Darkness

The movie, Barbie (2023), is a fantasy/comedy about a group of dolls who live in the perfect world of "Barbieland." One night, the dolls are having a dance party when Barbie starts thinking about the uncomfortable reality of death.

All the barbies are dancing to pop music in the barbie dream house saying, “Oh, isn’t this the most beautiful day! Aren’t we the most beautiful people? Doesn’t it feel like this is just going to go on like this forever?” And then the main Barbie, Margot Robbie’s character says, “Do you guys ever think about dying?” and the record scratches and the music stops. The other Barbies stare at her aghast and angry, as if to say, that topic doesn’t belong in Barbieland. And Barbie kind of covers it up and says, “I’m just dying... to keep dancing!” and the music plays and the Barbies go back to their fantasy world.

The next morning, Barbie wakes up with bad breath, cellulite, and flat feet. The rest of the movie is about her quest to discover what it means to be alive outside of perfect Barbieland.

Preaching Angle: Just like in Barbieland, it can be uncomfortable to bring up the topic of death. But we need to face the reality of death to grow spiritually and emotionally.

Clip available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImFQpKImJqQ

In his novel, This Is Happiness, Niall Williams’ elderly narrator, Noe (pronounced No), remembers when electricity and light came to their little Irish village of Faha:

I’m aware here that it may be hard to imagine the enormity of this moment, the threshold that once crossed would leave behind a world that had endured for centuries, and that this moment was only sixty years ago.

Consider this: when the electricity did finally come, it was discovered that the 100-watt bulb was too bright for Faha. The instant garishness was too shocking. Dust and cobwebs were discovered to have been thickening on every surface since the sixteenth century. Reality was appalling. It turned out Siney Dunne’s fine head of hair was a wig, not even close in color to the scruff of his neck, and Marian McGlynn’s healthy allure was in fact a caked make-up the color of red turf ash.

In the week following the switch-on, (store owner) Tom Clohessy couldn’t keep mirrors in stock, as people came in from out the country and bought looking glasses of all variety, went home, and in merciless illumination endured the chastening of all flesh when they saw what they looked like for the first time.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Such is the illumination of the gospel—in a person’s heart, in a community, even in a culture. It’s no surprise, then, that John 3:19 says, “Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.” James 1:23-24 warns against the folly of looking in the mirror of God’s Word only to walk away without changing.

Darkness captivates, baffles, and appalls us. It's a shifty thing of many textures, many moods, a state of fascination and of horror, an absence and a presence, solace and threat, a beginning and an end.

If you have ever been down a mine and been told by a guide to switch off your lamp you may feel like you have experienced it. But quantum physics has found that you are in fact surrounded by light you cannot see, for true darkness “does not exist.” Light particles—photons—exist throughout the known universe and beyond it.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Darkness is no impediment to our all-seeing God (Heb. 4:13). The One who created light (Gen. 1:3), sees all things (Prov. 15:3), nothing can conceal us from God, not even the deepest cave. Psalm 139:11-12 “… If I say, ‘Surely the darkness will hide me, and the light become night around me’—even the darkness is not dark to You, but the night shines like the day, for darkness is as light to You.”

Not only are the images from the James Webb Space Telescope brilliant and beautiful, but they are also baffling. Approximately 40 pairs of a new classification of orb have been identified within pictures of the Orion Nebula.

Dubbed JuMBOs—Jupiter Mass Binary Objects—these objects defy our current, conventional understanding of how planets, stars, and gravitational orbits work. Unlike normal planets, the Jupiter-sized pairs don’t orbit a star. Astronomers don’t know why—or how—they function in this way. As The New York Times put it, they are “a complete mystery.”

These images and discoveries coming back from the far reaches of space put us in our place. They bring to the forefront how expansive the universe is, how small we are, how much we don’t know, and how much there is yet to discover. When we consider the heavens—the star clusters, nebulae, black holes, and now JuMBOs—who are we? What is humankind that God is mindful of us and cares for us, as Psalm 8:3–4 says?

