Nothing is impossible with God
18 Dec 2011 Leave a Comment
The Rev. P. Joshua Griffin preached on Advent IV this morning.
In the name of God the Creator, Liberator, and Animator of the Universe.
In our reading from Second Samuel, King David finds it unfair that he is to live “in a house of cedar,” while “the ark of God stays in a tent.” As King, David has achieved some sense of stability in his life, some semblance of control, a sense of power, and he feels that the Lord deserves the same manner of comfort.
But God replies: “Are you the one to build me a house to live in? I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent and tabernacle.”
And here it is: the fundamental transcendence, motility, vitality, infinity, irreducibility of God—or the Holy, or the Divine, or Love. Take your pick, none of these words can contain what they refer to. A transcendent universal Love so radical, so mobile, cannot be reduced to words.
The great Anglican poet T.S. Eliot reminds us:
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.
And yet words are what we have, and stories are one way we communicate the Mystery. This time of year we tell the story of infinity drawing near, of God coming to dwell in history:
In the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a tiny town in Galilee, a remote backwater called Nazareth, to a Jewish virgin named Mary, who was engaged to a tradesman, a common laborer, named Joseph.
Gabriel said to her, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you. Do not fear, for you have found favor with God! And now you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, Jesus, and he will be great, and holy, a servant of Love, ‘the Son of God.’”
But she was afraid, terrified, mystified, and stupefied. “How can this be, for I am a virgin?”
The angel said to her “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, the power of the Most High will overshadow you…. Oh, and by the way, your cranky old cousin, Elizabeth—the barren one—yeah, she’s pregnant too.”
Then Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Then the angel departed from her.
These two stories, of King David and of Mary, present us with a paradox. Each reveals a fundamentally different image of God. The first presents a transcendent, wandering God, who cannot be contained by structure or word. In the second, it is announced that this same God will come to dwell in Mary’s womb, housed and held in human flesh.
And so we encounter a fundamental quality, not just of Christian life, but of all human experience. Theologians call this “the coincidence of opposites,” that place and moment when the transcendent collides with the imminent, the infinite with the finite. Too often we whittle down this paradox, yet the spiritual invitation is not to resolve it, but to live within it, to hold it as Mary did.
As God-bearers, each one of us trembles with Mary, even as we say, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” We live in service of an already/not-yet Kingdom, a paradox we feel at every level: in our hearts, in our families, in our parish, in our neighborhoods, in our Church, in our city, in our country, and in our world.
This Advent, as we struggle to make way for the coming of the Lord—the infant King who redeems all our earthly humanity, we might take comfort in the words of the great Trappist monk Thomas Merton, written to a younger monk:
“Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on… you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.”
The angel said to Mary, “Nothing will be impossible with God.”
The infinity of Love will be enfleshed in the womb of Mary, and will be born in a sordid encampment. Nothing will be impossible with God.
Mourning shall turn to joy, darkness to light, death shall give way to life. All tears shall be wiped away. Nothing is impossible with God.
The lowly are lifted up and the powerful brought down from their thrones. Nothing is impossible with God.
The hungry shall be filled with good things, and the rich sent away empty. Nothing is impossible with God.
Justice and peace shall encompass the earth. Equilibrium shall be achieved. Competition shall be set aside, cooperation shall be the norm. Nothing is impossible with God.
The infinite will collide with the finite, and the impossible shall be rendered possible.
As we labor for God’s Kingdom, as we labor with the earth, in our homes, and in our hearts, may we not fear what we do not understand. May we continue to seek after that which we cannot express —the infinite, uncontainable, unpredictable Love of God.
Amen.
