Between Dusk and Dawn
John 11:32-44, Isaiah 25: 6-9, and Revelation 21:1-6a
The texts read today are the texts for the celebration of All Saint’s Day. The history of All Saints stems back to the celebration of the life of the martyrs. Initially, the martyrs had a day, usually the day they died, dedicated to remembering them, but as martyrs increased, the Church chose to consolidate all the remembrances of the martyrs to one day – and eventually – this led to remembrance of all those who have died in Christ.
With this emphasis of Scripture and the recognition of All Saint’s Day, I was reminded of CS Lewis’s The Great Divorce. How many of you have read it? It’s a fabulous imagining of Heaven and Hell and the interaction of people between the two places.
Hell is described as the “Grey Town,” where it is constantly raining, but also where there is this sense that the sun is always about to set. It never does, but the sky appears as perpetual dusk. Much could be said about the town, but a few things are notable. We’re told that all of the people in Hell could probably fit in two city blocks fully occupied, but people cannot stand to be around anyone else, so they are millions of square miles apart from one another. The second is that all anyone has to do is think of what they want and they have it, but no one is ever satisfied.
A bus stop exists in Hell, and if people are willing to do so, they can ride the bus, which takes them to another place. This bus goes in the upward direction and eventually lands in a place where the dawn is perpetually breaking. There is no full sunrise yet, but all signs indicate that the sun is soon to come up over the horizon. This, of course, is Heaven, and it, too, has notable qualities. First, the people coming off the bus are nothing more than smudges shaped as people. They have no substance, and when they try to walk on the grass, the blades stab their feet. One of them attempts to take an apple, but it’s as heavy as a boulder.
Bright, gleaming people come to each of the ghosts to try and convince them to travel to the mountains, but each one must make the decision to accept the help of these bright ones. As we get to know both the smudge people and the bright people, we find out they usually knew each other on Earth, and often, the smudges cannot quite acquiesce to the promptings of the bright ones. They return to the bus to return to the “Grey Town.” But for those that enter into community with the Bright ones, they are transformed and become more solid, more real, and they begin the journey to the mountain with joy and delight.
Now you may be concerned about the theology of Lewis here, but saddling the book with eschatological significance may be missing the point. Just as taking our scripture passages at purely face value could be a mistake.
In the Isaiah passage, the author is likely talking to a beleaguered group of Jews in the 4th century who had suffered greatly under the Persian empire. For the readings in Revelation and John, we know that the churches to whom these books and letters were written were also being highly persecuted – possibly encompassing the first of the martyrs whom All Saint’s Day initially celebrated and remembered.
While in the setting of All Saint’s Day, these texts provide comfort – that our dearly departed are now in a place where there are no more tears and where death is swallowed up; in their historical setting, the passages are much more about bolstering those, as Isaiah says, with weak knees who’s next step could lead to their fall or who feel like a smoldering wick, wearily close to growing cold.
And this is why I love Lewis’s story, because it is more of an allegory of our day-to-day lives. Exposing our weak knees and smoldering wicks and how they play out in thought patterns and interactions with others. His view of these people living between dusk and dawn is extremely powerful and common to us all, thus the sermon title.
At my day job, I work with people who aren’t quite sure if the long shadows they see cast around them are hints of darkness to come or heralds of a new day. Usually, the assumption is that it’s the night ready to overtake them. Some people have a vague hope that it will, and others ardently desire it, which is another type of darkness all together.
The shadows come from physical and sexual abuse, neglect, feeling deep loneliness, being the target of slurs or misrepresentations, experiencing the pain of broken trust, or having a brain that is misfiring and flooding the body with anxiety and fear. While these events could seem to be extreme cases, it is pure statistics that allows me to say that many in this room have experienced these things. We live in a world that resides between the dusk and the dawn.
The shadows need not only come from our suffering, but can also come from our success. In Lewis’s Hell, people can have whatever they want, whenever they want it and it leads to their isolation. When has getting what you wanted lead to dissatisfaction or misery? Or maybe you’ve surveyed all you own, and it feels more like a ball and chain than a conduit of fulfillment? These are shadows, too.
If the shadows are so easily seen, to what are they leading us?
If we look for themes in these passages, two things stand out. One, they all extol the communal nature of what we would call the Kingdom of God. In Isaiah, the Kingdom is a banqueting scene filled with tables of food and wine surrounded by people. In Revelation, it is a City that is envisioned with all of God’s people within it. In John, the community is there in mourning, yes, but as some commentators note, Jesus fulfills the miracle through the community by telling them to unbind Lazarus. Jesus didn’t use his Jedi powers to remove the burial cloths, he tells the community to do it, emphasizing the importance of community and giving us clues as to how God works in the world.
Community is of utmost importance in the Kingdom – it’s where we feast, it’s where we experience God’s presence, it’s where we become unbound from those shadows that hold us so tightly.
Secondly, the passages encourage hopeful anticipation. Isaiah tells us that at the banquet laid before the people, the people say, “This is the Lord for whom we have waited.” God tells John, “To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life.” And Jesus tells Martha, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?”
And because it’s a little more symbolic. . .the idea of thirst here harkens back to several Bible passages. Isaiah 55 says, “Come all who are thirsty, come to the waters. And you who have no money, come buy and eat.” In John 7, Jesus is celebrating the Feast of Booths which used water in the ritual sacrifices. During the feast, one of the sung hymns was from Isaiah 12, “With joy will you draw water from the wells of salvation.” John tells us that Jesus stood up in the midst of this feast and said, “Anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink.” Thirst, then is symbolic for longing, for needing something more than what is available, and per the scene from John, thirst is searching for salvation – and finding it in Christ. Thirst is, in a sense, journeying, seeking after God to fulfill the longings of our heart.
So hope, seeking, belief – these are the currency we exchange as a community when the shadows draw near.
And I ask again, to what are the shadows leading us? They are leading us to community – a true community, where we are not in the Hell of our own self-absorption, but where we offer to each other our true selves in all of our brokenness as well as all of our beauty. Where we learn how to unbind each other from those things that are not life giving or that are not real or true. Where we work together to unbind the world. The shadows are also leading us to hope, seeking, belief – that even if we have to go through the night to get to the dawn, and often that is the only way, with the empowerment of community we believe that the Spirit is with us, we hold to hope that Christ is bringing us to salvation, and we seek the God who dwells with us.
We are the community of the Saints, we have a God who is faithful and true, and while we do live between dusk and dawn, we are told that the intervening darkness is not dark to God; the night is as bright as the day. And God is with us each step along the way. Thanks be to God.
November 4, 2018 - a sermon preached at Meadowthorpe Presbyterian on All Saints Sunday
