Covenant in the dazzling darkness: Abram, qarrtsiluni and hope in despair

Opening address given at Creaton United Reformed Church, 17 March 2019. Text: Genesis 15:1-18. See also sermon about Jesus' journey to Jerusalem, which followed later in the service.

Image: Total eclipse, by Jim Friedrich

Two shorter addresses on two passages today, as they’re linked but too important to treat together.

What promises does God make to God’s people, in the depth of darkness and despair? The psalm says that “when evildoers assail me to devour my flesh, they shall stumble and fall”. What really happens then? We have hope from the psalm, but is that the experience that most people actually have? Because there are people in real despair, in real darkness. People in Christchurch whose whole world was ripped apart on Friday by a far-right terrorist. People who are living on the street, only kept going by alcohol or drugs that are also killing them. People who are watching the ones they love slowly fade and die. People who don’t know where the next meal is coming from. That kind of despair.

So to Abram, in a weird kind of despair. If you have a spare half-hour, I do recommend reading the whole story of Abram-who-becomes-Abraham, which occupies chapters 12 to 25 of the book of Genesis. He was quite a peculiar character with all sorts of peculiar events in his life, not all of them especially commendable. Genesis as a whole is a semi-mythical account of the backstory to why the Israelites were the people of God stranded in slavery in Egypt. It’s a mistake to take it too literally. And Abram is at the start of it all, representing the creation of the people of Israel through one individual, showing God’s covenant with Israel in one person. And this is a story about covenant.

Abram begins the story basically whining. He’s rich, he has plenty of power, and in the previous chapter he has just defeated his enemies in battle and been blessed by the local high priest. Yet he’s annoyed because he’s been promised an heir, a child to take up his mantle, and he doesn’t have one. That sounds trivial compared to the kind of darkness I’ve mentioned, but for Abram it’s a real issue. It’s about his future, about whether everything he stands for will come to an end after his death. If you know about the life of Henry VIII, he was desperate for a male heir because his kingdom was invested in the individual, and the Tudor monarchy was very precarious. So it is with Abram, and as I’ve said he’s not just an individual but a symbol of the people of Israel. His lack of heir means a lack of continuation of the whole people of Israel. The whole story wouldn’t get off the ground. So for Abram it’s real darkness.

And God makes a covenant with him in the darkness. And the weird story about heifers and goats and pigeons is important. Because in the later years of the Jewish people, when this text was written down, that was how you solemnised a covenant. Trigger warning for animal lovers and vegetarians: this bit’s not very nice. You take an animal, or several animals, and cut them in half, then you separate them, leave a good-size gap between them. Then the two parties who are making some kind of agreement with each other walk down the middle between the halves of the animals. And that seals the bargain. Because symbolically it’s saying “if we don’t keep our side of the bargain, may we be cut in two like the animals”. Sometimes this kind of covenanting was done with individuals, but much more often with groups. It was a collective undertaking.

So here we see God coming to Abram in what’s described as a deep and terrifying darkness. And in that dark time, that dark place, Abram sees a symbol of God, fire and smoke, passing between the two halves of the animals. God has come to Abram in the dark. God has stood alongside Abram in the dark.

I read recently that the Inuit people of the Arctic regions have an amazing word for this experience, “qarrtsiluni”. It means “sitting together in the dark, waiting for something to happen.” Groups sit together in the darkness, and out of that darkness comes… insight. Sometimes, in the hunting communities of the Inuit, it’s song or storytelling. And to Abram, it’s life, and it’s hope for the future. It’s the promise of God, that all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

And from that experience Abram, and through him the whole people of Israel, had strength to continue. Because God had been with him in his darkness. An Anglican priest called Rachel Mann calls this dazzling darkness, and writes that “this is the God we cannot use for our purposes and devices, for deep darkness consumes us and denies us the means to chart our way. We are liberated from our own convinced power of control and talent and mastery.”

And it leaves us with the love and power of God. Because God has made a covenant with Abram, and God has guaranteed it with his own life. So that when the covenant becomes stretched and broken, the only thing that will repair it is the death of God himself. The faithfulness of Abram and the faithfulness of God lead us towards the cross. It takes us on the journey of Lent that will end in Good Friday. But the cross is not the end, and that’s where we come to in the second passage later. For now, let’s rest with Abram, accompanied and blessed by God in covenant relationship, sitting in that dazzling darkness.