It was night. Nothing else need be said. That short and simple phrase says it all. It was night.
It was night when they visited my bedroom, when I was a child of six, to tell me that my mother would not be coming home for a long time. The stress of giving birth to my brother had been too much; she needed to rest, they said. “Go to sleep, young man; it’ll be all right in the morning.” In the morning?! What does that mean to a young child? It was night.
It was night when the telephone rang, loud and insistent, visiting us with the news of the death of my grandmother. In those days when the phone rang at night, it was not good news. The valley of the shadow of death had opened for that fascinating saint who had given me my first Bible. It was night.
It was night. My wife and I had just returned to our apartment from a long day’s journey, filled with bright hope for tomorrow. A church was considering me as pastor, near a university where I wanted to study. It was so right, we could taste it. But it was night when the caller said, “I’m sorry; our people have voted ‘No’”. A long day’s journey into night.
It was night when we arrived at a hospital bed to find a man whose heart was giving out, a man who looked at me, his eldest son, and said, “Is this the beginning of the end?” My eyes visited the windows, searching for somewhere else to look for light. But it was night.
It seems it always is night when deadly things are done. When terrible things happen. Visits in the night are generally not good. Visits in the night suggest that the darkness is overwhelming us. Visits in the night tell us that the powers of death are huge. Night visits.
It was night when traders from the coast stole into sleeping villages and snatched men and women from their slumbers, visited them in the innocence of their rest, to take them to Goree to be sold into slavery. It was night.
It was perpetual night in the holds of the ships that made that middle passage, where hundreds perished and thousands languished, on their way across a pitching ocean to visit a far country and work, endless work. It was night.
It was night when “Massa” came and took her man, night when the peddlers of flesh visited the cabin and took his prime daughter. Weeping endured that night, and don’t tell us about joy coming in the morning. Morning just pointed up the emptiness of the bed. Night visitors. It was night.
It was night when the hooded riders came, with their fiery crosses, their horses, and their cross-covered robes. Night when the Klan rode and night when “uppity” men were lynched, strung up before their brothers so that everybody would see what becomes of those who aspire to be somebody. Night visitors enforced a cruel code. It was not good to sleep too soundly; not when the night’s silence could be split open by the curses of self-styled noble warriors. If ever there was a dark night, this was it. It was night.
It was night when kings and princes danced in luxury in palaces built on the wealth brought by Africans. It was night when planters, politicians, and even preachers slept in mansions built by African labor. And it was night at the Lorraine when shots rang out and visited Dr. King with their devastating message. Night visits. Never a good sign.
Leopold Sedar Senghor – African poet, philosopher, statesman, and Christian – wrote about night visits:
“I dream in the intimate semi-darkness of an afternoon.
I am visited by the fatigues of the day,
The deceased of the year, the souvenirs of the decade,
Like the procession of the dead in the village on the horizon of the shallow sea.
It is the same sun bedewed with illusions,
The same sky unnerved by hidden presences,
The same sky feared by those who have a reckoning with the dead.
And suddenly my dead draw near to me.”
Senghor, the father of Senegal, member of the French Academy, felt a presence. He felt the brooding, silent presence of the suffering of his people. And he knew that the night visits had to end. That there must be a reckoning. That justice was to be done. It was night.
Yet, brothers and sisters, if you and I, like this poet, are “visited by the fatigues of the day”, then I invite you to discover what God will do with night visits.
I
Peter too had been visited in the night, and it was not a courtesy call. Herod the King had decided that this Christian business had to be stopped. Herod started with one of their ring-leaders. He got to James, one of the three closest to Jesus. And James was put to death. The word spread quickly to the little band of believers, but they were not intimidated. So Herod, made bold by picking off James, now moved against Peter, and stole him away one night. Clapped him into jail and held him there until the moment would come to parade that preacher before the people and put him down.
You see, those who have power and who claim that God put them there – they know their power is shaky. They are scared. They are frightened little men, with nothing but naked strength on their side. And so they visit at night and they steal lives away.
