Is anything too wonderful for God? (Advent #5)

Luke 1:26-38

In my last post a few days ago I commented on the strange paradox that we see often in our society today: that we are surrounded by wonders yet so often fail to believe in the wondrous aspects of the Bible. There is, perhaps, an explanation for this: though we do not understand much of what surrounds us - the physics required, say, to allow a plane to fly off into the clouds, seemingly defying all laws of gravity; or the software programming used to make iBooks with translucent pages that we can turn with our fingers - we trust that somehow "science" has made each of these wonders possible. We couldn't do them ourselves, we reason, but we just don't have the know-how. Someone else does. But parting the Red Sea? That's impossible. A virgin giving birth to a baby? No-one can do that.

Which means, essentially, that we have elevated science to the true, marvellous miracle-worker of our age, but demoted God to the role of a fairly subservient heavenly janitor; all He can do is move around and tidy up what is already there, as if the laws of physics, which He created, are somehow too powerful for Him to overrule. Many have already commented wisely on the way in which the "miracles" of technology that happen daily have numbed us to the wonder of it all, one article from Christianity Today and the YouTube clip it references both expressing this phenomenon particularly well. The attendant effect that I often barely notice in my own life is that, though we expect great and marvellous deeds daily from our iPads, we expect nothing of an almighty God.

In a time well before iPads were even conceivable (even books with words printed on them and bound together were still a good millennium and a half away), a young girl was faced with something that still defies modern science and is therefore dismissed as nonsense: she was told that, despite being a virgin, she would have a child. On asking how this was possible, she was given a response that, to modern scientific readers, might sound like nonsense:

The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.

Not really a scientific explanation, but what could possibly be lacking from it? I do not ever feel the need to understand the mechanics of how exactly it is that I can tap away at a few black keys and hit a few buttons and suddenly become a globally published author. I just know I can, because I trust that my computer and those who have programmed it and the thing we call the Internet knew what they were doing when they set up the whole system in which I now can simply luxuriate. Likewise for Mary. How can a virgin give birth? To a human constrained by the law that matter can neither be created nor destroyed, it seems more or less impossible. To a God who made everything out of nothing - creation ex nihilo, the theologians call it - it is surely no harder than what He has already done, no harder for Him to manage than any of what we take utterly for granted in our everyday lives.

I don't question the reality of what my computer can do, simply because it is beyond my understanding. I see the proof of it daily. So too, Mary, whose virgin body would soon begin to show all the signs of being with child, would surely have known before too long that the impossible had happened. For nothing is impossible with God.

With Clouds Descending (Advent #4)

This afternoon, as part of a unit on "Future Worlds", I set my Year 11 English class the task of writing a short piece about the future, using the opening phrase, "In twenty years from now..." While they wrote their pieces, I wrote my own. By the time I had finished it, it felt remarkably Advent-related, so now I am sharing it with you.

In twenty years from now, we will not know how much our world has changed. The rapid growth of our planet and the ever-increasing, ever-changing world of technology will conspire to make us blind to change.

We will wonder: was there ever a world in which we had to leave our houses to go shopping? Did we ever not drive in cars that talk to us, remember the route to work for us, avoid oncoming traffic for us? And yet we will still say, “It is not enough.” We will still say, “It is not enough.” We will still complain when our train is late by a nanosecond, when information on any topic in the world cannot be instantly accessed from wherever we stand at any point in time. We will still say, “Miracles do not happen”, even though all around us will be phenomena that in any previous age would be declared great signs and wonders.

And when we find we still cannot make grey skies turn blue, still cannot reach heaven with our iPhones, or whatever we will call them then; when we find that God is no further from us nor closer to us regardless of the speed of our internet connection, we will still shake our fists at the sky in rebellious fury, still retreat into our labs to turn gold into eternal life, still worship the things our hands have made.

And if, in twenty years from now, we see on the clouds a sign that makes our hearts rise or weep, we will look at what we have made, the miracles we poured our hearts into and ignored, and know that now all our hopes are either met or destroyed. If that happens in twenty years from now, the greatest scientist, the greatest software developer, the greatest engineer, the greatest politician, will all be on their humbled knees.

The World, the Flesh and the God Made Flesh (Advent #3)

John 1:1-18

I have spent a lot of time with the famous prologue to John's Gospel over the past few weeks. Somehow, I don't seem able to get past it. Each morning, when I have my morning devotional time over breakfast, I come back to what is perhaps the strangest opening to any of the four gospels, yet also perhaps the most rich of them all.

Yes, it is certainly rich, but it is also extraordinarily difficult to get your head around. Much easier to think about God as distant, or simply as human; much easier to settle for either extreme, rather than the strange, arresting, confusing fusion of the two that John so unequivocally presents.

