A line in a novel which I read recently observed that, "One day, there will be nothing left."  This is a truely radical thought.  And in the absence of a God, it is entirely true.  But what, really, is nothing?  And how there be nothing if there is, truly, nothing?
     It is so difficult for we who are something to imagine nothing.  It is counterintuitive to who we are.  And perhaps that's the point.  Perhaps that's why we have so much difficulty (and, for some, terror) imagining it.  We are something, made to be something, made to engage in something.  We are made to long for something, the something that explains our somethingness.
     How could Jesus, the one whose goings forth, as the prophet Micah observed, "have been from long ago," have been nothing?  Indeed:  we are made to long for the "somethingness" of God.

     "For the grace of God has appeared," writes the apostle Paul in the third chapter of his letter to Titus, "bringing salvation to all people" (Titus 2:11).  What is Paul saying?  Simply, that as we remember the second Sunday of Advent, we can come to understand more fully that in Jesus, God in the flesh (as we observed last week (John 1:14)), we see, in flesh and blood, concrete and visible expression of God's grace, physical manifestation and display of his truest posture toward us.  In Jesus we see the fullest possible picture of God's intentions for favor toward us.  Jesus tells us that, above all, God is gracious and loves us, and he provides us with a way to know him, fully and intimately.  Jesus is the grace of God.
     Jesus' appearance tells us that whatever else we may think about God, what we ought to think most about him is this:  God is loving, God is gracious, and God is for us, for us today, for us tomorrow, for us forever.  All we need do is accept his invitation, his invitation of his son Jesus, to us.  God's extended the invitation; now he's waiting for us to reply.
     What else do we really need to do?

     December 7, 1941.  For members of the so-called "Greatest Generation," this is a day, the day of the attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, which will forever remain in their memories.  In the same way, December 8, 1980, is a day which (along with November 22, 1963) will likely forever remain in the memories of their children.  On this night, John Lennon, the former Beatle, was assassinated in front of his apartment building in New York City.  Similarly, September 11, 2011, the day that two jets flew into the World Trade Center Towers in downtown Manhattan, is a day which, although it will certainly remain in the minds of all Americans for many years to come, will perhaps burn most strongly in the memories of the Baby Boomers' children.
     Three days, three generations, three seminal events, three liminal moments.  Such moments are the stuff of historical angst and cultural tragedy, the Urstoff that moves hearts and shapes minds, the liminality that bursts categories and horizons, thrusting those who experience them into unexpected perceptions of what life can hold.  They change the way that people see the world.
     As they should.  When such momentous tangles of metaphysical and material horror erupt into our everyday experience, we are often aghast, struck at the seeming capriciousnss and unanswerability of existence.  We weep, we ponder; we wonder why.  We wonder why they happen, we wonder why they have to be.  And we feel helpless that we cannot go back and stop them.  Our grasp of time is so fleeting.
     But this is our reality, our place, our world.  We wander in the shadows of forces and movements over which we have absolutely no control, living out our lives in the umbra of twists and turns of space and time from which we at times wish only to flee, only to find that we cannot.
     Yet, really, should we?  To flee is to deny the facts of existence.  Not that we embrace the tragedy, not that we rejoice that we experience it.  But we understand it is part of living on this planet, part of walking on a globe bent and broken by sin.
     What can we do?  We weep, we wonder, we restore and repair.  Ultimately, however, we trust.  We trust in the fact of a loving God.
     Darkness, be it come in 1941, 1980, or 2001, need not be ascendant.

