Sermon preached at Evensong on the Tenth Sunday after Trinity 2024

Can you picture the scenes described at the opening of our first reading?

Job said:
'Surely there is a mine for silver,
   and a place for gold to be refined.
Iron is taken out of the earth,
   and copper is smelted from ore.
Miners put an end to darkness,
   and search out to the farthest bound
   the ore in gloom and deep darkness.
They open shafts in a valley away from human habitation;
   they are forgotten by travellers,
   they sway suspended, remote from people.

Archaeology suggests that mining first occurred in prehistoric times, as our distant ancestors searched for flint, used for tools and weapons. Early mine shafts, up to 100 metres deep, have been uncovered in France and Britain. They’ve been dated to the Neolithic Period (that’s around 12,000 years ago). But, the world’s oldest known underground mine, where people extracted ochre for use in ceremonies and rituals, is located in Swaziland’s Ngwenya mountains. It is believed to be over 40,000 years old.

For millennia then, humans have burrowed deep, searching for what is useful, beautiful, valuable and meaningful. There is wisdom in such an endeavour, even for us today. Of course, I’m not speaking literally, but to live well and to live together in a world facing complex challenges and divisions, maybe we need to mine beyond the superficial, to go deeper than the first reaction. In the ancient text of Isaiah this divine promise is given: ‘I will give you the treasures of darkness and riches hidden in secret places, so that you may know that it is I, the LORD, the God of Israel, who call you by your name’.

What treasure might await us, if we were to go deep, in search of what is useful, beautiful, valuable and meaningful? To do so requires a willingness to peer into the depths and to contemplate the reserves contained in the rich seams of darkness within our world and our lives.

What though might we mean by depths and darkness in the context of this sermon? Priest, writer and speaker Barbara Brown Taylor suggests a definition for our purpose:

‘Darkness is everything I do not know, cannot control, and am often afraid of’ adding ‘But that’s just the beginner’s definition’.

Everything I do not know, cannot control and am often afraid of.

Just sometimes I miss the assuredness of my earlier self, when it seemed so obvious who was right and whom was wrong. Now the expansiveness of all that I do not know, may never know and cannot control, surrounds me. And I’m growing accustomed to, am even liberated by, this state of affairs, for, despite surface appearances, the deep unknown of the darkness remains rich with possibility. How often though, I need reminding of this: that there are treasures we can only discover in the uncertainty and vulnerability.  

Take for example as we face uncertainties about the future of the church in the west. I have heard us described, I think accurately, as ‘an anxious church’. 

There is much talk of growing secularism, concerns about whether the church can hold together over doctrinal differences, declining numbers, fear of irrelevance and yes, even of dying. Look on social media, be present in synodical meetings, listen to your own heart and it is as if one can taste and smell the angst.

It can be hard to believe that anything good can come from the darkness, from the things we do not know, would not have chosen, or unnerve us because we cannot control them. Yet the Biblical texts suggest that the darkness and depths are rich with the possibility of the divine.

At the very opening of the Bible, darkness was the context out of which God brought everything into being. Jacob wrestles an angel in the middle of the night and God comes to Moses on Mount Sinai in a dense, dark cloud. Darkness is where God dwells and is encountered. Then angels announce the coming of Jesus, their song surrounding the shepherds in the inky darkness of a Bethlehem night. At the Last Supper Judas slipped away into the darkness and we are told ‘it was night’; later, as Jesus hung suspended between heaven and earth on the cross, darkness is described as descending for three hours. Then, hidden in the pitch night of a sealed, rock mined, hewn out tomb, death was overcome, and treasure was lifted up high with a shout of life in the depths of darkness.

If I am a believer, then darkness, even the darkness in my life, in the world, is also where God dwells. Indeed, aspects of God are unnerving, uncontrollable and impossible to fully know, those characteristics of darkness which we are invited to mine in order to discover the treasures found only in the depths of God. Such depths, unknowability and uncontrollability require of us a degree of humility and trust which is countercultural in our present time. And they produce countercultural treasure:

This week in the wake of the terrible knife attack in Southport some used that pain and perhaps their own fear of uncertainty and anxiety to lash out in hatred and superficial, despicable acts of violence.

We should not and cannot not speculate on the specifics of the atrocity in Southport - we simply do not have the information to do so. 

But the response of some to it - the sharing of lies and misinformation, the looting and damage, the blaming of whole categories of people completely unrelated to the original events, the attacks on police - point to the reality that we need do better and learn to go deeper. To mine for truth, for wisdom and our deeper connection one with another.

Those rioting on our streets…I don’t know all their reasons… but some, who seem to support them, speak with affront and distress at what they perceive to be changes within neighbourhoods, which mean they no longer feel they belong. Yet the people whom they target might equally speak of a longing for home and a desire to belong.

Many public and private responses seem to focus on separation; the removal or one side or another. But this is a fallacy. The truth is our communities are always evolving, growing, adapting. They always have. Which means that the deeper questions include what ‘home’ and the longing for home means for us, for each of us and how can we each and all belong. To answer these and other important questions requires going deeper, together, seeking to understand as well as demanding to be understood.

This week, in the midst of the darkness of rioting, hatred and attack, other choices and other voices shone as treasure: the appeals for calm from the families of Elsie, Alice and Bebe and the coming together of community members to sweep the streets and to clear away the detritus and repair the damage caused by the rioters. To focus on these small acts of community resilience and kindness, when there is so much turmoil, is not to ignore the reality but to inspire us in the search for the greater treasure.

That takes faith and humility and it takes courage. To mine the depths in order to understand, to go deep into relationships, into our own motivations, the things we do not know and cannot understand, into the problems which beset our world, in search of the most profound treasure. When we do, we may well find God already there, waiting for us.

This is the last stanza of Henry Vaughan’s poem ‘The Night’:

There is in God, some say,
A deep but dazzling darkness, as men here
Say it is late and dusky, because they
See not all clear.
O for that night! where I in Him
Might live invisible and dim!