Texts: Isaiah 40: 1-5; Luke 1: 26-37
Mary, Gabriel, and the Blessings of Confusion[1]
Most every morning, I get up early, and when it’s still dark, I leave the parsonage and begin running. As soon as it’s light enough to see, I step onto the forest trail at the end of Library Lane, and I run a circuit that brings me back to the house just in time to help the kids get to school on time. I know every inch of those forest paths. I know where to avoid roots that have tripped me up in the past. Almost thoughtlessly, my feet can find a footing on stones placed in small streams. It’s so ingrained in me that I rarely see the forest or the path anymore. But then invariably, a root or a rock I hadn’t otherwise noticed gets in my way – I stumble and catch myself, startled back into awareness of the landscape around me.
For many of us, the Christmas narratives are a little like that forest trail. They’re well worn pathways that most of us have traveled many times. They’re lovely. They’re familiar and comforting. But there are few surprises left in them. Wherever our feet may land in those old texts, they do so with the assurance of having landed in the same way dozens of times before. Until something snags our feet, sending us stumbling.
That happened to me this past week when I returned to Luke’s Advent narrative. There were all the familiar steps along the path – Zechariah and Elizabeth, Mary and Joseph, angels and shepherds. But then a phrase I had read a hundred times before leapt out at me, like a rock on the trail, startling me back into awareness. When Mary is told that she will bear divinity into the world, she gives voice to a question: how can this be?
Christmas, it would seem, begins in a moment of confusion. Indeed, the entire story of Jesus, and the good news that Luke is concerned to announce, starts in a moment of bewilderment and perplexity. Faith begins with a question, one that the angel never bothers to answer.
Imagine Mary’s question, then, as a stone placed along a well-worn path, one that sends us tumbling. We pick ourselves up, but then we pick up the stone as well, to examine it. I imagine it as translucent, but with uneven surfaces, like a crystal. Light shines through it and then refracts in several directions all at once. And so what I’d like to do in the coming moments is to turn that stone, that question, over and over, examining its surfaces, noticing how light passes through it first from one angle, and then another, and then another still. I’ll make several turns or shifts, but they all pertain to that richly suggestive question, “how can this be?” I’ve come to understand that question as opening toward a spirituality of blessed confusion, where uncertainty and a lack of clarity are the preconditions of our growth as human beings. Most of all, however, inhabiting the fullness of Mary’s question might open us toward prayer, a possibility I sensed on Wednesday night in the quiet and beauty of what we called the “Blue Christmas” service.
Before going any further, let me address a lingering worry. Not all confusion is a blessed confusion. Not all confusion deserves to be lauded or celebrated. Sometimes Babel is more than an old story found in Genesis. It is, at times, an accurate description of the world, in which individuals and groups speak past each other without listening, and without understanding. An inability to comprehend another – is that not the essence of confusion? And is that not what faith seeks to prevent, and overcome? “God is not a God of confusion, but of peace,” the Apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthian church, filled as it was with warring factions. Ignorance, misinformation, lies, prevarications – those are forms of confusion that Christian faith rightly warns against.
But there is another kind of confusion that Mary’s question opens before us, what I’m calling a blessed confusion. She doesn’t contradict the angel – she doesn’t say “this can’t be, or won’t be, or must not be.” Her question is, rather, “how?” Hers is a confusion, in other words, that is inquisitive, curious, and open. It’s a confusion that’s alive to the possibility that there is that within the world that eludes her comprehension and mastery. It’s a confusion that suggests an openness to mystery, to the possibility that one’s outlook or one’s very life can be reshuffled toward a greater sense of truth or purpose. Confusion might be the very substance from which the most important revelations of life emerge.
I wonder how many of us have had an experience of blessed confusion. That’s the first of my prismatic angles: all the ordinary moments of confusion or uncertainty we each of us face across our years. It can feel scary and awkward when we’re in the midst of it, but it might also be a sign that we’re on the verge of a significant breakthrough in our lives. That’s certainly been true for me. As a parent, I’ve often been more than a little perplexed about how to respond to each new stage of development in my kids, including what each of those stages has meant for my own identity. It was especially pronounced in the earliest years of our family, as we added first one child, and then another, and then – surprise! – yet another. Rachael and I had a vision of the future, one that felt right in the abstract. But it didn’t match the feelings of exhaustion, and loneliness, and frustration that I often felt in the moment. Sometimes I simply felt confused, as the gap widened between my own desires and the requirements of the moment. It was uncomfortable, but I would say that the confusion was productive. It allowed me to learn some things that I needed to learn, about patience and commitment, and to become something that I couldn’t become all at once. The confusion of “how can this be?” was a sign of growth.
