Y’all, God is really, really, really big.
And that’s kind of scary, isn’t it? I like the way I’ve conformed God to fit in my head. God-in-my-head is comfortable to me. He does what I expect Him to do most of the time, and I know His rules, and I keep the idea of Heaven and being face to face with Him as kind of a vaguely Renaissance-painting style ideal complete with fluffy white clouds and round-cheeked cherubim, and I like it that way.
But it also allows me to grow complacent. God-in-my-head never disrupts or disturbs me. He doesn’t challenge me, unless I want to be challenged of course, in which case He gives me easily attainable goals that stroke my self-confidence. God-in-my-head is a pleasant conversation partner. God-in-my-head always complies with my own logical system. If there’s something that I don’t understand, I can shrug it off and put it away somewhere, and God-in-my-head doesn’t bring it back up again. God-in-my-head is malleable.
God-not-in-my-head, the real God, knows that we do this. He knows that our human frailty likes to bite off things in very manageable chunks. He knows that we sometimes can’t get past the smallness of our human way of thinking, and so He likes to provide us with reminders of who He really is, just in case we find ourselves running away from Him and into the arms of Gods-in-our-heads. This week’s selection of readings give us some delightful examples of the hugeness and glory and might of God.
In our first reading, from Genesis 15, we encounter Abram. He’s not Abraham yet; this is pre-covenant. Even so, Abram is a friend of God. The reading starts out with God taking Abram outside to show him the stars. He makes a promise to Abram, that his descendants will be as plentiful as the stars in the sky, and despite Abram and his wife Sarai’s inability to conceive any children at all thus far, as well as the slightly puzzling suggestion that it’s daytime, and there aren’t any visible stars for Abram to see in the first place (Gen 15:5 is the verse where God tells him to look at the sky and count the stars; 7 verses later, in the same story, we hear that the sun is about to set), Abram believes God. Even if you’d never read another word of Genesis, you could safely conclude that God and Abram are on pretty good terms.
Being on “good terms” here though doesn’t mean comfort. Abram asks God for a sign that he will possess the land God has promised him, and God asks him to set up the ritual sacrifice for the making of a covenant. Abram complies, and we hear that “As the sun was about to set, a trance fell upon Abram, and a deep, terrifying darkness enveloped him.” The reading for today skips the next several verses, but I think they’re important to illustrate our point. “Then the Lord said to Abram: Know for certain that your descendants will reside as aliens in a land not their own, where they shall be enslaved and oppressed for four hundred years. But I will bring judgment on the nation they must serve, and after this they will go out with great wealth. You, however, will go to your ancestors in peace; you will be buried at a ripe old age. In the fourth generation your descendants will return here, for the wickedness of the Amorites is not yet complete” (Gen 15:13-16). The narrative concludes with a note that a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch appear, apparently a visible sign of the invisible hand of God, and pass between the pieces of meat for the sacrifice, thus completing the covenant.
I’ve got to tell you: God-in-my-head would never.
This experience is truly awe-inspiring. The passage even tells us that the trance Abram falls into is “terrifying.” He is an old man, barren. God has just spoken to him about his as-yet-nonexistent descendants and promised him land, and when he goes to set up the sacrifice for the covenant God puts him in a trance, gives him a very detailed description of the future persecution of his people (and, to be fair, their future shortcomings), and then completes the covenant by passing fire between the two halves of the sacrificial animals. Nothing in the human mind dreams this stuff up. God is reminding us that He is bigger.
Lest anyone fall into the trap of thinking that only “scary Old Testament God” would do something like that, while “warm and fuzzy New Testament God” is much more palatable, today’s Gospel reading has some great news for us about the eternal continuity of God’s character. Today’s Gospel is the story of the Transfiguration. Jesus takes his three closest disciples, Peter, James, and John, to the top of the mountain with Him. These men have been with Jesus for the entirety of His public ministry thus far. They are not strangers. If we just look at chapter 9 of Luke, the chapter from which this Gospel passage is taken, we see that they’ve already been given “power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases” (Lk 9:1), they’ve watched Him multiply the loaves and the fish to feed the five thousand (Lk 9:10-17), they’ve heard that He will be killed and raised from the dead (Lk 9:22), and they’ve heard that following Him means taking up their crosses (Lk 9:23). Peter even acknowledges directly that Jesus is the Messiah (Lk 9:20).
At first, they seem to be hanging with the whole Transfiguration thing pretty well. They watch Jesus’s face and clothing change; they see Him conversing with Moses and Elijah. Peter’s reaction isn’t terror, and doesn’t even seem to be amazement. He just wants to make some tents. But then we hear that while he (Peter, presumably) “was still speaking, a cloud came and cast a shadow over them, and they became frightened when they entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, ‘This is my chosen Son; listen to him.’ After the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. They fell silent and did not at that time tell anyone what they had seen.”
Even though Peter, James, and John had had ample opportunity to see Jesus’s divinity thus far, they still react with fear at being covered with the cloud of God (which is reminiscent of God’s practice in Exodus of leading the people through the desert as a cloud or a pillar of smoke). And perhaps even more remarkable, they’re so impacted by the situation that they do not speak of it. Peter, king of not keeping his mouth shut, who had just been rebuked by Jesus for publicly stating that He is the Messiah in Luke 9:21, is awestruck into silence. If Peter ever created a God-in-his-head, we have pretty ample evidence that God-in-his-head was never able to awe him into a loss for words.
So, what’s the point of meditating on all this bigness? Despite the reactions of Abram and the Apostles, it’s not just to scare us. Fear is perhaps the normal immediate response to being forced to acknowledge God’s God-ness and our human-ness. But God does not desire that we live in fear. God desires that we live in awe. Because God-in-my-head is only the size of, well, my head. He might be more palatable and make me less uncomfortable than God of the universe, God who makes covenants of fire and speaks in a voice that echoes in our souls, but no one ever said that “pleasant” was going to get us to Heaven. If I’m going to believe in the empty tomb, if I’m going to believe in the resurrection, then I’ve got to acknowledge that God is powerful enough to take the sting out of death. If I’m going to believe that I am redeemed, that not just my sin but the sin of every person who will ever walk this earth can really be washed away, and I might really be invited to be face to face with God in Heaven for all eternity, then I’ve got to acknowledge that God is mighty enough to bear that burden. And those are not small things. Those are not comfortable things. When the veil tears at the crucifixion and a great darkness falls over all the land, when Christ dies on the cross but then Thomas gets to stick his fingers in His side, when He ascends into Heaven and sends down the Holy Spirit as tongues of fire, comfort is not the word that springs to mind, but awe is.
As we continue through this season of Lent, let us continually lean into the opportunity to be awestruck by God. As we fast and pray to divest ourselves of human comforts, let us embrace the feeling of our smallness and His greatness. And the more we can acknowledge that, the more we can rest in the knowledge that He is bigger than anything we’ve ever invented in our heads, the more our faith can grow. For whoever we are, whatever we have done, whatever burdens and aches and wounds and sins we bring into the desert with us, He is big enough, mighty enough, strong enough to carry us. And so we rejoice, even as we are struck dumb, even as we are filled with fear, even as we are forced to confront our human frailty, because we have a God who does continually inspire us to awe.