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It was a ghastly, blood soaked business. This cutting up of heffer goat and sheep, the stuff that makes for nightmares after and for terror dark and deep, ominous as a thundercloud. This promise more

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gloom than grace. It plagues his fitful sleep. Floating torch and fire pot, mute and ghostly. Do not assuage this terror dark and deep in the night. The dark divines a covenant. But covenants

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are words for God's to keep while we who restless only yearn for daybreak must find our way through terror . Dark and deep. I was first introduced to Genesis 15 by scholarly worthy's of another generation who did

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their level best to explore this passage and all its obscurity and meaning. And explain the significance of this covenant making ceremony. And I have to tell you , it went over my head. I don't understand

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this passage and I don't know anyone who does. I have no clue why it's so important that Abraham saw into all of these animals and lay their carcasses side against side. I have no idea what a

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floating fire pot and torture are supposed to signify. And I know that I am not alone in this . I know not of one single scholar who sees through the darkness of this text with enough clarity to

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report to the rest of us. What in the heck is going on here? Which pretty well leaves me to do exactly the thing that those great worthy scholars of my years of training told me not to

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do insert myself and my own psychology into this story sit among its details as though I were between the carcasses and ask myself what stirs in me. And when I do that, I find myself brought up

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short, over and over again, not by the argument between God and Abram about what the evidence for God's promise would be not by the blessing of the multitude of descendants, but by this sentence via he

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, Hashemi's Lavau toward um a Naff la Salle Avraam Via he a Maha Sheikh, Abdullah, no fella olive. And as the sun was going down, sleep overcame Abram and they're descended upon him. A

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terror dark and deep. Something in me trembles at the approach of those words, my mother says that when I was five years old I contracted scarlet fever . The penicillin shots they gave me worked well enough

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, but I still spent four days running high fevers and wandering in and out of a fever dream. In my dream I lay on my back in my bed in my room dark with the shades drawn and

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the lights turned off. I was immobile and alone , immobile. Not because I was paralyzed. The fever wasn't that bad or at least not physically paralysed , but but because I was terrified. You see

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from the ceiling of the bedroom down to the level of my bed sheets, I lay beneath a gigantic slab of granite, unimaginable tonnage, a rock cast up from the very basement of time. And yet

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unlike any granite I had ever seen in my brief life, it was completely transparent. It was kept from crushing me by nothing more than a straight pin upright on the end of my nose. Had I

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chosen to move he the sigh call out for my mother's help. The very movement would have brought that immeasurable late down on me, and crushed me and bed and floor, and Gribbon us all into the

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ground beneath. I can still remember how it looked . I could see it, I could see the edges of it, and yet I could see through it and make out the shapes of lamp and desk

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that were in the bedroom I lived in every day . I remember how it smelled like driveway gravel after a hard rain, a smell I knew from every time my father pulled his car into our garage.

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Mostly I remember the terror I lay there for hours for at least. So it seemed too terrified to move, praying, silent prayers from my mother to come. And yet praying at the same time she

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would not come because if she did her entry into the room would disturb the ticklish balance of the stone and it would all be over in a heartbeat. And as I stand here this morning, I find

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myself wondering if that's what it felt like to be . Abram. They're in the darkling day, bloody and beleaguered between the halves of animals he had only moments ago sawn into I wonder if exhausted from his

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labor, and overwhelmed by the blood and gore around him, he sank into something not unlike a fever dream in which he heard the voice of God. God does not say pleasant things when God speaks in

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the dark. Have you noticed that God or some divine figure? The text isn't really clear, ambushes Jacob at the ford of the jab back river and fights with him for his very life. In the

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pre dawn darkness behind the door of the temple in shiloh God shows Samuel the blueprint not for a beautiful future, but for the absolute destruction of the house of Eli, his mentor in job LF as one

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of the so called comforters is overwhelmed with dread and trembling, which made all my bones shake just before he hears the central question of the book. Can mortals be righteous before God, to which the rhetorical

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answer is no. I suspect that the angelic vision to joseph in Matthew one, you know the one requiring joseph to marry his young betrothed who is now publicly and very scandalously pregnant. Wasn't exactly greeted with

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rejoicing either. And I wonder if luke's shepherds in their pastoral bliss. Having recently been visited by the angelic chorus thinking they're Alleluia wasn't a bit more dumbstruck than dazzled otherwise. Why were they as the old

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king James has its sore afraid. A phrase I have always liked better than terrified. Somehow the physicality of that is a little clearer. Maybe it's true that before you can hear the promise of God,

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you have to get past the terror of God. A terror as Abram will tell you dark and deep God's word to Abram. In the midst of that terror is a dark command. Know this for certain

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God says, make no mistake about this. Your descendants will be wanderers and slaves living in lands they do not own serving masters. They do not choose , and not for a day or a season,

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but for nearly half a millennium, Abram must have learned to hear the But after that must have hoped for some better fate than the bondage of his progeny , whose promise he had treasured since he had left

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Theron, following the call of this strange God. And finally that promise comes well, sort of God promises to bring judgment on the Masters as yet unnamed and to swell the large orders of the Masters as

