Latest / Deep-Grace Diving with Tim Wright and Terey Summers / Grace in the Dark-1: In the Beginning was Darkness

Transcript

Grace in the Dark-1: In the Beginning was Darkness · Deep-Grace Diving with Tim Wright and Terey Summers

• 0:00
  [music]
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, everyone.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: When you hear the word night, what comes to mind?
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: Or when you hear the word darkness, what comes to mind?
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we're going to explore that.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: And we're going to explore what the Bible has to say about darkness and about light.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: And we're going to do that in a series that'll take us,
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how many weeks, but we'll just go for it for a while.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: And we're going to talk about darkness and we're going to talk about grace in the dark.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: And is there grace in the dark?
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: And we're going to look sort of at our propensity as human beings to avoid the dark,
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: to light up the dark.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: But maybe, just maybe, God wants to meet us in the dark and in the light.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's what we're going to talk about.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Tim Wright.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: I am here with John D. Burgess.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Hey there.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: John is coming to us from?
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: From Colorado.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: Very good.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: It took him a while to figure that out.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: His mind's in the dark, apparently.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: Terry is still doing Les Mis.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's October 5th as we record this today.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: She is done at the end of this month.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: When she is done, we're going to get her back.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: And we will spend some time talking with her about that experience
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: because it has been a special experience for her.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to see her for the third time, John, this weekend.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: I was going to say, it's the third time for you, right?
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Are your seats getting better or worse?
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: This one's a freebie.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: My sister bought tickets and they have an extra one, so I'm going.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: Well, they doesn't get any better than that.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: I said, as long as you don't mind a 68-year-old man weeping through the show,
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: I'll come because it's that kind of show for me.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: John, do you have any scary night stories?
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: I do, but I don't like to talk about them
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: because they're too scary.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: I think the one that sticks with me the most is probably dead of the winter.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: I grew up in North Dakota, dead of winter.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: And my parents were big on,
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: I was the guy who goes out into the night and gets the wood for the fire.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: And it was one of those nights when it was 40 below.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I went out to the wood pile with my sled because that was my job.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: And the dog next door bit me in my left arm.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: And that kind of made me less excited to get wood after that.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: I had an experience that I can remember vividly.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: My grandpa Wright had died.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't know him very well.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: He was an alcoholic and we didn't see him much,
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: but we were going to go to the funeral the next day.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: It was a long two, three hour drive.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: I was going to go with my dad.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: And so we had a bunch of people at the house.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: I ended up sleeping on the floor in the living room.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: And all of a sudden I heard in the middle of the night Footsteps in the kitchen.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: And there was no doubt there were footsteps in the kitchen in a quiet house.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: And nobody had walked by me, so I don't know how they got there.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: And every time I heard a footstep, I got increasingly scared.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: And finally, I cried out and I said, and nothing would come out.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: I was so frightened, I couldn't even make a scream.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: Oh no.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: And then all of a sudden I realized it was acorns dropping off of our acorn tree
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: onto the roof of the house.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what sounded like footsteps, right?
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: You know, Tim,
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: when that dog came,
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: that just reminded me,
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: when the dog came and bit me, I could not move or say anything either.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: All I could do was stand there.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: Well, so that's when a lot of us think of the dark and think of the night.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: We think of scary things, right?
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: We think of monsters, monster under the bed.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: It might be spirits that are somehow there or somebody sneaking in on us.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: And we have done all kinds of,
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: when you think about some of the things that scare us for pleasure,
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  SPEAKER_01: it's usually in the dark.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: So when you watch those horror movies, They're never slaughtered in the morning.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: They're always slaughtered at night with the chainsaw.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: And when is it that you tell ghost stories?
