Dark and Light

Dark and Light

Devotional for the United Church of Christ Science and Technology Network

December 21, 2017

Rev. Dr. Ruth E. Shaver

⁵ I am the Lord, and there is no other;

  besides me there is no god.

  I arm you, though you do not know me, 

⁶ so that they may know, from the rising of the sun

  and from the west, that there is no one besides me;

  I am the Lord, and there is no other. 

⁷ I form light and create darkness,

  I make weal and create woe;

  I the Lord do all these things.

—Isaiah 45:5-7, NRSV

This section of Isaiah is addressed to the “Savior” of the Israelite people, Cyrus the Great of Persia. We know of Cyrus from the so-called Cyrus Cylinder, an artifact held by the British Museum that proclaims the king to be a liberator and restorer of proper faith and practice to the people of Babylon and all those held captive by the Babylonians. The Cylinder makes no mention of the Israelites, Jews, Jerusalem, Judah, or Judea,¹ but the Biblical narrative tells us that Cyrus set the captive peoples of Judah free and began the restoration of Jerusalem. No wonder, then, that the prophetic school of Isaiah calls him “Messiah!”²

Today is the Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere and the Summer Solstice in the southern hemisphere. Here in the northern hemisphere, we celebrate that our daylight hours will increase steadily until June, while in the southern hemisphere, the daylight hours will decrease until June. This is as it should be. Notice in verse seven above that God (YHWH) asserts creative responsibility and control over dark and light. As their cousins around the Mediterranean basin believed about their gods and goddesses, so our ancestors believed about YHWH: everything happens because YHWH makes it so.

The Greeks and Romans had amazing mythology to explain how the gods and goddesses worked, even after the YHWH stories were written. We no longer think that a chariot pulls the sun from horizon to horizon to create day and night or that Persephone (or any of her non-Greek alter egos) spends three months of the year in Hades, during which her mother Demeter refuses to allow anything to grow. Neither do most of us believe that YHWH literally commands the sun to rise and set and the Earth to tilt on its axis throughout the year. We know now night and day happen because the Earth rotates on its axis about every 24 hours and that dark nights are vital to the ecosystem, both because of nocturnal (night active) animals like bats, owls, and beavers and because diurnal (day active) animals need sleep to rest, recover, and even solidify memories. We know that seasons happen because the Earth tilts on its axis and that dormancy in winter months is an essential part of the life cycle of many plants and that hibernating animals need that time to be ready to mate or to give birth. We understand that dark is not bad at all. Dark is as necessary as light. I find it amazing that the laws that govern creation made it possible for life to evolve that requires dark and light, summer and winter (and spring and fall, too)…it’s as if YHWH intended for us to notice the good and necessary presence of both/and so that we do not choose either/or and destroy the balance of forces.

As we struggle with racism today, we have to look carefully at how we use the terms “dark” and “light” during Advent and Epiphany. Our God who made night and day, dark and light, to be equally necessary for life surely never meant for us to consider skin color any differently. Skin color is an evolutionary trick for survival: as humans migrated away from the equator, we needed to be able to absorb the necessary amount of vitamin D from increasingly weaker sunlight. Those whose skin was lighter had an advantage in higher and lower latitudes. Slavery, colonization, and immigration have brought people together again, leading to the amazing mosaic of skin colors humanity exhibits today. There is nothing inherently good about any one color, just as there is nothing inherently bad about any one skin color. We are all of us facets of the image of God/YHWH, so we are ALL good, whatever color flesh we have. 

Of course, at Christmas, we use a lot of imagery for LIGHT. Jesus is the Light of the World and it is his birthday we celebrate. But I wonder if sometimes we have gone overboard with the light=good/dark=bad idea here, too. I think we might be confusing Jesus with the Light side of the Force, another myth in which “good” has been equated with “Light” and “bad” has been equated with “Dark.” Even in the costumes! Seriously, when Luke Skywalker is struggling between “Light” and “Dark” in Empire Strikes Back, his costume is—wait for it—GRAY. Ugh… But our tradition says that Jesus was born at night, while shepherds were keeping watch over their sheep in the fields because that’s what sheep need during lambing season. We think of angels as being brighter than anything else in the sky, but if you were YHWH or Cecile B. DeMille, you’d have the angel choir appear at the darkest part of the night, too, wouldn’t you? How better to allow all the wavelengths of light to shine most brightly than to set the radiant angels against the absence of those wavelengths?

Yes, my friends, when we speak of “light shining in the darkness”, we are actually talking about PRESENCE. As in, the brighter, whiter the light, the more saturated the spectrum is with visible wavelengths of light (and maybe even infrared and ultraviolet, too). Darkness—deepest black— isn’t even really a thing, this way, because it’s the absence of wavelengths of light. The darker it is, the fewer wavelengths are getting to our eyes. Now, here’s the funniest thing of all about physics: the exact opposite is true of pigment! Light is the ABSENCE of pigment, while darkness—specifically black—is the PRESENCE of all pigment. Even here, YHWH has taken away either/or and asked us to embrace both/and.

It’s said about the Force, “It’s like duct tape: it has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.” This is what’s true about YHWH. YHWH created the light, the dark, and both are necessary for the universe to hold together. So let us, in this new Christian year, pledge to be both/and people. Let us celebrate dark and light in all their separate and combined beauty. Let us remember that the phrase “Jesus is the Light of the World” is a metaphor to help us understand the moral and ethical call we have to make the world more like heaven, where there is no doubt light and dark in equal measure, both proclaiming the glory of YHWH.

Prayer: God of Dark and Light, help us to celebrate both/and. Let us see the beauty of all shades, of presence and absence. Let us remember that metaphors are helpful but only go so far, so that we seek new ways to speak eternal truths that give us new understanding and new hope for the building of heaven here on earth. We ask in the Messiah’s name. Amen.

¹ http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=327188&partId=1

² I think it’s pretty awesome that archaeology as a science is so important to understanding the stories in the Bible. What we learn from archaeology helps us understand how the narrative is and is not history as we understand it and also helps us place the stories of our faith in the broader context of the ancient Near East.