A Meditation on Encountering a Dangerous God
[This is actually several years old, but somehow these 12 days of the Christmas season brought back the notion that God, as one of Lewis' Narnia characters says, "is not a tame lion."]

I come to Stony Creek on Sunday mornings expecting to meet the risen Christ. Sunday after Sunday I am not disappointed.   I hear Jesus speak in the beautiful singing of familiar songs, in the written Scriptures, and in the preaching.  I see His hands at work in the announcements about mission activities, fellowship opportunities, and joyous news of answered prayers. Most profoundly, I meet Him soul to soul when I kneel with fellow worshippers and commemorate His death and resurrection with bread and wine.  All in all, the time I spend at Stony Creek comforts and enriches me beyond measure.  Recently, however, my comfortable expectations about encountering God have been turned about.  Sunday morning is no longer quite so comfortable; indeed, its beginning to feel downright dangerous to me. 

Friday, April 16^th, I had the privilege of attending Temple Beth Emeth’s services commemorating the 6 million Jewish deaths in the Shoah -the Holocaust. The highlight of the service was the testimony of a “Righteous Gentile”.  The speaker, Anneke Burke told the assembled worshipers of her meeting with God. 

In 1940 she was a typical four-year-old Dutch girl, happy and carefree.  She lived in Utrecht with her mother, father, a seven-year-old sister and a baby brother. That fall the German Army forever changed her life. Her hometown was captured and put under occupation. Life with German soldiers strutting about was a bit strange, but not burdensome.  Then the identification of the Jews started.  All Jews were required to wear the Star of David sewn on to their clothing.  They were prevented from riding the streetcars.  German soldiers and sympathetic Dutch Nazis violated their shops and homes.  Soon the Germans began to round up Jews for deportation to work camps.  Anneke’s father and mother were God fearing, church going Protestants.  In the faces of their Jewish neighbors they saw the face of their Lord.  Moved by a profound sense of Christian duty, in 1942 Anneke’s father arranged with the Dutch Underground to hide a Jewish man.  When he went to make contact with the man and bring him home, three other Jews were also there.  All four Jews were brought to the safety of Anneke’s house.  Soon they were joined by four more Jews. For the next three years, eight of God’s children spent their days in one small bedroom.  They could go into the living room at night, but no lights were allowed.  The Burke’s even dug a tunnel under the house so that when the German search parties came, the Jews could hide in the tunnel.

Now the story so far sounds like a Hollywood movie - brave Dutch Christian resistance fighters, evil pagan Nazis’, frightened Jews.  You can practically hear the swelling music and feel your tears being jerked as the Allies liberate the town and the Jews walk arm in arm with the brave Christians into the sunlight for the first time in three years. 

But real encounters with God are never quite like Hollywood productions.  Anneke never knew the Jews were in the house all those years until her parents awoke her late one night in April of 1945 and invited her to the living room to celebrate the war’s end with a group of complete strangers.  Her parents simply could not risk telling their children about the human contraband in the front bedroom.  Jews, and those who hid Jews, faced deportation to work camps at best, and on-the-spot execution at worst.  Her parents closed off the bedroom where the Jews were hidden.  Anneke was told that the bedroom was her father’s workroom, and she would be severely punished if she ever entered that room.   The children slept, locked each night, in the attic for three years so their visitors could, with some safety, come out at night.  When wartime food rations for the five members of the Burke family were first divided up to feed 13 people and Anneke ate but still was hungry. Her parents told her all the food was gone. When Anneke heard strange noises in the house, her parents lied to her.  They said she was merely hearing things. When a thump on the wall made her turn her head, her parents sat motionless.  Three years of that sort of deception left Anneke deeply scarred.  She no longer trusted her own senses.  Anneke had to go through years of psychological counseling to heal from the experience.  She still, as a mature woman, experiences moments of doubt about ordinary everyday experiences because for three important years of her life the adults around her told her that noises she heard were not noises at all, that lights she saw under doorways were not real, and  that odors she smelled were just her imagination. 

God came to Anneke’s family in the form of eight Jews on the lam from Nazi death squads.  The Burke’s were obedient to the teachings of Jesus and embraced the desperate ones.  That encounter left Anneke scarred for life.  Her testimony has begun to change my perspective on Sunday worship at Stony Creek.  I still love the comfortable feeling of closeness to my Lord that comes from singing the old hymns, from greeting loving neighbors, and from the rhythms of the familiar liturgy.  But I also have read with new eyes the Biblical stories of encounters with God.  He's mighty, He's loving, but He's also dangerous.  Jacob, the tricky one, was crippled for life after he met God.  Hosea heard the voice of God order him to marry a prostitute and turn his quiet life into a living billboard advertising God’s indignation with a faithless people.  Peter, the cowardly fisherman, was led to death in a Roman prison because he saw and declared, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God”.  Oh, I still pray each Sunday for the presence of the Lord, but after hearing Anneke Burke, I pray a bit more warily.  The God we worship didn’t hand over His own Son to torturers so Peter Freedman-Doan could warm the cockles of his heart with familiar Sunday morning rituals shared with good friends. He comes to us so that His will be done.