There’s an analogue for that state of necessary and enabling confusion in the sciences.[2] Here comes another prismatic angle. Just before enrolling in divinity school, I read a book that has stayed with me ever since. It was called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by a historian of science named Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn argued that scientific knowledge doesn’t proceed in a linear fashion, progressing from ignorance to greater knowledge. Instead, in every moment of history, particular paradigms predominate that adequately explain certain physical phenomena. Those paradigms are ways of seeing and knowing that guide research. But they also wind up impeding those same researchers, preventing them from accounting for anomalies in the paradigm. Researchers overlook the data that doesn’t fit.
Now and then, however, a few brave souls have lingered with the data that doesn’t fit. They permit themselves to be confused. When Copernicus challenged the Ptolemaic view of the universe, he was seeking to account for anomalies in the data that no one else could see. It was a moment of blessed, and productive, confusion. When Galileo challenged the Aristotelian physics of motion, he was building a new thought pathway to account for data that didn’t fit the earlier paradigm. It was another moment of blessed, productive, confusion. When Nils Bohr challenged the classical model of subatomic particles with his quantum model, he was doing the same, introducing a moment of confusion that ushered in an entirely new understanding. Most scientists spend their lives solving puzzles within previously existing paradigms. But a few allow themselves to become confused by what they encounter in their research. Sometimes, that question, “how can this be?” leads to whole new ways of seeing and knowing.
Those examples suggest how painful confusion can be. When we’re confused, having to learn new skills or new relational patterns, to say nothing of building a new worldview, our brain circuitry is literally being rewired. Research has shown that whole new neural pathways are being created to allow our bodies and our minds to adapt to the new reality. No wonder some people lash out in anger or frustration during moments of confusion. No wonder change and difference can be so painful for some people. There’s a whole chemical and neurological story occurring underneath it all, suggesting just how hard it is to live into a new and confusing reality. But remaining open to the possibilities inherent in confusion just might be the source of our most productive growth.
What I’m talking about has obvious implications for the cultural moment we’re living through just now. The complexity of a pluralistic world has led some to beat a hasty retreat into older, narrower, more tribal paradigms. But in truth, that’s not the place I would have us land just now. Instead, I would have us consider what Mary’s question might imply about our spiritual lives, and especially about our ability to pray. Which leads to yet another view through that prismatic lens.
I won’t ask for a show of hands, but I suspect that “How can this be?” is a question that many of us ask somewhere deep in our hearts most every Sunday. I suspect it represents some small part within each of us that feels dubious every time we speak a call to worship, whenever we address a prayer to a Someone we call “God.” Is there not a little atheist (and maybe quite a bit more than little!) within each of us that sits in the pews Sunday by Sunday, thinking, “How can this be?” I submit to any of you who share that response that it is a precious gift. That Christmas begins in confusion, and that faith is set in motion by skepticism, is a gift that the biblical writers have given to all of us. I don’t need to tell you that faith and fanaticism are next door neighbors, and it is that critical, questioning voice within each of us that changes unqualified belief (which is the seed of fanaticism) into something approaching faith. We have no less than Mary the mother of Jesus to thank for giving voice to her own confusion at the beginning of the story. Because indeed, how can this, any of this, be?
And yet turn the stone, the question, ever so slightly and it reveals something further. Mary’s question has a way of keeping us open to the greater mysteries of our lives, toward the possibility that, skepticism be damned, there is more to the world than we can account for or explain. Somehow molecules bind us together into bodies, and somehow there’s some organizing thing within each of us that allows us to be an “I” in the first place. There’s a planet, with a thin, inhabitable crust, and a sun that keeps that planet spinning in orbit. How can this be? And then there’s love between people, and it actually happens, and sometimes, neighbors do take care of one another. There is such a thing as regeneration and healing, and mercy and forgiveness do exist as possibilities, rather than just base necessity, or survival. How can this be? How can any of it be?
