sermons
Faith when the Road Isn't Clear
Faith In the Dark
Lydia Shiu
May 18, 2025
Psalm 42[a]
42 Just like a deer that craves streams of water,
my whole being[c] craves you, God.
2 My whole being thirsts for God, for the living God.
When will I come and see God’s face?[d]
3 My tears have been my food both day and night,
as people constantly questioned me,
“Where’s your God now?”
4 But I remember these things as I bare my soul:
how I made my way to the mighty one’s abode,[e]
to God’s own house,
with joyous shouts and thanksgiving songs—
a huge crowd celebrating the festival!
5 Why, I ask myself, are you so depressed?
Why are you so upset inside?
Hope in God!
Because I will again give God thanks,
my saving presence and my God.
6 My whole being is depressed.
That’s why I remember you
from the land of Jordan and Hermon,
from Mount Mizar.
7 Deep called to deep at the noise of your waterfalls;
all your massive waves surged over me.
8 By day the Lord commands God’s faithful love;
by night God’s song is with me—
a prayer to the God of my life.
9 I will say to God, my solid rock,
“Why have you forgotten me?
Why do I have to walk around,
sad, oppressed by enemies?”
10 With my bones crushed, my foes make fun of me,
constantly questioning me: “Where’s your God now?”
11 Why, I ask myself, are you so depressed?
Why are you so upset inside?
Hope in God!
Because I will again give God thanks,
my saving presence and my God
Alright, it looks like I’m preaching a downer sermon. After the celebrations of resurrection on Easter, there comes a letdown. For the early church and the disciples, there was lots of confusion and fear. They felt lost after their teacher and friend died tragically. We’ve been taking this post-easter time to talk about faith without a roadmap. Faith in the darkness. What does it look like to have Faith when we’re not sure what God is doing?
And maybe you’re thinking, it’s sunny outside, Lydia. I’m feeling pretty good these days, except for the pollen. I’m in a good place and God is good. I don’t really need a faith in the midst of a dark valley sermon today.
Look, I’m not trying to pull you down. It’s a rather gentle invitation, to linger those moments of dawn or dusk. I keep trying to invite myself to let me know that it’s safe for me to sit a little in the discomfort before moving on to the next new thing with a big plan. It’s safe and in fact, God actually uniquely meets us there in the uncertain, not yet spaces, in a way that is holy and even fresh and mesmerizing–that’s my invitation. In fact, these dark seasons are the gems, often unexpected gifts of faith, and a natural rhythm and seasons to our faith that we shouldn’t look at as seasons of doubt or faithlessness but normal and integral part of the faith journey.
Or maybe for some of you, that’s where you are. You resonate all too well with this Psalmist’s prayer. Asking yourself,
“Why are you so depressed?”
“Why are you so upset inside?”
and you can’t seem to shake it off.
To me Psalm 42 sounds a bit hectic. The drastic contrasts, it goes back and forth from depressed to smile. At times I didn’t resonate with it or were suspicious of it, familiar to the feeling of sitting with someone who tries to turn your suffering into meaning a little too quickly.
At such a time in my life, I stumbled upon a book called Dark Night of the Soul. I feel like this often happens to me. A book just pops up in my life and I happen to open it up and it’s just the thing I need. The Dark Night of the Soul is a 16th-century spiritual classic by the Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross. It’s poetic and it seemed to take me through dark places where I had been residing with raw honest companionship and then take me even further into the dark yet with hope somehow.
St. John of the Cross offers a startling perspective: sometimes God removes our felt sense of divine presence—not to punish us, but to purify us. Not to punish us but to purify us. He says,
“In the dark night, the soul learns to love God for God’s sake, not for the consolations of God.”
We often associate God’s nearness with emotional highs or answered prayers. But in the dark night, God strips away every idol, even our ideas about God, until we are left with only the ache. This ache becomes holy.
I remember reading the words that felt like just a string of words, in a vernacular foreign from my 21st century mind, in a strange ancient lingo, it described to me my own predicament.
Words like,
“God thus leaves them in darkness so great that they know not whither to go with their imaginations and reflections of sense. They cannot advance a single step in meditation, as before, the inward sense now being overwhelmed in this night, and abandoned to dryness too great that they have no more any joy or sweetness in their spiritual exercises, as they had before, and in their place they find nothing but insipidity and bitterness. For, as I said before, God now, looking upon them as somewhat grown in grace, weans them from the breasts that they may become strong, and cast their swaddling-clothes aside: He carries them in His arms no longer, and shows them how to walk alone. All this is strange to them. For all things seem to go against them.”
