Offering Thanks for the Impossible

"How will I know that this is so? For I am an old man, and my wife is getting on in years." So asks Zechariah. "How can this be, since I am a virgin?" asks Mary. Part of the angel's response to Mary might well have been said to Zechariah, too. "For nothing will be impossible with God."

It is so easy to look at the newscasts and headlines and become cynical. Syria, ISIS, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Hong Kong, Ferguson. Partisan bickering and a seemingly broken political system able to do little beside blame the other side. Church pastors are sometimes prone to a cynicism born of congregational life. Pastors can pour heart and soul into declaring God's word, into speaking what they hear God saying, and then see people who say, "Nice message," but seem totally untouched by it. The burnout rate for pastors is quite high, and I've spoken with a few such pastors who tell of frustration and cynicism born of congregations who are experts at modelling the ways of world and culture, but seem little interested in modeling the way of Jesus.

In my own moderate, "progressive" end of the church spectrum, there is sometimes a lot of squeamishness about the Spirit or the power of God working through us. We may resonate with Jesus' call to love others and help the poor and the marginalized, but we imagine that the only power at our disposal is the gathered gifts, talents and resources of our particular group.

In the face of all these forms and sources or cynicism, I am thankful to be confronted once more with the texts of Advent, with voices of prophets who proclaim that God's purposes will come to pass, with the words of Gabriel, "For nothing will be impossible with God."

We modern, sophisticated people sometimes imagine that we have plumbed the limits of what is possible. We "know" which biblical texts are true and which are the fanciful inventions of ancient writers, and we imagine God is bound to our logic and our understandings of how things are.

But from time to time, I catch glimpses of a reality not bound to my logic or beholding to my cynicism. Here and there, I brush up against the power of God that does not acknowledge my notions of what is or isn't possible. And as we enter another Advent, ancient texts speak again of such things. I hear once more that "nothing will be impossible with God," and I recall the fleeting brushes with that power I have known. Small tears appear in the garb of cynicism that I too often wear, and hope peers through. And I am thankful.

Thanks be to God for the hope that is bigger than my cynicism, and a Happy Thanksgiving to you.