Preface
Wise Nicodemus saw such light As made him know his God by night.
O for that night! Where I in him Might live invisible and dim.
We are a people who languish in the doldrums of a pervasive, shared disappointment. A cultural disappointment: technological, relational, conversational, rhetorical—spiritual (including donkeys and elephants and others). After a year of disappointment, broadly shared: disappointment of process, outcome, option, influence, rhetoric, values, and virtues. While not universal, and while certainly varied in focus, a common disappointment robes the vast majority across our land. We pause in prayer under a night sky, in the moonlight.
Hear Good News: Faith discovers in disappointment a truth that sets free. A freeing of the will.
Remember that the ancient and holy scriptures afford a space for moonlight, as well as for sunlight.
The heavens are telling the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech and night to night declares knowledge.
At night, there is moonlight. A song in the night. A weeping that tarries for the night. A reflected light. A pale moonlight.
If I say let only the darkness cover me, and the night about me be as night: even the darkness is not dark to thee; the night is as bright as the day; for darkness is as light with thee.
Out in the wilderness, late on a winter night, say it is a clear night, you see by a different light. A refracted illumination. A reflected brightness. A luminosity of a different measure, kind, sort and type. The moon on the breast of the new fallen snow brings the luster of midnight to objects below. The corn stubble in the field gives its shadow out from the dark brightness of the night.
Look around you here in the dark. Train your eyes to see what only shows up in moonlight.
The heavens are telling the glory of God. That is sunlight. And the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork. That is moonlight.
Day to day pours for speech. That is sunlight. And night to night declares knowledge. That is moonlight.
There is a wonder of the heavens. And there is a wonder of the firmament. There is a wonder of the day. And there is a wonder of the night. There is a wonder at life. And there is a wonder at death. There is a wonder at birth, brightness, gaiety, satiety, summer, joy, victory, discovery and all that lives. And there is a wonder at death, darkness, despond, emptiness, acedia, defeat, loss and all that limits life. One wonder is exuberant, and the other is melancholy—one of the day and one of the night. But both are wonder and both are ours and both are witnesses to faith, a faith that uncovers freedom in the heart of disappointment.
The heavens are telling the glory of God. And the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork.
Day to day pours for speech. And night to night declares knowledge. As Nicodemus knew (H Vaughn):
Wise Nicodemus saw such light As made him know his God by night.
O for that night! Where I in him Might live invisible and dim.
John Sees
On Christmas Day, we newly remembered, by John, grace in dislocation. Their Johannine Grace in the heart of dislocated darkness: our Epiphany of grace, by Jesus, in our own experience.
In Baptism, that of John today, who comes and sees, we newly remember, by John, freedom in disappointment. Dislocated out of the synagogue, they also had been disappointed, by Jesus. He did not, had not, would not return. Not Parousia, Armageddon, Speculation: but Paraclete, Artistry, Spirit. Not the end is here, but the Lord is near. And in that trauma of abject disappointment, by Jesus, their Epiphany of freedom! The hour is coming? No. The hour NOW IS. Our Epiphany, by Jesus, of freedom, right in the teeth and belly of supreme disappointment.
When you have known disappointment together. When you have endured disappointment together. When you have suffered disappointment—together. When together you have faced disappointment.
Then, in freedom, you see. Then, in the moonlight, you see. Not the freedom of the will (Pelagius), but the freeing of the will (Augustine).
Come and see. See. It is the freeing of the will that allows moonlit sight, that at last allows a night vision, tenebrous vision.
John knows the twilight. His is the twilight Gospel, with which our lectionary, our liturgy, our day light predilections are least at ease. Hence the others, on a three-year cycle, all have their space, their own room: John sleeps in the stairwell, outside, occasionally, as here in January, granted a comfortable night’s rest, an occasional, limited hearing.
John knows night. All the chapters 13-17 are Jesus speaking at night, a twilight farewell discourse. All the chapters 18-20 are burial, visitation, inspiration, at night. Nicodemus appears in Chapter 3, 12, and 19, only at night. The darkest, bitterest words of the New Testament are found in chapters 7-8, a nighttime of rhetoric. And Chapter 1: the light shines—in the darkness; the true light that enlightens everyone—was coming into the world. John knows night.
John knows the night of disappointment, shrouded by these rhetorical forms. John faces what others avoided: disappointment. The greatest early hope of the primitive Christian church—its rejoinder to doubting contestants, its encouragement in the face of suffering, its expectation of scores settled, its very marrow and meaning and mane, its name—was the expected, imminent, soon and very soon return, Parousia, coming of Christ in power on the clouds of heaven. Read again the Revelation. All for nought. Into the third generation, it became clear, all arithmetical recalculations aside thank you 2 Peter, that Jesus was not coming again, at least not any time soon. John looked dismay in the eye, admitted disappointment, and then—SURSUM CORDA—saw by moonlight the freedom of the gospel. Spirit, not Jesus. Presence, not absence. Artistry, not apocalypse. Soul, not speculation. Here and now, not there and then. Real freedom.
It is the shunted aside lectionary avoided Fourth Gospel, John, you need when the chips are down. We saw this on Christmas Day—dislocation illumined grace. We see it today—disappointment illumines freedom. When it gets dark enough, you can see the stars. But you have to wait and watch as the sun goes down, down, down below the horizon to your left, and then wait and watch as the moon comes up, up, up, over the horizon to your right. And it is harder to see, at night. But, mirable dictu, you see some things better. In the moonlight.
The Gospel is not a prophecy fulfilled, but a mystery revealed. John is very different. Be careful! *Step lightly: this (1:29) is John—the Baptist—yet not named so. *Jesus is not baptized by John in John. *Behold: the Lamb of God who takes away sin: this is the only use of this line in the Bible, yet we use it monthly for eucharist, so think it is common. *In thy light we see light. *He ranks before me because he was before me. *The true light that enlightens everyone was coming into the world. *For this (John the Baptist) came that He might be revealed.