I’d read words like this and looked over my shoulder, wondering, is St. John of the Cross watching me, for this is how I felt.
maybe you’ve, “somewhat grown,” up and God weaning you.
St. John says if you don’t go through this kind of dark night of the soul, that you’ll be weak. For those who pray happily without much suffering, he says this:
“Now spiritual men generally, speaking spiritually are extremely weak and imperfect here, though they apply themselves to devotion, and practise it with great resolution, earnestness, and care. For being drawn to these things and to their spiritual exercises by the comfort and satisfaction they find herein, and not yet confirmed in virtue by the struggle it demands, they fall into many errors and imperfections in their spiritual life; for every man’s work corresponds to the habit of perfection which he has acquired. These souls, therefore, not having had time to acquire those habits of vigour, must, of necessity, perform their acts, like children, weakly.”
He’s like,
You weak! You haven’t been through stuff!
Oh but I have. I have seen the dark. I have made a home there and my meals were tears, tears for breakfast and tears for dinner and tears of midnight snack and all. Tears mixed in with a lot of spicy Shin ramen and kimchi in the moonlight.
Cole Arthur Riley, a more modern voice to holy in the dark, was sharing a practice that her household does. Once a month they have a day where they don’t use any artificial light. She talked about her curiosity about darkness and light, and the power in being able to control light and how that’s formed her whole life, and how the absence of that power would’ve formed her ancestors. She talked about how the light switch gives us control and also ties us to work and productivity, how the natural rhythm of the night brings us to rest because you can’t hustle and grind till 12am, how you just have to wait until the next day. The invitations of just sitting in the darkness, again, as she talked, reminded me of the safety of my own late dark nights when I didn’t have to perform, or fake it, or pretend, but just be. She posed that such practice could translate to things like,
“how willing we are to sit with dark seasons of someone’s life, how willing we are to sit through someone else’s pain, how inclined we are to flip the proverbial switch to brighten things up and be known and seeable and calm again.”
That be me. Give me any situation, any hard thing and I have the gift of putting a silver lining on it. It’s been my gift and curse–it was how I coped and what I had to survive some of my own traumas. But it also repressed the feelings, ignored the pain, invalidated the experiences. So such an invitation, to not turn on that light switch to switch things up from pain to fun, well that was really hard for me. And yet might be precisely why St John and St Cole’s invitations to the dark with holiness felt so safe for me to enter into with them.
It is scary. Like I said, I loved fun. In high school I lived in Wichita, Kansas where there wasn’t much to do for teens. And so it isn’t the safest thing to do but, we’d race cars. I mean I didn’t drive yet but we’d all pile into a fixed up Honda Civic or Toyota Supra with spoilers and rims and just drive around fast, chasing each other. Like Tokyo drift, but you know Kansas drift. And we’d do this one very very dangerous thing. Please don’t ever try this, you could die. We’d drive on a highway, going like 60, and for a few seconds turn off the headlights. You can’t see anything, even the freeways with street lamps, like it’s dark at night. We’d all scream in fear for a few seconds and turn it back on. You realize how truly dark it is out there and how even the headlight, it literally only shows you a few feet in front of you, and we trust that to drive around and apparently that is sufficient.
It feels like that sometimes in life, driving weight headlights, or right now in our country, where we really don’t know what’s going to happen with our rights, healthcare, finances, or whatever down the line and it feels like we’re going 80 in the dark. It’s a bit scary.
Earlier this week I went to a GBIO’s listening session. It was in the basement of an old Black AME church in Cambridge where maybe 20-30 of us gathered. It was organized by a few of our own Reservoir’s Faith Into Action core team leaders which happen to be made up of poc’s, women, or queer members.
In the listening session, the first story that was shared was from a man in a suit. He is a professor at Tufts and he shared about how he teaches his students in communication and engagement with social action sometimes through op-ed in newspapers outlets. But since the abduction of one of the Tufts students recently by ICE, he thinks twice and he can’t ask the students to do that project. He was almost in tears, just broken by this situation, his pride and life’s work interrupted by the administration.
And then we broke up into groups and shared. An older woman concerned with women’s reproductive rights as a retired ob gyn, again, her life’s work, threatened. A man sharing how his niece can’t get a job after paying her time in prison trying to raise a daughter of her own, and how he volunteers at the local grassroots effort to protect immigrant neighbors from ICE. As I heard stories after stories of folks heartbreak, concerns, I too felt sad and angry.
