Good Friday (4-4-26)

On Good Friday, Dr. Woods Lisenby preaches about "Darkness."

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Transcript

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As we sit, as we reflect, as we experience this story once again, as we journey to the cross, we carry with us weight, heaviness, sorrow. This is the Good Friday Tenebrae service. Tenebrae is a Latin word for darkness. The service ends in darkness. And after it's over, we're gonna walk out of here in silence. So after the very last song, after you sing the last hymn, I invite you uh to not say a word until you make it outside. Once you get up there, you can have your planning for dinner or your saying hello to those you didn't know were here. But while we're still in this place of worship, let us sit in the darkness, the heaviness of this night. And in fact, I want you to imagine or remember the darkest place that you've ever been in life. What's the what's the darkest memory that you can bring to mind? I can't remember. I might have told you about mine before. Uh, you know, even though I've done some of those sensory deprivation chambers, those uh float tanks they call them, where you're like floating in salt water and and you're like closed in and there's like no lights. It's completely dark in there, but there's a light within reach. You can push a button and like light will come on. So even though it was dark, it didn't feel dark. I knew the light was just within arm's reach. No, for me, it was uh I remember going to Mariana Caverns as a kid. Uh I think I was like less than 10. Uh, and and we walked deep down into the caverns, and uh it was damp and it was cold, and then there was the stalag tide and the stalagmite, and and then uh we made it into the heart of the cavern. Um, and uh we were so we we were all kind of huddled in there, and then they turned the lights out. You know, they had the guiding lights to get you, they turned them out, and as a child, deep underground, without any access to the light switch, I just remember how overwhelming that sensation was. How utterly dark, not only that it was, but that it felt. I mean, it was so dark you couldn't see your hand in front of your face. You couldn't tell if your eyes were open or closed. The only way uh you knew is if if if you touched your face, you could see if the lids were there or not. Darkness that uh intense, it's almost physical. It's like it's tangible, it's oppressive, it's smothering. You can feel it. It's almost like your eyes and your mind begin playing tricks on you, and it's like you have this feeling that the darkness is visible. I have to imagine that that's what Job was trying to describe when he was attempting to put words to his agony after he'd lost his land and his income and then his family. He's trying to describe just how deep the pain was. In the tenth chapter of Job, he offers this lament to God. He says, Why then did you bring me from my mother's womb? I wish I had died before any eye saw me. If only I never came into being, or had been carried straight from the womb to the grave. Are not my few days almost over? Turn away from me so I can have a moment's joy before I go to the place of no return, to the land of gloom and utter darkness, to the land of deepest night and utter darkness and disorder, where even the light is like darkness. Where even the light is like darkness. That is a profound description of darkness, and it's a depiction that might be foreign to some of us, but it's one that others might know all too well. A feeling that you've encountered more than you wish you had. That level of darkness is not something we ever want to encounter, nor is it something we can endure for very long. According to John Milton, that level of darkness is what hell must be like. You know, most of our modern concepts about hell they don't come from the Bible, they come from two other sources, from Dante's Inferno and from John Milton's Paradise Lost. And in the very beginning of Milton's epic poem, he describes Satan waking up in hell for the first time. And in his imagination, and in Milton's imagination, this is what it must have been like. He writes this the dismal situation, waste and wild, a dungeon, horrible on all sides round, as one great furnace flamed, yet from those flames no light, but rather darkness visible, served only to discover sights of woe, regions of sorrow, doleful shades where peace and rest can never dwell. Hope never comes. That is darkness. Darkness visible, where peace and rest can never dwell, and hope never comes the darkest experiences are more than just the light going out. It's more than just stumbling around at midnight. The darkest experiences in our lives are the things that don't make sense, are the things that we cannot even fully put into words. And I have found that only art can really capture the essence of true darkness in a way that is ineffable, in a way we cannot describe with our own words. Only art can it communicate the experience of what we're feeling. It's the painter and the poet, the songwriters, to help us articulate just what it's like to feel darkness visible. It's Ophelia and her death in Hamlet. The most innocent character driven to madness climbed up in a willow tree when the branch broke. But long it could not be till her garments, heavy with their drink, pulled the poor wretch from the melodious lay to Maddita. It's Vincent van Gogh's at Eternity's Gate. It portrays a man seated in a chair with his hands on his head, weeping at the thought of his life coming to an end. It's Edgar Allan Poe's Annabelle Lee. It was many a many a year ago in a kingdom by the sea that a maiden there lived, whom you may know by the name of Annabelle Lee. Annabelle Lee, this maiden, she lived with no other thought than to love and be loved by me. But the angels, not half so happy in heaven, went envying her and me. Yes, that was the reason, as all men know, in this kingdom by the sea, that when the wind came out on that cold by night, chilling and killing my Annabelle Lee. It's Mozart's Requiem in D minor. And it's Johnny Cash. I hurt myself today. What have I become? My sweetest friend. Everyone I know goes away in the end. And you can have it all. My empire of dirt. I will let you down. I will make you hurt. Do you feel that? That tick weight. That heaviness. Can you imagine the darkness that these people felt? The feeling of darkness that is visible. That feeling right there is what the world felt on a Friday evening in Jerusalem two thousand years ago. The darkness overcame the world when Jesus hung on a cross. You can feel it in Michelangelo's Pieta. A grieving mother that has lost her child, Mary without Jesus. It's in Brunelleschi's crucifix. It's full of emotion. And when his friend Donatello saw it, he dropped his eggs and bowed his head on the floor. And you can hear it in Isaac Watson's hymn. Alas, and did my savior bleed, and did my sovereign die? Would he devote that sacred head for sinners such as I? Well, might the sun in darkness hide and shut its glories in when God the mighty Maker died for his creation's sin. There is no darkness darker than the killing of an innocent God. There's no crime greater in humanity than our bloodlust against our Savior. Which also means there is nothing that we can ever feel that God Himself has not felt. There's nothing darker than what happened to Jesus. And so whatever darkness happens to us, Christ understands. God knows our pain because God has felt our pain. God has felt the sting of betrayal. God has felt the loneliness of abandonment, the brutality of violence. God has felt the approaching of unavoidable death. And so, though Good Friday is a service that ends without hope, it's a reflection on the disciples' experiences that we've been reading. We remember that when their Lord was crucified, there at least was still good news on Good Friday. And that is this we are never alone. There is no darkness. There is nothing you experience that Christ cannot journey with you through. And Christ will bear your sins for each of us. There's a light that came into the darkness, and the darkness eventually was not able to overcome it, which is what makes this Friday good. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.