2011-12-24–The Astonishing Coming of God

The Astonishing Coming of God

It’s hard to be astonished these days. It’s one of the consequences of the 24 hr news cycle. To fill up time, everything counts as news. Newsreaders switch from drone attacks gone awry in Pakistan to the latest Kardashian birthday party/marriage/divorce without breaking a sweat or their all too white smile.  Highs have been flattened and lows raised in our world to become one big pool of mediocrity. And we yawn.    And as a result, the consumers of news—that would be us—have lost our ability to be astonished.

It’s hard to be astonished in our world. But no more than in the ancient world, the world in which Luke took up his quill and set down what he called “an orderly account of the things that had transpired.” In the ancient world to which and from which Luke wrote, Jews and Gentiles both were world-worn and weary. They could not be easily astonished, either.

For Jews, God had been silent for 400 years. No prophet had come bearing God’s Word and so they squabbled amongst themselves about how best to be Jewish. What did it mean to be a Jew? To go to the Temple to worship? That’s what the Sadducees thought. To go to synagogue and obey the Law? This was the answer of the scribes and Pharisees. To free the Land from foreign occupation? So taught the Siccari—the assassins. Or was it to withdraw and wait for then end of the world? That’s what the Qumran folks argued. No word from God. No clear way to follow God’s commands. Always and everyday, more of the same.

The Greeks were—as always—more philosophical about things. Many believed that history was one grand cycle, with everything repeating itself constantly. Those who were lucky enough might be freed from the cycle by death; those who were not so lucky would be re-born to try again. Others—decidedly more extreme—thought that this was all there was. There was no point in trying to change anything since in the end, we all died anyway. One of their philosophers, though an atheist, insisted his followers should pray to idols so that they could get used to having their prayers always unanswered. Either way, nothing ever changed. History repeated. There was no way to be astonished anymore.

“In those days,” begins our Gospel lesson. Yes. In those days. In the days when everyone thought they had seen everything. In those days when there was nothing new under the sun. In those days. God did something astonishing.

God came to our world. “In those days, Emperor Augustus issued a decree. In those days, when Quirinius was governor of Syria.” Why does Luke include those names? They aren’t characters in his story in anyway. Because Luke wants his world-weary readers to know that the story he is about to tell happened in their world. The real world. He includes their names for the same reason that we include Pontius Pilate’s in the Creed. Those names anchor the Gospel in the story of our world. This is no myth. This actually happened. This is open to historical investigation every bit as much as Augustus and Quirinius and Pilate and Queen Elizabeth and Premier McGuinty are.

Luke’s inclusion of these names mean that God comes to our world. And he means more than that. He means God comes to our world in public. The story of the Gospel is public truth. The Gospel is not about me and my relationship with Jesus. It is not about—to quote William James—what a man does with his solitude. The Gospel is about God coming to our world, to a stable in Bethlehem during the reign of Augustus. And he comes to heal and to transform, to renew and recreate his own world. God comes to our world and he comes in public.

God came to our world. That’s astonishing!

And if we look at the people to whom God came, that’s astonishing, too.  For God comes to the marginal. Who are the central characters in Luke’s tale of the birth of Jesus? Kings and princes? No. Shepherds and girl named Mary. Do you remember her song that we sang last week? Mary sang about God exalting the lowly and sending the rich away empty.

This is how God does it. He comes not to the Senate in Rome arrayed as a victorious general. He comes not as David’s heir to Herod’s throne in Jerusalem.  He comes not to sit on the mercy seat in the Holy of Holies in the Temple. He could have done all those things. But no. He comes to our world by taking up human nature, by becoming all that it means to be human, in the womb of a teenager in a backwater Roman province. God indeed comes as a warrior to deliver God’s people. He comes to end oppression. But he will do it on his own terms. He will begin his revolution here. In a stable. As a child born of a child. And with his coming, she ceases to be a child and becomes instead, God’s highly favoured one. He begins his exaltation of the lowly with her.

