The Dark Angels

Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector

St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas

March 3, 2013; 3 Lent, Year C

Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(Luke 13:1-9)  There were some present who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. He asked them, "Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them--do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did."
Then he told this parable: "A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, 'See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?' He replied, 'Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.'"

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The Roman Empire had a pretty strong stomach for cruelty.  As far as we know, Pontius Pilate is the only governor who was removed from office by the Roman Empire because he was too cruel.  Imagine what it was like living under his authority.  Today Jesus speaks of one of his atrocities.  Some neighbors, fellow Galileans, had been massacred by Pilate while performing their worship rituals.  The event must have shocked Jesus and the other Galileans.  Some of you from the South may remember the children killed in Ku Klux Klan bombings of churches.  We read of similar atrocities all too frequently.  Why?  Why do these things happen?

A sink-hole opens in Florida, and someone is buried alive in their own home.  A bridge falls, or a hurricane hits, or, as Jesus mentions, a tower in Siloam kills eighteen bystanders.  How do we deal with these things? 

Jesus doesn’t tell us.  But he says, “Repent.”  Which means, turn around and go the other direction.  Bad things happens.  Sometimes they happen to people we love.  Sometimes they happen to us.  Sometimes they turn us around.

My friend John tells of a dry, arid time in his life.  He felt like the verse in today’s psalm:  “my soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you, as in a barren and dry land where there is no water.” (63:1b)  He says his spiritual life was the prayer of vain repetition.  He felt lifeless and bereft. 

John began to pray for God’s help, asking for three things:  “Dear God, increase my faith; deepen my trust; expand my capacity for love.”  He prayed ardently. 

Almost immediately he was laid off from his job, deceived in a love relationship, and sued for a lot of money.  He says it was the answer to his prayer.

Unemployed, he found that he had to walk a walk of increased faith, counting on God to get him through when he had few resources.  Deceived in love, he turned to God with deeper trust, for human intimacy had betrayed him so profoundly.  And, he says, if you ask God to expand your capacity for love, “God doesn’t send Beanie Babies” to cuddle, but really annoying people, some of whom will sue you.

He was in the wilderness.  He went on unemployment, with all of the indignities of registering with the state and going through mandatory retraining.  He recognized that the dissolving of his relationship was actually a blessing in disguise, freeing him from an unworthy entanglement in a way that left him thankful.  A couple of attorney-friends intervened and helped John settle the lawsuit in a satisfactory way. 

Without a job, he turned to some volunteer work, organizing an Interdenominational Prayer for Peace.  It went well.  So well, in fact, that the CEO of an international training and development corporation noticed John’s project, and offered him a great job.  That was over twenty-five years ago, and today John is a happy guy. 

He calls what happened to him a visitation of the Dark Angels.  The Dark Angels visit us with trials and difficulties that seem tragic or overwhelming at the time, but if we hold on and persevere, they give us gifts we could have no other way.

You might say I’m here because of Dark Angels.  When I was called to St. Paul’s I had begun to feel almost unemployable.  I had entered five successive search processes and been turned down by each.  One ended after the first interview, and that was a church full of friends I had known for years.  The other four took me to the final two or three candidates, and each church chose someone else.  It was pretty demoralizing.  But now, I am so glad.  Those failures left me free for a call here that has been my life’s joy.

The spiritual masters speak of something different:  a passage called the Dark Night.  It has to do with our attachment to the things we think we need to be happy or successful or secure.  Sometimes it seems that God initiates a Dark Night. 

Thomas Merton explains it this way:  “Everything you love for its own sake, outside of God alone, blinds your intellect and destroys your judgment of moral values.  It vitiates your choices so that you cannot clearly distinguish good from evil, and you do not truly know God’s will.”[i]  So God, in love, will free us from the objects of our desire to help us learn to yearn for God alone.  If we persevere through the Dark Night, we can come to love things for God’s sake, including loving ourselves for God’s sake, because God loves us.

In her memoir Still, Lauren Winner tells of her crisis of faith when she experienced in close succession the death of her mother and the end of her marriage.  “She no longer knew how to pray, she doubted the God she had loved and trusted for so long, and she suffered extraordinary loneliness.”  She wanted to die.  She would do anything to avoid being alone:  “Call a friend, go shopping, pedal endless, frantic miles on my stationary bike; pour another drink; take another sleeping pill.” 

Her friend Ruth had a suggestion:  Try to stay with the loneliness for a while.  Maybe just five minutes; …ten minutes.  Ruth wondered if the loneliness had something to give Lauren.  Maybe Lauren should see what that gift might be.[ii]

When the Dark Angels visit, sometimes we have to hold on to them, maybe even desperately.  Rainer Maria Rilke has a poem that seems to speak to this.  I’ll quote it in part:

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming…

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.

She then speaks of those who wrestled with Angels in the Old Testament, like Jacob, who held on all night, whose hip was put out of joint as he grappled for a blessing. 

Rilke continues:

Whoever was beaten by this Angel…
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.[iii]

Jesus would come face to face with the cruelty of Pontius Pilate and with the awesome violence of the Roman Empire, yet we see his struggle not merely against those evil human powers but against evil and death itself.  Defeated decisively by these greater beings, Jesus rose from the dead proud and strengthened, changed in shape to give new life to all who struggle against the darkness.

It is our destiny to claim that new life and that new power, and to make that claim fearlessly.  Claim your birthright.  You are God’s child.  As Marianne Williamson has said:

Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate, but that we are powerful beyond measure.  It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us.  We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, handsome, talented, and fabulous?  Actually, who are you not to be?  You are a child of God.

Your playing small does not serve the world.  There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.  We were born to manifest the glory of God within us.  It is not just in some; it is in everyone.  And, as we let our own light shine, we consciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.[iv]

You are worthy to wrestle your Dark Angels.  You are strong enough to wrestle God.  Challenge God, dare God to increase your faith; deepen your trust; expand your capacity for love.  And may you continue to grow by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

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[i] Christian Century, December 26, 2012; p. 29

[ii] Ibid, p. 30

[iii] Rainer Maria Rilke, The Man Watching, translation from German by Robert Bly

[iv] Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love, Ch. 7, Section 3 (1992)