium and its successors to reduce their anxiety, ease their loneliness, calm their apprehension. Like the Kris Kristofferson song, we feel:

Yesterday is dead and gone,
And tomorrow's out of sight,
And it’s sad to be alone.
Help me make it through the night.

We have forgotten the help that God has given to us in the past; we cannot see tomorrow we see only the darkness in which we currently dwell. We need to be singing the Isaac Watts hymn:

Our God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home.

God gives us the treasures of darkness so that we will know that we are called by name. It was in the darkness that the boy Samuel heard God speak to him. It was in the smoky darkness of the Temple that a vision came to Isaiah. It was in the darkness of a Good Friday noon that God demonstrated his love for humanity. It is from the darkness of an empty tomb that light emerges and fills a universal void.

When we see all that terror has done in this world, of innocent lives snuffed out, parents who have seen their children massacred by exploding bombs, and infants orphaned by an assassin’s bullet, of evil running rampant, our confused hearts cry out to an empty heaven and demand to know why God has permitted this to happen. It is the nature of darkness to make us nearsighted. Our myopic vision will not allow us to see the distant future as God sees it.

Darkness is the other side of the coin that God has given us. God has said, "I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I the LORD do all these things." In the religion of Star Wars, the Force, that universal energy field that some define as God, is composed of two sides. There is the good side of the Force and the dark side. In each person there is both good and evil, and often the dark side becomes more seductive. Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader is the same person. Anakin has yielded to the dark side because he has not yet achieved that spiritual strength that enables him to resist. As Joseph Campbell observes:

The monster masks that are put on people in Star Wars represent the real monster force in the modern world. When the mask of Darth Vadar is removed, you see an unformed man, one who has not developed as a human individual. What you see is a strange and pitiful sort of undifferentiated face. (Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, Doubleday, 1988)

Heaven and Hell reside in each of us. The work of spiritual nurture and growth is to move toward the light, recognizing that we sometimes we have to pass through the darkness in order to attain eventual salvation.

Those who are wise are those who remember that there is treasure in every dark experience of life. That the darkness and the light are both alike to God, that "The Lord has said that he would reside in thick darkness," as Solomon confessed II Chronicles 6:1), but is "wrapped in light as with a garment," as David has written (Psalm 104:2). "Night has knowledge as well as the day (Psalm 19:2)."

When the last morning dawns, it will be all the brighter for the treasures of darkness that have come into our lives. Remember that you are a children of light, created by a God of Light, and it will be to that light that you will return. Do not fear the dark for it makes the dawn possible.