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's at night when you're in their sleeping bags at camp and it's the time to be scared.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: And then every noise because you can't see what's around you.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: The darkness is frightening to us.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: And that is also true when it comes to our spiritual lives.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: We want to avoid the dark night of the soul to the best of our ability.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: And just like we turn little lamps on and have nightlights to push away the darkness
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: because we're afraid of the dark,
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: we as Christians tend to put lights on in the dark night of the soul and in
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: the tough times of life.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: And that may or may not be what God wants us to do.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: I have been going through counseling because Jan has been five months now,
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: actually more than that since Jan died.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm still working through grief and a lot of stuff.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: And one of my counselors recommended a book to me called Learning to Walk in the Dark.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: Learning to Walk in the Dark.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's by Barbara Brown Taylor.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: I'll put it in the notes on the site.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: Learning to Walk in the Dark by Barbara Brown Taylor.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: And as I was reading her book,
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: I thought,
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: This is really good stuff,
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: and we need to talk about this because this is personal for me.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: John, I'm sure it's been personal for you at times in your life.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: I'm guessing anybody who's listening has or will go through a time of darkness,
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: and oftentimes that darkness is the absence of God.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: And that's really what the darkness is.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: We feel like God is absent.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: Just as light is absent in the dark,
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: God seems to be absent when we're going through really tough times.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what becomes sort of that dark night of the soul.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: And the Bible speaks a lot about that.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so we're going to look at some stuff over the next few weeks where
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: the Bible suggests that maybe the darkness isn't as bad for us as we think it is.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's not always great.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: But maybe it's not as bad for us as we think it is.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I wanted to read this quote for you from her book,
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: again, Learning to Walk in the Darkness by Barbara Brown Taylor.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: And she says this,
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: When we run from the darkness,
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: how much do we really know about what we are running from?
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: If we turn away from the darkness on principle,
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: doing everything we can to avoid it,
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: Because there is simply no telling what it contains,
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: isn't there a chance that we are running from God?
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I thought that was really interesting.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: Is there a chance when we're trying to escape the darkness that we're running from God?
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: And again, darkness isn't normally the place where we think about God being present.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, she has a phrase She calls it Full Solar Christianity.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: Full Solar Christianity.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
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  SPEAKER_01: It's the Christianity that only lives in the light.
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  SPEAKER_01: And everything is good.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: And everything is okay.
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  SPEAKER_01: And God's got you.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: And God's in control.
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  SPEAKER_01: And you don't need to cry.
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  SPEAKER_01: You don't need to grieve.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: You don't need to worry.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: Everything is good.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: That's Full Solar Christianity.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: And she said, but the reality is there's also a lunar part of life.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: The moon, the darkness.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: And in her book, she's helping us sort of navigate both of those, the sun and the moon.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: And that Christianity is really about living in both worlds.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's not either or, it's both and.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: So to kind of get a flavor for this biblically,
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: and then we'll sort of build on this in the weeks to come,
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  SPEAKER_01: we're going to go back to the very first book in the Bible.
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  SPEAKER_01: So we're going to start at the very beginning, John, which is a very good place to start.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you know this.
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  SPEAKER_01: When you read, you begin with what?
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  SPEAKER_01: ABC.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: Have you not seen The Sound of Music?
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: I'm still back on.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'm from Colorado.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: When you read, you begin with ABC.
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  SPEAKER_01: When you sing, you begin with Do Re Mi.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: And when you read the Bible, you begin with In the Beginning.
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  SPEAKER_01: In the Beginning.
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  SPEAKER_01: And folks, if you haven't noticed, the name of this is Grace in the Dark.
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  SPEAKER_01: Part one in the beginning was darkness.
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  SPEAKER_01: So we're going to look at the very first story in the Bible.
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  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to have John read for us Genesis chapter one, verses one and two.
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  SPEAKER_00: When God began to create the heavens and the earth,
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  SPEAKER_00: the earth was complete chaos and darkness covered the face of the deep.
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  SPEAKER_00: While a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.
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  SPEAKER_01: All right.
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  SPEAKER_01: So this is really interesting.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: Remember, this is not a literal book, a literal story.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: We've done enough podcasts on this so I can just summarize very quickly.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: This is not a literal story.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: This is a piece of poetry.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: This is a piece of myth with a capital M.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_01: It is a way of telling a story about something which we know nothing about.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody was there at the beginning of time.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: We don't know how God brought all these molecules together to start the world.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: So this is a story not so much about how the world was created, but about who created it.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_01: All right?
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: So we've got that out of the way.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: But notice, in the beginning, God.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: So God is there.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: But what else is there in the beginning, John?
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: The heavens and the earth.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_01: Well, no, it says God created the heavens and the earth.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: So in the beginning, God was there.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: Darkness was over the face of the deep.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: So now you can read that two ways.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_01: One is that darkness was always there with God,
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: or that when God first created, darkness was created before light.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: Now,
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: I tend to lean toward the first one that in the beginning, God created.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: In the beginning, there was God hovering over this chaos, hovering over the darkness.
