The Pastor’s Pen

The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus.”   ~ Luke 1:30-31

Servants of God,

Sometimes, progress toward a goal is measured in seconds. With the Winter Olympic Games coming soon to Vancouver, BC, I think of the pending competitions where seconds or even fractions of seconds will mark the distance between medalists and also-rans.

Sometimes, progress is measure in terms of months—nine months, in the case of the young Mary. (We’ve had a number of families measuring time that way this year!) A reasonable length of time to prepare home and heart(h) to receive a new life…or maybe not.  By turns those weeks may drag on, or race forward with a swiftness that leaves parents-to-be breathless, with half-finished baby preparations dogging their heels.

Sometimes, progress is measured in decades. “Four score years,” the Psalmist declared, is a generous interval for human life.  My parents both crossed that threshold in 2009, and some of you are approaching or have exceeded that mark.

But sometimes, progress toward a goal is measured not on any human scale at all. Take geologic time.  The time it took the Colorado River to carve the Grand Canyon.  The time it took the slow motion collision of the Indo-Australian and Eurasian Plates to produce the Himalayan Mountains.  The time it took the earth’s primordial land mass known as “Pangaea” (from the Greek pan = entire + gaia = earth) to spread out across the globe becoming seven distinct continents.

Within the cycle of seasons we call the church year, Advent is here once more, and with Advent comes the invitation to expectant waiting as we look forward to the fulfillment of God’s plan to unite heaven and earth under the gentle rule of our Savior Jesus Christ.  The first generation of Christians expected the fruition of God’s plan in their life times.  The delay of Christ’s much anticipated return was the subject of deep conversation among the congregations Paul founded and corresponded with, and by the time the gospels were written one can see how this “delay” challenged the faith of some.  Two thousand years later, we still await the fullness of God’s promised redemption.  How we wish that God would abandon this infernally slow timeline and adopt ours instead!

Enter Pierre Teihard De Chardin (1881-1955), a Jesuit theologian, philosopher, geologist and paleontologist, who combined his knowledge of the earth’s origins, and his studies of early humans with his faith in a divine Creator to produce some of the most imaginative and forward thinking theology of the 20^th century.  De Chardin once wrote:

If Chardin is right, (and the evidence seems to point in that direction!) God is not the least in a hurry.  John Haught, professor of theology at Georgetown University, illustrated this point powerfully in a presentation I attended earlier this year.  Imagine that each one of the Universe’s 13.7 billion years was contained in 30 volumes, and that each volume had 450 pages; and that each of those pages represented 1 million years.

Using this analogy, the Big Bang constitutes the first letter of the first word on the first page of Volume 1.  But it isn’t until Volume 21 that the earth itself is completely formed, and in Volume 22 that the first forms of life emerge.  In Volume 29 we find the so-called Cambrian explosion of new species and complex animals.  Dinosaurs don’t make their entrance until Volume 30, the final book, and become extinct on page 385.  Most startling of all, modern humans like you and I only appear on the last paragraph or so of the last page of the last volume.

God is most decidedly patient with the unfolding of this vast universe. We have no idea how many volumes God plans, but the witness of Scripture is that the Universe is moving toward a goal, an end (telos), and that this end is, finally, seeded with hope.

“Above all, trust in the slow work of God.” This is Advent’s invitation. That’s what Mary did, and it in a burst of insight that can only be a gift of the Spirit, she caught a glimpse of the Divine trajectory of hope within the human story—within her story—and it rang out from her soul in a lyric of such crystal clarity that we’ve never forgotten it, or her.  [Luke 1:46-55, The Magnificat, see below.**]

In what is often the most frenetic season of the year, the words of De Chardin and the song of Mary are worth holding onto: A God of immense patience calling us into sympathetic patience with ourselves and with each other as the “spirit gradually forming within” us, and God’s hope for this world, are revealed.

O, Come, O, Come, Emmanuel!

Pastor Erik

**When a divine messenger approached Mary about God’s plan to bring Jesus into the world through her, she also learned of her cousin Elizabeth’s pregnancy. Luke records what happened next:

In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.” And Mary said,