By Joe LaGuardia
The Bible says that God is love, but it also says that God is terrifying. In a recent study on covenants of the Bible, my congregation and I read Genesis 15 as a refresher on the promises God gave to Abram. The covenant ceremony which God initiated states:
“As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him” (Gen. 15:12).
We think that the promises of God are beautiful, that the land and offspring set aside for Abram was bountiful and blessed. We forget that the promise was just as much a nightmare as it was an inheritance whereby God assured Abram that the Lord would be a “shield” of protection (v. 1). Protection against what?
At the time, Abram was well on in years. He doubted God’s promise of offspring because his wife Sarai remained barren.
“I remain childless…you have given me no offspring,” Abram told God. And the biblical text is sympathetic. Genesis 16 begins, “Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, bore him no children.” Besides, God said that Abram’s offspring was destined for slavery, not for one season, but for several generations–400 years. What kind of promise is that?
We spend many hours if not days avoiding those things that terrify us. We spend large amounts of money alluding death and vulnerability. We encourage one another, as if to exchange favors so that we sustain the illusion that we are not fragile, that life itself is not terrifying.
Perhaps, in all of this bluster, we fail to recognize that it is God who resides in the terror as much as in the celebrations of life. We do not sleep because we are afraid of the nightmares. We are afraid that God might answer our prayers and show up.
In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard quoted mystic Jacob Boehme: “The whole Deity has in its innermost or beginning Birth, in the Pith or Kernel, a very tart, terrible sharpness, in which the astringent Quality is very horrible, tart, hard, dark and cold Attraction or Drawing together, like Winter, when there is a fierce, bitter cold Frost, when Water is frozen into Ice, and besides is very intolerable.”
That is the writing of someone who has experienced the presence of God, an intimacy with God and an urgency of one who recognized his own fragility in the face of God. It is the writing of someone who also knew the hardships of cold winters–a season very much a part of God’s creation as spring or summer. It is the “know this for certain” of God (Gen. 15:13), a conviction that not every calling or anointing or divine intervention is set to the music of Chris Tomlin or Cheers.
Boehme’s reflection is not words crafted to talk about divine experience, but crafted to describe the experience itself, in its most honest poetic horror.
If God is not terrifying, then why avoid God as much as we do? Why not pray more or kneel more or intercede more? Why not listen more or dig deeply into God’s Word beyond the mere parts we enjoy reading, the ones that make us feel good or reinforce our preconceived notions of who we think God ought to be?
Perhaps it is because God is a God of nightmares as much as visions and dreams, that God is in the darkness as much as God is the “Light of the world.”
God is the “smoking fire pot and a flaming torch” that passes in night, threatening to scorch those who get too close or wander carelessly into Presence with too much hubris. It threatens to consume anyone who yearns to domesticate that Fire and wield it to do her bidding.
It is easier to look at what we long for — our longings are safer than God. We find the Hagar in our household who can bear the offspring promised to us. We pass each other off as invaluable pawns to the powers and Pharaohs that exploit us. We laugh when God returns to us yet again, even when we pass on God’s promises to us. We are too old to birth something new, to raise a child. We are too frightened to tell the truth that the one we claim as sister to Pharaoh is in fact our wife destined for something greater than settling on the shores of the Nile.
We want to be left alone, but God does not leave us alone. God does not seem to have it or want it that way. So God visits again, and deep darkness settles upon the earth.
Baptist Spirituality 