God’s Not Finished
Advent 4, Year A
Last year, I heard an interview with the artist and editor, Adam Moss. Moss spent many years as a magazine editor, including heading up the prestigious New York magazine. But after leaving that job, he decided to pursue painting, dedicating himself to being good enough to work as a professional. Through that combined work history, Moss became interested in how creative people make the choices that end in a finished work. How does an artist know when a painting is complete? What is the process by which a writer turns a manuscript into a satisfying novel, or a poem where no word seems misplaced? How does a chef recognize when a recipe is just right? How does a composer hear her music and know it is complete?
To explore those questions, Moss began to interview creators of all sorts: sculptors and musicians, cookbook writers and playwrights, to understand their creative process. All of those interviews were then collected in a book. In the conversation with Moss I listened to, he said that his first proposed title for the book was On Editing for that is what he found at the heart of all of the interviews—creators were constantly asking, what needs to be added, what needs to be taken away, how can this or that change and still keep the initial creative energy of the work alive? In the end, Moss’s title itself underwent editing, and the book was published under the title The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing.
In classic Christian theology, only God creates from nothing, the great “Ex Nihilo” act of speaking the world into being we find in Genesis 1. And there can be a tendency, drawing from that theology, for us to see God’s creative act as coming to a quick completion. All was called good, and that was the end of God’s work. But a more careful attention to our scriptures shows that God is not a creator who finishes a masterpiece, hangs it in the museum of the cosmos, and moves on to other projects. Instead, God has created a world of dynamic, interactive relationship among a myriad of willful beings. In this dynamic world, God acts like a jazz band leader, carrying the improvisation forward with every move from the varied members.
That God has not abandoned creation, and especially human life within it, can easily be forgotten. We are often so caught up in our small dramas, our failed works, our unraveling projects that we think that God has simply let creation go and left us to make the best of our messes. Instead of the patient waiting before God that is the repeated call of scripture, we cease to trust that God is still creating and instead make our own projects to move the story along, taking the tune up on our own, but then losing it into dissonance.
This was the case when, in eighth century Judah, God invited Ahaz to join in the work God was doing. Ahaz, was the King of the southern kingdom. It was a tiny place, surrounded by large powers on every side. In this instance, he was particularly worried about two neighboring kingdoms that he feared would form an alliance and overtake his reign. Ahaz, uses pious language about not putting God to the test, but in reality he does not trust that God can turn this seeming moment of chaos into beauty and goodness. Instead, Ahaz in his fear, comes up with a plan to make an alliance with the powerful Assyrian, turning his throne into a vassal state of a pagan kingdom against God’s wishes.
It is into this state of anxiety, when the creative energies of merely earthly kingdoms have run out, that God speaks through his prophet Isaiah. Despite Ahaz’s fears, God is not finished with Judah. To show that God is still at work, Isaiah points to a young woman in the court, likely Ahaz’s wife. She is pregnant, and Isaiah says that by the time the child is weaned, the two kings whom Ahaz fears will be no more and their kingdoms will be destroyed. The child will be named “God with Us,” Isaiah tells Ahaz, because God is not finished with creation.
Emmanuel—God abides with us. What we see God doing in Isaiah culminates in the Incarnation. God’s great creative act is not only to create the world, but to enter the very frame of creation, to be with us in the very limited, painful spaces where our fears can overcome our vision, our anxieties can keep us from waiting on God. It is here that God came, far from the palaces of those who think they are in control. Instead, God comes to another young woman, Mary, inviting her into this new work of creation.
Gone in this story are the kings and rulers, those who would seem to have the power to make things happen. Gone, too, is the patriarchal system by which only male agency counts. Instead, in Mary, God brings a new creation, the Holy Spirit once again moving to create life from what seemed to be chaos. It is a scandal both to our closed systems of reason and to the social mores of Mary’s day, but as Stanley Hauerwas writes in his commentary on Matthew, “What should startle us, what should stun us, is not that Mary is a virgin but that God refuses to abandon us.” In this work of new creation, God undoes what we imagine God to be.
For our part, most of us find ourselves closer to Joseph in the story. We try to clean up God’s wild creativity by making the scandal of Incarnation as respectful and tidy as possible. But like Joseph, we are invited instead to let go of our systems of control, and to discover instead the radically new creation that God is working among us. Thaks to his slow responsiveness to God, Joseph, too, is given a role in this work. By naming Mary’s son, he adopts him as his own, following the divine command to call him Yeshua, the one known to us as Jesus. In Joseph’s adoption of Jesus, he reflects the adoption Jesus opens to all of us, to be the sons and daughters of God.
On this final Sunday of Advent, we are given a reminder that God is not finished with us. The story wasn’t over with the threats Ahaz thought were so imminent. In the same way, all of our fears, both personal and collective, do not define the end of God’s story, whatever narratives we may be telling ourselves. In the Incarnation, God showed his immense and radical creativity. Ours is a God who continues to create, continues to work toward love and mercy, until all is healed in the end and God and creation can live in full and everlasting relationship.
In the meantime, our work, like that of Mary and like that of Joseph, is to say yes to God’s creative work within our lives, even when it is a scandal to a world that has settled for either kitsch or chaos. God is with us, and in that truth only love and goodness and beauty await us in the end.
