Thomas J Parlette
“Times of Darkness”
Job 23: 1-9, 16-17.
10/13/24
A couple of years ago, I was really struggling with my vision. I first noticed it during our COVID shutdown time, when we were filming our services in the Atrium on Thursdays and posting them online. I was starting to have trouble seeing my sermon text.
Then I noticed that driving at night was becoming more of a challenge. The glare from oncoming traffic bothered me more than it had before. And if it was raining at night – well, I started to get downright afraid to drive.
So I bought some of those yellow tinted night driving glasses, hoping that would help. They reduced the glare a little bit, but they really didn’t work. I wish had seen the study that recently appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association – the data suggested that “wearing yellow-lens glasses when driving at night does not improve performance. Particularly in the most critical task: detection of pedestrians.” (1)
So I went to the eye doctor and discovered that I had cataracts starting to form in both my eyes. I wore some prescription glasses for awhile, but my doctor advised me to think about cataract surgery sometime in the near future. I was a few years early for cataract surgery, but I got it done. It wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be, and afterwards I had 20/20 vision. Finally, when I play golf, I can see where the ball lands – and it’s much easier to drive in darkness.
In today’s passage, Job is experiencing some problems with darkness as well. Job couldn’t see what was going on in his life at that moment. He couldn’t understand – he had no clarity. All the horrible things that had happened to him were unreasonable and absurd, and definitely unfair. He tried in vain to see through the murkiness – he peered into the darkness and could see nothing. Perhaps he would have been tempted to try some yellow-tinted glasses – but they wouldn’t have helped. So, He crys out to God, “My complaint is bitter!” We can certainly understand that.
In his darkness, Job wanders in search of answers. He is interested in where God is while he suffers from his afflictions. He goes looking for God – “O that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his dwelling! I would lay my case before him, and fill my mouth with arguments.”
But Job has a problem. He can’t find God: “If I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him; on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him.”
In the 1500’s, St. John of the Cross, coined a phrase, “the dark night of the soul” that has become familiar to many. St. John was a Spanish mystic and Carmelite friar who wrote extensively about his own spiritual journey. He used that phrase, “dark night of the soul”, to describe how he felt when his faith was at a low point, when he struggled with intense periods of doubt and despair – just like Job experienced.
St. John of the Cross and Job are hardly alone in this struggle with times of darkness.
The Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh struggled with mental illness throughout his life, which manifested in startling episodes of depression, anxiety and emotional turmoil.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, the great Russian novelist, best known for works such as Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, also suffered periods of intense doubt and despair, which are reflected in his characters’ inner struggles.
But of all the figures who have struggled to hang on to their faith in times of darkness, doubt and despair, Job is the poster child for those who wrestle with the complexity of the human experience and the paradoxes of life and darkness that we sometimes have to struggle through.
Barbra Brown Taylor has long been fascinated by darkness. Indeed, she wrote a book about it. Near the beginning of her book Learning to Walk in the Dark, Taylor writes, “Since I have spent at least half of my life in churches, I am especially aware of how many old-time Christians are looking into the dark right now. Attendance is down, debt is up. Plenty of smaller churches are closing, or at least putting their buildings up for sale. All the divine energy seems to be going to the southern hemisphere, leaving the old-timers up north with a bad case of solar affective disorder. Learning to walk in the dark is an especially valuable skill in times like these – or maybe I should say, remembering how to walk in the dark, since people of faith have deep pockets of wisdom about how to live through long nights in the wilderness. We just forgot, most of us, once we got where we were going and the glory days began.”
“The remembering takes time, like straightening a bent leg and waiting for the feeling to return. This cannot be rushed, no matter how badly you want to get where you are going. Step 1 of learning to walk in the dark is to give up running the show. Next, you sign the waiver that allows you to bump into some things that may frighten you at first. Finally, you ask darkness to teach you what you need to know…”
“Meanwhile, here is some good news you can use: even when light fades and darkness falls – as it does every single day, and every single life – God does not turn the world over to some other deity. Even when you cannot see where you are going, and no one answers when you call, this is not sufficient proof that you are alone. There is a divine presence, that transcends all your ideas about it, along with all your language for calling it to your aid, which is not above using darkness as the wrecking ball that brings all your false gods down… Darkness is not dark to God; the night is as bright as the day.” (2)
Yet, all those people who deal with times of darkness are rarely above picking a fight with God. Job was certainly not afraid to do so. After all, when you’ve lost everything, what do you have to lose if you shake your fist in the face of the Almighty? You’ve lost a child to cancer, your spouse dies, you lose your job or your house, your whole future. You’re down and out, at the end of your rope – you have nothing to lose.