So: Come…and…see. Over a long time, the community of John—say in Ephesus, say in the years following 90ad, gradually and painfully came to see. They came to see…Him. They came to see that He, and those in Him, through Him, were bathed in glory. Bathed not only in beauty, but bathed in glory. His glory. Glory as of the Father’s only Son. Glory. Come…and…see.
Imagine their antiphonal music in worship: “I am the vine”. “I am the door.” “I am the door”. “I am the vine”. (Insight received from John Ashton).
In a small upper room. In the evening. In candle light. In seclusion. Away from their formerly beloved, now feared, perhaps familial, opponents, whom they now held in odium theologicum. In reading. In communion. In silence. In utterance. Knees on hard, cold floors. Hands outstretched. Eyes closed. In a small upper room.
We See
In the moonlight, in the freedom that a twilight disappointment alone can give, we see things we otherwise would miss.
We have a shared national disappointment. To repeat: let it be firmly asserted that this lacrimose loss is not limited to donkeys or elephants, left or right, loser or winner. The disappointment, though not universal, by large measure, is broadly shared, if variously construed, and variously defined. Look around, in the moonlight. Let your eyes adjust over the next many months and years. We will come around again in four years to such a period as we had last year. But now: be ready to receive what the moonlight shows. The greater light to rule the day; the lesser light to rule the night. What do you see, now, at midnight? What did you learn during the day, that now you can see, during the night? In the moonlight.
In the moon light we see…
We see that we see what we want to see, or what we expect to see, both pollsters and others.
We see that we have penchant for entertainment, sometimes to the detriment of information.
We see that big, unexpected, bad things can and do befall people, both individuals and countries (as if any of us in Boston following April 2013 needed a reminder).
We see that social location, your choices in standing and sitting, prayer and worship, volunteering and voting, come Sunday and come weekday, do matter. Particularly in voting.
We see the ongoing corrosive effects of race and sex, still with us long after emancipation and suffrage. The exuberant gathering on the Boston Common yesterday, wherein we greeted so many of you, nourished us and others.
We see that we tend, tragically, to underestimate the power of hatred and evil, having neglected too long our careful reading of Niebuhr.
We see that we learn humility from humiliation, and discipline from pain. ‘Advice we humor. Pain we obey’ (Proust).
We see that our view of history is dim, our grasp of history is weak, our knowledge of history is partial, our respect for history is far too limited. Give us today, in 140 letters. So, the marvelous Monday BU MLK observance nourished us—in song, chorus, instrument, band, dance, speech, reflection, and remembrance
We see that we neglect gathering, including ordered worship, to our peril.
Now we see, in the freedom following through disappointment. Now we see. Come and see. In your own experience. To live it down we will have to live it through.
You See
I am told that a recent film titled ‘Moonlight’ carries the story of a young man’s acquisition of freedom through and throughout the harrowing experiences of disappointment. What about you?
Once you have sat down by the rivers of Babylon and wept, you may just find a wise freedom. That job you knew was meant for you—gone to another. That degree you most wanted to pursue—not going to happen. That labor, unfulfilled, to make a marriage go that would not go. That dream deferred, making the heart sick. Once the disappointment is faced, squarely, admitted, honestly, endured, faithfully, then a freedom of another dimension may enter.
You may have offered yourself, say, as a candidate for a high office. How much we owe, and how little we honor, those who are willing to run and not win. By the way, winning is not always success, and losing is not always failure. They are not the same, losing and failing. They are not the same, winning and succeeding. So Unamuno: we truly do not know when we have succeeded. You lost the race, which is not always to the swift, by the way. So. Now what? You may seize, or, better, be seized by, a full freedom. Now you are free! Go and make climate change, said Al Gore. Go and bring world peace, said Jimmy Carter. You may just find, as a friend said to another, following a bitter defeat: You have not so much been denied, as spared. Not denied, but spared. You did what you could. People know who you are. They had their chance. They had their chance. Now you have yours, another, perhaps richer, maybe truer, possibly freer. Let faith hold you, and mold you, and enfold you in a greater freedom, that of God’s cruciform love. One high proud moment here at Boston University came three years ago when we had dinner around a small table with John Lewis, whose suffering on the Edmund Pettis bridge in 1965, a profound, gruesome disappointment, opened over time into a great life of faith, a faith that found freedom right in disappointment.
Coda
We are a people who languish in the doldrums of a pervasive, shared disappointment.
The heavens are telling the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech and night to night declares knowledge.
At twilight there is moonlight.
If I say let only the darkness cover me, and the night about me be as night: even the darkness is not dark to thee; the night is as bright as the day; for darkness is as light with thee.
Out in the wilderness, late on a winter night, say it is a clear night, you see by a different light. A refracted illumination. A reflected brightness. A luminosity of a different measure, kind, sort and type. The moon on the breast of the new fallen snow brings the luster of midnight to objects below. The corn stubble in the field gives its shadow out from the dark brightness of the night.
Or with Howard Thurman, out on the beach. The sun has set, the moon has risen, the stars are out, the wind is light: the ocean and the night surrounded my little life with a reassurance that could not be affronted by any human behavior. The ocean at night gave me a sense of timelessness, of existing beyond the ebb and flow of circumstance. Death would be a small thing I felt in the sweep of that natural embrace.
Look around you here in the dark. Train your eyes to see what only shows up in moonlight. Disappointment is the seedbed of freedom. In disappointment there is a discovery, a truth that sets free.
Wise Nicodemus saw such light As made him know his God by night.
O for that night! Where I in him Might live invisible and dim.