Come Be My Light

October 20^th, 2013      “Come Be My Light”  Rev. Heather Jepsen

Luke 18:1-8 and Jeremiah 31:27-34

          Today, I want to take a break from our current news cycle, and talk about someone who was in the news several years ago, Mother Teresa.  In 2007 with the publishing of some of her letters in a book titled “Come Be My Light” the world found out about the interior spiritual life of Mother Teresa and what they found shocked them.  The world previously knew Mother Teresa as a living saint, a holy person who walked among us, a person with such faith that they were an example to all who met or knew of her.  With the publishing of her personal letters we discovered a flip side to that life, we discovered a woman who often felt alone and abandoned by God.  These are Mother Teresa’s words to her spiritual confidant, “Jesus has a very special love for you.  But as for me – The silence and the emptiness is so great – that I look and do not see, - Listen and do not hear.” 

          Rather than being some sort of exposé or negative campaign, the book “Come Be My Light” was actually gathered by Brain Kolodiejchuk who is Mother Teresa’s postulator, or the person who is working to make her a saint.  He is responsible for collecting all supporting materials about Mother Teresa which would pertain to her sainthood; and the letters were among these documents.  The title, “Come Be My Light” refers to what Mother Teresa felt her calling from Christ was, to come and be his light among the poorest of the poor.  Kolodiejchuk has stressed that the letters do not diminish the holiness of Mother Teresa in any way, rather they enhance it.

          In our gospel lesson this morning, Jesus tells the disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.  He tells them a story of a widow who persistently comes before an unjust judge asking for justice.  A widow has no protection or authority in the ancient world, and so the only way she can achieve justice is through the ruling of a judge.  Judges in Israel were especially charged with care of the poor and widows, since no one else would.  But the judge in this story cares not for God or people, so he is not moved by the woman’s request.   Finally, after the woman’s great persistence, the judge offers justice to her, just so she will leave him alone. 

Jesus points out that if a cruel judge will give way, how much more will God listen to the prayers of God’s people.  The key is persistence, to pray always and not to lose heart, even when it seems that God is not listening at all.  Mother Teresa writes, “In my heart there is no faith – no love – no trust – there is so much pain – the pain of longing, the pain of not being wanted.  I want God with all the powers of my soul – and yet there between us – there is terrible separation.”

When studying this parable of Jesus, Fred Craddock points out that the story “presents prayer as continual and persistent, hurling its petitions against long periods of silence.  The human experience is one of delay and honestly says as much, even while acknowledging the mystery of God’s ways.  Is the petitioner being hammered through long days and nights of prayer into a vessel that will be able to hold the answer when it comes?  We do not know.  All we know in the life of prayer is asking, seeking, knocking, and waiting, trust sometimes fainting, sometimes growing angry.  Persons of such a prayer life can only wonder at those who speak of prayer with the smiling facility of someone drawing answers from a hat.”

The compiler of Mother Teresa’s letters points out that “the tendency in our spiritual life but also in our more general attitude toward love is that our feelings are all that is going on – so to us the totality of love is what we feel.  But to really love someone requires commitment, fidelity, and vulnerability.  Mother Teresa wasn’t feeling Christ’s love, and she could have shut down.  But she was up at 4:30 every morning for Jesus, and still writing to him, ‘Your happiness is all I want.’”

Mother Teresa’s experience of the silence of God is nothing new in the lives of the saints.  The Spanish Mystic, St John of the Cross is one of the great spiritual masters of the church, and he is known specifically for his experience of the absence of God, which he termed the “dark night of the soul.”  The amazing thing about Mother Theresa is that despite her feeling separated from the Lord, she continued to do God’s work.  And not only that, she did it in such a way as to be an example to all and to bring others to faith.

An article about Mother Teresa that appeared in Time magazine when the book of letters came out tells this story; “For most people, Teresa’s ranking among Catholic saints may be less important than a more general implication of Come Be My Light: that if she could carry on for a half-century without God in her head or heart, then perhaps people not quite as saintly can cope with less extreme versions of the same problem.

