December 14, 2025
Advent 3
O
the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!
How
unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!
“For
who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?”
“Or who has given a gift to him, to receive a gift in return?”
For
from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory
forever. Amen.
We are making our way through the season of Advent by paying attention to the verbs. Careful observers were waiting for today’s two verbs – rejoicing and abounding. Careful listeners did not hear them in the reading of the text. At least, not that text. Not the Romans text.
There is plenty of rejoicing in the reading from Isaiah 35. The prophet is thrilled at the prospect of going home. He speaks in poetry, of course, so his words lack specifics. But the emotion is there. The desert shall rejoice. The crocus shall rejoice. The speechless will sings for joy. Those claimed by God will rejoice. “Everlasting joy shall be upon their heads.” That’s a pretty good promise.
And the abounding is there, too. A stark landscape breaks into blossom. The hot sand burst into green grass. Those who can’t see shall see. Those who can’t hear shall hear. Those who can’t walk shall dance. This is the abundance, the abounding. There is a surprising over-supply beyond what anybody expected.
Many times, the New Testament verb for “abound” points to food. Like loaves and fishes! Church people know about abundance. The quilting group invited me downstairs for lunch on Tuesday. There was a lot of food. Last Sunday’s LIFT luncheon, also downstairs, had too much food. I drove my wife over the mountain to the small church where she plays the organ on Sundays. They were preparing for a Christmas cookie sale. They expected 130 pounds of Christmas cookies. We know about abundance. And it’s more than merely food. God is exceedingly generous.
In the Advent promise, we see extravagance and hear exuberance emanating from the heart of God. Rejoice! Abound! It sounds like a holy protest against the sadness and the meanness that threatens our world. Joy and abundance defy the fear and scarcity that constrict so many people’s lives.
I think of a woman who many of us know. She’s always laughing. No matter what happens, some kind of carbonated holiness infuses our spirit. She is a make-lemonade-out-of-lemons kind of person. Is her life easy? No easier than yours or mine. Is everything going her way? Not at all. Does she sink into a slump from time to time? Everybody does, her included – but she can break into a Christmas carol without notice.
Last time I saw her, she was recounting some health challenges. Suddenly she broke into song, “Joy to the world! The Lord has come. Let earth receive her king! Let every heart prepare him room. Let heaven and nature sing…”
What is astonishing is how to explain people like that. Are they in denial? No, not really. They know what kind of world this is. Are they avoiding tough conversations? No, they are well aware of the issues. Are they trying to change the conversation? Well, maybe. Maybe something else has happened to them.
There’s that moment the Grinch
steals Christmas from the Whos down in Whoville. He leans to listen to their
wailing on Christmas morning after he has stolen all their presents. You
remember what happens. He hears them break into song, a happy song, a joyful
song. Then, as Dr. Suess tells us,
And
the Grinch, with his grinch-feet ice-cold in the snow,
Stood
puzzling and puzzling: "How could it be so?
It
came without ribbons! It came without tags!"
It
came without packages, boxes or bags!"
And
he puzzled three hours, `till his puzzler was sore.
Then
the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before!
“Maybe
Christmas," he thought, "doesn't come from a store."
“Maybe Christmas...perhaps...means a little bit more!"
(Theodor Seuss Geisel, How the Grinch Stole Christmas (New York: Random House, 1957)
Yes, yes. This is the secret. This is the Mystery. And we name it as the coming of God into this world. That God is not absent. God is not indifferent. God may be quiet and exceedingly subtle – yet God is coming. And everything will be infused with unexpected joy and abundance.
So, we circle back to what we heard today from the apostle Paul. It comes from his letter to the Romans. This is the thickest book in our Bible. Not the longest in terms of pages, but the thickest. The heaviest. The most profound. Paul is laying out the entire work of God in human history. He is swimming in very deep water. At the end of chapter eleven, he suddenly breaks into song:
O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of
God!
How unsearchable are God’s judgments! How inscrutable God’s ways!