     "My work isn't about form, it's about seeing," asserts the artist Roy Lichtenstein.  Though this is an aesthetic statement, an observation about the nature of an artist's craft, given the Advent season which surrounds us at the moment, we may profit from considering its sentiments in a theological light.  To the point, from the days of Plato and Aristotle, philosophers have struggled to define form.  Is form, as Plato suggested, an ideal set in another realm, something into which we come, as he concluded, through the activity of the memory of our soul?  Or is form, as Plato's student Aristotle opined, simply a statement or expression about the characteristics of a given object of perception?
     If we assess these things in light of the Christian notion of incarnation, that God, in Jesus, became a human being, perhaps both positions are true.  If God is a distant form, lost in the heavens and beyond seeing, then we will not know him.  Yet if God is no more than an object of our sensory perceptions, as material as we, he may not be any greater or more useful than any other object on the planet.  If, however, God is a distant and omnipotent and loving and creator form that becomes an object of seeing, one to whom we can readily relate, well, then we have a profound artistic statement, one that affirms the wisdom of Lichtenstein's insight:  wouldn't we rather imagine--and have--a God whom we can see?

     "To be or not to be," says Shakespeare's Hamlet, "that is the question."  Indeed:  it is the question.  Every moment of every day, we bump into this question.  Should we choose to embrace life with its joys and challenges, or do we run away from it, ensconsing ourselves in philosophical oblivion.  The choice is always ours.
     As it was for George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life.  Though he didn't want to live, he eventually was persuaded that he really did.  He chose existence over its absence.
     But why do we pursue existence?  More often than not, it is because we do not wish to leave it.  And why is this?  Simply, we think that this existence is the only one we have.  From our mortal vantage point, this existence seems to be, in itself, the beginning and end.  It's it.
     And perhaps it is.  But have we really come from nothingness?  And we will really one day return to the same?  Have we really never had a point?
     It's enough to make one believe in God.
    

     How do we see?  We see what we want to see.  Although what is in the world, that is, what there is to be seen does not change, what we see about the world does.  Depending on our background, circumstances, and mindset at a given time, we all see differently.  We all see different things in what there is to be seen.
     Perhaps this is one reason why many of us tend to deny recountings of spiritual experiences.  We do not think human beings can see what people who have had these experiences claim to have seen.  Fair enough.  But this assumes that what there is to be seen is limited to, well, what we think there is to be seen, and how do we know--really know--that we are seeing everything there is to be seen?
     What if there are things to be seen that, due to our respective notions about what can be seen, we cannot (or will not) see?
     Enter faith.  But not faith in faith itself, for that misses the point, but faith in a someone, and a personal someone at that, a personal someone who, all things considered, is the only viable explanation for our experiences of seeing what we think we would otherwise not.  It thinks, it purposes, it acts.  Like us.
     Only this kind of faith will really see what it cannot.

     Running through the theology of the early Christian church was a belief called Gnosticism.  In sum, Gnosticism held that all things pertaining to the flesh, that is, of the body, were harmful and evil, while only that which was spiritual or intellectual, that is, of the mind, were good.  What the Church found most insidious about Gnosticism was that although it elevated God above all else, it at the same time made it impossible to associate God with anything having to do with matter, that is, things of everyday existence on earth.  God was there irretrievably distant from the flesh and blood problems and challenges of humanity.  And if God is impossibly distant from us, why should we both with him?
     Here is why we must consider, in this first week of the Advent season, the time of year in which Christianity remembers and celebrates the appearance of Jesus Christ on the earth, just how important Jesus' coming is.  If Gnosticism were true, we would never see God, we would never know God, we would never understand God as a personal presence in our lives.  He would be always infinities apart from us.  But Christianity says that, as John's gospel tells us, "The Word [that is, God] became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14).  God, in the person of Jesus, became part of our world, became an integral part of our everyday reality, became a being as flesh and blood as you and me, subject to all its infirmities, hardships, and limitations while, and this is crucial, remaining the omnipotent and creator God.  God became like us, as real as you as real as me, as real as anyone else in this world.
     Most importantly, God became for us, ready to be our counselor, friend, and greatest joy and meaning forever.  It's the ultimate paradox:  a perfect God in an imperfect world.  But it works.  How can flesh and blood ever be the same?