          One powerful instance of this may have occurred very early on – when British writer turned filmmaker Malcolm Muggeridge visited Teresa.  Muggeridge had been an outspoken agnostic, but by the time he arrived with a film crew in Calcutta he was in full spiritual search mode.  Beyond impressing him with her work and her holiness, she wrote a letter to him that addressed his doubts full bore.  “Your longing for God is so deep and yet He keeps Himself away from you,” she wrote.  “He must be forcing Himself to do so – because he loves you so much – the personal love Christ has for you is infinite – the small difficulty you have regarding His Church is finite – Overcome the finite with the infinite.”  Muggeridge apparently did.  He became an outspoken Christian apologist and converted to Catholicism.  His film, Something Beautiful for God, made Mother Teresa an international sensation.”

Though we ourselves are not Catholic, we stand to learn something from Mother Teresa, for I believe that her experience is something that average believers also experience, albeit to a lesser scale.  This is why Jesus taught the disciples to pray always and not to lose heart.  In our day and age of prosperity preaching and happy clappy worship, in which our faith is so often equated with our feelings, Mother Teresa offers a profound counter example for us.  Sometimes we just can’t feel God in our lives, but that doesn’t mean God is not there or that we are not good Christians.

I find the reading from Jeremiah to be an interesting conversation partner on this topic.  As you know from last Sunday, Jeremiah is writing to the Israelites who are in exile in Babylon.  They have lost their homes, the seat of their faith, and they are separated from the people they love.  Through the prophet Jeremiah, God tells the people that they will spend 70 years in exile in Babylon, after that God will restore their fortunes.  Part of that restoration is the promise we find in today’s reading. 

The Lord promises that a day of a new covenant is coming; a day when God will write the law of love directly on the hearts of God’s people, rather than on cold stone tablets.  Once more God promises fidelity to the people, God promises to be their God, to write God’s law in their hearts, and that they will all, down to the last person, know the Lord. 

My understanding of this writing is that God’s law of love is written in the hearts of all people, whether they know it or not.  As we read so often in the New Testament, through the work of Jesus Christ, God’s covenant extends to all people on earth, not just the Jews.  If God’s law is written in the heart of every person, than I believe that even during those times in our lives when we don’t know God, God is with us.  Even in those times of darkness, when we can’t feel God, God is still present with us in an intimate way.  God is always in covenant with us in our hearts.

As believers, and perhaps even non-believers, I find a lot of value in our faith lives to just showing up.  Some of us have been walking the Labyrinth on Tuesday nights and this is a great opportunity to just show up.  All of the Spiritual disciplines, from prayer to meditation to studying scripture, rely on us giving our effort, whether we feel it that day or not.  Some nights at the Labyrinth I am profoundly moved by the presence of God with me there.  Some nights I am so busy in my own mind, I can’t seem to get out of my own way to see God.  A huge part of the value of a spiritual practice like the Labyrinth is just showing up.  If I keep walking every week, then every week I have a new encounter or even non-encounter with God.

I am certain the same is true for many of you when it comes to Sunday morning worship.  A big part of church is just showing up.  Some weeks it really hits you; the music is just right, the sermon is in your language, the prayers touch your heart, and you feel the presence of God here.  But other weeks not so much; the songs throw you off, the sermon is boring, and you just don’t feel right.  The trick to being faithful is just that, being faithful.  Keep coming, keep showing up, keep opening the door to God in your life.  Even if you go through years of feeling nothing, at some point, in some moment, God will be there.  Like the persistent widow in Jesus’ story, if we keep coming and asking for God, eventually God will show up.

The reality of our lives of faith is that while some of us feel the presence of God every minute of every day, most of us go through a time when our only experience is a sense of absence.   How much more than do we all need to listen to the story that Jesus’ tells and petition God continually in prayer.  My hope is that like Mother Teresa, we will be able go out into the world bearing the Light of Christ, even in our days of darkness.  Like Mother Teresa, we need to keep working for God in the world, even in the midst of our own unanswered prayers and moments of loneliness and doubt.  We can find hope in the fact that we are not alone in this experience, rather we stand with each other and we stand among the saints.  May we pray always and not lose heart, and while we do it, may we bring the light of Christ into our world.  Amen.