But I tell you this morning, God also is a night visitor. God neither slumbers nor sleeps. God also makes His night visits. And when God comes in the darkness of the night, things happen, things that power does not know. For God does not forget His own. God does not forget the victims of injustice. God does not forever stand aside while His children are enslaved. God is a God of justice, and for every Herod who flies in His face, there is a day of reckoning. There is a time to balance the books.
Oh, I wonder just how many nights Peter slept fitfully in that prison cell. I wonder just how many filthy rats visited with him, how many crawling roaches, how much dank cold. I wonder how deep the dark night of the soul that crept over Peter, and how many times his silent voice cried out, “How long, O Lord, how long?” However long it was, it wasn’t as long as Mandela’s twenty-eight years in a South African cell. However long it was, it wasn’t as long as life without parole, visited on “three-strikes-and-you’re-out” offenders. However long Peter slept in that cell, it wasn’t as long as it is for thousands of men today who feed a commercial system and make money for the purveyors of prisons.
Are you aware how much money is being made off the bodies of prison inmates today? Are you aware that the District of Columbia, like many other places, is turning over part of its prison population to profit-making businesses, which have an interest in keeping the prison population as high as possible? Are you aware – I was not until I started working with a prisoner – are you aware that even though the taxpayers spend multiplied thousands of dollars to secure each man, nevertheless that system will not provide simple items like toothpaste and underwear? The prisoner I’m working with does work in his prison, and gets paid the princely sum of $25.00 a month for it, but has to buy all of his personal items out of that pittance! Oh, I tell you, Peter probably had it good compared with what is happening today!
But our Bible tells us that God visits in the night. Our liberating God visits in the night, and works the work of justice. God does not forget the plight of His children, whether they be innocent or guilty. God visits prison cells in the night. He is not interested in keeping a man down forever; God wants to redeem. God wants to offer grace. God wants to set the captives free.
Leopold Senghor wrote of this. Senghor had fought in the French Resistance during the Second World War, and had been captured. He had been in a Nazi concentration camp; he hope for a God who would work to set men free.
“I have been with you to that corn village and as far as the gates of night;
And I was speechless before the golden enigma of your smile
When a brief twilight crossed your face like a divine mood …
When they attack me such agonies, those ancestral fears as treacherous as leopards,
The spirit cannot drive them back to distant boundaries of day.
Is it, therefore, night forever and the parting with no goodbye?
I will weep in the shadows, in the maternal hollows of earth,
And will sleep in the silence of my tears
Till I feel again on my forehead the milky dawn of your kiss.”
II
God visits in the night to set the prisoners free. But now I also want you to notice that when God visits in the night, He not only liberates, He empowers. He not only sets free, He gives power. When God gets involved in your life, not only does He take away your shame and your guilt; God also gives you the power to become.
Listen to all of the empowerment words in the Bible story. An angel of the Lord tapped Peter, sleeping in that cell, and said, “Get up quickly.” Don’t wait around, Peter, because God is on the move, and so get up quickly. And then, look at the rest of it: “Get up quickly, fasten your belt, put on your sandals, wrap your cloak around you." Urgent! Get going! When God is on the move, respond. Respond now, respond with obedience. “Get up quickly, fasten your belt – today we would say, ‘fasten your seat belts’ – put on your sandals, wrap your cloak around you and follow.”
When God liberates, God empowers. When the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed. There are people in this very room who have been brought out from all kinds of things and have been empowered. Some of us came out of poverty, and God empowered us to earn a living. Some of us came out of the long and tortured history of racism, and God empowered us to make our way in not only in the so-called black world, but also in the white world and the Gold Coast world and the multicultural world, the whole world. We have been empowered. When God liberates, God also empowers.
I tell you that God’s church, if we are true to our God’s agenda, we need to be an empowering people. We need to be saying to the downtrodden, “Get up quickly”. We need to be helping people do and not telling them what they cannot do.