And he extends beyond it. Who attends the birth of the Son of God who is God the Son? Did the angels go Rome? Did they go to Alexandria? Did they go to Jerusalem—to the Temple or to the Palace or to the Governor’s mansion? No. They went to shepherds. They went to a group of men who were socially about two notches above being thieves. They went to the marginal. They announced God’s coming to marginal men.

God comes to our world. He comes through and to the marginal. He comes to exalt the poor and send the rich away empty. And it is astonishing!

God comes and the first response is to ponder the manner of his coming. Mary, we read as our Gospel ends, treasured these things and pondered them in her heart.

Try to imagine the scene. Mary has just given birth to her Son. She has cleaned him and herlself as best she can. She has wrapped him in rags. She has done so not in a softly lit birthing room with an exercise ball, a shower, and a bed that can bend everywhich way to give one as much comfort as possible. She has not done so attended by a midwife or a doctor. She did so with her husband helping as best he could and with animals as her audience.

Do you hear the sounds? Smell the smells?

And then, a dozen swarthy, roughly dressed men barge in and start worshipping the child and no sooner do they arrive, but they start announcing to everyone their strange story about an angelic army that sang God’s praises to them in the fields.

And then there’s Mary. Surrounded by all this noise. A picture of silence and contemplation. She treasured these things. She pondered them.

She treasured Gabriel’s stunning announcement. She treasured her own words of assent. She treasured the greeting she received at Elizabeth’s house. She treasured the song she sang in response. She treasured the months that followed as that life grew inside her. As her Son began to kick within her womb and she wondered just who he was and how he would accomplish just what Gabriel said he would. She treasured the stable. She treasured Joseph’s help as she laboured. She treasured the birth. She treasured the shepherds with their rough-hewn humour and tall tales. She treasured it all.

But not just treasured. She pondered. What does pondered mean? The Greek word means, literally, to put things together. It means that Mary  reflected on all that had happened and was consciously trying to put it into a whole story that made sense. Mary was astonished. Mary tried to make sense of it.

This is what all disciples since Mary have done. We have pondered the places of God in our lives. Pondered God’s interventions. Tried to see not simply where God was with us, but how we fit into the story of God.

And not simply at the times when God seems profoundly close, but also at times when God seems absent. Even Mary, the Blessed Mother of God, had times—times that Luke recounts as he unfolds his story—when she could not make sense of things. When she was estranged from Jesus. When the sword of God’s judgment passed through her own soul. But she still pondered. And because she pondered, she is numbered with the disciples in the book of Acts who were filled with the Holy Spirit when the church began.

So it is with us. We will ponder our place in God’s plan and God’s place in our plans when we feel that God is close and when we feel that God is absent. As some of you know, I was out of work for a year in 2009-10. Through those months, God felt absent. God’s presence was gone. But now, as I look back, I can see where God was present. Bringing what was evil—and it was—to a good end. That doesn’t make that year good. That doesn’t make it pleasant or nice. It certainly doesn’t mean I want to go through it again. But now, as I ponder, I can see where God was.

Some of you have gone through losses far more significant than mine. And I don’t pretend to know the depth of your grief or struggle. But in Mary, God has given us an example of perseverance. Of pondering through grief. With her Son, she knows your sorrows. And we are wise to follow her example. To ponder as she did. To keep on turning things over in our minds, to keep discerning our place in God’s plan and God’s place in ours. To persevere to the end when God will make all plain. To the end when our astonishment gives way to understanding and our longing yields finally to joy.

God has come to our world. God has taken up the side of those on the margins. God has called us to ponder this mystery both in itself and as we are caught up in it. There is no word for that other than astonishing. This is the world that God loves. These are the people that God embraces. God does so not from a distance, but by embracing all that it means to be human. God does so in the messy and every day event of being born.

World-weary and bored. No more so than the ancients to be sure. But world-weary and bored surely defines us, too. There is nothing new under the sun, we say with the Ecclesiastes. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity and a chasing after the wind.

And that’s true. Except.

Except this one thing: God has entered this world, and taken up the cause of the poor. God is even now transforming, renewing and recreating.

What kind of God would do this?

And what difference would it make if we believed it enough to be astonished by it once more?