The Dark Night of the Soul

Dr. Jon Burnham preached this sermon from Luke 19:28-40
at Batesville Prebyterian Church on Palm Sunday, April 1, 2007

Images of donkey carts and cars run through my mind when I recall looking out the window of a tour bus in Cairo, Egypt. I saw a man riding a small contraption with wheels being pulled along the street by a donkey. Next to him was what appeared to be a family riding in a late model Mercedes Benz. At one point the bus had to stop so a man herding sheep could cross the busy street. The place was bustling with people traveling by foot, donkey cart, and luxury car. Welcome to the post-modern Middle East. Long ago, in another bustling Middle Eastern city named Jerusalem, rode a rabbi named Jesus. His mode of transportation was a donkey. Jesus rode the donkey down the slopes of Mount Olive as hosts of his disciples shouted "Hosanna, Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!"

Like Jesus on Palm Sunday, the people I saw riding donkey carts and Mercedes Benzes on the streets of Cairo in 1994 were people in motion. They were people who were going somewhere. They had not yet arrived at their destination. They were on the way there. On Palm Sunday, Jesus was on the way to the cross, the grave, and God's glorious resurrection. He had not yet arrived at the upper room where he will meet with his disciples on Thursday night for their last supper together. He had not yet arrived at the hill called Golgotha, place of the skull, on the outskirts of Jerusalem but he would get there by Friday. He had not yet arrived inside the enclosed stone tomb where his body would be laid for burial for crucifixion. He had not yet arrived in hell where he would completely identify with human suffering on a cosmic scale. He had not yet arrived at the moment of his resurrection. Jesus is on his way on that morning that we now call Palm Sunday when he rides a donkey into Jerusalem. Jesus was on his way through Holy Week and so are we.

I remember the flight from New York to Amman, Jordan. The President of our seminary, the Rev. Dr. T. Hartley Hall, was traveling with our party of 25 seminary students and 3 seminary professors. President Hall was a short man with a booming voice. When we got settled in the airplane I could tell he was an experienced traveler. After the flight was underway he put on a pair of ear plugs and covered his eyes with a blinder and reclined his seat. Within minutes he was laying with his arms spread out over his head, snoring loudly. President T. Hartley Hall knew how to travel. He was aware of the importance of timing in a long journey such as we had undertaken. He knew the time would come to stare in wonder upon the slab of rock where Jesus is claimed to have been resurrected in the Church of Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. But now was not that time. Now was the time to relax and rest. Timing is important in the spiritual journey as well. We have to learn when to speak and when to remain silent, when to move forward and when to lag behind, when to pray and when to remain silent in God's presence, which is, I believe, the highest form of prayer. I found reassurance in the sleep of President T. Hartley Hall. If he could be so relaxed as to fall asleep and snore his way through the night on that flight from New York City to Amman, Jordan, then maybe I should relax my grip on the magazine I was grasping and trust the Lord to keep us safe and sound on this flight and on this trip.

My fear on that trip was more than merely the fear of flying. It was deeper than that. Whether riding in the bus in the Middle East or flying on an airplane, I was not in control. I was a passenger and someone else was the driver. In a larger sense, that trip to the middle East was frightening to me because I was opening myself to the possibility of change in the way I viewed myself, the world, and my faith. So it was for Christ during holy week. he was not in control, he was not driving events.

Let's travel with Jesus through this Holy Week. Let's stand on the slope on Mount Olive and join his followers shouting: "Hosanna, Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord." Let's follow Jesus into Jerusalem and stand by his side even when the crowd turns against him. Spirit will be our mode of transportation this week. We will walk in the Spirit and not in the flesh. We will be, as Jesus put it, "In the world but not of the world." Holy Week is a spiritual passage and we are on that journey now.