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  SPEAKER_01: So the darkness was always there.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: But then read verse three for us.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't ask you to do that, but read verse three.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: What's the first thing that God creates then as he's hovering over the darkness?
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, verse three, then God said, let there be light and there was light.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: And verse four says,
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: God saw that the light was good and he separated the light from the darkness.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: God called the light day and the darkness he called night.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: Now notice
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: that God, the darkness is there and light is created.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_01: And so then God begins to separate light and darkness,
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: light being the daytime, darkness being the nighttime.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: We don't have a sun yet, which makes it, okay, where's this light coming from?
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: That's why you can't take this literally.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: You have to read this figuratively and as poetry.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: But the point here is that darkness and light don't compete with each other.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: Darkness and light are a part of life, a part of God's goodness.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: So we're gonna hang on to that for a moment.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna have John read some verses for you and you might find a pattern here.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: So John, read for us the end of verse five.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: End of verse five, and there was evening and there was morning the first day.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: And then let's go down to verse, what is it, verse eight?
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: Verse eight, and there was evening and there was morning the second day.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: Very good.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: And how about verse 13?
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: And there was evening and there was morning the third day.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll just tweak this a little bit.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_01: And there was darkness and there was light the third day.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: Next verse, verse 19.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: 19.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: And there was evening or darkness and there was morning or light the fourth day.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: Excellent.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: And verse 23.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: And verse 23.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: And there was evening or darkness and there was morning or light the fifth day.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_01: And let's go then to verse 31.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: And there was evening, and there was morning the sixth day.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: So normally when we talk in our modern world,
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: at least in the Western culture,
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: when we talk about a day, day begins with dawn, so to speak.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: It begins with the light.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: And we move from light into darkness.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: The biblical understanding of a day is that we move from darkness into light.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: We move from darkness into light.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_01: And that's a very different way of understanding the rhythm of a day,
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: for example, or the rhythm of darkness.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_01: So for us, in a sense, we're sort of moving through the light.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: And then the scary parts coming,
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: the darkness when we can't see stuff at nights,
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: the stuff of dreams, it's the stuff of monsters under the bed.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: The biblical understanding of the Bible or of the day is it begins with darkness and
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: then light comes.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_01: And the darkness isn't seen as something bad or something scary.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's just a part of the normal rhythm of life, right?
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's the rest.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: Into work concept, for example, we rest and then we work.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: We're in the United States, for example, we work and then maybe we rest.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: But there's something here about darkness that I think the Bible wants us to see,
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: that darkness is a normal part of the human experience.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's a daily part of the human experience.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not something to be avoided.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's not something where we need to be turning lights on during it.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: God is in the darkness as much as God is in the light.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_01: That's what this creation story is telling us in part.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's completely different,
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: of course,
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: than what I think I have been told in decades of church and song,
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: that is that the darkness is bad and that God is coming to bring light into
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: the darkness or bring goodness into the badness.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: That the darkness is something to be I don't know about feared,
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: but certainly avoided,
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: I think, would be a good way to look at it.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that's a really excellent point,
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: and it's certainly a point that Barbara Brown Taylor makes in her book,
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: that the Bible,
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: if we read it a certain way,
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_01: seems to be anti-darkness,
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: because it does talk about Jesus being the light of the world, right?
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: And the light breaks into the darkness.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: And certainly there is a metaphorical understanding of darkness that has to do
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: with being lost,
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_01: maybe being so self-absorbed that we can't see things around us.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_01: It could be a metaphor for sin.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: And so the Bible, if you read it a certain way, could be suggesting that all darkness is bad.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: If you're in a chapter in your life or your day that's full of darkness,
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: the fact that there's no light then necessarily means that I'm absent from God.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: That's what we're taught, right?