That is Job here. Listen to how Eugene Peterson puts it in The Message: “I’m not letting up – I’m standing my ground. My complaint is legitimate. God has no right to treat me like this – it isn’t fair. If I knew where on earth to find him, I’d go straight to him. I’d lay my case before him face-to-face, give him all my arguments firsthand. I’d find out exactly what’s going on in his head. Do you think he’d dismiss me or bully me? No, he’d take me seriously.”
That is what you call giving God the business. Job was so mad he’d make a hornet look cuddly. He wanted to get God’s attention, not realizing that sometimes you should be careful what you ask for. God was indeed listening, and God responds to Job – but that’s a story for another day.
For now, Job is not happy with how God is running the show, and he wasn’t timid about letting God know about it.
Former President Ronald Reagan once told a story about an American and a Russian talking about their countries. The American starts to brag – “In my country, I can walk into the Oval Office, slam my fist on the President’s desk and say, “Mr. President, I don’t like the way you’re running this country!”
The Russian appears unimpressed and says, “We can do that in my country, too.”
The American says, “Really?”
“Yes,” says the Russian. “I can walk right into the Kremlin, slam my fist on Gorbachev’s desk and say, “Sir, I don’t like the way President Reagan is running his country.” (3)
The point to remember when we’re pounding on God’s desk and yelling about how the universe is being run is that God is not without answers. Perhaps, God will be merciful and not put us in our place as God does later with Job.
We may not be able to find God on our own, but God will always find us – indeed, we discover that God has not lost us. Job admits as much in verse 10 – “But he knows the way that I take, he knows where I am and what I’ve done.” God knows – but do we?
The story is told that on the eve of the conclave that would elect him as the next Pope, then Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, later known as Pope Francis, urged his fellow cardinals to remember that Christians should live by the light of the moon rather than of the sun. Followers of Christ should reflect the source of light rather than acting as if they are the source. With regard to the hierarchy of the religious structure he would soon be elected to lead, he said that the church exists to reflect Christ – as soon as it believes itself to be the light, disaster occurs, and the church becomes an idol.
Commenting on the story, Vance Morgan wrote on Patheos.com, “While there may be many reasons to fear the dark, times of darkness are part of being human, and spiritual darkness is central to a search for the Divine. The way many people of faith talk about darkness, you would think that it came from a whole different deity, but as Barbara Brown Taylor reminds us, “to be human is to live by sunlight and moonlight, with anxiety and delight, admitting limits and transcending them, falling down and rising up.” (4)
In the end, for Job, it was all about God. God knows the way. God knows the way for all of us. True, healing is a gradual and nonlinear process, which is why we need to be patient and gentle with ourselves as we go through the ordeal. But success requires something more – faith.
It took a ton of faith for Job to admit this, but deep in his heart, he knew it was true. God knows the way we take. God knows us. God can track us as though we have a GPS chip implanted in our hearts. As Isaiah puts it, “As a mother comforts her child, God will comfort you.”
In Jeremiah, there’s an image of a God who is actually anxious to be discovered. In Chapter 29, verses 12-14, we read, “When you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will LET you find me, says the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes…”
“I will LET you find me.” What an amazing promise.
That is precisely what Job, the beleaguered character of text, is looking for. It’s often what we’re looking for as well. We might want some night vision glasses for those dark night of the soul when we cannot see God. But darkness is not dark to God – the night is as bright as the day in the eyes of the God. And God will always let us find him – even in our times of darkness.
And for that – May God be praised. Amen.
1. Hwang, Alex D., Merve Tuccar-Burak and Eli Peli, “Comparison of pedestrian detection with and without yellow-lens glasses during simulated night driving with and without headlight glare.” Journal of the American Medical Association, JAMAnetwork.com, August 1st, 2019.
2. Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark (HarperOne, 2015) p15-16.
3. Homileticsonline, retrieved Oct. 1st, 2024.
4. Vance Morgan, “Let There Be Light (Or Not)”, Patheos.com, March 7th, 2024
