Night -- the 2003 Commencement Sermon

by the Rev. Dr. Alan Gregory, Associate Professor of Church History at the Seminary of the Southwest. Given on May 20 at St. Matthew's Episcopal Church in Austin.

I was ordained on the June 6th 1979. For me, this was a great day. At the time, I thought it a great day for the church as well, even, for the entire system of being. I wore my clerical collar with a blush of pride. I reveled in my own reverendness; it was so very close to godliness. One of my duties, of course, was to bury people. I regret to say that isn't nearly as much fun as it sounds. I scurried into the Church, one afternoon, late, with the funeral party already piling up in the pews. The undertaker handed me a sheet of paper. It gave me the name of the deceased as one Mabel Phipps. I processed said Mabel through the Church and stood with my feet on the last resting-place of Elizabeth I's court astrologer, a man whom I have reason to believe hates me.

The funeral went well enough until, just after the 23rd Psalm, a lady in the front pew began to swell. I'm very easy-going as regards church behavior but rampant displays of public swelling strike me as indecorous. I gave her a look of pious rebuke. Undeterred, she continued to spread egregiously until she was pouring over the front of the pew. I decided to ignore what was probably evidence of a dissolute life and pushed on with all I knew about Mabel Phipps. I suspected my account rather generous, given she had relatives so careless with space. It must have been a little before the end of my sermon that I noticed that whilst she had chucked in the swelling, her face was now flashing the vivid, bruised purple of extreme rage. I have seldom seen such an unguarded expression of an anti-clerical spirit.

We'd had another prayer or two, a hymn, and a couple more prayers, when I glanced down at the paper in my hand and my heart started to fight its way out of my rib cage. On my paper were the most terrible words one can ever read during a funeral service, right by the name Mabel Phipps it said, "next of kin." One of many unfortunate aspects of this was that, on seeing the lady's wrath, I had rashly assumed I was taking the service in an insufficiently personal manner. I had, therefore, begun to use the name "Mabel Phipps" at every conceivable opportunity - and with considerable feeling. What to do was a dilemma for which I was ill-prepared. I could rush screaming out of the Church, claiming later I'd had a breakdown -- or, better, perhaps, a visitation. Or, I could pretend innocence and stick Mabel with the rest of her own funeral. I chose to switch corpses. I had not, however, reached the nadir of my fate, to use a term familiar to Elizabeth's court astrologer. The paper in my hand was poorly written, giving the deceased's name as "Nude Welfare." Now I am aware that some pretty grim stuff is pulled round the font but this well exceeded the normal vindictiveness of parents. Besides, I quailed at the thought of commending our sister "Nude" into the arms of Almighty God. So it was, that having been mislabeled for most of the liturgy, she was, whoever she was, waved to eternity in a condition of complete anonymity.

A few hours later, I perched on a gravestone in the cemetery and reevaluated my career. The night began to fold away the remains of the thin February day. It was chilly, as I reflected that nothing would ever be the same again. I would always be the priest that buried the wrong people. I had failed at a most primary skill and could not tell a congregant from a corpse. I had fallen off my ecclesiastical horse. I had all but defrocked myself. Now, as the night snuffed the last gleam of day, I would go like everybody else, groping in the dark.

"If you to the chapel," she had said, "assuming you make it, you will find God." So he pulled his car onto the roadside, jumped over the fence, and plunged into the wood. The branches snapped into his face as he pushed his way through, creepers and thorns snatched at his clothes, roots at his feet. After about ten minutes of this, he got to a path, it was muddy and every so often a tree limb lay across his way but he went as fast he could. It was getting dark and once the light went, he'd be lost. A mile further on, the path began to rise steeply to where the wood seemed to end. Beyond, he could see the little hill where the chapel was.

He began to get the uncomfortable sensation that he was being watched, even that someone was following him. He stopped and looked round, there was nothing except the persistent feeling that a crowd was watching through the trees, through the burning leaves of mid-Autumn. Walking on, he heard a clatter in the branches: for some odd reason, it made him think of dragons. In front of the hill, there was a ditch, spanned by an old bridge, half-collapsed with the bricks falling way from one side. On the last tree he passed, a sign read, "Danger." The light was almost gone and plumes of evening mist floated like smoke around the hill. It was hard going now, and he began to sweat, his ears hummed with the effort of climbing.

The chapel, or what was left of it, was at the very top. He stopped and watched the lights beyond the hill, like little fires in the distance, like an encampment. For the first time, since leaving the road, he heard traffic again and a train rumbling like thunder in the distance. The last few yards were the hardest, he thought of Moses as he clambered over rocks to reach the entrance. The building had lost its roof so, once inside, he could see around by the pale moon. He sat in a pew, the floor was broken under his feet; at the front, on either side of the altar, there were a pair of rather tatty commandment boards. He wondered why he'd come. Then the mist poured in over the wall and rose to choke the moon. He stuck a match but it went out with a hiss, he struck another, and another, each one snuffed in a moment. The traffic stopped, the silence thickened, the darkness wrapping him like a coat; then he knew he was in the midst of God -- and it was night.

"Saul got up from the ground, but when he opened his eyes, he could not see."

