Creekside Church Sermon of September 2, 2001 "God in the Dark Hours" Lamentations 1:1-6	Rev. David Bibbee
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Wednesday afternoon, walking down a hall at Elkhart General Hospital, I listened to a man talking with a nurse who was headed home from work. "It's been a very long day," she said. "I haven't had time to look out the window to see what kind of day it is." "It's near-perfect," the man replied. "The sun is shining. It's 80°. The humidity is low. There is a light breeze. It's wonderful. Get out there and enjoy it." "I think I will," she replied.

It's a good thing she didn't ask me. I would have given the same weather report as the other gentleman, but my feelings at that moment were not like his. The sun was shining and a cool breeze was blowing, but given my mood at that moment, a dark dreary overcast would have better fit the mood that possessed me. I had just been with Hal and a gathering of his extended family. There was lots of laughter and swapping family stories, but there was also a sober awareness that Hal is growing weaker. As I stepped outside the hospital, I was struck by the weight of my own grief over what is happening to Hal, and the thought of how that grief is multiplied among so many people for whom Hal means so much.

Then I did something that deepened my distress. I turned on the car radio just as a story was being aired from Seattle. A troubled young woman had stopped her car on a freeway bridge, stepped out and perched on the edge, preparing to take her own life. The police arrived, closed one lane, and began talking with the woman, gently trying to persuade her not to jump. What made this sad story tragic is that while the police spoke to her, passing motorists who were irate because of the traffic delay began shouting obscenities and yelling at her, "Go ahead and jump!" Desperate to stop the verbal assaults, the police closed the bridge. But it was too late. The anger of some unbelievably cruel people weakened any desire she had "not to jump". She plunged from a tremendous height into the water and miraculously survived, although her condition is critical. It is a tragic commentary on the depths to which we have descended, that even as good people were pleading for the woman to live, others were encouraging her to die because they were caught in stalled traffic.

The day before I was visiting Walter Harroff. Shaking his head and looking to the floor he said, "I just don't understand why things happen the way they do. What comes over people that they would do the things they do?" A constant diet of the evening news has lessened our squeamishness about the kind of world in which we live. Three white men in Texas drag a black man to death behind a pick-up truck. A baby dies from being shaken to death by her mother's boyfriend because the baby won't stop crying. Schools are back in session and we will not be surprised when we hear there has been another shooting. In one respect none of this should come as a surprise. After all, humans have the stomach to kill the Son of God, didn't they?

The naturalist, Loren Eisley remembers looking down an abandoned well when he was a boy. He was startled by something down in the dark depths that slithered from the light he shined into the well. He said that what startled him was the knowledge that there were creatures in the world that preferred living their whole lives in the darkness.

There is another side to Walter's question which is not easy to answer at all. He said, "I think of people like my wife, and I think of people like Sarah and Hal…good people, exemplary people, the kind of people you wish you could become; people you think would be the very last in line for suffering and cancer. I don't see any good reason for it, David." "I don't see any good reason for it either." I said. There is no fairness to the things which happen to people. Every answer we construct to make sense of the awful things which can happen to those who love God in the end get us nowhere.

Is it any wonder people go to churches where you only hear positive messages? The value of going to worship is based upon how good you feel when you leave. Deal only with the certainties. Stick with what you know and what works. Emphasize the, "Lord I believe" aspects of life. Don't dwell on the "Lord help my unbelief" part. This can be of help to us when all is well. But where is God when the bottom drops out? Where is God to be found when your life is in little pieces on the floor and there is no dustpan or broom?

If our speech was endowed with supernatural powers, and we could, just by uttering the words, "Be gone!" make another's pain subside and their problems disappear, we would. If God endowed us with power to heal anyone of anything by simply touching them, surely we would. Those of you who are parents can recall times when your children were sick, in pain, or maybe in peril of death. You know how desperate you felt and how, if there was any way possible, you would have put yourself in their place to spare them. If it were within our ability to avoid all suffering and spare those we love from it as well, we would. Jesus had that kind of power. But when the time was right to use that power to save his own life, he didn't. He could have avoided the whole bloody ordeal. He could have said, "Look, you're making a big mistake. Let me set you straight." But he didn't. He didn't lift a finger to save himself.

