I grew up in rural Alabama, 30-40 miles from any town or city. We could not see any of our neighbors’ houses, none of the street lights worked, and the thick southern woods blocked any car headlight. I loved evenings at my parents’ house the most; I still do. The night was both still and humming with life and noise. Far from artificial lighting, the stars formed such a canopy that some nights it seemed like you could name every one of them. You could hear cicadas and bullfrogs while the lightening bugs cast their soft glow. I was not afraid under the gentle promise of the warm starlight. The night was not a threat.
I attended a college set in an even more remote location than my parents’ house. We used to drive to an abandoned air strip to gaze at the stars wholly untouched by any light bulb. The world has never felt more alive to me than when I was lying on my back staring at the sky pulsating the earth’s heartbeat. Even the slightly brighter campus did not drown out the sky. I would walk back to my room from the biology lab looking up. I watched for Orion’s Belt shifting across the sky over the months, its position telling me whether cold weather was coming or going.
In some ways, of course, I romanticize these evenings of the past. Even so, stars embody an unidealized simplicity of the ever constant, ever changing night. The wide, untouched sky filled with mysteries we cannot see among the ones we can.
I live in the city now. I love its ebb and flow as much as I do the quiet repetition of the rural, but nights here are different. The streets lamps, recently replaced with garish LED bulbs (to the vitriol of my neighbors), along with porch lights and flood lights and headlights drown out any hope of starlight. The hum of insects, frogs, and other wildlife is largely replaced by cars driving past, airplanes arriving at and departing from the nearby airport, first response vehicles announcing their urgency, and a steady parade of trains traversing the tracks only a block away. My husband and I sit in our sunroom at night looking out to a street so illuminated you can see almost as well at midnight as at high noon. I now live in a world that is aggressively bright. There is nothing hidden from our sight under human-made illumination, yet somehow the night lit by the artificial is more maliciously dark than I have ever known.
Perhaps I perceive this malice because I am an adult now, shedding an innocence all children should be allowed. Perhaps it is because I am a mother now, ever ready to protect. Or perhaps it is trauma that taught life’s fragility. The child that met the mystery of the unknown with curiosity has given way to an adult who is not sure if the dark holds friend or foe and are uncertain the risk to find out is worth it. Perhaps adults uniting our fears has led to these street lamps and porch lights and flood lights so bright they dim the moon and the stars. I love the city and I love my home with my husband and our daughters. I don’t necessarily miss my childhood porch. However, I do miss the darkness is not malevolent.
God who created day is the same God who created night.
We’ve created our own lights to rule the night, counting on them to preemptively reveal the potential threats of the dark by eradicating the dark entirely. Yet, the brighter our light, the darker the dark.
Barbara Brown Taylor defines darkness as “shorthand for anything that scares me – that I want no part of – either because I am sure I do not have the resources to survive it or because I do not want to find out.”1 In a white supremist world, dark has equaled evil while light (read: white) has equated to good. Barbara Brown Taylor’s definition recognizes that we are not afraid because dark is evil, but because it is unknown. Fear of the unknown assume the darkness is malevolent. Sometimes the dark is not a choice. Sometimes the thing we want no part of envelopes us, forcing us to learn if there truly is something scary held within the unknown. Forcing us to find the resources to survive and thrive the uncertain, and the fear that we might be devoured.
Paul writes to the Philippian church, a community immersed in darkness they did not choose. They are already experiencing persecution from a culture that does not welcome them. Paul was forced to abruptly leave under traumatic circumstances, and he now writes them from prison awaiting probable execution. One of their number, Epaphroditus almost died from an illness. This is a people who know that life is fragile and that the space between each moment subject to shattering change. Afraid of loss, suffering, and its accompanying grief, they may close themselves off to loving one another. They may withdraw – from Christ, from their community, from themselves.
Paul is tender and gentle in this epistle, encouraging this beloved church to “shine like stars.”2 Which, I don’t about you, is not something I want to hear when I am facing something frightening. But the exhortation is also a promise. As deep as the unknown is, in the midst of it they are still known by God.
The Psalmist famously said, “your Word is a light to my feet and a lamp to my path,” a statement of faith that God will direct our steps, but also an acknowledgement that we may not see beyond the next foot fall.3 Beyond the light, the dark holds the unknown. Walking in our own knowing, setting up our own street lamp so to speak, will drown out the mystery of being known and held by God.
