Inconceivable!

This is the sermon delivered by Rev. Don Van Antwerpen to the congregation of Unfinished Community on Sunday, February 4, 2024, drawing from Isaiah 40:21-31 and Mark 1:29-39

One day, a great many more years ago than I am comfortable admitting, I was walking my eldest child to their first day of preschool. It was an absolutely gorgeous day out, warm and sunny with just the gentlest of breezes and, as either luck or anxiety would have it, we had all managed to get up extra early and got ourselves ready to go with plenty of time to spare. So even though it was only like a 5 minute walk to the daycare, we were just lazily strolling down the sidewalk, talking and smiling. In this moment my kid was more excited than I had ever seen them; the prospect of finally getting to go to school like a big kid had filled them with so much pride and excitement that there was a very real chance of detonation! The future looked unimaginably bright, and right then, swept away by the happy energy of the moment, I got it into my head to ask that one fateful question that every parent eventually asks their unsuspecting child:

What do you think you want to be when you grow up?

I was honestly curious, of course; what parent wouldn't be! With all the excitement swirling around us as we considered the future together, I couldn't imagine what exciting idea my amazing kiddo might've come up with. Would they want to be a doctor? An artist? A musician? When I was that age I was 100% certain that I was going to be an astronaut; maybe that's where they'll land? Or maybe, just maybe, we've made a good impression and they'll want to be a pastor just like mom and dad?

The suspense was really starting to et to me because, despite the fact that my eldest - who is 10,000% like me in all respects - is always super quick on the response and never stops talking, they…weren’t doing that. In fact, the question had managed to do what 2.5 years of bedtimes had yet to accomplish, and brought my child to a complete halt and a stunned, even overwhelmed, silence.

There was some serious thought going on!

But we were well ahead of our schedule for the day, and the sun was shining, and the gentle breeze was gently breezing, so I I didn't press. We just stopped for a moment in the sun as my child did something remarkable, as they stopped everything to just listen to what was going on in their heart, to allow all the infinite possibilities of creation to settle upon them and to imagine, just for a moment, what their place within it might actually be. It was so beautiful to witness in action the kind of deep, spiritual discernment that can only ever truly be managed by a child untouched by all the limitations of adulthood.

As wonderful as that moment was though, it did eventually come to an end after a time, and as my brilliant kiddo turned their big brown eyes up to me with a twinkle and a smile, I readied myself for a revelation. I was so excited, so eager to hear which one, out of an infinite number of options, my amazing kiddo had chosen as their thing!

"Pastornaut," they said, with that peaceful countenance that only ever comes from absolute certainty.

Pastornaut.

It took me a moment, I have to admit, to realize exactly what it was that had happened, so taken aback was I by this wildly unexpected answer. You see, my child had looked upon all of the many  vocational possibilities they could grasp, and had decided that no single one of them best expressed the person they were inside. So instead of trying to cram themselves into a single, ill-fitting box, they'd just manufactured a new one which fit them better.

Pastornaut. Or space-chaplain, if you prefer.

And as the truth of what they'd said settled upon me, I had a moment of real struggle. I felt the voice of all the generations before welling up within me, screaming in the back of my mind that the only real and true way to speak to this truly remarkable answer was by explaining, with restrictive and shattering love, "No, honey. That's not a real thing; you need to pick something else instead." In that moment, I felt the cold and claustrophobic crush of reality laying heavy on me, the unbreakable laws of reality that bind us to being just one thing, living in just one way, because to do otherwise would be chaotic, destructive, or even unsurvivable.

What they wanted, in short, simply could not be.

But as I prepared to deliver that crushing blow, the same one which had been delivered on me as a child, the same one which nearly all of us have had administered to us at one time or another - if not repeatedly in our lives - I found that I just couldn't. I had just watched a young child do something wonderfully transcendent; to drop all their defenses and open themselves fully to all the infinite possibilities that God might have in store, to allow the fullness of all creation's myriad possibilities run through them unchallenged, to allow the Spirit of God to wash over them completely, and when they emerged from that moment of pure, immersive discernment…

…who was I to say it was wrong? Who was I to say that the beautiful fluidity they had just perceived with their hearts was impossible? 

Who was I to render finite the infinite possibilities of God's creation?

Here in the Christian church we love to toss around that word "infinite," but have we ever really grasped what it means? Have we ever really wrestled with what it means to worship a God who is truly infinite? To be ourselves made in the image of that infinite?

Isaiah tried to express that in today's passage, at least a little bit. When he speaks from the perspective of God he compares us all to mere grasshoppers, the rule of princes and kings in time as ephemeral as plant which in time withers, stick and stem, while God alone remains. The only thing to which Isaiah could turn to in attempting to establish the blinding infinite of God by comparison is the earth itself, the oldest and strongest thing he could connect with physically. Of course, at 4.5 billion years old the Earth is ancient compared to the handful of decades afforded to each of us, but even that compares to the unending nature of our God who not merely predates, but exists entirely beyond the bounds of time itself.

"Have you not known? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable."

Today, the closest comparison we can find to the infinite of God isn't the hard firmament of the earth below us, but in mathematics. The number pi - an irrational number which is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter - is mathematically infinite, and never repeats. So far, we have managed to calculate the decimals of pi out to 62.8 trillion digits, and there is no end in sight. Of course, that may mean very little to most of us, not being mathematicians and all, but when you think about it…there is some really profound meaning in. this very simple fact.

