FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT
Prayer of the Day: Stir up your power, Lord Christ, and come. By your merciful protection save us from the threatening dangers of our sins, and enlighten our walk in the way of your salvation, for you live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.
“Let us then throw offthe works of darkness and put on the armor of light;let us walk decently as in the day.” Romans 13:12.
“O house of Jacob,
come, let us walk
in the light of the Lord!” Isaiah 2:5.
As the new church year begins, darkness deepens in the northern part of the globe even as the days begin to lengthen in the south. For both hemispheres, however, it is the season of Advent. Our texts for this Sunday all employ the imagery and interplay of darkness and light to express the season’s message of hope. The scriptures frequently employ images of darkness and light, both literally and metaphorically. As illustrated below by poet Mai Der Vang, light and its counterpart darkness contradict, complement and define each other. It is nearly impossible to speak of one without at least an implicit reference to the other.
According to Saint Paul, darkness and night characterize the present age. Nevertheless, disciples of Jesus are called upon to live in the light, as though it were day. That might sound like a no brainer. Who would not prefer to live in the light? Darkness is difficult for us diurnal creatures to navigate. We trip over things, bump our heads and struggle to get our bearings. What little we can manage to see is subject to distortion. I remember well how at the age of eight years old I pleaded with my parents for permission to spend the night out in the back yard under my Dad’s old pup tent. As it was a mild August evening, my folks relented and I went out to set up the tent. Though there was obviously no need for it, I dug a trench around the tent to protect myself from seepage from rain. I wanted the full camping experience. When I had completed digging, I threw my sweat shirt over the shovel left in the ground, brought my sleeping bag into the tent and hunkered down for the night.
At some point, I woke up. To my horror, there was a large black bear hunched over the tent glaring in at me. I froze. I had not had much experience with bears. Still, I should have known that the appearance of one in our suburban neighborhood was about as likely as meeting a fish in the Mojave Desert. But at eight years of age, imagination frequently trumps reason. What I did know was that bears can easily outrun any human being. Trying to escape would likely be futile. So I lay as still as I could for as long as I could. As the sun came up, the bear was still there-though it looked much less like a bear and more like a sweat shirt hanging over a shovel. That is how darkness functions. It distorts what we see, transforming every vague image into an object of terror. People who live in the darkness are forever fleeing buggy men, ghosts and monsters under the bed. Frequently, they are blind to real dangers and, in their flight from imaginary ones, dash headlong into them.
But there are challenges also with living in the light. Light exposes us to what is real-the good, the bad and the ugly. While light dispels the dread of imagined fears, it exposes plenty of things we would rather not see. Nothing illustrates this dread of light more than the efforts of the current administration to expunge from American history every reference to the genocidal wars against the continent’s indigenous populations, our ruthless practice of slavery for the first century of our nation’s history, the following decade of Jim Crow segregation and the presence even now of systemic racism, sexism and homophobia. These efforts take the form of banning books from public schools and libraries, removing “offensive” exhibits from public museums and the shameful distortion of legal protections for civil rights to further white supremacy. Of course, these frantic measures to protect the illusion of an “exceptional America” are futile. As John the Evangelist tells us, “the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.” John 1:5. Champions of censorship always end up on the wrong side of history. Or, as Jesus puts it, “For nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed, nor is anything secret that will not become known and come to light.” Luke 8:17.
There is also much about ourselves we might rather not see. Turning the searchlight of truth on our society and on other people is perversely gratifying. Turning it inward, not so much. A great deal of what we find so objectionable in others is a reflection of what we strive to deny about ourselves. It is easy enough for a white middle class church to make bold statements condemning racism. It is quite another to explore how it has historically benefited from or even been complicit with systemic racism. It is harder still for that church to begin thinking about how it might make meaningful reparations for its past complicity. Walking in the light means recognizing and looking hopefully toward all that God would have us be. It also means having to confront the deep chasm between that and what we now are. Coming out of the darkness into the light is a jarring experience. At first, you want to close your eyes, resist the light and flee back into the darkness. So, too, stepping away from comforting lies that allow us to live contentedly with oppression, injustice and cruelty is a agonizing process. Healing is always painful and it is for healing that Jesus calls us out of darkness and into the light. Socrates once observed that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” But that does not mean the well examined life is easy.
The challenge of Advent is well expressed by the prophet Isaiah who pleads with God’s people to “walk in the light of the Lord.” Here is the above referenced poem by Mai Der Vang about light and so much that it does and signifies.
I Understand This Light To Be My Home
In the awareness, I am brought closer
to my being from long before.
In my
awareness, there is only what I can take
from the small spaces of
knowing, an earnest ascendance imparted
by way of transmissions from the grid,
a voice calls
out unbroken below and above as the aura
of faraway light.
There is a light that
shimmers so deep it never goes anywhere
but to shimmer.
Light assumes its job is to shimmer,
and so it is,
but more than that, light is ancestral.
Light is witness. Light is prehistory,
blueprint of vibrations shifting through
all directions of time.
Light as hidden winter that leads to
shadow as the growth.
Light as first
language of source. Light as both terrestrial
and celestial. Light of long nights far up
in the sky, I stare to the heavens and
weep for
the stars whose light I have always known
and understood to be my rooting.
I once shared a life with the name of
this light as I know it in the stars who
gave me
my body. As I know it in the frequencies
of my footsteps,
as I hear it in the code of a landscape
imprinted on my fingers,
as I spirit
my eyes open from the inside,
as I know and understand this light
to be kin.
Consider then the pain of leaving
this light, of losing the stars to spaces
no longer lit by its truth.
I am shaped
in the spaces where the light does
not reach, a need for what does not
shimmer
but opening to the shadow to receive
just as much light.
I miss this
light always.
Then more light.
Ever more light. Deficit of light to bring
more light.
Template of light to bring more love.
That is my one true wish, as I know
and
understand
this light to be my home, as a knowing
up there in the galaxy is me,
and I am up there
in my bones built from stars.
Source: Poetry, (October 2021) Mai Der Vang is a Hmong American poet. Her parents resettled in the United States in 1981 as Hmong refugees fleeing Laos. She graduated from University of California, Berkeley with a degree in English and from Columbia University with an MFA in Creative Writing-Poetry. Her book, Afterland, won the 2016 Walt Whitman Award selected by Carolyn Forche. Afterland was longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry in 2017, as well as a finalist for the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. You can read more about Mai Der Vang and sample more of her poetry at the Poetry Foundation website.
Peter's Outer Cape Portico 