I remember 1954. I was a teenager when Brown vs. Board of Education came down. But now I was a teenager in segregated Louisville, and we all talked about what was going to happen. Almost everybody I knew said, “They’re not ready. They cannot handle freedom. They need training, they need education”. What we really meant was, “They need to be more like us – and then we can begin to commence to consider to think about talking about maybe someday desegregating.” Almost everybody said, “Let’s not move too quickly. They’re not ready.” But, praise God, my pastor sat down with a group of us and pulled out a book of old newspaper stories. He pointed out that here in the 1950’s people were saying the very same thing that they had said in the 1870’s – they’re not ready. He showed us that in the Reconstruction Era, after the Civil War, public opinion said, “Black folks are not ready. They’ll need to wait. They are not equipped. Let them wait.” My pastor waved that book of newspaper stories in our faces and said, “How long? How long until ‘they’ qualify by our standards? We cannot stand by and tell them to wait. We need to let them be free and to equip them for freedom.”
If we are God’s church today, we need to be saying what the angel said to Peter, “Get up quickly.” We need to be empowering people rather than telling them what they cannot do.
We have a little prison ministry just getting started. Several folks in our congregation heard God’s call, at God’s time, because there is a move on among the churches in our city to respond to the 2500 parolees coming back into the community in the next year. The court is asking the churches to respond. Well, the other night there was a meeting to provide orientation for people willing to serve as mentors. Our church was represented, yes – but how well? By how many? Two. Two and only two of us responded and said, “We will empower somebody coming out of prison.” Oh, brothers and sisters, that is not enough. That is not good enough. That is not a sufficient response. That is not being faithful to the God whose angel says to the man in prison, “Get up quickly.” That is not following a Lord who says to the incarcerated, “Fasten your belt, put on your sandals, wrap your cloak around you, and follow me.” In the first place, he probably doesn’t even have the belt, the sandals, or the cloak. And beyond that, are we willing for him to follow us? Are we ready to build a mentoring relationship to a man who’s been in trouble? Or is it going to be, “Go on now, and don’t bother me in my nice, safe neighborhood”?
When God liberates, God also empowers. God’s church can do no less. Leopold Senghor started out studying for the priesthood in the Catholic Church. He would have loved to spend his life teaching philosophy and walking the green glades of French universities. But he could not. He could not. His people called out to him. The pain of Senegal got to him. Senghor came to understand that he could no longer be an armchair Christian, penning pungent phrases, spinning spiritual sweetnesses. Senghor knew that if God calls you, He calls you to get involved in the pain of others and to equip them.
“I will not emerge, oh Lord, from my reserve of hatred,
For these diplomats who show their canine teeth and who tomorrow will trade black flesh.
Yet my heart melts like snow on the roofs of Paris in your gentle sun,
It is sweet to my enemies, to my brothers whose hands are white without snow.”
III
God visits in the night to set men free and to empower them. But, brothers and sisters, our redeeming God, our God liberates, our God restores, our God sets free. And not only does He set men free from prison; not only does He break the chains of the captive; not only does He shatter the shackles of segregation; our God sets us free deep down in the depths of the spirit. Our God works in our very hearts to set us free from everything that entraps us. Our God works not only to set us free from poverty and prejudice, from prison and problems, our God works to set us free from the most fundamental of all human issues. Our God is at work to set us free from sin. From sin.
Oh, what a wonderful phrase I read here in this story about Peter. It says that when he had been set free from the jail cell, and made his way back to town, “Then Peter came to himself and said, ‘Now I am sure that the Lord has … rescued me.’” Peter came to himself and acknowledged the power of God in his life.
I know that there are folks who think that salvation is just a matter of better education and clean clothing and training for a job. I am not one of them. I know that the human condition is more serious than that. I know that there are folks who believe that everything is politics and that if we could just move Congress in the right direction, if we could just get the President’s attention, we could solve this thing. But I do not agree. I cannot agree. For I know that if you give the vote to a selfish person, he will vote only for his own self-interest. I know that if you provide money to an evil person, he will throw it away on evil pursuits. I know that right down in the depths of the human heart, there is something else that must be dealt with, or all the education, all the training, all the mentoring, all the charity in the world will come to naught.
And that something else is sin. Our fundamental brokenness, our basic estrangement from God and from one another, our alienation from what God wants us to be. If you do not deal with that, in your own life or in the lives of others, you will not have accomplished anything. And so how poignant and how beautiful it is to watch Peter, “coming to himself”. Coming to himself, becoming what God wanted him to be, and acknowledging the place of God in his life. Until that happens, in your life, my life, anybody’s life, not much else will happen.
