Luke 1:26-38
This past week at our Sunday evening service, the well, we began in silence. I asked everyone to sit and listen in silence, to nothing, to their surroundings, to themselves, to God. I asked them to think of one word that describes what they are looking for out of our time together. We came back and shared those words. I wrote them down and wanted to share them with you today. The words were; assurance, reassurance, encounter, anchoring, stability, peace, tranquility to name a few…I had to work hard at letting those words sink into the soil of my own life, but when they did they became the framework for me this past week. Those words are words of searching. Not a skeptical searching but a faithful search, a humble search, a come to us searching.
We are all searching, and ultimately—whether we know it or not—we are searching for God. Ultimately we are searching for the ultimate and the ultimate is God. It is not easy searching for God; it is not easy waiting for God—especially in a world of instant “get-ification.” But here we are today—searching, waiting, wondering, and looking. Almost a thousand years ago, St. Anselm of Canterbury said, “God is that greater than which cannot be thought.”
Think about it. Think about how great God is, then go further and further again, and again into infinity. We can stretch our minds as high and as deep and as far as our minds can take us, and at the furthest point upon which our minds can stretch us—we still have not “thought” about God. God is quite a bit further than which we are able to think. “God is that greater - than which - cannot be thought.”
God is quite literally inconceivable. And this is precisely why God was conceived as a human being in the womb of a woman—the Virgin Mary. Because even in thought, we cannot rise up to grasp God, God stooped down to us in Jesus, who is “Emmanuel,” which means “God with us.” And so we sing, “O come, O come Emmanuel!”
And so we search. As we are searching for God, the good news is that God is searching for us. Even better than this, God has found us. The great question is not whether we have found God but whether we have found ourselves being found by God. God is not lost in the infinite cosmos. We were, or, as the case may be, we are lost.
Our impossibilities, intellectually and materially provide the soil for the possibilities of God. That God would stoop and become one of us so that we can be found by God finding us! This is the soil of hope. Therefore, hope becomes our first great word in experiencing Emmanuel through the words of waiting- this advent season!
To aide us in this trans-rational hopeful finding ourselves found by God we need the stories that take us there and the artist who can soften the soil of our minds, melt us, tilling us, making us capable again to shake us from our own impossibilities and lead us, ever so gently, into the arms of God’s possibilities.
Madeleine L’Engle helped me to understand this many years ago. To paint a picture or to write a story or to compose a song is an incarnational activity. The artist is a servant who is willing to be a birthgiver. In a very real sense the artist should be like Mary, who, when the angel told her that she was to bear the Messiah, was obedient to the command.
Obedience is an unpopular word today, but the artist must be obedient to the work, whether it is a symphony, a painting, a chalk drawing, a grunge band ballad, a hip hop rhyme, or a story for a small child. Yet each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius or something very small, comes to the artist and says, “Here I am. Enflesh me. Give me life. Birth me.” And the artist either says, “May it be to me as you have said,” and willingly becomes the bearer of the work, or refuses. Not everyone has the humble, courageous obedience of young Mary.
Mary, a mere child, is called upon by God in the form of an angel-Gabriel, to do what, in the world’s eyes, is impossible, and instead of saying, “she can’t,” she replied immediately, “Be it unto me as you have said.” This simple, “YES” in a world of “No,” transforms our impossibilities into God’s possibilities. With a little faith comes a big dose of hope.
What would have happened to Mary, and to us, if she had said No to the angel? She could have but the faith and hope of a child is easier to believe in an angel visitation on behalf of God than an educated progressive. After all, this story is simply a metaphor isn’t it? How difficult we find this and these stories. How could one young girl contain in her womb the power which created the galaxies? How could that power be found in the fragility and humility of an infant? It is more than our scientific, limited and literal-mindedness can cope with and even bear. So the logical conclusion that many reach for today is-this is just metaphor. I find it ironic because faith by definition is not something which lay within the realm of verification. I submit that if faith can be verified, we would nullify it and we certainly would have no room left for HOPE. We would only be left with our best efforts. To that I say just look around at our world today to see “our best effort!”
Mary did not always understand. But one does not have to understand to be obedient. Instead of understanding---that intellectual understanding that we are so fond of—there is a feeling of rightness, of knowing, knowing things which we are not yet able to understand. Like the artist that remains obedient to a work because the words and images mean even more than the writer or painter or composer ever knew they meant. It is then that the artist has been listing. At the moment of this writing I am listening to Bach violin concerto. Did he know how influential his music would become for centuries? I doubt it, yet he remained obedient—by listening and birthing and therefore becoming the salve of salvation through music by offering hope to a hopeless world. Think of the powerful shaping and remembering capacities that the images of the sacraments have through the centuries and millenniums in a world that is so easy to forget. And when we listen, we too, are led to places we do not expect, into adventures that we do not always understand. Yet through our impossibilities are God’s possibilities.
Through our searching we remain obedient because the essence of faith is that in our impossibilities are always embedded God’s possibilities. When we are found by God finding us, we live hopeful lives. Not lives of despair. Hope is that which lies on the other side of reason. Hope is what makes life bearable, with all of its disappointments, tragedies, ambiguities and sudden startling joys and smiles. My friends in our impossibilities are birthed God’s possibilities. May we be people of hope this waiting season!