But why not go even farther? Why not give it all a name? Why not render it in the language of symbols and stories and say that God so loved the world, that God so loved this world, and that Jesus came to be a part of it, to reveal what God might be like. If we open ourselves to all the rest, why not open ourselves to that? Because really, how can any of this be?
I have one final turn of that translucent stone, one final prismatic angle to explore, one that emerged this past Wednesday at the Blue Christmas service. It was Laura who constructed that service, and I’m so grateful that she did. Those of you who attended know how beautiful it was. It was designed for everyone who carries the ghost of loss within them somewhere, and at some level of our being, that includes all of us, even if our lives are going fairly well. Some piece of us is always touched by loss. Some piece of us is always haunted by regret, or by concern for the well being of someone we care about. Something within us always approaches the joy of Christmas and wonders, “How can this be?”
Toward the end of the service, we were invited to write upon a small piece of paper a name, or several names, of individuals we wished to remember this season. And then, after the benediction, everyone was invited to come forward to take one of those pieces of paper with them, and to pray for those individuals for the remainder of the season.
I had written down four names. They were the names of those most closely affected when a friend of ours took her life this past summer. The names I wrote were those of her daughter. Her husband. And then both of her parents. We had become close during our years in New Haven, and we had often been together in the years since. But unbeknownst to us, or most anyone that knew her, she wrestled with demons that finally got the better of her.
It will be a painful Christmas for those friends. More than painful. Those are wounds that will never fully heal. But as I wrote their names, my prayer was that they could all take care of each other, that they could continue to speak their pain, that in time they might build lives that weren’t wholly defined by that pain. I prayed they might come to forgive what seems like an unthinkable act. I prayed that their sense of love, and trust, hadn’t been damaged beyond all repair. I prayed they might feel an assurance that there is a gentle force within the world that slowly, slowly, slowly, mends.
Through all the turns of that translucent stone, here’s where Mary’s question finally lands: in the quiet possibility that maybe, just maybe, God continues to enter the world as something vulnerably small, like a child, like a prayer. How can this be? I don’t know. It feels a little confusing even to name such things. But the question itself opens to the wild hope that it might all be so.
When the service concluded, individuals came forward to retrieve the names we had all written. I waited in suspense, hoping, aching, for someone to choose those names. And then, someone did.
That act signified a whole wide world stitched together by anonymous care. Each person committing to hold those they don’t even know in prayer suggested a whole world joined by gossamer thin tendrils of grace that hold us close. And it helped me to trust that prayers for those we love, and sometimes for those we do not love, or even know, is one of the most significant things we do for one another. How can this be? I don’t know. But I do trust it.
And so here’s what I’d like to ask of you this Advent. In the spirit of that Christmas service, I’d like to ask that you embrace the blessed confusion called prayer, even if you can’t quite grasp what you’re doing. And I’d like to ask that you choose three, or four, or five individuals in your life that you care for. Or maybe to choose a person or two that you don’t care for. And then I’d like to ask you to pray for those people every single day throughout this season. It doesn’t need to be elaborate, or eloquent. Just speak their names. And trust that there is Someone who hears.
How can this be? I don’t know. It’s confusing. But in that blessed confusion, it might be that a steady assurance takes hold, an assurance that there are few things more important than trusting, just trusting, that God continues to come into the world, and that when we pray for one another, we access something profound and holy, something that has the capacity to bear us up through whatever befalls us.
Mary’s question is a translucent stone that I’ll continue to turn over and over. I’m grateful to have stumbled on it this year. I’m grateful for its uneven surfaces, and for all those surfaces reveal. How can this be – is that one of the hidden gifts that God offers us every Christmas season?
[1] At several points along the way, this sermon depends upon a paper written by a friend, Paul Burgmayer, entitled “How Can This Be: Exploring a Spirituality of Confusion.” That paper proved especially helpful after being struck by Mary’s question all over again in the early days of Advent.
[2] Burgmayer’s essay is especially helpful on Thomas Kuhn, the paradigms of scientific research, and the neural pathways that must be constructed in order to account for new insights that don’t fit earlier paradigms. I’m depending upon Burgmayer in the next two paragraphs.