"Why is it so Dark?"

On Sunday morning before the worship service, I heard someone ask the question, "Why is it so dark in here?"

I thought to myself, I bet others are wondering the same thing. Let me offer an answer. It is dark because Lent is a dark time of year. It is a time when we are called upon as Followers of Jesus to take our blindfolds off to just how dark it can get in ourselves, in our lives and in our world. Easter is a time for the LIGHT to breakthrough the darkness, but we cannot see the LIGHT until we first acknowledge how dark it is.

That is what Jesus is doing on the cross. By volunteering to endure the pain and shame of the cross he is challenging us not just to see his suffering, but to acknowledge our own and that of others. He is showing us what sin of every shape, size and form really looks like. Your sin, my sin, the sin of this world only ever paints a bloody, torturous, humiliating, sickening picture. It is a picture we rather not see, but one we need to see both for our sake and for the sake of others.

Associated Press Writer, Jon Gambrell, writes, "The killers showed no mercy: They didn't spare women and children or even a 4-day-old baby, from their machetes. On Monday, Nigerian women wailed in the streets as a dump truck carried dozens of bodies past burned out homes toward a mass grave."

What initiated such a massacre? What awful act had these men, women and children done to deserve this death? Their offense was the land on which they lived and that they would not hide their faith in Jesus Christ. A crowd sang, "Jesus, show me the way," as rubber-gloved workers tossed the bodies into Nigerian mass graves.

Perhaps, you read a story like that and with me find yourself wondering, why is it so dark? The only way I know to answer that question is to say, Look at the cross. That is what sin does to us, to others, to our world. Sin is nothing to laugh at or flirt with...sin only leads to suffering and death as it tears us away from the One who only desires to give us life.

So, yes, the worship area is very dark these weeks because Lent is a very dark time that challenges us to see what sin looks like. But in the darkness, on the cross, the LIGHT that is being snuffed out, burns bright in this truth...a truth that was prophesied 700 years before Christ was even born in a manger....Isaiah 53 says,

1 Who has believed our message
and to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?

2 He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

3 He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.
Like one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

4 Surely he took up our infirmities
and carried our sorrows,
yet we considered him stricken by God,
smitten by him, and afflicted.

5 But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed.

6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to his own way;
and the LORD has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.