I’ve told this story two or three times this week, but I just have to tell it again. It’s so powerful. Last Tuesday morning I was in a board meeting, and we were talking about the prison ministry that I’ve already mentioned. One of the pastors there said, “You know, we’ve just ordained some new deacons in our church. And when I looked at that group, I realized that several of them had come out of drug addiction. It spoke to me of what God can do – taking an addict and making him grow to where he can become a deacon.” Well, as soon as he finished that statement, a minister sitting next to him said, “I’ve never told any of you this, but thirty years ago, I was a teenager, sitting in Lorton, convicted of bank robbery. But …” – and he pointed to an older pastor across the room – “but this man came out to Lorton to work with a few of us who wanted to turn our lives around; he taught us, he discipled us, he mentored us. And when I got out, he helped me get a college scholarship, and then he led me to hear the Lord’s call into ministry. He stayed with me all the way, and now my life is completely different.”
Well, that older pastor began to cry. Just out of control. And then another pastor began to weep and told us about baptizing a man who came to the baptismal service drunk because he was afraid of being rejected again, as he had been rejected all his life. I sat there and I thought of some of you, and I teared up too. In fact, the whole room dissolved. We were supposed to be having a board meeting, but we had a revival instead! Because God deals with the heart, the core; God frees us from every spot of sin and stain. Nothing is too deep for God to forgive. Nothing is too difficult for Him to work out. When Peter came to himself, he said, “Now I am sure that the Lord … has rescued me.”
IV
It is night. It is still night for somebody here today. The darkness of doubt and despair has not yet been lifted. It is still night for somebody. So what shall we say?
It was night when they came to the city gates to celebrate Passover. It was night when Jesus and His disciples prepared an upper room for the festival.
It was night when He took off His outer robe and picked up a towel to wash their feet. It was night when He sat at table with them and dipped bread with one who would betray Him into death. It was night when He stood before them and said, “This night will the Son of Man be given into sinful hands.” It was night.
It was night when they visited Him in the garden with swords and staves. It was night when they arrested him, night when they tried Him, mocked Him and spat upon Him, night when they visited the high priest for an illegal hearing, night when they hastily convened the Sanhedrin, night when they visited the colonial governor. It was night. Night visits, all of them.
And when they took Him to Calvary’s hill and strung Him up, lynched Him for all the world to see, all nature turned into night for that awesome moment. It was night even at midday. Oh, were you there when the sun refused to shine? Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble. Were you there when the sun refused to shine? For it was night. It was the night of our redemption. It was the night when our sin was dealt with, once and for all. When God, very God, gave His only son so that whosoever believes in Him should not perish, but should have everlasting life.
Night visits. What is man, that thou are mindful of him, and the son of man, that thou visitest him? In the night visit, we are redeemed. We come to ourselves. We come to Christ.
Senghor sang, in his poem, “Prayer for Peace”:
“Lord Jesus, at the end of this book, which I offer You as a ciborium of sufferings
At the beginning of the Great Year, in the sunlight
Of Your peace on the snowy roofs of Paris –
Yet I know that my brothers’ blood will once more redden
The yellow Orient on the shores of the Pacific
Ravaged by storms and hatred
I know that this blood is the spring libation
The Great Tax Collectors have used for seventy years
To fatten the Empire’s lands
Lord, at the foot of the cross – and it is no longer Your
Tree of sorrow but, above the Old and New Worlds,
Crucified Africa,
And her right arm stretches over my land
And her left side shades America …
At the feet of my Africa, crucified for four hundred years
And still breathing
Let me recite to You, Lord, her prayer of peace and pardon.”
Our prayer of peace and pardon. Christ is the redeemer of human suffering. Christ is the savior from sin and the solace of those in pain. Christ is the answer to both the pain of Africa and to the pain-inflicting Europe and America. Christ is the one who visits us in the night and turns our groaning into song and our complaints into praise. What is the son of man that thou visitest him? Praise God! It is no longer night.