Look, I must touch something. I'm resting my hands on the table, hold them, please. You can't believe how silent it is in the dark. Are you still there? Ananaias, are you even in the room. Thank God. Just stay for a while, will you? I keep straining to see, as if I could push out my eyes from the sockets. Nothing happens and everything else is dull -- my voice sounds like a foreigner, speaking from a distance. Look, look here, at my face. You can laugh if you like. I was in the dark but now I'm enlightened and I can't see anything. You've never seen a blinding light, have you? Look. Remember the man who brought me here? One day he does everything I tell him, then he leads me along like he was touching a leper. Barely said a word all the way. You don't know what I mean, I do know that. It's never flashed on you that you've been, as we say, barking up the wrong tree -- with a vengeance. But it's more than that --more than anything you can just learn from and go on your way. When my heart stills, when I'm not calling out for you in a panic, I can feel him, here in the dark. I sense his breath. He's at home in the dark, moving about in it, not banging his shins on your table. I'd stay here with him, you know, blackness and all. He's not like you, scuttling about, you cockroach, you're not even at home in your own room. Look, I tell you again:: midday, the road down here, to Damascus, I saw the light, I fell off the horse, right into his hands -- and it was night.

"Jesus said to him, "Do quickly what you have to do. ...As soon as Jesus had received the bread, he went out, and it was night."

He ran down the street, and where it turned, sharp into the darkness, stopped to catch his breath. The wind snatched at his bag and his name seemed to rustle in the trees, "Judas," "Judas," Judas." The path took its way up toward the hill where they were waiting for him. He crossed a small bridge and looked over the side. For a moment, he thought he saw his head suspended in the moonlight reflected in the water. It made him shudder and he walked faster up the hill. As the moon passed behind the clouds, the night wrapped more closely around him; he had to step carefully to avoid falling. Ahead, he could see torches, not illuminating exactly, flickering, more like fear, a last, hopeless stand in the dark.

When he joined them, out of breath, the night pressing harder than ever, they set off, further up the hill and into the garden. The torches kept sputtering, dying into a glow, being relit. They walked more slowly than they intended, authority leaking from every step, like they were intruders, in a garden off limits, banned them long ago. Under what was left of the moonlight, he saw Jesus leaning against a tree. He looked at home there, cloaked in night. Judas grabbed a torch, as he went ahead to his master, the voices behind him dropped, even the wind fell, and the cicadas ceased chattering. He took a breath, and with only a yard to go, the torch went out.

Judas left the room, shut the door, hurried downstairs, and stepped into the night. And that night, we know only too well. This is the night of betrayal where money swears misbegotten oaths and Dives sits to supper while Lazarus begs down the driveway. Tonight is no night for travelers and the chill eats to the bones of the sleepers in ditches, under bridges, in cars. The child sits on the top stair listening to the fight in the kitchen. My friend's son goes berserk tonight, full of cocaine, trying to kill his wife. Outside the city, the slow drip of poison seeps from the pipe into the water channel. There's a shooting in the theater, we all have to diet lest we die, and the cool print out says she has a pre-existing condition. The light snaps when the electricity's cut off and the email spins reassurance while the stocks crash. Tonight belongs to the universal wolf and Satan surveys it all from a treetop, a ragged crow like a black flag. We can not escape this night, nor can we bear it. That's one way of looking at it, real enough, God knows: a vision to keep us indoors, with the lights on, as when we were children fearful of the dark.

Judas left the room, shut the door, hurried downstairs, and stepped into the night. This is the night when God walks alone in the garden, kneels, and sweats blood. Soon, when he returns the betraying kiss in the dark, he, at least, will mean it. This is the night of God's passion, the night he takes to himself like a robe of royalty. When he is crucified, it will sweep the sky and be night at noonday. Men will offer a toast in vinegar, tonight, and God will reply with v life. Tonight, the Son will find the Father in the dark beyond the bleakest blackness of the forsaken. When my son died, it seemed that my eyes narrowed and I was looking down a tube into a retreating world. It went awfully dark, it was like groping but I ran up against God in the darkness, as if he been there already, waiting for me to catch up with life. God knows his way about the night, carefully setting the table in the middle of all that frightens us, everywhere we'd rather not go.

Judas left the room, shut the door, hurried downstairs, and stepped into the night. And what a night. This is the night of incomprehension and wonder. This is the dazzling night when every sound is crisp and vital and there is a perfume all the way from Eden; there are stars that poets only dream of and at last in the garden a whispered and tender conversation begins again. This is the velvet night when inexhaustible darkness staggers angels and leaves them gaping; all the powers in heaven fling down their crowns and tonight there is silence in heaven. Tonight, the child is heard from the blackened room, the robe is on the prodigal, and the thief lies in the dark with Divinity. God has his triumph tonight, there is nothing left to give, and love has its way with the world.

"I slept but my heart was awake. Listen! My beloved is knocking. Open to me ... my love, for my head is drenched with the night mists." We are invited into the night: into the night of betrayal, where we must tread with courage and pity, cautious, alert, truthful; into the night of God's ready passion, where we must learn to love; and into the night of God's glory, where we must find that love inexhaustible. We will be unsteady in this, as those who walk in the night and grab for help when they see nothing. Do not be afraid, for faith is not easy illumination and the world is dying of its own enlightenment. Faith must become accustomed to the darkness, as "night to night declares knowledge," revealing the world, our calling, and the form of God.

When I was a child I was afraid of the dark. I didn't know that God walks in the night, that he has made the darkness his own, the environment of his passion. Nor did I know that he would invite me onto that shadowy path, into the valley where night hangs thick. Nor did I know that I would find such good company there as you, and work to do, and hope. And nor did I know that God is, in his very self, that blinding brilliance, that deep and dazzling darkness, to which all things will come trouping home, afraid no longer.

Amen.