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: And we're going to speak more about the absence of God next week in our podcast.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: But yes,
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: all of that stuff that you're bringing up is everything
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: that everybody who's listening right now is thinking, well, wait a minute.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: The Bible seems to be anti-darkness.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_01: We're called to be people of light.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody hides their light under a bushel.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_01: And yet, right from the beginning, we see that God has a very different take on darkness.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: Darkness into light.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_01: Darkness is a part of the created order.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's a part of our human experience.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: Let me read for you something she said.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: Here that I think might be helpful.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_01: And then I'll try to clarify a bit.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: So she's been trying to learn lunar spirituality.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: So full solar spirituality is all about, it's always happy.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's always good.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: If you do certain things and God will bless you,
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: if you're struggling, then there's something wrong with you.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: That's full solar Christianity.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: She says there's also a lunar Christianity.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so she's been in her book.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: She'll reference the moon several times.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: And here's what she writes.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: Tonight there will be no moon in the sky.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: For close to three days,
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: it will rise and set with the sun, leaving the stars alone to light the night.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_01: I always wondered why it took three days for significant things to happen in the Bible.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_01: Jonah spent three days in the belly of a whale.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus spent three days in the tomb.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: Paul spent three days blind in Damascus.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: And now I know,
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: from earliest times people learned that was how long they had to wait in the dark
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: before the sliver of the new moon appeared in the sky.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: For three days every month they practiced resurrection.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_01: So what she seems to be suggesting is that even the scripture talks
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: about this period Where the night comes and there doesn't seem to be light anywhere,
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_01: but as we're going to see with Jesus in the tomb and so on and so forth,
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_01: that doesn't mean that God wasn't there.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_01: And this is where we always want to read our scriptures.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: We have a tendency in our culture to read it either or.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: Scripture is more often both and.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: We don't want people living in darkness, meaning we don't want them deceived.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_01: We don't want them living in fear.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: We don't want people living in sin.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: We don't want people lost.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_01: That's a form of darkness.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: And the light has come to help us with that.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_01: The light of love, the light of grace, the light of mercy.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: People who live in poverty, for example, living in a form of physical darkness.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: And we want to bring light of food and hope to them.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: But there's another form of darkness that comes that's more spiritual that has to do
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: with meeting God in a different place where it's not all bright,
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: where we're not distracted by the lights,
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_01: where it's just the darkness and us and God.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_01: And as we're going to see in a week or two,
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: where we're stripped of everything and all that's left is God to say,
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: I'm here and I'm enough.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: So Those are harder lessons to learn,
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_01: and we don't talk enough about them in Christianity because we really are,
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_01: especially in the United States of America, we're full solar.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_01: You've got prosperity gospel and these other forms of Christianity that name it
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: and claim it, don't worry, be happy.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: That's full solar stuff.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: And the sun is okay, but night comes.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: And then day comes, and then night comes, and then day comes.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: And as human beings, we're wired for both.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: Think about what our lives would be like if we didn't have night to rest our souls
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: and to rest our bodies.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we don't have to think about it.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of people who are trying to live through the night with their screens
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: and their devices,
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_01: and we're getting less sleep now than ever,
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: and we're more tired than we've ever been.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, there are a lot of things that we can find in the dark that are good.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_01: There's beauty that's found only in the darkness.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_01: And there are some flowers that only bloom in the dark, right?
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: There are some animals that only come out in the dark.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: And if we're afraid of the dark, how do we see that beauty?
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: And is it possible that God,
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_01: who is Lord of light and darkness, May have something for us in the darkness.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_01: So right from the beginning,
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: we get this picture of the darkness and the light sort of working in a rhythm
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: that sets the course for our day.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: And in the Hebrew Scriptures,
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: it starts with the darkness,
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_01: starts with rest, and it's not something to be afraid of.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_01: And then we move into the light of day.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: And let me read another quote from you here from her book that says it,
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: I think, better than I am.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: And again, I recommend the book to you.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's called Learning to Walk in the Dark by Barbara Brown Taylor.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes the light is coming.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes it is going.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes the moon is full and sometimes it is nowhere to be found.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_01: There is nothing capricious about this variety since it happens on a regular basis.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_01: Is it dark out tonight?
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_01: Fear not.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: It will not be dark forever.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: Is it bright out tonight?