I remember another trip. I took this trip alone. It was a walk I made in Manhattan one Sunday in August when I was 25 years old. The walk began at the Statue of Liberty. There were many people there. A juggler entertained us as we waited in line to climb up into the Statue of Liberty. My turn finally came and I climbed the stairs, one by one, going up to the top of Lady Liberty. Finally, we got to the top and walked around the deck on Lady Liberty's crown. Manhattan shone like a diamond across Hudson Bay. The twin towers of the World Trade Center stood like two giant toothpicks holding together a juicy hor d'oeuvre called the Big Apple. Then I climbed down the Statue of Liberty and made walked up Broadway through Manhattan where I was staying with a friend near Central Park. As the sun came out that Sunday morning it was so hot and humid. The concrete sidewalk and nearly empty streets seemed to intensify the radiant rays of the sun. Even the tall skyscrapers seemed to be heaping heat down on my head. The soles of my feet were burning from the hot pavement. The streets were nearly deserted except for a stray car here or a taxi cab there. I walked alone in silence. Surrounded by intense heat. Such a walk may not have meant much to a young man from Brooklyn, but for a young man from a small town in Mississippi, to walk halfway across Manhattan Island alone on a Sunday morning on a nearly deserted street, it was a turning point in my life. Something clicked. I had achieved some unspoken goal. I was more self confident after that walk than before it. No one saw me do it but to me it was a growing experience.

Jesus walked alone on Good Friday. The Palm Sunday crowd of followers and well wishers were nowhere to be found. Jesus made his way down the Via Dolorosa, carrying a cross up to Golgotha, the hill of the skull. Imagine the heat he felt then. The heat of the accumulated sin, fear, guilt and dread of the human species throughout all history. Jesus must have been hot on that lonely walk. He must have felt the heat of hell summoning him down to where he would willingly go after his death on the cross. He descended into hell, we say in the Apostle's Creed. Jesus was no stranger to suffering. He walked alone when he had to do it. He walked from Pilate's quarters to Golgotha. He had to walk it by himself. As the great spiritual song says, "Nobody else could walk it for him. He had to walk it by himself."

There comes a time in our lives when we must walk alone. The crowds no longer support us. Our friends provide no consolation. We must walk alone through the valley of the shadow of death. Our family and friends may stand with us during the funeral service but there comes a time when everyone goes back home and we are left alone in the house without our loved one who has died.

I found an interesting book in the Great Hall of Calvary Episcopal Church in Memphis on my recent trip there with the Xyz Group. We arrived early enough to browse through the bookstore before the preaching service with Rabbi Micah Greenstein. As I browsed the books, I was drawn toward one called The Dark Night of the Soul: A Psychiatrist Explores the Connection Between Darkness and Spiritual Growth . Author Gerald Mays, a psychiatrist and spiritual director, suggests we may experience unseen spiritual growth during those times in our lives when what we were formerly doing no longer bring us any satisfaction. The experience is called "dark night" not because it is evil but because God's presence is obscured. It is hard to see at midnight when the lights are all turned off. During times of spiritual obscurity, when the way before us in unclear, the Spirit may be maturing our faith. Certainly Jesus' solitary walk down the street in the Old City of Jerusalem named Via Dolorosa, the way of grief, was an experience framed by poor vision. He could not see well. His eyes were swollen from the beating he had taken at the hands of the Roman soldiers who mocked him. There was blood and sweat in his eyes from the crown of thorns on his head and the heat of the day that beat down upon him. Surely that solitary walk on Good Friday caused more growth in Christ's faith than the joyous journey on the donkey's back down Mount Olives into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. We all long for the celebration of resurrection on Easter Sunday but are less enthralled with the ugly details of Good Friday. Yet good Friday is just as much a part of Holy Week as Palm Sunday and we grow more during the Good Fridays of our lives than we do on the Palm Sundays.

God is inviting us toward greater freedom and love during this holy week. Part of that growth may involve not knowing what God is doing in our lives. God works through obscurity. According to Mays, it is not so much that God does not want us to know what God is doing in our lives. Rather, God is able to lead us further when we do not know where we are going. During the dark night of the soul, during the times when we are unsure where God is or what God is doing in our lives, God may be purifying our soul and cleansing our spirit.

We all long for the clarity of the view of looking down on Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives but the more significant spiritual growth occurs when we walk the Via Dolorosa knowing that at the end of our path lies a cross and that we will be crucified upon it. Holy Week for Christ was an experience of the dark night of the soul. Hear him cry out on the cross in confusion, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?"

Let's take it one day at a time during this Holy Week and fully experience the joy of Palm Sunday and the horror of Good Friday. God suffers with us in the bad times and rejoices with us in the good times. We don't have to be always in control. We can relax in the knowledge that God is leading us onward even when we find no evidence of God's active presence in our lives. During the season in our lives when God's activity seems faint and shadowy, we may be experiencing the liberating power of the dark night of the soul. One thing we know for certain and we take hope in this fact. After every dark night there comes the dawn and after every Good Friday comes Easter Sunday.