In “God’s Promises Are Clearest When We Turn Out the Lights,” Cort Gatliff reflects that “the stars provide perspective. They humble us by highlighting our finitude. Yet they also lift up our heads by reminding us of our infinite worth in the eyes of the Creator.” And while stunning images from space let us glimpse celestial realities we’d never be able to see with the naked eye, simple nighttime starscapes also invite us into awe and wonder.

During Advent, we often read this prophecy from Isaiah: “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned” (9:2). In a spiritual and emotional sense, the recent heaviness of war, natural disasters, and other global tragedies helps us understand even more deeply what it means to be people walking in darkness. And this deep darkness only magnifies what it is to gaze upon the Light of the World. Amid it all, God is mindful of us. God does care for us. The Light of the World shines in the darkness.

When was the last time you needed to use your cell phone as a flashlight, perhaps to look for something in the garage, read a menu at a darkly lit restaurant, or find something in the backyard at night? Why did you need it? Your answer probably includes some expression of dark or darkness.

As a sinner living with other sinners in a fallen world, you encounter darkness every day. While you may experience Instagram-worthy, sunny day picnic lunches, the reality is that life is more of a midnight walk through the woods. On any given day, you probably encounter more darkness than you do truth. So, to move forward without danger and get to where you are meant to go, you need something to light your way.

No passage gets at this need and God's provision better than Psalm 119:105: "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path."

In an issue of CT magazine, author and college president Krish Kandiah writes:

One of my earliest memories is of holding my mother’s hand on my first day of school. I was so nervous as I entered the classroom that I wouldn’t let go. The warmth of her fingers reassured me as my heart pounded in my chest. When I felt scared and alone, she was my lifeline and my security.

I was reminded of that day a few years ago as I sat in a dark room, once again holding my mother’s hand. The silence was deafening as I strained to hear the muted words coming from the dehydrated mouth of a woman whose body had been ravaged by cancer. This time my mother held on to my hand, seeking reassurance from its warmth in her time of distress. The comforter had become the comforted.

Those were heartbreaking days. One moment I was praying for a miraculous recovery, the next for the end to come quickly. I was also haunted by God’s conspicuous absence. What I would have given during those long, languishing hours for his still, small voice of calm.

Turkish theologian Ziya Meral, writes: Where is God when millions of his children are being persecuted in the most brutal ways? Why does he keep silent in the middle of persecution but speak loudly in the middle of conferences with famous speakers and worship bands? I have prayed many times like Luther: “Bless us, Lord, even curse us! But don’t remain silent!”

Meral’s struggles eventually led him to consider Jesus’ own experience: “The greatest glory Jesus brought to God was not when he walked on the water or prayed for long hours, but when he cried in agony in the Garden of Gethsemane and still continued to follow God’s will. (He did so) even though it meant isolation, darkness, and the silence of God. Thus, we know that when everything around us fails, when we are destroyed and abandoned, our tears … are the greatest worship songs we have ever sung.”

Heath Adamson shares the story of his deliverance from the occult and addiction in an article in CT magazine. Even as a child, the spiritual world was real to him because of his involvement with the occult. Heath remembers watching a chair slide across the floor and a candle floating off the coffee table. His experiences with the supernatural led him on an all-consuming quest for answers.

Then in eighth grade a female classmate sensed in her heart that God was whispering Heath’s name. The whisper said something to the effect of, “Pray for that young man. You are going to marry him one day.” They struck up a relationship, but when the school year ended, they went their separate ways. She attended church, but Heath had regular encounters with the demonic realm, became addicted to numerous drugs, looked like a human skeleton, and lived life in quiet desperation.

Heath then writes:

In my junior year of high school, I asked my physics partner about religion and he invited me to church. I actually went and one Sunday night, I lay in my bedroom thinking about who God was and what the truth could be. I felt like God himself had come into my room. I remember saying out loud, “Jesus, you are who you say you are.” Deep inside, I believed he loved me the way I was. God’s presence was so real that I could almost feel him breathing in my face.

I told my physics partner I would go back to church with him on a Wednesday night. I said, “Remember when the pastor asked if people wanted to ask Jesus to forgive them. Well, I think I need to do that.” At the end of the service, a volunteer pastor said a prayer and shared the gospel. I was the only one who responded. That night, when I embraced the grace of Jesus, my body was supernaturally and instantaneously healed. My substance addictions vanished.

The very next day, I discovered something incredible in the mailbox. Inside was a handwritten letter from the girl who dared to listen in eighth grade when God touched her heart. It just happened to land in the mailbox the day after I met God. After I married that amazing girl, I found her prayer journals. That’s when I discovered how God used the prayers of her and others, often whispered when no one was watching, to help soften my hardened heart.

Looking back at my salvation, I am the product of a girl who dared to believe when God whispered, an invitation to church, and the power of prayer. And most of all the Savior who stepped into my darkness and, instead of turning away in horror, showed me who he was and who I was created to be.

The podcast, “The Agent,” tells the story of Jack Barsky, a Soviet-era KGB secret agent embedded in the US, beginning in the 1970s. Gradually, his loyalties shifted and in a remarkable turn of events, the FBI actually eventually helped him to secure US citizenship.

Near the end of the podcast he says,

I had a home again, an official home. … I’d put East Germany out of my mind. I stopped thinking about the folks back there. ... I put it away and put it in a part of my brain that I didn’t want to access anymore. You always want to belong to something. This is one of the basic things that make us human. … Now I had a country again. That felt really good.

You can listen to the podcast here.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The Christian's change of citizenship is far more dramatic, from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light, thanks to Christ Jesus, our King.

American physicist and author Alan Lightman is a professor at MIT. He contemplates the day of his daughter’s wedding:

It was a perfect picture of utter joy, and utter tragedy. Because I wanted my daughter back as she was at age ten, or twenty. As we moved together toward that lovely arch, other scenes flashed through my mind: my daughter in first grade holding a starfish as big as herself, her smile missing a tooth … now she was thirty. I could see lines in her face.

Lightman confesses he has a hard time accepting that for him and his daughter and everything else, it all ends in nothingness:

Despite all the richness of the physical world — the majestic architecture of atoms, the rhythm of the tides, the luminescence of the galaxies — nature is missing something even more exquisite and grand. Some immortal substance, which lies hidden from view. Such exquisite stuff could not be made from matter, because all matter is slave to the second law of thermodynamics.

Perhaps this immortal thing that we wish for exists beyond time and space. Perhaps it is God. I cannot believe that nature could be so amiss. In my continual cravings for eternal youth and constancy, I am being sentimental. Perhaps I could accept the fact that in a few short years, my atoms will be scattered in wind and soil, my mind and thoughts gone, my “I-ness” dissolved in an infinite cavern of nothingness. But I cannot accept that fate even though I believe it to be true. I cannot force my mind to go to that dark place.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Such is the hopelessness of those without Christ (Eph. 2:12), but compare it to the hope of eternal life for the believer—“In the hope of eternal life, which God, who does not lie, promised before the beginning of time” (Titus 1:2).

In 1879 the modern world changed forever with a patent. It was issued for the invention of a carbon filament made of cotton and linen thread, wood splints, papers coiled in various ways. This process which, after fine tuning, would launch a company the following year dedicated to commercial production of the electric light bulb. The Edison Electric Company offered its customers a safer, cleaner, cheaper alternative to gas light. As electric power began to replace gas in homes and factories, for the first time in human history work was no longer limited to the time between sunrise and sunset.

With his modern utterance of “let there be light,” Thomas Edison invited humanity into a world that never sleeps. Edison himself believed sleep was a waste of time. He was known to work over 100 hours a week, to hold job interviews at 4:00am, and to insist that his employees adhere to the same sleepless schedule he did. He adhered to and promoted a philosophy that rest was the enemy of productivity. In 1914 he said that there is really no reason why men should go to bed at all.

It appears his vision for a sleepless humanity has come to pass. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has declared a sleep deprivation epidemic among Americans. Though Edison’s “let there be light” may have ushered us into sleeplessness, the divine creator who uttered, “Let there be light” also benevolently declares “Let there be rest.”