Impossible

Luke 2:1-7

December 24, 2024 • Mount Pleasant UMC

In the Bible there are two different types of time. Chronos refers to clock time, chronological time, but kairos refers to “the right time,” the critical moment. Things always happen on chronos time, of course, but when something happens and the world changes, that’s a kairos moment. I can’t help but think about certain moments when the right words were said at the right time and history was changed. For instance, five words spoken by Winston Churchill in October 1941 at a private boarding school rallied the British people in their struggle against Nazi Germany: “Never, never, never give up.” Churchill’s determination filtered out to the British people to the point they were willing to make sacrifices in order to defeat Hitler. Or the words John F. Kennedy used twenty years later at his inauguration to unify the American people: “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” Kennedy knew there were hard choices to be made in the days ahead, and he called the American people to move forward together in a spirit of unity and sacrifice. Even more recently are the words Ronald Reagan said in 1987 as he stood near the Berlin Wall during a time of unprecedented openness in the former Soviet Union: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” A couple of years ago, I stood in the same place where Reagan stood, at the Brandenburg Gate, and I can tell you that the wall is still down. Freedom came to a place once gripped in fear and desperation. Words can indeed change the course of history. Words can call people to believe in what seems at the time to be impossible.

Words like these: “You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus” (Luke 1:31). Even Mary, the girl who heard these words from the angel Gabriel, knew that what he was saying was impossible. “How will this be,” she asks, “since I am a virgin?” (1:34). She may not have had all of our scientific and medical knowledge, but she knew having a baby without the involvement of a father was impossible. And so she asks how can this be, and everything hinges on what the angel says next: “Nothing will be impossible with God” (1:37, NRSV; Willimon, Heaven and Earth, pg. 116). Say that with me: nothing will be impossible with God. Nothing.

Impossible seems to be our normal experience. We hear about and run into a thousand impossible situations each and every day. Our world seems to specialize in impossible. The war between Russia and Ukraine continues on, despite international pressure and opposition. A just peace and settlement between the two? Impossible. A cease fire is holding so far in the Middle East between Israel and Hamas. I have dear friends there that I pray for constantly, and yet we all know it’s only a matter of time before hostilities between someone and someone else erupts there again. Hostilities have been going on in that part of the world for thousands of years. A lasting peace seems impossible. There’s division in our own country. People with different worldviews and different ideas about how to solve our problems won’t actually talk to each other, and some of us here are dreading family dinners tomorrow because we have that one family member who always brings up politics at the table. Resolution seems impossible. And so does getting through dessert without an argument.

The child who is hooked on drugs and the parent who would give anything to see them clean. The finances that always seem to have more month at the end of the money, and even if that’s not an issue, we constantly hear that we won’t have enough to last into retirement or that our retirement funds won’t be there when we get to that stage. How will we survive? The cancer came back and the doctor says there is nothing that can be done this time. All of the treatment options have been exhausted. It’s only a matter of time. Healing is impossible.

I have a friend who was appointed to a small church where, he said, you could literally stick your hand outside the office window and pick corn. He was told the congregation didn’t have much time; basically he was sent there to close it. Turning it around was impossible, he was told. But my friend did something strange. He began to pray for the church. And he gathered others who would pray for the church. That’s not the only thing they did, but it was the most significant and the most impactful. And now, thirty years later, my friend is retired, having only ever served that church as it grew from a handful of people to a congregation of around 1,200. Impossible? Well, let’s let Gabriel have the final word: “Nothing will be impossible with God.”

“When the sky is dark, when our roads come to a dead end, or we run into a brick wall, when time has run out and there’s no tomorrow, that’s when the God of Mary…loves to…show up…” (Willimon 117). And thank God that he did not wait until everything was perfect, until all wars had ended, until there was no more poverty or strife, anger or illness to come to us. Right in the middle of our impossible mess, God showed up in a small, nowhere town in the middle of a backwater province in the Roman Empire (cf. Card, Luke: The Gospel of Amazement, pg. 48). Out of all the people in the world, he chose the most unlikely family to join, a family no one knew, a common laborer and a virgin girl. He entrusted his very self to them and did the impossible. God became a human being. He did not wait until the “perfect time” to come among us. He came when the world was out of joint, when we had no trust in our leaders or our institutions, when we had proven so many times we couldn’t help ourselves. He came into a broken and hurting world, a world not unlike our own, and then he announced the arrival first to the lowest of the low—night-shift shepherds who weren’t even allowed into the synagogue for worship. Angels came to proclaim to them first of all that a baby had been born, that the impossible had become possible, that joy had arrived, and that even they were welcomed into God’s presence (cf. Hamilton, The Journey, pg. 113).

It was not the perfect time, but it was the right time. The Bible calls it “the fullness of time” (Galatians 4:4), and I don’t know exactly what was “full,” but I do know this: we needed him to come. We needed the truth he brought, we needed the light he provided, we needed the hope he gave. And we still do. I don’t know what your “impossible” is this Christmas season, but I do know this: nothing is impossible with God. Jesus “does not wait until you’ve got your life all together and are at a good place, comfortable in your skin, at peace with yourself and all around you, sure in your convictions, steady in your faith, all cleaned up and shiny…He comes anyway because that’s who Christ is” (Wllimon 119). He seems to show up when it’s most impossible. He loves to show up when we most need him, not when we think we’re ready for him. If we wait until we get it all together to allow him into our lives, we will never do so. That’s why Jesus shows up in the midst of our impossible, in the mess and the muck of a manger. If you think what happened in Bethlehem is impossible, wait until you see what happens after his death (cf. Willimon 116)!

And so the angels sing to the shepherds, the shepherds come to find the baby in a manger—can you imagine them asking people all throughout Bethlehem about a baby in a manger? I imagine people giving them strange looks—I mean, come on, who would give birth to a baby in a manger? A manger is a fancy word for a feeding trough. It’s what a family’s animals would eat their food out of. Who in their right mind would put a newborn baby in a manger? So I doubt the shepherds got much help from people in town, but eventually they must have heard a cry and they find the baby they are seeking. They tell Mary and Joseph what they have experienced, and then they go back to their fields, telling everyone else along the way what they have experienced, that the savior of the world has come—undoubtedly to more strange looks, but they no longer cared.

Then it gets quiet in that stable. And Mary, we are told, has time to think, time to ponder in her heart everything that has happened (2:19), time to pray. I imagine, like any mother, she would look at and touch his tiny fingers, count all of his little toes and stare at his precious face. How far he had come to be in that manger that night! God, sleeping in the straw. Miracle of miracles. Mary is no stained glass saint, poker-faced and draped in blue and white as the artwork usually pictures her. No, Mary is an ordinary girl, not more than thirteen years old, who has had her world turned upside down. A lot has happened, maybe more than she could process mentally this night (cf. McKnight, Luke, pg. 35). The song asks, “Mary, did you know?” Yeah, I think she knew. She of all people knew what had happened and why it had happened. She of all people knew now how God specializes in impossible. I don’t think she knew all of what was to come or comprehended all of what it would mean. But I do think she knew that night that something had changed, something in the world had shifted, and things would never, could never be the same again.

This she knew: the impossible had suddenly become possible. Because of Christmas, we know that “God is not distant, aloof, high and lifted up. God is a babe in a manger, the light shining into our darkness” (Willimon 129). God had become a human and nothing was off the table now. For nothing will be impossible with God.

“For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:6). Thanks be to God. Amen.