Your God is Too Big
When Albert Einstein was asked about his belief in God, he once replied,
“The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds...The human mind, no matter how highly trained, cannot grasp the universe. We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God.”
To Einstein God was a grand mystery, a reality far outside of the scope human understanding, a being unconcerned with the minutiae of human life. To believe that God was personal, one who worked and intervened in the lives of people was, for Einstein, a fable of the feeble imagination. As he wrote on another occasion, “it is always misleading to use anthropomorphical concepts in dealing with things outside the human sphere—childish analogies. We have to admire in humility the beautiful harmony of the structure of this world—as far as we can grasp it, and that is all.”
Einstein’s religion is an attractive one--it begins in the limits of human knowledge and yet recognizes a mind in the mystery of the universe, a law giver at the root of all being. This God behind the world is the God of the philosophers, a God perceived with reason, a God well beyond the childish views of some great parent in the sky.
Ahaz believed in this kind of deity. His God was big and unconcerned, not the kind of deity who would get mixed up in assurances to Judah threatened with war from its neighbors. When Isaiah asks Ahaz to request a sign from God that all will be well, Ahaz refuses: “I will not put the LORD to the test.” And so to Ahaz, and all of who believe in an impersonal God who is unconcerned with human cares, Isaiah responds, in effect: your God is too big. God will give a sign in a baby, the small and the fragile life of an infant, says the prophet. And then in our Gospel, God goes even further, God becomes an infant, entering into the vulnerable life of humanity by becoming one of us.
Before we discount Einstein and Ahaz too much, we must admit that God is big from the human side. Einstein’s reflections on God are proper to the limits of our minds, our inability to grasp the vast truths of the universe. Ahaz is right not to tempt a God who is all powerful and all-knowing with something so mundane as a sign. Our understanding of God should be humble in its claims and realistic in its limits.
But to leave our understanding of God to the human side is less than half of the equation. Our humility rooted in ignorance is met by God’s humility offered in love. The God of the burning bush, of Hagar in the wilderness, of John baptizing in the Jordan is not some impersonal being beyond the concerns of our lives. God is someone who cares about marginal nations like Judah in the time of Ahaz, God is someone who cares about the human anxieties of our finite lives and limited powers, God is someone who provides the reassurance of signs whether we want them or not. God is one who is humble, entering the earthly life of dirt-bound humans, taking on flesh and becoming one of us.
Joseph, the poor carpenter on the margins of the Empire, is open and ready for such truths. He’s no king like Ahaz trained in the distance of rank and power. He has no illusions that he can take care of life so that God can remain in the distance, unimaginable and uninvolved. Joseph accepts the witness of an angel in his dream; he listens to the revelation of the Holy Spirit who has revealed that God is with us. Joseph has lived at the margins and seen the miracles of life that daily unfold there.
Those in power like Ahaz, those in power like so many of us, can pretend that God is big and distant because we like to take care of things ourselves. We want a God too big for our lives so that we can be our own gods in all the details and decisions of our existence. But those like Joseph and Mary, the powerless peasants waiting in expectation for God to redeem Israel, see by the light of the Spirit’s witness that God is here among us. They have felt the presence of God and recognized the truth that God has never been far. As the theologian Stanley Hauerwas writes: “God does not need to intervene in creation, because God has never been absent from creation.”
Because God has never been far from us, we are not left to our inability to understand the vast realities of the divine with the weak apparatus of our minds. All of the superlatives we use for God--all knowing, all powerful, everywhere present-- are disrupted by this story of God coming to be with us through the womb of a teenage girl. “By Mary’s conception through the Spirit,” writes Hauerwas, “our prideful assumption that we are capable of knowing God on our own terms is challenged.” We can know God, this powerful God containing all the bigness we can conjure, because God revealed Godself to us in Jesus. To see Jesus is to see God--as a vulnerable infant, as a patient teacher, as an innocent crucified, as a resurrected Lord. It is not up to us to understand God with our minds because God has reached down and made himself known to us in his Son.
In this season, as we remember Christ coming among us in all the weakness, all of the smallness of human life, we should reflect on this question implicit in our scriptures this morning: Is your God too big?
In answer we must stop our attempts to figure God out. We must stop keeping God in the distance so that we can be the minor deities of our day to do lives. Instead we should sit in silence and listen for the Word that became flesh, Immanuel, God with us. We should make our hearts like Mary’s womb, ready for the Holy Spirit do its work of new creation within us. We should go among the lowly and humble because God is humble, bending down in love, more likely to be born in a stable than a palace, more likely to be recognized on the margins than at the center, more likely to be understood by looking at the dirt than at the vast wonders of the cosmic scene.
Our work now, is to echo the incarnation and open ourselves to God’s appearing. As the writer Mary Karr writes in a poem addressed to Christ:
The miracle’s not just
that you became us, but also
those breathed-in instants allotted to us each…
when one relinquishes self and will and want.
Then you’re laid bare in us,
and for some briefly gentle eyeblink
we bloom and are you.
In the incarnation not only has God come close, but each of us get the chance to join God’s life and become God’s love to the world around us. So this season let us move to the humble ground of Christ’s coming where the seeds of God are placed in the soil of our lives so that we might bloom with the radiance of God’s love. Amen.