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: Enjoy it.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: It will not be bright forever.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: And that's just the rhythm of life.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so rather than fearing that rhythm of darkness and light,
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_01: darkness and night and day, I think the Bible wants to invite us to embrace it.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: And we're going to see,
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: for example,
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: that Abraham,
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_01: his great vision of what God was calling him to be as the father
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: of great nation happened at night.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_01: Jacob, who became Israel, wrestled with God at night.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: And according to the New Testament, Jesus was born at night.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: Night and darkness do not have to be bad,
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_01: but darkness is a different kind of experience than light.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: And we just really haven't prepared ourselves for that.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, no.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: I'm thinking, Tim,
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: as you kind of encourage people to think of darkness differently,
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: you talked about screens at night, that sort of thing.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just thinking that for all of us,
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: And certainly me included,
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: and certainly for some of the people I love, sleep just does not come very easily.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm just thinking as I kind of look over the scripture here that you asked me
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: to read and how you're talking about,
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: there seems to be a peace that is there at the night.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: That is available and how hard it is when that peace is not available because sleep
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: and rest don't come or when it's a battle to have that.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: It sort of becomes its own vicious cycle.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's right.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_01: You need peace to sleep at night.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_01: And if you don't have peace, you don't sleep.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: So you don't get peace that you need for the daytime.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_01: And then, you know, that's where we get into, of course, emotions, what we call dark emotions.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: We even label them, you know, good emotions and bad emotions.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so even by labeling them,
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_01: by labeling,
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_01: say, anger as bad or grief as bad, we already set ourselves up for failure.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_01: And we set ourselves up really to miss what God has for us.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_01: If anger is bad, if grief is bad.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: And then we've got, you know, so you've got emotional stuff.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: We've got the stresses of life.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: that's where we as Christian people need to come clean a little bit,
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: I think,
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_01: and bring that kind of stuff into the light of grace and ask the question,
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_01: There are sometimes difficult to ask, but why am I so stressed?
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_01: What does my stress need to teach me right now?
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: I think C.S.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis called stress a megaphone, God's megaphone.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_01: What is my stress telling me?
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_01: What is my inability to sleep telling me?
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_01: Is it a physical condition?
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_01: Is it a chemical imbalance in my brain?
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_01: Am I overstressed?
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not living You know, the kind of way that I should.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not living a light life so I can sleep in the dark.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, the nighttime gives us a chance to slow down and ask questions.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: But more than that, we want the nighttime to give us rest.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: And how do we rest our weary souls in the darkness when we're so afraid of it?
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_01: And when in many Christian churches, we're told it's a bad thing.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: For sure.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: And, and,
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: we're going to talk about this,
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_00: I think in later podcasts,
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: dive into this,
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: but we're using in this podcast,
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_00: really the actual night and the actual daytime to kind of lead us
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: into maybe thinking about this a little bit differently.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_00: But there are certainly times, chapters of the light.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: Certainly you're going through a chapter in your life right now
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: that just involves more darkness.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't mean like literal darkness.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's just grief is hard and painful and uncomfortable.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I think our first knee jerk reaction is to avoid it.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: You know, Disneyland is way more fun than grief.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_01: Even Disneyland at night is more fun.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: You're welcome for that, by the way.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe we start looking at it a little bit more as an opportunity for peace
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: and questioning a long-held disbelief that God must be absent in the dark.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: He certainly wasn't absent as he was separating light from dark in verse 4.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_00: Right, right.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_01: And when you get to the end, you see God says, It was all good.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_01: And that includes the darkness.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_01: That includes the darkness, right?
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_01: Now, you know, the first verse talks about sort of the chaos and so on.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, darkness can feel like chaos, but God brought order.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_01: That's what's important.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_01: God brought order to the chaos in verse 2.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_01: And that order is God's presence.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, in what can sometimes feel like a disordering of life.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_01: when you go through grief,
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_01: for example, you lose someone, your life has been disordered.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_01: Your life is in chaos.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, so you're in the darkness.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_01: Well, how does the spirit of God then come in the midst of,
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_01: those raw emotions and how do you allow yourself to have those raw emotions,
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_01: maybe be angry at God,
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: maybe be angry at cancer or the dot, whatever you're angry at, which is normal.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, And then how do you sort of go through that and be human about it and just say
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: to God, you know what, this really sucks.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know where you are right now, but this really sucks.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: And that will be our podcast topic for next week.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: So what we're encouraging you to do is to hang in there with us.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to talk about darkness for the next couple of weeks.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_01: And we're going to find out that maybe, just maybe, darkness is a place that God can meet us.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_01: And next week, we will look at when Jesus goes through a dark moment in his life.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_01: And so we'll be back with you next time.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_01: The Wonderful
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_00: Deep Grace Diving Podcast.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the Deep Grace Diving Podcast, by the way, is a great one.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_01: But this is the Deep Grace Diving Podcast.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm here with John and he's from somewhere and he's still in the dark about that.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_01: So we'll be back with you next time.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_01: Hopefully, John will come to the light and know that he's from Colorado.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_01: Back with you next time.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_01: Bye.
• 30:52
  [music]