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yet unclear some relief there, I guess. Even so, It's a dark word, this promise and hardly takes the edge off the terror in the night , and we're not done yet. What follows is

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more terrifying. Still down the bloody corridor of carcasses comes a fire pot and a torch symbols whose meaning is now lost in obscurity in what sort of right exactly do fire pot and torch passed between sacrifices as

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if under their own power, as if held up by ghostly or perhaps divine hands. Abram stands as a witness at the edge of the unknown, says not a word moves, not a muscle as if

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by speaking or moving. He might bring the weight of the universe crashing down upon him and again comes the Voice. And this time, maybe it's good news at last to your descendants. I will give

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this land. Perhaps not to you. Perhaps not to anyone, you know, but to your descendants . I will give this land. And so you have a hope. You have a home. There

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is an end to this darkness. Even if there is yet much darkness still to traverse. In luke's little tale of jesus laments over Jerusalem. There is also a darkness, even if it's a little less

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obvious, Jesus is warned of Herod's plot to kill him, and he retorts with apparent disdain for Herod's power, declaring his intent to finish my work. But I can't help wondering if Jesus replied to Herod

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doesn't have less to do with Herod, and more to do with jesus awareness that an apocalyptic darkness is about to descend on Herod, to be sure, and on Jerusalem, and perhaps by extension on the

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Empire itself, and certainly on jesus, the evocative image of the mother hen trying in vain to corral her chicks and protect them from the fox captures that mood pretty well, don't you think that awful anguish

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, or maybe more like terror, as you watch the inevitable and cataclysmic unfold as you watch your child run into the street into the path of an oncoming car. The apocalyptic darkness is gathering, and with

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jesus words, see your house is left to you . His resignation to that darkness seems complete terror overwhelms dark and deep. We are two weeks downstream from the ashes, and we are hip deep in lent

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. And though we are perhaps endured to it, distracted as we are by class assignments and homework, and still unfamiliar routines, we occasionally forget classes and such around the edges of the life of Faith.

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We are vaguely aware that there is a gathering darkness and it will not wane, and it will not go away. It will only grow and deepen until it is unavoidable, all consuming, until it at

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its blackest, most terrifying heart deposits us at the foot of the cross dame Edith Sit Well Was a literary maven of the mid 20th century. She was a londoner, an eccentric woman whose lives and loves

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were well chronicled and right on the edge of outrageous . She was also a woman of faith and like her contemporary T. S. Eliot, a convert to roman Catholicism in midlife. She was a poet

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and of her poetic legacy. One poem stands out among all the others Still Falls the rain. The poem is written during the London Blitz of 1940 when Londoners sought cover in basements and subway tubes, while

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Luftwaffe a bombers rained death and destruction from the skies and the irregular pulsing rhythm of her lines mirrors the thump, thump, thumping of the bombs exploding heard in the underground darkness. Sitting in the shelters,

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sit well saw clearly enough. The terror dark and deep. The darkness that swirls at the foot of the cross, here is what she wrote, still falls the rain Dark as the world of man,

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black as our loss. Blind as the 1940 nails upon the cross, still falls. The rain with the sound like the pulse of the heart that has changed to the hammer beat in the potter's field,

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and the sound of impious feet on the tomb still falls. The rain in the field of blood where the small hopes breed and the human brain nurtures. It's greed, that worm in the brow of cain

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still falls. The rain at the feet of the starved man hung upon the cross, christ that each day, each night nails there have mercy on us on dives, and on Lazarus Under the reign the

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Sore and the gold are as one still falls, the rain still falls, the blood from the starved man's wounded side he bears in his heart all wounds those of the light that died the last faint spark

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in the self murdered heart, the wounds of the sad, uncomprehending dark, the wounds of the baited bear, the blind and weeping bear whom the keepers beat on his helpless flesh. The tears of the

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hunted hair still falls the rain. Then o I'll leap up to my God, who pulls me down . See see where christ's blood streams in the firmament . It flows from the brow we nailed there upon

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the tree, deep to the dying, to the thirsting heart that holds the fires of the world. Dark, smooched with pain as caesar's laurel crown. Then sounds the voice of one who, like the

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heart of man, was once a child, who among the beasts has lain. Still do! I love thee! Still shed my innocent light, my blood! For the Here, at the very last

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is the good news, terrifying as it is. The darkness is not total. In the midst of the terror. Abram at long last hears it, As the word of God's faithfulness to progeny, and

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promise to the hope of a future Sit well sees it even amid the black house and the constant thump thumping of bomb and blood, the innocent light that yet burns in the gathering gloom. Darkly foreboding as

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jesus words are. They conclude not with futility and alienation, but in the promise that when the time comes we will say together, Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord, halting

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at first, to be sure. But with rising hope in our voices. It may appear that the end of the Lenten journey holds only darkness and pain and cross, but the unimaginable is also true.

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The time will come. Even if not yet, The promise will be realized. Even if not today we must get through the terror dark and deep. But beyond there is a new day dawning over the

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horizon of an empty tomb. Blessed is he who