Two of my favorite Christian guides lived and died mostly in the last century: Mary Flannery O’Connor, the fiction writer from Georgia; and Karl Barth, the theologian from Switzerland. In one of her letters, I believe, O’Connor says, “Faith is walking in darkness.” And in a lecture after World War II Barth says, “In Christian faith, we are concerned quite decisively with a meeting.”
“Faith is walking in darkness.” I interpret O’Connor’s statement this way: We are not God. So we can’t know the path our life will take without walking it. And to walk it means only to put one foot in front of the other. To walk our path means to see only the very next step. To live our faith is to take one step at a time.
“In Christian faith, we are concerned quite decisively with a meeting.” I interpret Barth’s statement this way: We are not God. But we do trust that God created us, that God met and saved us decisively in Christ, and that God longs to meet us anew throughout our lives. To live our faith is to live in expectation that God will meet us again and again.
To take these two reflections together, then, might be to say, faith is walking in darkness, but faith is also expecting that God will meet us in the darkness.
As Christians, we might easily assume that light is good and darkness is bad. After all, the Bible brims with passages that associate light with God or goodness, with clarity or insight. Likewise, the Bible is full of passages that equate darkness with the absence of God or goodness, with confusion or folly. These associations reflect much of lived human experience. But let’s remember something else the Bible tells us: God is present in the darkness as well as in the light. In her recent book called Learning to Walk in the Dark, Barbara Brown Taylor reminds us that, as Genesis 1 says, God’s good world emerged from a fertile darkness; dark places can be places of creation, re-creation, and growth. Faith can grow in dark places.
Abraham’s faith certainly grows in the dark. Our reading from Genesis presents the second extended meeting between God and Abraham in the book. Here God starts things off and does most of the talking. God appears to Abraham and promises that the ninety-nine-year-old will be the father of many nations, and that his equally geriatric wife, Sarah, will be the mother of nations. God also promises to be God for Abraham and his children, and to give to them the land, Canaan, where Abraham lives. God follows all this with a command that Abraham and his male descendants solemnize God’s promise with circumcision.
Confronted with the impossible promise of fathering nations with Sarah, Abraham ultimately laughs: “Can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Can Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?”
In the sense that Abraham doesn’t understand how he can possibly father children with Sarah, he is still (we might say) in the dark. But up to now, Abraham has taken the steps he has seen before him. A chapter before ours, between his two meetings with this God who promises him a child, Abraham agrees with his wife’s plan: he is to sleep with her servant Hagar and to accept Hagar’s child, Ishmael, as his own; surely this is what God means for him to do.
When God tells him clearly in our lesson that he will have a child with Sarah, Abraham still has a hard time wrapping his mind around the promise. So he says, “O that Ishmael might live in your sight!” The meeting continues: God and Abraham go back and forth again; Sarah is promised a child in a year. Eventually, God joins in the astonished laughter of Abraham and Sarah: Sarah births a boy named Isaac. (The name means Laughter.) Faith is expecting to meet God, meeting God, listening to God, and responding to God. But at the same time faith is also walking—and sometimes laughing—in darkness.
If we’ve been around long enough, we know that in the life of faith, the heart brightens and darkens and brightens and darkens—over and over again. The Christian story and the liturgical calendar we follow make allowances for this play of light and dark within the heart. Advent plunges us into the expectant dark, so we light candles. The child of Light is born and Christmas dawns, so we sing carols. The season of Epiphany brims with brightness—from the star the wise men see to the healings and teachings of Jesus to the splendor of Jesus’s transfiguration.
If Advent pictures darkness before the Christmas dawn, if Epiphany shines in morning brightness, then maybe our current season of Lent resembles a hot, dusty, dusky afternoon. Tensions emerge and tempers shorten. In today’s Gospel lesson, at least, the heat seems to be rising. Peter rebukes Jesus for moving unflinchingly toward the darkness of the cross. Jesus, in turn, scolds Peter for losing track of God’s light in the murkiness of human preoccupation. If Lent is a dusky, dusty afternoon, Holy Week is twilight, and Good Friday is deep night. But the intensity of this darkness only strengthens the dazzling light of Easter.
So the Christian story embraces both darkness and light, from Advent to Easter and beyond, just as the life of faith encompasses the heart’s light and darkness throughout our lives. God meets us in the brightness of Epiphany, in the murkiness of Lent, in the darkness of Good Friday, and the radiance of Resurrection.
Since I live with hearing loss, low vision, and limited mobility, I also struggle with anxiety about maintaining my current level of functionality. I live on the edge, without much margin space. I am prone to falling. I’m at risk of blindness and further hearing loss. All this makes me fearful and anxious sometimes. These worries can keep me up at night, obsessing over my health, feeling sad, and withdrawing into myself. For a long time I didn’t realize that my worries were more limiting than my physical disabilities. But they are. God met me in a particularly dark time of anxiety several years ago in Oregon. Betty, a friend from church, who also happens to be a no-nonsense nurse, took care of me when I was really low. She told me point blank that I needed to learn to manage my anxiety. At the time, her advice felt like a slap to the face, but also like a ray of light. Betty spoke out of her experience of having learned to manage her own anxiety. And in that moment, through Betty, God met me. Though I still walk through the darkness of anxiety sometimes, now the darkness feels less threatening. In this darkness God continues to meet me, and my faith continues to grow, however slowly. God doesn’t take away the darkness; God meets us in the darkness.
Kelly Renee Gissendaner is scheduled to be executed tomorrow night in Georgia. She has been convicted of hiring someone to kill her husband. The New York Times recently told the story of how God met Kelly and brought her out of darkness to light in prison. Kelly embarked on a one-year program of theology study in prison. She was particularly helped by theology about faith and hope. One of the theologians she studied was Jürgen Moltmann, whose work focuses on the theology of hope. When Kelly discovered that her teacher in prison knew Moltmann, Kelly asked whether she could write to him. They have exchanged between twenty and thirty letters.
As a result of her study and letter writing, Kelly has developed a strong faith. She is able to counsel other inmates, especially those considering suicide. However, recently, her request for clemency has been denied, even though there is a groundswell of support to commute her sentence. When I read the New York Times piece profiling Kelly, I was struck by two things. First, darkness of her own actions cast a long, long shadow; second, that darkness, plus the darkness of prison, allowed her to see the light of God. God has met her in darkness.
As I mentioned earlier, our Old Testament lesson presents the second extended meeting between God and Abraham. In the first meeting, two chapters earlier, God directs Abraham’s gaze skyward at night. God says, “Count the stars if you can; so many will your descendants be.” Those stars are far away from Abraham, and far away from any future he can envision for himself or his descendants. When she went to prison, Kelly Gissendaner probably could not have imagined how her life would be transformed or the brightness that her life in prison would bring to so many, in prison and without. God is always at work, strengthening our faith, whether God meets us in darkness or in light.
Spreading Wide My Narrow Hands 