“He sends his
command to the earth; his word runs swiftly.”
It’s interesting to speculate that somewhere (on high? —who
knows?) God is seated on some divine aeron chair before a control panel and a vast
wall of innumerable video screens, a celestial Situation Room.
The place is wired, so there’s no need of microphone, but
God (who I can’t really imagine anyway) is sitting there scanning the prayers
of the world—“please let Ben Smith’s Grandma live until his birthday,” “please get
some money to the people in that fire in Williamsburg,” “good night!—please steer
that tsunami into the ocean,” and, “hey, Notre Dame needs a field goal, bad.” That's just the prayers in English.
Our imaginations can’t create a digital wall spacious
enough to hold 6.6 billion screens—and that number isn’t counting this world’s
sparrows, or crows, or seagulls, or, for that matter, the broad and blank
wilderness places, landscapes totally without people. Somewhere there’s got to
be a heavenly IMAX theater equipped with surround sound. “Somewhere?” Does it
have to be someplace real?
Boggles the mind.
Even if I could imagine something that huge, I can’t imagine
a world without time. After all, he can’t see all six billion screens in a nano
second; there’s got to be some lag time between interventions, right? He can’t simultaneously
handle Emperor penguins and the woman whose dad just died in Fiji. He can’t see
everything, for pete’s sake.
Yes, he can. He’s God.
His son saved us. His son pulled on an unremarkable suit of ordinary
human flesh and settled in among us to be our savior. It’s almost Christmas
again, and the tree is up, the downtown mall blasting carols to sweeten holiday
shoppers. Creches appear all over, and
one of the local churches is having, again, its own live Nativity.
Today, I’m guessing, some proud parents are worried about their
five-year-old remembering her Bible verse in the Sunday School program tonight or
hoping their little boy doesn’t just take off running.
God’s son came for us, scalps and souls. This time of year, we
have pictures of the Son galore, thousands of images of the incarnate Lord in
shopping centers, millions of baby dolls in all those Christmas programs and
nativity scenes, a live one in the live manger show down the block.
Maybe he gave us too much at Christmas. Maybe this time of
year especially, we think we know him when we see that darling baby in a crib.
Maybe all this business about the Word-made-flesh prompts us to create our own
silly images of God, like the Psalmist here, who pictures the Creator of Heaven
and Earth as if he were a dispatch officer, in headphones, on far end of our
911 calls. He’s God, the one-and-only I AM, not only to us but to every last
thing, and even things that aren’t things, the whole blooming cosmos, including
planets and galactical systems we’ve not yet spied. He’s there too.
Imagine that.
He’s everywhere.
I can’t.
And so I praise him, like the psalmist, in the only words I
know, in the only shapes I can conjure, with only pictures I’m capable of
imagining. And there he is, in that aeron chair, instant-messaging his blessed,
divine imperatives to all the world.
This baby in a barn. This baby in a manger.
Amazing.
Praise his name.
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