Because pi is both infinite and never repeats itself, every possible pattern can be found within it represented as a number. The complete works of William Shakespeare? That's represented as a series of numbers in pi somewhere, in any language you might like including the original Klingon. Every blog post made by hormonal and unstable teenagers in the late 1990s? That's in there too. Every password you've ever had, every word you've ever said, every thought that has ever occurred to you, every thought that will ever occur to you; all of it is represented within the digits of pi somewhere. 

It's not just math that's in there. Everything that ever could be expressed or communicated, from math, to science, to literature, to music, to…you name it. Anything that can be either expressed as or interpreted from a sequence of numbers is there, if you go on far enough.

Think of all the possibilities, everything that might be contained within that simple, infinite, sequence of non-repeating numbers.

And if that wasn't enough for you, pi itself is part of creation, so as mind-bending as that chain of infinite possibilities might be, it still pales in comparison to the immeasurable, transcendent infinity that is God our Creator. 

The God in whose image you have been made.

Hold that thought for just a moment, and let's turn our attention over to the passage from Mark, which I promise I did not forget. In this passage, we get Jesus coming into the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John in tow, and the first thing he finds is Simon's mother-in-law in bed with a fever. Now, I'll spare you the in-depth contextual analysis and exegesis today, but the short of it is that what she was experiencing was no small thing. First, the way in which this fever is presented in the text suggests not something small like a passing cold or a light flu, but a chronic condition, one which may even have been eventually terminal. What's more, even if it were not so severe, the treatment for a fever in those days was no small thing either; a treatment that took several days at least, if not considerably longer.

So Jesus just taking her by the hand and causing the fever to just…leave…that very much is a miracle!

But while we could spend forever talking about the nature of miracles, and even longer talking about the whole "casting out demons" thing that comes shortly thereafter, or even the fact that the English text seems to present the mother-in-law as getting right out of bed just to "serve" them, it's actually the reactions of the people around Jesus I want us to focus on right now.

[OK, if you must know, the word used for "to serve" here is the same one used for the ways in which the disciples "served" Jesus by following him. She didn't get out of bed and rush to make coffee, she joined the disciples in following Jesus just like the men did earlier. You can blame misogynist preachers in the 17th and 18th centuries for that little misunderstanding!]

" That evening, at sundown, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons. And the whole city was gathered around the door. And he cured many who were sick with various diseases."

As soon as they saw that Jesus was capable of healing the sick, the entire community around him - including his own disciples - immediately stuck him in that box. In a split second, he became known to them as "Doctor Jesus, M.D.," and the whole town turned out not because they felt the presence of the Holy Spirit or anything, but because they expected him to keep doing what he was doing. The full lot of them had taken hold of this one, single action - one thing they knew him to be good at - and they defined him by it, made it the fullness of his entire identity in their eyes.

He was a healer.

Of course, because he's Jesus, he spends the night doing exactly that; healing and healing and healing.

But, "In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed."

And when the disciples found him, they told him that the whole town was looking for him, looking for the healer to come and keep healing. They wanted him to be this one, single thing that they knew and understood, to define Jesus by this one miraculous skill, this one thing by which they could identify and make use of him. They wanted to put him in a box, nice, easy and predictable.

They wanted to know just what it was he was gonna be when he grew up.

Is it any wonder that Jesus, the incarnate form of our impossibly infinite God, immediately skipped town at the prospect?

Jesus is a healer of course, but Jesus isn't just a healer. Jesus is a teacher, but he isn't only a teacher. Jesus is a preacher, a theologian, a Rabbi, the literal Messiah, the actual son of God, and somebody who carries around an almost inconceivable hatred of both unfruitful fig trees and capitalism in God's temple alike, but he isn't just any one of these things.

Jesus' healings were bespoke of the creator, and could not be mass-produced without becoming something other than what they were, something less. Jesus retreated because he needed to be allowed to flow, and the crowd wanted to dam the river of love because they coveted its power.

We all do this, when we see a miracle - we want to control infinity, and force it to behave according to the rules of our understandings, but God defies containment. Jesus cannot be kept in the house, made to keep healing over and over again. Jesus isn't just a healer - Jesus isn't just any one thing, and neither are we.

Infinity is reflected in our souls, and we need to embrace that by living into who we are, not the single purpose our structural inclinations have told us we must serve. God's justice is lived out through our variability, through our change, through our infinite permutations, throughout our lives, and God's love is muffled when we try to trap that infinite into one, singular box.

Each one of us is made in the image of an infinite God, not static or limited, not bound to any one form or expression, not restricted to any one mode of being or way of living. Each and every one us contains all the possibilities of the divine, far more possibilities than what we might find in a single, non-repeating number.

Our diversity is our strength, because our wild and untamable uniqueness is the aspect of ourselves which is most like God.

Love, compassion mercy, reconciliation among all God's people, that abiding peace we all seek which comes the presence of realized justice among us; all these things begin from this place, the recognition that there is nothing that divides us because everything different between each of us is just a single, colorful reflection of the infinite prism of God's infinite beauty shining in and through every single person in our world.

Even the ones we really don't like.

So today, I would like to leave you with this one thought, this one hope; that somehow, some way we can all stop trying to deny these refractions of grace as something shameful or dirty, something that needs to be blocked or broken so that we can all fit into rigid boxes that hold us to a single, confining form. Instead, let us go out looking for each beautiful facet of God's infinite light shining within the people around us, embracing the beauty that each of us holds as a reflection of God, and seeking to uplift each person we encounter - in all their many differences - as a fully realized and entirely unique expression of God.

And when we turn our eyes in towards ourselves, and ask that great and deeply terrifying question of who we are as well, I hope that we can all pause, soak in the warmth of the sun, feel the gentle breeze, and look up at our Creator with our eyes filled with wonder, and declare for all the world to see that we too want to be a Pastornaut.