Finitum Capax Infinity

It’s hard to believe that we baptized Cecily and Agatha just a week ago today! What an awesome moment that was for our whole community and for the Phillips Calo family who joined us from across the country. As I glowingly reflected back on last Saturday while writing this sermon, it became abundantly clear to me that Cecily and Agatha’s baptisms combined with our communion celebration last week were profound in their timing. We were after all in the fourth and final Saturday of Advent last week, and in that final week of preparation for the impending coming of Christ into our world, their baptisms were a revelation of God finding a home in the finite element of water, and in our communion Christ’s flesh and blood became truly present to us in bread and wine.

And in what simultaneously feels like a lifetime ago and just the blink of an eye, here we are now celebrating Christmas, but still centering on this very same truth that God has been born into our very finite existence. In Latin the term for this is finitum capax infiniti which translates to essentially mean that the finite is capable of containing or receiving or bearing the infinite. This was a central aspect of Martin Luther’s radical incarnational perspective. Essentially, in Christ, heaven and earth have come together into one and so any shadow of cosmic dualism or distance between the finite and infinite is banished by the light of the Christmas gospel. In Jesus, God embraces all creation absolutely and irrevocably.

When Jesus is brought to the temple in today’s Gospel it is Simeon and Anna who recognize and reaffirm what had been already been revealed to Mary through the Angel Gabriel, her Cousin Elizabeth, and through the Shepherds who visited them in Bethlehem, that this baby is the Messiah, our redeemer, and Emmanuel, God with us. This experience of seeing Jesus presented in the temple leads Simeon and Anna to praise and sing.

And our own response this Christmas story is also to praise and sing because Jesus is our sign that God is springing up in all things. As it says in our First reading from Isaiah, “For as the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord GOD will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations.” Because Christ is in all things, all creation springs up with praise with a song like Simeon and Anna’s. Our Psalm today affirms this:

Praise the Lord, sun and moon;
sing praise, all you shining stars.
4Praise the Lord, heaven of heavens,
and you waters above the heavens.
5Let them praise the name of the Lord,
who commanded, and they were created,
6who made them stand fast forever and ever,
giving them a law that shall not pass away.
7Praise the Lord from the earth,
you sea monsters and all deeps;
8fire and hail, snow and fog,
tempestuous wind, doing God’s will;
9mountains and all hills,
fruit trees and all cedars;
10wild beasts and all cattle,
creeping things and flying birds;
11sovereigns of the earth and all peoples,
princes and all rulers of the world;
12young men and maidens,
old and young together.
13Let them praise the name of the Lord,
whose name only is exalted, whose splendor is over earth and heaven.

Thus on this first Saturday of Christmas we join creation in praising God for the birth of Christ on Earth and in all things. Our very own Mark Bangert writes this, “Joining the cosmos, the fog, creeping things, mountains and hills, we praise the Lord God—as it is right to do—and then, at the Spirit’s urging, see that embodied in bread and wine lies the saving and redeeming one who knew all along that Christmas finds its way to Holy Week, where we get to see the full and glorious landscape God is giving in the young child.”

Maybe Holy week seems too far away for us to consider amidst the Christmas high, but consider this, even while they praise and sing, both Simeon and Anna in their own revelation make it clear that Jesus’s birth has changed everything, and that means trouble for, and opposition from those who are happy with the way things are. Simeon says, “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul too.” Anna too, spoke about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.

Rev. Melinda Quivik says this, “These two prophets know what God is about: salvation comes through confrontation. The sign of the Messiah is opposition. There is no resurrection without the crucifixion. There is no unbinding without the binding. That the hard reality of repentance precedes forgiveness tells us plainly that there is no forgiveness where there is no fault.”

Just as God has embraced all things through Christ's earthly incarnation, God is also at work healing, redeeming, and restoring all things. Through baptism and communion, we finite humans intimately receive God’s infinite presence and grace, and we are God bearers for the world. A life of praise is the only appropriate response to such amazing grace and we take our place in joining the hymn of all creation.

Our very beings are capable of containing, receiving, and bearing the infinite. Jesus’ radical incarnation on this earth has brought heaven and earth together as one. Church Father Athanasius provocatively put it, “God became man that man might become God” But this is just it, Jesus’ birth is for all of us a reminder that finite as we may be, we are Christ bearers.

The Apostle Paul says in our second reading from Galatians, “God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts,” so the spirit of Christ not only rests upon us but flows through us like the blood in our veins pumping from our hearts. This spirit flows through us and through all creation as we sing praise to God together.

As hard as it is to believe Cecily and Agatha’s Baptisms were only last week, it’s almost harder to believe that the next time we meet, we will have already welcomed a new year, 2021. So let us take this hinge moment between one of the hardest years in recent memory and what is to come to renew our song of praise joining with Simeon, Anna, Isaiah, the Psalmist, Paul and all creation! And just as Christ was born on Earth in Bethlehem and placed in a manger with the meek and lowly let this be our prayer going into 2021, “Here is a place for you, Lord Jesus. Just as our hands have made it ready, so make our hearts ready to love and to welcome you. Be born again, not in a manger, but in us. Make us your Bethlehem, where God is personal and all things and all people are made new.” Amen