“Dazzling Blackness” based on Exodus 16:15-25 and Mark 9:2-9

This week has included a delightful amount of sunlight.  Which was nice because I’d almost forgotten what it was like.  Several times I found myself turning my face to the sun, closing my eyes, and just savoring the wonder of warmth on my face.

The sun can feel like a gift directly from God, especially after dreary winter days, and I have realized that the delightful warmth of the sun is something I associate with the story of the transfiguration, when we’re told “And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them.”  I envision Jesus shining like the sun.

Which, I think is pretty much in the text.

And I think is a gorgeous metaphor.

It is an especially gorgeous metaphor in the time it comes from, when nights were unyieldingly dark and the sun was the way things were illuminated.  When it was day, people could see clearly.  When it was night, they could not.  Then, to have Jesus shine like the sun serves to remind people of the ways God illuminates truths that are otherwise not easily seen.  Its lovely.

I think, though, that is also incomplete.  If Jesus shining like the sun was one single metaphor in the midst of many, it would be an important one.  But there are a LOT of metaphors about God and Jesus as the Light of the World, and all together they end up creating a mental narrative that light is good and dark is bad.  Right?  Which fits the whole “it is easier to see things in light” idea.

Light is only half the story.  I’ve been asked a lot about day and night recently, and found myself saying, “it is dark right now because the sun is shining on the other half of the world.”  Light and darkness are balanced on our planet, and focusing on just one half of that whole gets us out of balance.

The total solar eclipse is seen from Charleston, South Carolina, on August 21, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / MANDEL NGAN (Photo credit should read MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)

And darkness has its own profound spiritual gifts.  Darkness is the space for rest and restoration.  It is also the time for un-productivity.  Those things you can do in the light – the planting and sowing, knitting and weaving, cooking (or gathering manna) and cleaning up – just don’t work as well in the dark.  Historically nighttime was for storytelling and song, snuggling and simply being.  The demands of the day couldn’t be met a night, so night had its own softer rhythm.

Slower, more about connection and joy, a time to make sense of things that had happened, a time to consider what was coming.  Time for prayer, and contemplation.  Time for rest – physical and otherwise.

In this “city that lights and hauls the world,” we are at the epicenter of messing up darkness by making it possible to be productive during the night!  Maybe this is why the image of Jesus shining feels incomplete to me – we are used to lots of shining and seeing the value of light, but we don’t get enough darkness.

In the book “The Dark Night of the Soul” by Thomas Moore, the metaphor of darkness is expanded and used to make space for times of grief, uncertainty, and when healing is desperately needed.  Moore talks of those as times when we can’t connect to God because the ways we once understood God don’t fit how we now understand things.  For him, the darkness becomes a womb, a place where development is happening without being seen, a place one stays in until one is ready to leave and able to thrive outside the womb.

Which is all to say that God is found in the darkness, and not just in the light, and I fear that modern Christian faith over focuses on the light, just like modern life does.  We fight back the darkness with LED bulbs, and we miss the gifts the darkness means to give us.

I also want to take this one step further, when we associate light with God we then end up associating darkness with … not God?  Maybe even with evil.  In our society, which is full up to the brim with white supremacy narratives, that creates big dangers.  At the time of Jesus, racism wasn’t one of the issues on the table.  But today, it IS.  And while light and dark aren’t the same thing as light skin and dark skin, they’re related enough that when we emphasize the goodness of light, we end up supporting the narratives of white supremacy.  And when we emphasize fighting back against the powers of darkness, we end up supporting the narratives of white supremacy.

Which, clearly, isn’t what we want to do. 

So I want to reimagine this story in the simplest of ways.  What if Peter, James, and John get to the top of the mountain and see Jesus transfigured before them, and his clothes become dazzlingly black, such as no pigment on earth could dye them?  And then the story goes on like we know it, with Elijah and Moses appearing, Peter sticking his foot in his mouth, God blessing Jesus, and Jesus requesting the whole experience stays a secret.

What happens in our imagination if the clothes are dazzling black?  What happens if we see Jesus transfigured and instead of the ways that light is reflected by white, what we see is light being absorbed by black?  Is it less dazzling?  More?  Less sacred?  More?  Maybe just the same, but different too.

Of the many gifts of darkness, one of them is that there aren’t shadows in darkness.  Jung speaks eloquently about our shadow selves, the ones we try to hide that emerge despite out best efforts.   Which, really sounds like the metaphor I’m concerned about, but I think we can glean something from it.  Especially because the parts we experience as “shadows” are wonderful and important parts of ourselves that we’ve denied, but are are beloved by God.  But in darkness, there are no shadows.  Which I think suggests that darkness makes space for us to integrate ourselves, the self we project into the world with the self we try to hide, and to simply be as a human – imperfect but beloved by God.   Darkness lets us be whole, make space for our whole self, and notices the gifts of all aspects of our beings.  Darkness is a place for healing and integration!  What a wonderful, and needed, gift!

What if the dazzling black of Jesus’s clothes that is awe inspiring like catching a glimpse of the cosmos itself, was also an experience of profound love where Peter, James, and John realized that they were loved as they were – all parts of themselves, even the ones that they struggled to love or were ashamed of?  What if the reason Peter offers to build a monument is because it is so utterly amazing to find out that God can love the whole of you, even when you struggle to do so yourself?  What if the dazzling blackness is being wrapped in the story that you are already loved, just as you are, without hesitation, and without an expectation that it takes producing enough to be enough?  What if our humanity is found in the meaning-making of darkness instead of in the production of light?

What if the dazzling blackness is another form of manna in the desert – a way of God taking care of the things the people need?  And what if it is meant to be shared with abundance because there is plenty – of manna, of love, of darkness? 

What if all we have to do to experience it is to turn out the lights?

Amen

February 11, 2024

Rev. Sara E. Baron 
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady 
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305 
Pronouns: she/her/hers 
http://fumcschenectady.org/ 
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady