Psalm 139:7-12
Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,” even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.
Isaiah 41:10
Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.
We’ve worked our way through Psalm 139 once already, reflecting on the ways in which it tells us that we are known and well made and understood, but I think there’s more to get out of this wonderful piece of scripture, and so we’re going to take another look at the middle section over the next two weeks. I want to start this morning’s reflection by focusing on verses eleven and twelve, which we didn’t really give any thought to on our first pass through the psalm: If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,” even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.
Darkness is one of the most commonly used images in scripture, and it is almost always negative and fearful. We can see that from a cluster of verses in the book of Job alone. Darkness prevents us from finding our way: “He has walled up my way, so that I cannot pass, and he has set darkness upon my paths” (Job 19:8). Darkness protects those who seek to cause harm: “The murderer rises before it is light, that he may kill the poor and needy, and in the night he is like a thief” (Job 24:14). Darkness provides a cover for all kinds of wrongdoing: “The eye of the adulterer also waits for the twilight, saying, ‘No eye will see me’; and he veils his face” (Job 24:15). And “the terrors of deep darkness” (Job 24:17) are greatly to be feared.
There are two threads that run through these references from Job, and they offer two ways of reading the verses from Psalm 139. In the first, darkness hides sinful and harmful actions, but not from God who can still see them as if it were the brightest day. This seems to follow quite naturally from the previous verses, which speak of God being ever present and all knowing. It reminds us that we may be able to use the cover of real or metaphorical darkness to hide our actions from others, sneaking around and lying and misdirecting, but none of that will work on God, “to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid”, as the Book of Common Prayer has it.
It’s easy to hear this and imagine God as a malevolent Big Brother figure, spying on our every action and waiting to catch us in our most incriminating moment, but I’m not sure that holding on to such an image is healthy, as it can lead to a fear that has little to do with reverence and destructive levels of guilt. I don’t think it is scriptural either, as Jesus declared that he did not come to condemn the world but to save it, and when the psalmist asks God to “see if there is any offensive way in me and lead me in the way everlasting”, he seems to trust that God will not point the finger of judgement but will instead point out the better path.
God sees all and will hold us accountable for all, but God’s justice is restorative not punitive, seeking to make things better rather than simply make us pay, and so we should welcome it rather than fear it. It is right that we confess and seek to repair what we have done wrong, the ways we have sinned “in thought and word and deed, through negligence and weakness and our own deliberate fault”, and perhaps knowing that God has already seen everything might make it easier to be honest, to step out of the darkness and into the light.
In the second thread that runs through the use of darkness in Job, it is the darkness itself that brings fear, carrying a sense of claustrophobia and disorientation. This reading also sits well within the psalm, especially when we tease out the nuances of the language. Perhaps the most familiar translations of verse 11 have “the darkness will hide me” or “cover me”, but others have “overwhelm” or “crush” or “oppress”, and when the Hebrew word appears elsewhere in the scriptures it is translated as “bruise”. Darkness is not then a cloak of invisibility to pull on in order to protect us as we do harm, but something that comes upon us whether we seek it or not and in fact causes us harm.
(Well I say it’s this and not that, but the truth is that words can hold layers of meaning, especially when they are used in poetry as in the psalms, so I don’t think we need to choose between these readings, but can hold them both as in some way true and significant.)
As someone with a history of depression and anxiety, this second understanding of darkness feels very familiar. I have certainly had days on which my mental health has left me feeling overwhelmed and crushed and oppressed and bruised, and it is difficult to put that into words except to say that it feels like a darkness has descended so that it is difficult to see anything beyond the depression or the anxiety. Sickness and grief and trauma can bring similar darknesses too.
But here we must return again to the declaration that darkness is as light to God. God can see beyond the pain and the chaos and so can lead us through them, which has absolutely been my experience. I wonder if you’ve ever done one of those trust exercises where one person is blindfolded and another has to lead them through an obstacle course. What is darkness to one is light to the other, and so the one who is in darkness relies on the one who is in light to get them safely to the other side. That is perhaps the simplest way I can describe how it feels to experience God in this second kind of darkness.
I want to go off on a slight tangent for a moment, because I said that darkness is nearly always negative and fearful in the scriptures, so much so that it is practically synonymous with ignorance and evil, but I think it is worth noticing that there is a hint of something else, because that is something rather more hopeful, and I’m all for taking hold of hope where we find it.
I can’t think of a passage that explicitly frames darkness as good, but the psalmist says that light and dark are the same to God, so there is a sense that darkness is not necessarily to be feared, and it strikes me that Jesus tells a number of parables involving seeds which grow in the dark of the soil, while the incarnation itself is a story of life brought first from the dark of the womb and then from the dark of the tomb. If we read between the lines, or step back and take a look at the bigger picture, we see that sometimes darkness is necessary as the place from which things grow into the light.
The Womanist biblical scholar and Episcopal priest Wil Gafney has reflected much on the creative and generative power of darkness. She says that “God, conjured, confected, and crafted creation out of holy darkness” so that “We are afraid of the dark but God is not. Darkness is a creative space to God”. Understanding darkness in this way is significant because it opens the way for us to experience it as a creative space too, and so no longer be afraid when we find ourselves in shadow or deep gloom.
That is particularly important when we realise that darkness is unavoidable. Returning to Wil Gafney, she says that “We are called to a mature faith in a complex world. There is light and dark, shadow and more than fifty shades of grey. The darkness and light co-exist. There is always shadow. We can’t see in the dark. We trip over the smallest thing. But it is not the dark that hurts us. It is our own limitations.” The night may be dark and full of terrors, but it is also inescapable and full of possibilities, and so we must learn to live with it and in it, allowing God to work with our limitations and nurture that which may grow.
I want to come at last to the theme I chose for this morning, which is ‘we are not lost’. It could equally have been ‘we are not alone’ or ‘we are not afraid’, but there was something about those images of the psalmist veering from the heavens to the depths and being surrounded by darkness which spoke to me of being lost, uncertain of where to go and unable to discern the way ahead. I think it is a powerful image which sits well with those understandings of darkness we considered earlier, because it is my experience that difficult days can feel a lot like being lost, and I also think that it is very easy to become lost in our wrong decisions.
And yet the assurance in these verses is that however lost we may feel, God is there to comfort and to guide. Better yet, it is not just these verses. We heard similar promises in the verse from Isaiah, and throughout scripture we are told that God “will never leave you nor forsake you”. The stories of the lost sheep and the lost son declare that God will not give up until we are found. Jesus’ final words to his disciples in the gospel of Matthew are “I am with you always, even to the end of the age”, and centuries of believers bear witness to the faithful presence of God.
Some of you may remember that as we approached last Christmas, I picked up on modern versions of traditional carols, and in one service I focused on the lines that Rend Collective added to their recording of We Three Kings: “In the dark, we're not lost / When it's hard, we're not lost / Don't lose heart, we're never truly lost”. Those words have been singing in my head again this week, and so I looked up my notes from that reflection. I talked honestly about how difficult I found last year, seeking to name some of the strangeness and sadness and sorrow we all faced, and then I said this:
“I truly believe that God has been in the midst of it with us. Not holding the map and keeping the directions from us like a cruel scout leader, but walking beside us and reading the landscape like a fellow companion. God has lived this year with us and that is why we’re never truly lost. Because being lost can mean we can’t find our way, but it can also mean that we are no longer in the care of another, and we are always in the care of another. God may not be flashing a neon arrow showing us the way out of this, although I do think God has given us all the wisdom and compassion we need to work our way out of it, but God is still holding us in love and care.”
I believe it as much now as I did then. Perhaps even more so, because I could probably best sum up my experience of faith as a growing certainty that God is in it all with us, walking with us through the dark and sitting with us in the mess. God is peace which soothes the anxious mind, love which tends the wounds of hate, presence which lifts the weight of loneliness, joy which heals the grieving soul, grace which forgives the most serious fault. God will never leave us or forsake us, because we are wrapped around God’s heart. The world has too much shadow for every day to be sunny, but God is the light we go towards and grow towards. So whatever darkness you find yourself lost in, may you always look for that light, knowing that God will never leave you lost in the dark.
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