The book of Lamentations is what the title suggests. It laments the terrible condition in which the people of Israel found themselves after its destruction by Babylon in the year 587 B.C. "How lonely sits the city that was once full of people…she was great. She was once a princess, but no more…her friends have become her enemies…her foes have become masters…all her majesty has departed." You won't find words like, "Things are bad, but not all that bad," or "It could be worse," or "We're going to rise above all this." There was no looking on the bright side. Israel's condition was as dark as dark could be.

It took strong people to embrace a scripture like Lamentations. It is in the Bible for a reason. The psalms are among the richest devotional literature ever written, and 40% of them are laments and complaints. And they are in the Bible for a reason. Darkness is an inescapable part of life. The challenge for Christians is knowing what to do in the dark, desolate times when God is silent and the evidences of God's presence are hard to come by.

Over 400 years ago there lived a Spanish monk named John of the Cross. He observed that everyone who undertakes the spiritual journey will encounter what he called, "the dark night of the soul". This is a time when God seems absent and the desire to pray evaporates. John taught that God is not confined to working on our souls when life is all joy and light. There is much to be learned when sorrow and darkness envelop us.

We prefer the Sunday morning God…the one we worship on sunny mornings like this. We come to count our blessings and lift up the beliefs of which we are absolutely certain. We sit with smiling faces, confident in God and in ourselves, not wanting to think that there is anything about God and our faith that is uncertain or ambiguous. Like the old gospel song says, "Keep on the sunny side, always on the sunny side. Keep on the sunny side of life…"

We should thank God for sunny times on the sunny side. But what about the dark hours? A God who is only available in the light won't have much to offer in the Alzheimer's unit, or on the cancer ward, or grief-stricken parents at the funeral home standing beside the casket of their teenage daughter who was killed by a drunk driver. These are some of the reasons there are laments in the Bible. All of us will take our turn facing the dark. It is a hard, hellish thing to do, but as Christians, we can do it because it is never the dark alone that we face. There is someone in it.

In the beginning the earth was a formless void. Darkness covered the face of the deep. But at creation, God pushed the darkness back and imposed upon it a boundary. In Psalm 139 we read, "If I say 'Surely the darkness shall cover me and the light around me become night,' even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day." "God is light," I John tells us, "and in him there is no darkness at all." The introduction to the gospel of John says, "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it."

Jesus had the power to avoid suffering, but he didn't. He took it upon himself because avoiding pain and suffering is not a choice that we have.

In his book, Silence the Japanese writer Shusaku Endo tells the story of a 17th century Portugese missionary named Rodrigues. His mission was to save souls in Japan, and to prepare himself spiritually for the journey, he contemplated the face of Jesus, desiring to have within himself all the qualities of character he saw in Jesus. When Rodrigues arrived in Japan, however, there was a national revolt against Christians. He was thrown into prison and pressed to renounce his faith. He pictured Jesus' brave face and refused. He hoped he would be martyred for Jesus, but this was not to be an option for him. He was returned to his cell. He listened for a word of guidance from God, but all he heard were cries from other prisoners and an odd snuffling sound he thought was from snoring guards.

Come morning he is taken from his cell and told to renounce his faith. He refused. He then is shown the origin of the strange sounds. It is the labored breathing of Japanese Christians who have been crucified upside down with their heads half buried in excrement. Rodrigues is told they will remain there until he renounces his faith. Which would he betray, Christ or the Christians? He returned to his cell where he agonized over the decision.

The guards soon reappeared with a metal figure of Christ. They put it at his feet and ordered him to trample it. "Put your foot in the middle, and grind it with your toe!" Looking at the figure, he sees that others have done it before him. It looked nothing like the face of the Jesus he had studied so long. He feels like he is dangling helplessly between loyalty to Jesus and to the suffering Christians snuffling in the dark. Then he hears a voice coming from the image at his feet. "Trample! Trample! I know more than anyone the pain of your foot. It was to be trampled on by people that I was born into this world.

Jesus spoke to the missionary out of the experience of darkness and suffering. Not when all was well. He chose not to avoid the darkness or ignore it. Out of love and loyalty to us he took upon himself our ordeals so we would not be left to endure them alone.

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