For an already fragile Christian or a Christian community, fracture is only a breath away as we fear the possible danger lurking in the shadows.
Paul calls for God’s people to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling for it is God who works in you enabling you and in working your salvation do all things without murmuring or arguing. The goal “of working out the grace that God has worked in” is that the light shine from within – working its way toward visibility.4
There is fear, doubt, and rage when it feels that God has not remembered you. But faith, salvation, is not always perfectly felt. At its core, we are believers not because we have always felt confident, strong, or certain; we are certainly not believers because we have done the right things or had the most faith. We are believers because we are known and held by God. That is the only bit of knowing needed to walk in the unknown.
Shining like stars, the lights of God’s people flicker in the midst of a “crooked and perverse generation.” This description is applied to the surrounding, pagan world here, but originally it was used in Deut. 32:5 to describe . . . God’s people. “Crooked and perverse” is applied firstly to God’s people who have received his grace, who know his love, who should have responded to his faithfulness.
Christianese is quick to demonize “the world.” We want to protect our children from it, we want to guard our holiness against it, we want to shine Christ’s light into it.
We constantly use this term “the world” in our vernacular. While we rarely attempt to define what exactly we mean, at the very least the ideology is world = bad, but Christ/Christian = good. Here in the Bible Belt where I reside, we are masters of creating opposing dichotomies between the Christians and the world, yet this phrase, “crooked and perverse generation,” has not been used in Scripture to accuse the world of its evil. It has been used to indict God’s own people, which tells us that the issue with shining like stars in the sky is not exclusively a problem outside of us. It is the crookedness and perverseness within our own hearts, therefore, within our own communities.
This passage is not apologetic nor is it an instruction manual for evangelization. This is a passage directed to a tired and anxious community encouraging us to cultivate spiritual lives together that allow Christ’s light to shine. Instead of the Christian life being about changing the world, making it more religious, infecting it with God’s holiness, according to Paul the Christian life is about allowing God to work in me, thus allowing God to work in all of us. And if God is at work within us, that light will shine from us simply because we trust him – working out what God is working within.
Shining like stars in the night has nothing to do with attempting to make the crooked, perverse generation straight and narrow, but with the Christian community allowing God’s grace working in us to also work out through us. The failure of the wilderness generation that earned them the moniker “crooked and perverse” had nothing to do with the oppression of the world. If it did, then these former enslaved people would have the best excuse on heaven or earth to justify themselves.
If the Philippian church fails in their calling to hold fast it is not because the persecution they suffer is too great, but because things like grumbling and murmuring, the same actions that led to the downfall of the wilderness generation, drowned out Christ’s light within them. In the same way, if we fail to build upon the investments of those who came before us, it is not because the challenge was too great or the environment too pagan. It is because our fear overcomes our trust that no matter what else we are experiencing or feeling, no matter how fragile our faith, God is with us. His presence unaffected by our emotional or spiritual state.
The wilderness generation grumbled, “let us return to serve the Egyptians for that was better than dying here.” In the wilderness, they can only see what God has illuminated, but we seek to make our own way on a highway lined with luminescent lamps. The crooked and perverse generations are the ones who turn on one another because, like the crooked and perverse generations in the era of the Judges, “everyone does what is right in their own eyes.5
Paul was not necessarily concerned about the crookedness of “the world;” the truth is I am not either. There is crookedness enough in the ranks of the church. These are the congregations harboring criminals and abusers. These are the pastors spiritual and emotional abusing their congregations. These are the churches upholding racist and patriarchal power structures. These are church leaders and congregations embedding themselves in the political power rather than the Kingdom of God. These are the cries against abortion but not against deportation or detainment camps on the border. The crooked and perverse generation is every generation of Christians who have seen evil and chosen to close their eyes rather than risk the unknown consequences of doing what is right in God’s eyes.
This is the terrifying risk of working out salvation – that we are placed in history following generations of both the faithful and the unfaithful; that we are placed in history, building upon the life investments of those who have come before us whether they worked good or evil; that we are placed in community where our calling is not just individual, but also corporate.
That if we share the name of Christ, his is the only light that shines. Artificial will never do.
Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark, (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), pp. 4-5.
All scripture references quoted from the NRSV.
Psalm 119:105
Ralph Martin, Philippians, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), pp. 113-116.
Judges 21:25.