A Unitarian friend of mine, whose beliefs exclude the possibility of Jesus being God, once said that he interprets the "Word" of John's prologue as being the plan of God, rather than Jesus. I had never come across this interpretation, and for a time it challenged me. But close inspection of the passage makes such a reading impossible. The Word is a person, the same as God yet somehow distinct. The Word does contain in it the wisdom, the clear, logical communication at the heart of God, but is also much, more more. The Word - lofty, sublime, beyond us, the creator of all things, yet...

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.

How do you ever get your head around that? The Creator of the world, dwelling among us...An N.T. Wright sermon that I read this morning commented wisely on how much this truth challenges our very worldview, one which, for instance, likes to keep the secular and sacred apart, one which often would happily prefer to declare that there isn't a sacred at all. Quite apart from being the first sermon I have come across to truly fit the term "antidisestablishmentarian", it raised for me an important question: how much am I willing to let God infiltrate not only the public sphere of society but in fact every sphere? Because that is what He has done. Him coming to earth doesn't just mean comfort for the poor or divine understanding in our suffering, though it does certainly mean those things too. And it was not just a means of attaining salvation; if Jesus only came to earth to die, His thirty years on earth would seem a little redundant. No, though all of these things are crucial to our faith, there is something else that the incarnation shows, which I will certainly be trying to think about this Advent.

The incarnation shows us that God is utterly, intimately, uncomfortably, involved in our lives on earth. He has come to be here; He dwells among us. Are we prepared for that?

Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming...(Advent #2)

Isaiah 11:1-10

If you fix your eyes on the deadness of winter, if you dull and numb your brain to all other possibilities, then there is a reasonable chance that you will not be able to conceive of a rose.

If you spend your time among wild animals bent on survival, you may then not be able to conceive of peace.

If you spend your nights awake and staring deeply into the darkness, you may struggle to understand the hope of the light.

If you close your eyes to the hope that Jesus brought into the world 2015 years ago, then you will probably not be able to conceive of His return.

If you look at the history of the world that God has made, if you let yourself see how frequently He has turned hopelessness into hope, impossibility into possibility, tender stems into full and beautiful roses, then it just may be that Advent this year can give you hope beyond reason.

Lo, how a rose e'er blooming

From tender stem hath sprung...

Prepare Ye the Way (Advent #1)

Several years ago I found a magnificently tattered edition of a Christina Rossetti devotional journal in the now-no-longer-existent Keswick books (it got bought out by Word Bookstore). The book cost me all of about 90 cents, but would have been a steal at any price, both for its antique appeal and the wonderful quality of the contents. Rossetti was quite "high" on the Anglican spectrum and so not all of her theology resonates with me. But it did introduce me to something that I, a thoroughly low Anglican, have appreciated in the years since. It showed me the value of letting the liturgical calendar prompt reflection and focus, directing me, for instance, to let Lent be a time of particular reflection on Jesus' sacrifice. I have always liked to do something similar with Advent - to prepare my heart for what is to come, rather than just prepare my wallet for presents or my bedroom for the storage of new presents.

And so this year I have decided to expand on my Advent preparations - to use a series of Advent-related readings to help guide my thinking in this time. I make no guarantees about how regularly I will do this, but you should expect at least a few Advent-related posts per week.

Today's comes from the passage that was preached on in the church in Hobart that I visited yesterday - 2 Peter 3:3-14. Here is a verse from the passage that particularly stands out to me:

First of all, you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires. They will say, "Where is this 'coming' he promised? Ever since our fathers died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation." (2 Peter 3:3-4)

Last night, as I was waiting to fly back from my weekend in Hobart (my flight was delayed by an hour), I saw a small, devoted gathering of TV cameramen and photographers on standby - they had been there all day - waiting for the arrival of Princess Mary who was, they had heard, potentially going to be possibly arriving in Hobart sometime that day. Their hopes had clearly shrunk down to a soodling thread by the time I got there (my flight was the last one leaving the airport that night) and by the time that the only flight left to arrive was a Jetstar plane (hardly fit for a princess) the soodling thread was down to a single follicle. They went home before my flight left.

It isn't hard to see the connection to the passage from 2 Peter. There had been no guarantee that Princess Mary would arrive, but the devoted few (devoted more because of employment than any particular love of the Danish Tasmanian Princess) had stuck it out - in vain. Is this what believers in Jesus are - naive? petulant? stubborn in the teeth of reason?

Peter would say otherwise. He would say that God has already shown Himself to be a God who intervenes in human history, almost always when we least expect it; he would say that what seems to take a long time for us is a matter of seconds for God (a statement that is strangely in line with what Einstein took millennia to tell the science world about the relativity of time); he would also say that, rather than a source of frustration and impatience, the time it takes for Jesus to return should be seen as a blessing - time to repent; time to be watchful and share the good news with others.

So: this Advent, be hopeful, be steadfast, be thankful and be watchful. We are not naive; we are not clinging to misinformation and dodgy tip-offs. He who promises is faithful.