Texts: Isaiah 40: 1-5; Luke 1: 26-37

Mary, Gabriel, and the Blessings of Confusion[1]

            Most every morning, I get up early, and when it’s still dark, I leave the parsonage and begin running.  As soon as it’s light enough to see, I step onto the forest trail at the end of Library Lane, and I run a circuit that brings me back to the house just in time to help the kids get to school on time.  I know every inch of those forest paths.  I know where to avoid roots that have tripped me up in the past.  Almost thoughtlessly, my feet can find a footing on stones placed in small streams.  It’s so ingrained in me that I rarely see the forest or the path anymore.  But then invariably, a root or a rock I hadn’t otherwise noticed gets in my way – I stumble and catch myself, startled back into awareness of the landscape around me. 

            For many of us, the Christmas narratives are a little like that forest trail.  They’re well worn pathways that most of us have traveled many times.  They’re lovely.  They’re familiar and comforting.  But there are few surprises left in them.  Wherever our feet may land in those old texts, they do so with the assurance of having landed in the same way dozens of times before.  Until something snags our feet, sending us stumbling.

            That happened to me this past week when I returned to Luke’s Advent narrative.  There were all the familiar steps along the path – Zechariah and Elizabeth, Mary and Joseph, angels and shepherds.  But then a phrase I had read a hundred times before leapt out at me, like a rock on the trail, startling me back into awareness.  When Mary is told that she will bear divinity into the world, she gives voice to a question: how can this be?

Christmas, it would seem, begins in a moment of confusion.  Indeed, the entire story of Jesus, and the good news that Luke is concerned to announce, starts in a moment of bewilderment and perplexity.  Faith begins with a question, one that the angel never bothers to answer.

Imagine Mary’s question, then, as a stone placed along a well-worn path, one that sends us tumbling.  We pick ourselves up, but then we pick up the stone as well, to examine it.  I imagine it as translucent, but with uneven surfaces, like a crystal.  Light shines through it and then refracts in several directions all at once.  And so what I’d like to do in the coming moments is to turn that stone, that question, over and over, examining its surfaces, noticing how light passes through it first from one angle, and then another, and then another still.  I’ll make several turns or shifts, but they all pertain to that richly suggestive question, “how can this be?”  I’ve come to understand that question as opening toward a spirituality of blessed confusion, where uncertainty and a lack of clarity are the preconditions of our growth as human beings.  Most of all, however, inhabiting the fullness of Mary’s question might open us toward prayer, a possibility I sensed on Wednesday night in the quiet and beauty of what we called the “Blue Christmas” service.

            Before going any further, let me address a lingering worry.  Not all confusion is a blessed confusion.  Not all confusion deserves to be lauded or celebrated.  Sometimes Babel is more than an old story found in Genesis.  It is, at times, an accurate description of the world, in which individuals and groups speak past each other without listening, and without understanding.  An inability to comprehend another – is that not the essence of confusion?  And is that not what faith seeks to prevent, and overcome?  “God is not a God of confusion, but of peace,” the Apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthian church, filled as it was with warring factions.  Ignorance, misinformation, lies, prevarications – those are forms of confusion that Christian faith rightly warns against.

            But there is another kind of confusion that Mary’s question opens before us, what I’m calling a blessed confusion.  She doesn’t contradict the angel – she doesn’t say “this can’t be, or won’t be, or must not be.”  Her question is, rather, “how?”  Hers is a confusion, in other words, that is inquisitive, curious, and open.  It’s a confusion that’s alive to the possibility that there is that within the world that eludes her comprehension and mastery.  It’s a confusion that suggests an openness to mystery, to the possibility that one’s outlook or one’s very life can be reshuffled toward a greater sense of truth or purpose.  Confusion might be the very substance from which the most important revelations of life emerge.

            I wonder how many of us have had an experience of blessed confusion.  That’s the first of my prismatic angles: all the ordinary moments of confusion or uncertainty we each of us face across our years.  It can feel scary and awkward when we’re in the midst of it, but it might also be a sign that we’re on the verge of a significant breakthrough in our lives.  That’s certainly been true for me.  As a parent, I’ve often been more than a little perplexed about how to respond to each new stage of development in my kids, including what each of those stages has meant for my own identity.  It was especially pronounced in the earliest years of our family, as we added first one child, and then another, and then – surprise! – yet another.  Rachael and I had a vision of the future, one that felt right in the abstract.  But it didn’t match the feelings of exhaustion, and loneliness, and frustration that I often felt in the moment.  Sometimes I simply felt confused, as the gap widened between my own desires and the requirements of the moment.  It was uncomfortable, but I would say that the confusion was productive.  It allowed me to learn some things that I needed to learn, about patience and commitment, and to become something that I couldn’t become all at once.  The confusion of “how can this be?” was a sign of growth.

            There’s an analogue for that state of necessary and enabling confusion in the sciences.[2]  Here comes another prismatic angle.  Just before enrolling in divinity school, I read a book that has stayed with me ever since.  It was called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by a historian of science named Thomas Kuhn.  Kuhn argued that scientific knowledge doesn’t proceed in a linear fashion, progressing from ignorance to greater knowledge.  Instead, in every moment of history, particular paradigms predominate that adequately explain certain physical phenomena.  Those paradigms are ways of seeing and knowing that guide research.  But they also wind up impeding those same researchers, preventing them from accounting for anomalies in the paradigm.  Researchers overlook the data that doesn’t fit.

Now and then, however, a few brave souls have lingered with the data that doesn’t fit.  They permit themselves to be confused.  When Copernicus challenged the Ptolemaic view of the universe, he was seeking to account for anomalies in the data that no one else could see.  It was a moment of blessed, and productive, confusion.  When Galileo challenged the Aristotelian physics of motion, he was building a new thought pathway to account for data that didn’t fit the earlier paradigm.  It was another moment of blessed, productive, confusion.  When Nils Bohr challenged the classical model of subatomic particles with his quantum model, he was doing the same, introducing a moment of confusion that ushered in an entirely new understanding.  Most scientists spend their lives solving puzzles within previously existing paradigms.  But a few allow themselves to become confused by what they encounter in their research.  Sometimes, that question, “how can this be?” leads to whole new ways of seeing and knowing.

Those examples suggest how painful confusion can be.  When we’re confused, having to learn new skills or new relational patterns, to say nothing of building a new worldview, our brain circuitry is literally being rewired.  Research has shown that whole new neural pathways are being created to allow our bodies and our minds to adapt to the new reality.  No wonder some people lash out in anger or frustration during moments of confusion.  No wonder change and difference can be so painful for some people.  There’s a whole chemical and neurological story occurring underneath it all, suggesting just how hard it is to live into a new and confusing reality.  But remaining open to the possibilities inherent in confusion just might be the source of our most productive growth.

What I’m talking about has obvious implications for the cultural moment we’re living through just now.  The complexity of a pluralistic world has led some to beat a hasty retreat into older, narrower, more tribal paradigms.  But in truth, that’s not the place I would have us land just now.  Instead, I would have us consider what Mary’s question might imply about our spiritual lives, and especially about our ability to pray.  Which leads to yet another view through that prismatic lens.

            I won’t ask for a show of hands, but I suspect that “How can this be?” is a question that many of us ask somewhere deep in our hearts most every Sunday.  I suspect it represents some small part within each of us that feels dubious every time we speak a call to worship, whenever we address a prayer to a Someone we call “Go