Now, he is interrupting himself. He has just spent three entire chapters wrestling with a thorny spiritual problem. Jesus the Messiah has come, but many of his own people do not believe in him. Paul is a Jew and he agonizes over the unbelief of so many of his spiritual family. Some of you know what this is like. Maybe your kids graduated from confirmation class and never came back. He is struggling to make sense of this. He knows God loves every one of them, that God will not abandon any one of them, that God will not revoke his call upon their lives. Then, without warning, comes the song: “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!”
Why is he interrupting himself with praise, especially here? Well, it’s a habit. He has done it before.
- Back in chapter one, Paul wrote about those who live without the Bible or any knowledge of Christ. He interrupts himself with another burst of praise to “the Creator who is blessed forever. Amen.”[1]
- In chapter nine, as he
anguishes about the rejection of the Messiah, he does it again, interjecting,
“the Christ, who is over all, God blessed forever. Amen.”[2]
- And then, one more time, at
the very end of this letter, he sings once again, “to the only wise God,
through Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory forever! Amen.”[3]
Paul can’t seem to speak about God without praising God. He knows his words, his reasoning, his thinking only goes so far. God is greater than our understanding. God’s grace is more abundant than we can comprehend. No matter much we think we know about God, God is bigger. God is greater. And this holy and inscrutable God is infinitely inclined toward loving all of us. God is going to take in the world for repairs. That’s the Mystery.
To strengthen his doxology, Paul paraphrases two verses from his Hebrew Bible. The first, from Isaiah, chapter 40: “For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?”[4] God is beyond our comprehension. No one is going to tell God what to do. The best we can do is line up with those things that God cares about. And it takes a good bit of discernment to figure out what they are.
The second verse comes from the end of the book of Job. God says to Job, “Who has given a gift to him, to receive a gift in return?”[5] In other words, life is not a transaction. Life is a gift, a whole lot of gifts, an abundance of gifts. And God is infinitely more generous than we could ever expect or deserve. So, rather than explain God, Paul bursts into song. He rejoices because God’s love abounds.
Now, are you feeling the same way? Maybe, maybe not. Paul was an unusual character, after all. Once when he was in prison, he rattled his tin cup against the iron bars. Then he exclaimed, “Rejoice in the Lord always! Again, I will say rejoice!”[6] How could he rejoice in those circumstances? Because he knew there are things worse than sitting in a prison. He had his life. He had his hope. He had his friends. He had his knowledge of the scriptures. More than that, God had him – a God so gracious that he couldn’t even comprehend it.
What we learn from Paul is something about the true nature of joy. Joy doesn’t depend on our circumstances. Happiness usually does; someone or something can make us happy. Happiness comes and goes. But the grounds for our joy don’t depend on us or anybody else. Joy is that spiritual essence that carries us through. It is rooted in the truth that we are divinely loved, that our purpose is to love in return, and, as Paul says elsewhere in this letter, the knowledge that “nothing shall ever separate us from the love of God.”[7] Nothing at all.
A second lesson about joy is that we don’t have to understand everything there is to know about God – and that’s OK. Trained as a Bible scholar, the apostle Paul sings out, “There is so much that I don’t understand. The fullness of God is incomprehensible.” There is so much more wisdom to pursue, so much more knowledge to grasp, so much more love to learn and practice. Even then, we cannot apprehend it all. We probably never will. But God apprehends us – and God comes to us in Jesus Christ. It’s something we could never demand or deserve. We can only receive the gift – and we can do so with open arms and open hearts.
So, in a dark world, we sing. We have seen enough of the light to know the darkness does not win. Darkness did not win over Jesus, and it will not win over us. And we live as fragile beings in a world of trouble, yet we are living - and fully alive - because the God of life has breathed life into us. And we pray for eyes to see the same abundance that the prophets could see: streams of water in the wilderness, sight and speech restored, hope renewed, and God approaching us on the holy highway.
And to take a cue from Paul, none of us have to pretend to be experts in the ways of faith. The Messiah does not come when we attain enough knowledge, comprehension, or even faithfulness - as important as those things are. The Messiah comes solely on the generosity of God. Rejoice, O people of God. Out of the abundance of God’s mercy, our Savior is at hand. He claims us as his own.
For what does the Bible say? “From God
and through God and to God are all things. To God be the glory forever. Amen.”
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