So, when I was kid, I had great-great uncle named Gilliam, and when I knew him, he was blind. And he fascinated me. I would quietly stand in the corner and see how he could fry his own eggs for breakfast. I can still see him touching the corner of the egg to 'see' if it was done!
By feeling the rotary dial on the telephone in his kitchen, (remember, this was the 1960's) he could call any of his surviving sons or daughters. With his red and white cane he could safely navigate the length of the lane over the railroad tracks to the main road to get his mail.
My Mom told me that he drove long after he should have. His second wife would sit beside him in the front seat and literally be his eyes. I was also told there was some effort in getting him a seeing eye dog, only he just couldn't get the hang of it. And so he spent his last decades walking around in the dark, 'seeing' with his hands and his ears and his sense of smell. And so it was that he could sense your presence in the room long before you announced it. Not that I was particularly quiet. Even so, I expect he knew a lot more of what was going on around him than many of us who actually 'see' sometimes did.
So sometimes, I would practice walking around in the dark, kinda like Uncle Gilliam. After a while I found I knew my childhood home by heart and could make my way through it quite well by feeling the wall and 'seeing' with my mind's eye.
Now most of us don't choose to practice walking around in the dark – especially not the sort of darkness our lessons describe this week. And yet we still do it regardless, and I think we get pretty good at it after a while. In fact, I sorta think we'v grown used to walking around in the dark. It may be the dark of grief or loneliness. It could be the darkness of uncertainty about what tomorrow will bring at work or at home or in the world. Or the darkness of unrelenting worry about children or grandchildren or aging parents. Or the nagging sensation that something is not quite right physically but you can't quite lay a finger on it. Or the darkness that accompanies depression or chronic illness. We have all gotten so good at walking around in the dark that maybe we hardly notice it after a while. Sometimes it's only when the light shines on us again that we can even tell the difference!
You've heard me speak, some of you, of the time in my family's life when we had a string of deaths. First my grandfather, then my grandmother, then my great aunt Mary. It had been a dark, dark, dark couple of years, especially for my mother, who found herself as the primary caregiver to all three. But my Aunt Mary was the hardest because she not only was physically declining, but also suffered from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. We were always having to take her to the doctor's office to treat infections on her face. She kept picking at her face, dabbing it with Kleenexes, and then just dropping the Kleenex wherever she happened to be.
We had gotten her into assisted living, but the staff kept calling us to come deal with this or that issue, and my mom was at her wits end. Well, the day finally came when Mary died. She had had a heart attack, and the ambulance took her to the emergency room where she died. My mom and I had gone there, and we were invited back to see her there on a table. We stood there, alone with her, Mom crying and me wanting to be anywhere else but there. Then her arm slipped out from under the sheet, and her hand opened up, and there, fluttering to the floor was another dang Kleenex.
We stood there, watching this like in slow motion. We stared at it for an eternity. Then we looked at each other and roared with laughter! We were so loud that the nurse came in to see if something awful was happening. When we pointed at the Kleenex, we started up again, and I'm sure the nurse thought we were crazy.
And it was the first time in those dark years that I could remember my Mom laughing. I remember how the wonder of that sound was a little like someone turning the light on again.
It was a gift. There was a promise in that moment. A the promise that God is there in there in the dark, that wounds will heal, and that we would laugh again. That light would replace the darkness after all. If only we will follow it.
This is the coming Light of Lights which will forever take us out of darkness. And the wonder of it is that this begins right here and now. We know this must be so for we hear it in our Gospel words from Matthew now.
Because I reckon that those disciples who Jesus calls in our reading today had also grown accustomed to walking around in the dark. Now, granted, their lives might have been pretty good ones. Maybe the business of fishing had provided a good living for them and their families. Maybe it meant a lot to them to be carrying on the work their fathers and grandfathers had done before them. Probably they had families to go home to and a community where they were held in high regard. But we also know that they lived in a country that was occupied by the army of another. That they paid taxes to a ruler who was not their own. And it may be so that maybe one among them wanted to be a carpenter, or had it in him to be a farmer, but was needed on dad's fishing boat.
More than that, we can also be certain, because they are human, that they had felt the inevitable pain of living with what may have been unspeakable losses. But here must have lived in them some longing for light; otherwise, they would not have abandoned all that they had known so quickly to follow this man who promised them something more. Maybe they thought they had grown accustomed to the darkness. Maybe they had finally given up hope for any kind of meaningful change. And maybe in Jesus' voice they saw a promise of light in their darkness.
And so when Jesus walks by and calls their names and the light shines on them, they go. They just drop their nets and go. And we all know what happens next.
Amen.