Saturday, January 4, 2014

Dreams, Dogs and Darkness

The Holy Gospel According to St. John, the 1st Chapter

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

(John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’”) From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known. 

The other night our dog woke me up needing to go outside.  This was Thursday night... the night of the blizzard.  When I opened the door he felt the snow and wind and he decided maybe he didn’t need to go after all.  I made him go out anyway.  He does this whenever it’s snowing or raining.  If I hadn’t made him go out then, he would have let me go back to sleep for about fifteen minutes and then woken me up... again... to go out... again... because in his little doggy brain he would have, at that point, forgotten that it was snowing but remembered that, “Oh yeah, I need to water a tree!  Wake up dad!”    So, out he went.  I sat down at the dining table which is right by that door to wait for him.  He took a long time.  Apparently there was more than tree watering that needed to be done at one in the morning in a blizzard.  He took so long that I opened my computer and saw on Facebook that a college friend was getting snow in D.C., another posted about our old fraternity and Banana’s the Bear, another college friend posted about his trip to Mexico and three others about a college bowl game.  I tell you those riveting details of my exciting late night adventures with my dog and college Facebook friends because once my dog finally decided to come in and I went back to bed I had a dream.  I dreamed I was in college but it wasn’t a good dream.  

John’s Gospel opens in a majestic and transcendent manner that attempts to connect us with God through Jesus the Christ.  Unfortunately for us, John was trying to connect God with Greek speaking people from a very different culture, 2000 years ago, so for folks like us who don’t speak Greek and who live today, it can be hard to really hear what he’s saying.  It needs some translation.  John starts with “In the Beginning,” intentionally connecting his book and Jesus with the creation story.  When the apostle Paul talks about the Son of God, Jesus gets that Divine connection at the resurrection.  In Mark’s Gospel, it happens at Jesus’ Baptism and when Luke and Matthew talk about Jesus being the Son of God it happens at Jesus’ birth.  In John’s Gospel that connection has always been there.  In fact, Jesus isn’t born at all in John’s Gospel... he’s always been there... with God even before creation began.  

When John talks about Jesus always having this Divine connection way back before creation, he talks about Jesus as the “Word.”  In John’s day, “The Word” was a phrase that meant the creative power of God.  Folks understood it as sort of like the energy God uses, or the mechanism God uses to do things... things like create the universe.  The Word then, is the connection between God and the world... John wanted us to think of Jesus as something like God’s hands at work in the world... still completely part God, but the “make things happen in the world” part of God.  

What my late night dog and college friend induced dream helped me remember was how important it is for my life right now that the Word is that ancient, that powerful AND is also still able to make things happen in my world today.  In the dream I was in college and lived in a dorm but in my dream my dorm room held a very real and very tangible and very scary darkness.  A personified darkness had moved into my little dorm room and was taking over my little cinder block walled world.  In my dream I really needed it to go!  The Word, John says, came into the world specifically to shine a light into the darkness and in my dream THAT is exactly what needed to happen.  In the crazy way dreams go, I did my best Roman Catholic exorcist impression and called on Jesus to expel this darkness from my dorm room.  There was dramatic thrashing around and wrestling and it didn’t work at first and then it was working and then it wasn’t working and in the end the light did shine in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it!

I woke up at that point actually remembering the dream, which is not usual for me.  I laid in bed and took some deep breaths.  It was that kind of dream.  Then I marveled at how my brain had used my dog’s small bladder and a few updates from college friends on Facebook to create a scene in my mind.  Then my brain wove that middle of the night sleepy jumble of dog and college in with the dark parts of my life right now and then stirred all of that into the part of my mind mulling over this gospel lesson.   I thought of the real monsters of darkness that are a part of my life right now:  Medical bills that need to be paid, while we continue to buy groceries and heating oil instead; being stuck in a place where we don’t fit in, working jobs that aren’t a good match for us;  being isolated from friends and being far from family and then there is the real physical darkness of these short, gray days of winter.  That’s a bit of my darkness these days.  I know you have yours too.  Your darkness and my darkness are powerful and very real, but here in the beginning of John’s Gospel we are again given real and more powerful hope than any darkness!  Hope that, with the same power that created the universe, God pushes back with light on the darkest places in each of our lives and on the darkest places in all of creation.  
Listen again to our hope... In the beginning the “make things happen in the world” part of God brought to the world the WAY to live an abundant, meaning-filled life.  A life that is filled with being fully alive and abundant with joy.  A light that has changed and is still changing the world.  A light that overpowers even the deepest darknesses of our personal lives and those that plague the world.   

You and I don’t need to track down this light to have it in our lives... it tracks us down!  Jesus, the Christ, came to us then and comes to us now, wherever we are, like a traveler with a tent, camping on our doorstep.  He floods our lives with God’s infinite light and love... with a lovingkindness that, if it was literal light, would blind us with it’s brightness.  It is a light that always persists no matter what we do A light that will prevail.  

If we were on our own, the darkness of this world and our personal darknesses would simply be too much to stand.  The promise, the hope that we hold onto though, is that we are not on our own.  We have the One, wielding the same power that created the universe, the One who is the "make things happen here in our world" part of God, shining light into every single darkness everywhere.

Thirteen chapters later in John’s Gospel, Jesus tells us that as we begin to trust in the hope of that power and love and light, we too can bring that same power and love and light into the lives of those around us and we too will be a part of transforming the world into what God intends it to be.  May each of us grow in the trust of that power, that love and that light.  May it be our hope in the dark places of our personal lives and in the life of the world.  May we come to a place where we, as part of the Body of Christ, can with God’s universe-creating power, endless lovingkindness and bright, blinding light shine that hope into every darkness until every darkness is gone forever.  Amen.

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