Have you ever had a time when you had to be out and about during a night-time power outage? It’s unsettling. The dining room chair becomes a piece of wood out to whack your shins, your cozy slippers left on the floor become fuzzy little objects of evil trying to trip you on your way to the stairs, the table seems to move itself just an inch to the left so that it can attack your hip. We’d rather just stay in bed until the lights come back on––walking about is too dangerous.
In 1998, when the big ice storm hit the East Coast and took out all the power in Quebec and part of Ontario for several days, I was living in downtown Montreal. And I remember having to go into my apartment in the dark, at night, up three flights of stairs that had no windows. I particularly remember that as I was going up the stairs I had gone up hundreds of times before, a voice came out of the darkness. It wasn’t the voice of God - that’s not where I’m going with this story - it was just someone else coming down the stairs as I was going up. But I remember that we started talking to each other in the darkness, asking each other how it was going. We were complete strangers to each other––if we had met on any other regular day, we probably would have said hi and that’s it–but here, in the total darkness, we expressed our concern for each other, reminded each other to go slowly and carefully, and made sure that we each got up and down the stairs safely. Something about both us being in the darkness during this state of emergency made us reach out to each other to help and support each other, even though we’d never met before and so instead of being a scary experience, it was quite a comforting one. I’ve never had that experience before or since, but I will always remember: in a darkness so complete it’s as if we were blind, connecting with a complete stranger to make sure we were both okay made the darkness seem fun instead of frightening.
Our stories today of Saul and Ananias, and of Jesus and the disciples, are stories of what it’s like to walk in the dark, and of how God calls us to help others who are also struggling in the dark. Most obviously, there’s Saul, blinded on the road to Damascus by a light so bright it makes his world completely dark. As Acts says, “for three days he was without sight.” We’re very familiar with this story. We often call it the conversion of Paul, even though there’s no evidence that he stopped being Jewish when he started being Christian, and in fact there’s a great deal of evidence from his writing that even though he became a Christian he continued to think of himself as a Jew. But this story is about more than just Saul. It’s also a story about Ananias, a disciple of Jesus, who is sent to heal Saul. Ananias is also in darkness. He’s not literally blind, but when the Lord calls him to go and meet with someone who would just as soon kill him for his beliefs, he is going into the situation blind, as we say. Ananias has no idea how he is going to be received by Saul––no idea whether he will be spit upon, cursed, rejected. When it comes to Ananias going into the house where Saul is staying, he is just as in the dark about what is going to happen as Saul is.
And then there’s our story of Jesus and the disciples on the shore. The disciples, who are initially in the dark about the identity of this man telling them where to fish, and then Simon Peter, completely clueless about what Jesus was saying when he said, “when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you want to go.” Peter, who would become the leader of the Church, would die a martyr, according to legend, crucified by the Roman Emperor Nero, with his hands stretched out, fastened to the cross. But Peter didn’t know that. And yet he must have known that when Jesus asked him to take care of his sheep, Jesus was asking him to follow the path that Jesus took, to be the shepherd that Jesus was. Peter, too, was being asked to trust in the Lord and to agree to follow a path that he couldn’t see. Peter, like Saul and like Ananias and like the disciples and like us, was in a situation where he couldn’t see the way, where he was blind to what lay ahead, and yet where he was nevertheless being asked to move about in his darkness and help someone else. Jesus’ disciples, and that includes us, were being asked to endure their times of darkness and, for the sake of others, to walk by faith and not by sight.
I think there are two messages here for us today. The first is that even though everyone in these stories is in the dark, unable to see where they’re going, they’re still going. They are walking in the dark, not sitting in the dark. Saul, after he was struck blind, didn’t stop in the middle of the road to Damascus and refuse to take another step until he could see again. He kept going, trusting God and trusting those who were leading him by the hand, putting one foot after another, never knowing where his foot was going to land but still taking each step as it came. He couldn’t see where he was going, but he kept walking.