Honestly every time I go to any GBIO event, this is how I feel. And actually, sometimes, this is why I don’t like going to them. Because they are downers. I sometimes feel more overwhelmed, more hopeless. This one elderly woman with an accent just shared that she recently got a $800 bill from Eversource. That’s it. She came to this meeting and that’s all she shared. I so wanted to ask her to pull out her bill and call Eversource myself because I felt so angry for her.
And at these listening sessions and GBIO meetings, they keep saying that this is power. This sad group of ragtags gathering, complaining and fed up, sharing our issues that impact our own lives or families with sometimes impossible ridiculous maddening situations–apparently is power. They call these listening sessions and 1-1 relational meetings, power meetings. It’s confusing to my empire building trained eyes. Where? Where is this power?
And yet, in such a sad place, this Psalmist filled with grief and taunting enemies says:
“Hope in God; for I shall again praise, my salvation and my God.” (v.11)
It feels abrupt for me. I’m like, how, how did this psalmist make the move from being depressed to praising? It’s not. It’s not a move. There is no movement.
The psalmist doesn’t say I feel hopeful. They are commanding their soul: Hope.
This is the work of faith in the dark. Not optimism, but resilience. Not clarity, but commitment. Not light, but a voice in the dark whispering, Keep going.
And so the evening of listening ended with no solutions or strategy. They just asked us, who wants to do another listening session. Again my efficient mind doubts,
“we’re just gonna talk some more again?”
It’s what resilience and commitment in action looked like. Resilience doesn’t FEEL resilient–it feels hard.
It’s easy to love God in the light. St. John is vicious with his words. He calls it
“spiritual gluttony,”
that we please and satisfy ourselves by serving and pleasing God. Staying close to the sweetness, to devotion and the results of that devotion in return that we feel. This darkness St. John describes, isn’t even simply a call to be faithful when God is hidden.
Sometimes when we’re going through a season of suffering and have bouts of doubt, many of us might think of Job, a character in the Old Testament famous for going through all the worst suffering and never denouncing God, and the teachings that often drew how strong Job’s faith was. Oh he never denied God in his situation we’ve been taught. But here’s a quick tip in reading the Bible in post-deconstruction or post-evangelical method. Don’t look for the hero in the story. Don’t look for the faithful character and resolve to be more like them. Look for what God is doing in the story.
What is God doing in the dark? St. John says that in the absence of all the benefits of God’s gifts, you are left with the mystical union with God. Complete surrender and intimacy with the Divine. No joy, no comfort, not even the goodness of God but just Godself. When all is stripped away, prayers fall flat, ideas seem meaningless, no answer, no service, no satisfaction.
St. John says for this Job character,
“God left him in misery, naked on a dung-hill, abandoned and even persecuted by his friends, filled with bitterness and grief, covered with worms: then it was then the Most High, Who lifteth up ‘the poor out of the dung-hill’, was please to communicate Himself to Job in greater abundance and sweetness, revealing to him ‘the deep mysteries of His wisdom’ as He had never done before in the days of Job’s prosperity.”
Dung-hill. Are you on a dung-hill? Good. Your spirit is not being weakened. God will meet you there. In the dark. God will purify and fortify you and strengthen you there. God will give all that you need there, humility, readiness. All that you don’t need is destroyed there. There, you rest. You rest in God.
I’m going on a sabbatical in a few weeks. I can’t believe I’ve been working here as a pastor for seven years already. I’ll be gone for three months, June-August. This is my last sermon before my sabbatical. And then I’ll be back. But one of the reasons I came into ministry is because I love to be close to Jesus. I joke that God put me on a short leash, that’s my evangelical theology coming out, an authoritarian God ha ha… but timeless teachers like St. John teach me freedom.
I’ve said this to someone who was really struggling once, he felt like he wanted to be more like Job and have faith but right now, he doesn’t even know if he believes. I told him,
wherever you go, to the farthest end of yourself or you think even from God’s grace, there you’ll find God.
I’m not in some dark period of my life right now, thank God the Dark Night of the Soul doesn’t hit me like it did last time I read it, but I hope even when I’m taking a break from preparing sermons or daily weekly doing the work of the church and ministry, God will meet me, not with things to do but with just rest. With just union. With just presence. I hope that for you too. You don’t have to do anything or be the perfect Christian. God’s love is already with you and church sometimes just reminds you of that. That you are deeply deeply loved and held by the love of God. The presence of God is in the light and the presence of God is especially in the dark. Let me pray for us.
Jesus, your presence on this earth with us showed us that God is here. That God cares for us. You are the visible being to the divine mystery. We thank you that you revealed yourself to us, showing nothing but love, justice, forgiveness, and healing. Show us that to each of us today. Love, justice, forgiveness and healing we pray. Even in the darkest of our nights. Amen.