As a teenager one of my favorite authors was Madeline L’Engle. Her most famous book was entitled A Wrinkle in Time. It is a fascinating story about two precocious siblings invited by three mysterious old women to “tesseract” (travel in time and space) to a far distant world to combat the evil that has besieged that world. Out of nowhere I received in the mail only a few years ago from an old friend my copy of A Wrinkle in Time (it had my bookplate in it) that I had enthusiastically loaned to him way back in the eighth grade some forty plus years ago. L’Engle wrote many more books, but for me none were as great as A Wrinkle in Time. She wrote over a long period of her life, and one of her later books was a short story for smallish children called The Glorious Impossible. It is a retelling of the birth of Christ, the birth of the one who was both God and Man….the glorious impossible.
The story was beguiling and the illustrations wonderful, but as to the title, The Glorious Impossible, I beg to differ with the venerable Ms. L’Engle. Her point is that this Incarnation is a singular supernatural event, that of God descending to earth to take on human form, changing the world, redeeming the world forever, but I want to argue that there is nothing supernatural about God or this event, nor about the life and ministry and death and resurrection of the Christ….all of these icons of our faith are the means to tell us, teach us the way life in truth really is…in other words, the Incarnation, Jesus’ life of healing and feeding and dignifying…living the God-life is the archetype, the model of what it means to be truly human, which is to be truly Godlike, and as people of faith when we live into our true humanity then all things become gloriously possible.
In this season of Easter we acknowledge that the life that Jesus gave so freely for the good of the whole is raised among us, bearing us up to engender endless possibility and potential to our world….the possibility of healing where there is disease….the possibility of peace where there is seemingly intractable conflict….the possibility of freedom where there is rigid oppression and intolerance….the possibility of dignity where there is abasement. God’s life among us does not lead us to hope for some glorious impossibility (which I think modern fundamentalism teaches, and therefore allows us to abdicate our own responsibilities)….God’s risen life among us invites us to hope for glorious possibilities….the possibility that God’s life does and will continue to transform our world for the better, even when hope seems distant….these possibilities are the fruits of our vocation.
Our God is the God of nature, inhabiting the created order, amid the ebb and flow of life itself, amid our joys and our sufferings, inhabiting our imaginations, forever making all things possible, all things new….Let us live lives expecting, imagining, and enacting the possibilities of God’s raised life in earth….Let us be courageous bearers of the Glorious Possible.