And Ananias. He, too, got moving even though he was in the dark about what might happen. He could have stayed home, he could have said, “Lord, I have a family to support and take care of and if I go see Saul he might kill me, so since I don’t know what’s going to happen, I’m just going to stay here at home.” But he didn’t. Instead, he left the safety of his home and his family, and went to Saul, the one who, as far as Ananias knew, wanted to arrest every Christian he could find. Ananias, in the dark, got moving.
The same is true of the disciples, who had been sitting in their boat all night without any fish, at a loss as to where to put their nets in next––floating blindly on the Sea of Galilee. When this stranger came along and told them where to fish, they didn’t just sit there. They moved. They lowered the nets. They took action, despite their own inability to see.
And there’s Peter, who was told by Jesus that he was about to set down a road where something not good would happen at the end, even though he didn’t know what it was going to be. Peter, like all of us, was unable to see what path his life would take, whether it would end as a success or a failure, and yet Peter continued on. He kept going, he left his home in Galilee, he even left Israel altogether. He didn’t have to. He could have sat down and refused to move. But he kept going even though his path was dark, saying goodbye to everything that he knew, saying goodbye to a life of sitting quietly with the friends and family of his hometown of Bethsaida, taking steps that brought him eventually to Rome and to death.
So that’s one thing that the stories today tell us. That even though we can’t see, even though we’re blind, we’re not supposed to sit in the darkness being afraid to move. We’re supposed to continue moving. We’re supposed to continue walking, step by step, even if we don’t know where we’re going. God calls us to walk by faith, not by sight. God calls us to leave our home and our family and our safety even though we don’t know what will happen. God calls us to trust.
The other important thing is that these people weren’t just walking in the dark, they were walking towards each other, in order to find each other and offer help. Ananias, who walked blind into his encounter with Saul, called Saul “brother.” Ananias took a truly bold step and claimed Saul as one of his family. That’s what we do when we’re in the dark with a bunch of other people who don’t know what’s going on––we help them like they’re family. Peter went walking into the darkness of his future in order to find and help Jesus’ lost sheep, in order to proclaim the light of Christ to others who were struggling in the darkness so that they could keep going. When we are sitting in darkness, God encourages us to continue to get up and get going so that we can find others who are in darkness. Yes, we’ll stumble, and likely stub our toe, or hit the corner of a table, maybe even run really hard into a doorway. We’ll be startled by strangers, and worry that they might want to hurt us, and we’ll be afraid of what is around the very dark corner. But when these things happen, God encourages us to keep going, to keep trusting that things are where they are supposed to be. God lets us sit with the lights out so that even though we’re afraid, we will have faith and reach out to one another. So that we might act in faith. When we can’t see what’s next, God encourages us to walk by faith, and not by sight, as we sang last week, all for the purpose of connecting with others who are in the dark. Because until we spend time walking in the darkness––walking, not just sitting––we will not actually be walking in faith. We will not be walking like Saul whom we call Paul, or Ananias, or even Peter.
What’s more, and here is the brilliance of Easter––when we start walking and then finding and connecting with one another, when we reach out and hold each other up in the darkness, that’s when the darkness is transformed into light. If times are dark for me, and I sit in the dark doing nothing but feeling sorry for myself, isolating myself, I will never see the light. Helping one another, what we would call serving one another, going out and finding people to help that is what changes the darkness into light. It was when Ananias reached out to Saul that all of a sudden Saul’s darkness was lifted. It was when Saul reached out to the disciples in Damascus that all of a sudden their darkness of being persecuted was lifted. The disciples recognized Christ when he helped them. Their darkness was lifted when he served them. Like me and the other person coming down the stairs in Montreal, reaching out to connect with each other turned the darkness into a moment of light.
When you are sitting in your own darkness, when you feel yourself lost and blind and when you’d rather just sit still until someone finds you, remember that there are others out there just like you. There are others who are also sitting still, too afraid to take even one step. Help them. Take your step for them. Be like Ananias, who must surely have been terrified about reaching out to Saul, but who did it because he had faith and knew Saul was in darkness. Because if we call to each other, if we each just take one small step towards each other, if we walk by faith and not by sight, we will find that when we are standing with one another, all of a sudden we are standing in the light. When you take that first step, trusting that God is with you, you will find that the risen Christ is with you, turning darkness into light. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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