“But when the fullness of time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.”

Galatians 4:4-5

Dr. Paul Tournier, the eminent Swiss physician and psychiatrist, has demonstrated that the universal human interest in secrets – having secrets, keeping secrets, sharing secrets – is something more than mere curiosity.  He is convinced that nothing less than the development of every personality hinges upon a wholesome handling of secrets.

Dr. Tournier shows that it is only by our being free to have our own secret, however small or insignificant, that we become individuals and have any separate reality from the family or tribe.  “Parents who deprive their older children of their private life prevent them from becoming individuals.  The right to secrecy is a fundamental prerogative of the individual.”  Some parents who pry ruthlessly are like totalitarian tyrants.  “Respect for the individual is an absolute requirement.  Either we have the sense of it and keep it scrupulously, or else we have started down the dangerous road of tyranny.  If keeping a secret is the first step in the formation of the individual, telling it to a freely chosen confidant is going to constitute the second step in the formation of the individual. . . By opening up – by telling one’s secrets – but freely – one becomes personally linked with those to whom he or she reveals them – and becomes a person thereby. (Tournier)

Our supreme level of personality development is reached when we begin to share our secret selves in openness and honesty with Eternal God, making confession of this inner world of reality, known only to ourselves, to the supreme Spirit of the universe.

It is extremely interesting to compare Dr. Tournier’s handling of the crucial importance of secrets in the development of human personality with the Biblical presentation of the crucial importance of God’s secrets, held and shared, in the development of both human personality and the unfolding of history.

This is what the Bible is all about – God’s sharing His secrets with people.  We speak of the scriptures as “a revelation of God.”  By this we mean that the Bible contains the story of how God has revealed Himself through sharing, with chosen confidants, his secrets about His nature and His purpose.

The Scriptures state that this secret sharing by God takes place always when He and His confidants are ready as the Old Biblical expression puts it, “in the fullness of time,” or when the time is ripe.

And in this give and take keeping and sharing of His secrets God has been bringing to full development, not only His revealing of Himself, not only human personality into the full and more glorious image of what He intends each person to be, but also what He has destined the community, or society of human beings to become.  To the Ephesians, St. Paul wrote: “God has made known to us His hidden secret – such was His will and pleasure, determined beforehand in Christ – to be put into effect when the time was ripe; namely that the universe, all in heaven and earth, might be brought into a unity in Christ.” (Ephesians 1:9-10 NEB)

There is no more classical illustration of this whole process of God’s self-revelation through sharing His secrets with His chosen confidants than St. Luke’s account of the Annunciation, which we read this morning.  To an engaged, but not yet married, Jewish maiden named Mary, an unprecedented disclosure is made: she is to become the mother of the Son of God.  To Mary, this is an astonishing, unbelievable idea.  “How can these things be?” asks Mary.  “I’m not even married.”

Mary, like all humanity, expected everything to follow the same sequence with which people have become accustomed.  In a baby’s birth it is: co-habitation, conception, pregnancy, labor pains, then birth.  Just as in feeding bread to the people of the world there is plowing, planting, watering, sunshine, cultivation, fertilization, and then harvest.

But the angelic answer to Mary’s incredulity is: “The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore, also, that holy thing that shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.”

God brings His secret purposes to light when the time is right, and to the prepared and proper persons, though the sequence or order may seem strange at the time.   Later, in the perspective of history and the greater understanding of the nature of God, it will all seem reasonable and right enough.

Some of our modern theologians, who hail the secularization of all life in our contemporary world as a great boon to mankind, tell us that we have been delivered from the ancient and mistaken belief that we live in a three-storied universe: Heaven – “up there,” earth – “around here,”, and hell – “down there” in the dark and dreary basement of the universe.  Some have insisted that to think of God and heaven as being “up there” is a very mistaken and even untenable idea in the space age.  Well, in a measure they are right, but to confine all reality to this age, this world, is to depart completely from the Biblical understanding of reality.

The three-story concept of the universe in the minds of the Biblical writers is not the essential truth they are conveying, but rather their insistent declaration that there is an eternal order above and beyond (and under-girding) this temporal order, and that the eternal is always pressing in, and is, now and then, breaking through, as God shares His secrets with His chosen confidants.

It is not just Mary at the Annunciation, who is chosen to share God’s secret of what He is about to do, but Jacob at Bethel, Moses before the Burning Bush and at Sinai, Paul on the road to Damascus, Peter and James and John on the Mount of Transfiguration, and on and on and on.

This is the Biblical faith.  This is the Advent Philosophy of History.  Namely: that God comes to men and women from beyond and above this world, always in the fullness of time (God’s time, not man’s time), to share His secrets for the transformation and redemption of themselves and their society.

But see what living with this Advent faith that God shares His secrets with people ought to mean for us:

First, it surely will mean living with an awareness, a lively expectancy, that the transformation of personality and the change in the flow of history will always begin with the inner spiritual experience with the shared secret of God.

The atomic age was not born with the flash of blinding light over Hiroshima but with the dawning of the idea of the theory of relativity in the mind of Albert Einstein.  The Protestant Reformation with its massive changes in human lives individually, its sweep of the cultural life of the western world into fresh channels, its thrust into the industrial revolution, began not with Martin Luther’s brave act of mailing the ninety-odd theses to the door of the Wittenberg Church, but with Luther’s being chosen to share God’s secret, then ripe for revealing, that the just shall live by faith alone.

Second, living by this Advent faith will certainly mean for us responding in trust and obedience to God’s secret shared with us.  Mary, though astonished at the disclosure of the unbelievable secret of God to her, and overwhelmed at the notion that she should be chosen, responded: “Be it unto me according to Thy word.”

Without Mary’s willing obedience the incarnation would not have been accomplished.  God’s secret must be shared by people, not only in the sense of belief but also in the sense of obedience, or the Advent of the Eternal into the temporal will never transpire.

St. Paul knew how the secular Roman world pressed in on those new converts to Christianity at the capitol city of the Empire.   He knew the Roman world would never be taken for Christ unless they shared God’s secret to the point of offering themselves as the available, obedient instruments of God’s secret purpose.  Therefore, he wrote: “Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into it’s mould, but let God remold your minds from within, so that you may prove in practice that the plan of God for you is good, meets all his demands, and moves toward the goal of true maturity.” (Romans 12:2 – J. B. Phillips Translation)

So, let our Advent Season be one of sober but joyful anticipation of something great about to happen, but not anticipation only of the wondrous secret God may be about to share with us, but also anticipation of our active share in the adventures of that secret revealed, that we, like the shepherds in W.H. Auden’s poem, may say when we arrive at the Christ child’s manger: “Here and now our endless journey starts.” Not — “ends,” but “starts.”