Sermon: Surprise!
|
EHCC Home |
Sermon: Surprise! Texts: Luke 1:26-38; 46-55 Date: December 18, 2005
December. Same ol’ same ol’. I don’t know about your family, but in our family we do a lot of the same ol’ things every December. We buy a Christmas tree from the Boy Scouts. We put one of the Fresh Aire Christmas CD’s on the stereo while we unpack the decorations. We make jokes about one of my high school boyfriends, Ted, when we unwrap the ceramic candle ornament he made me 30 years ago. We drink eggnog while we unpack the Santa photos and put them up on the mantle in chronological order. We get together with my Tacoma cousins and make cookies. We arrange the cookies in an aesthetically pleasing manner and serve them, along with copious amounts of cheese, at our Christmas open house. We always find an orange in the toe of our Christmas stockings. We do a lot of the same ol’ things with the church family as well. We light the advent candles. We send the ceramic wise men on a journey around the church. We outfit a few children as sheep who shed cotton balls and a few more as angels and stars who shed tinsel and get all choked up over the Christmas pageant. We round up the youth and troop out to sing Christmas carols at Finch Place and the Winslow Arms and the MARC. We read the same ol’ Bible story on Christmas Eve, and sing the same ol’ “Silent Night” as we stand together in candlelight. We’re just so predictable this time of year, aren’t we? And we would likely be outraged were anyone to suggest that we violate these set patterns or try to do our Advent and Christmas celebrations differently. What if someone proposed that this year instead of decorating a Christmas tree in the living room, you string up a clothesline in the kitchen and hang your ornaments and lights on it, and then for Christmas dinner, you dress all in black and eat hot dogs standing up around the kitchen sink while listening to the Beach Boys “Endless Summer” album? You’d be buying that innovator a one-way ticket to the loony bin. There’s nothing wrong with tradition. Tradition can be a vessel of holiness as the deep meanings behind what we do sink in from our habits to our souls. As Lawrence Hull Stookey writes, “Our Christmas routines are not reprehensible; indeed, much can be said for such established patterns… provided we are not thereby lulled into supposing that God is as predictable as we are. God is dependable but not predictable.”[1] Dependable but not predictable. That reminds me of the way C.S. Lewis wrote about Aslan in the Narnian Chronicles: Aslan the lion was not tame but was good. There’s a difference between being dependable and predictable. Again, in Stookeys’ words, “God’s love, God’s mercy, and God’s justice are dependable. We can rely upon that. But the ways in which those qualities are made manifest to us will vary from time to time. For God meets us according to our present circumstances, not according to ways that served well in the past but may now be obsolete.” God proves to be somewhat unpredictable in the biblical narrative. You could even say that God appears to love surprises. Rainbow, burning bush, stick turns into snake, Surprise! Parting waters, still small voice after the whirlwind, bread falling out of the sky, Surprise! Kid slays giant, lions’ mouths stuck shut, party in a furnace, Surprise! Demons into pigs, dead girl gets up, 12 baskets of leftovers, Surprise! Today’s scene: Angel appears to peasant teenager with a hearty, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you!” Surprise enough for any regular person. But the news that follows, Oh My! “You will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” Surprise! Do you think Mary was surprised? You better believe it. Her wonderment might have had something to do with her unmarried status, but had she been married ten years with the sagging bosom of a mother of six, the essential Surprise! still would have packed a wallop. Because in my opinion, the biological technicality of how Jesus’ conception occurred isn’t nearly as interesting or important as the Surprise! of God’s incarnation through the assent of a perfectly ordinary woman. God was coming into the world through the consent of a person just like you and me. Surprise! met by Yes! When Mary said Yes, do you suppose it was God’s turn to be surprised? I’m not at all a fan of the theological concept of predestination—that idea that everything that is to be is already planned out by God and our job is to fall into step. I think there must have been some uncertainty about what Mary would say to this surprising proposal that she let God into the world through her womb. Frederick Buechner imagines the scene like this: “She struck the angel Gabriel as hardly
old enough to have a child at all, let alone this child, but he’d been
entrusted with a message to give her,
Can you imagine God standing in the wings with bated breath as young Mary considers how to respond? God has sent Gabriel to make this proposal like Cyrano or Myles Standish send messengers to press their suit. The case is made powerfully about God’s ability to do this wonder. But God is all about consent. This is not a divine wham-bam-thankyouma’am. God has to wait for the Yes. I would think God was shaking in those celestial boots, waiting. Because God knows human nature. And the fact of the matter is, we humans don’t much like surprises. Especially when they promise to turn our lives upside down. Little surprises, that’s okay. We like unwrapping surprises under the Christmas tree. Well, some of us do; but some of us aren’t too excited even about those. I have a friend who set off for Silverdale a few days ago with a note in her pocket in her husband’s handwriting that had a very specific request: “a 14.4 volt cordless impact driver kit with free 14.4 volt M. Force driver drill kit and fluorescent light.” He also noted that it was on sale at Home Depot until Friday. I guess she’ll surprise him with the way she wraps it up. Is that the way most of us would prefer our interactions with God to be? No surprises? “Dear God, I’d like my Plantar’s Fasciitis to be healed before ski season is over; please persuade my son to pursue a degree in engineering instead of music performance; and while you’re up, how about a little world peace?” As for our side of the deal, we expect God to ask us to do the usual things: get some extra canned food for Helpline during the food drives at the grocery store, be kind to animals, take the kids to Sunday school, volunteer for worthy causes, give away some of our money, forgive our in-laws, that sort of thing. I think most of us would secretly like God to be not only dependable but also predictable. Not only good but also tame. But, doggone it, God loves surprises. Listen to this poem by Thom M. Shuman titled “Intruder”: every evening it’s the same: put the key in the deadbolt, turn and lock; check the windows; put out the dog; leave a light on…
all those routines to feel safe and fall asleep in peace.
but some night in the midst of my security, you will tip-toe into the house: rearranging the furniture so I will stub my soul when I burst out of my cocooned rest.
cracking the combination of my heart you ransack all my fears and stuff them into your pocket.
then softly whistling “come, thou long-expected Jesus” you slip out leaving the door standing wide open
that I might follow you into the kingdom.
Come, Lord Jesus![2]
God the Intruder can come like a thief
in the night to sidestep all our defenses. Take this true story of a professor
who sat at his desk one evening preparing the next day’s lectures. His
housekeeper had laid that day’s mail and papers at his desk and he began
to shuffle through them, discarding most to the wastebasket. He then noticed
a magazine, which was not even addressed to him but delivered to his office
by mistake. It fell open to an article titled "The Needs of the Congo
Mission". Casually he began to read when he was suddenly consumed
by these words: "The need is great here. We have no one to work the
northern province of Gabon in the central Congo. And it is my prayer as
I write this article that God will lay His hand on one - one on whom,
already, the Master's eyes have been cast - that he or she shall be called
to this place to help us." Professor Albert Schweitzer closed the
magazine and wrote in his diary: "My search is over." He gave
himself to the Congo. After Mary’s Yes, after the story of the Annunciation, we hear the song she sings that sketches out some of the other surprises God has in mind. The song, commonly known as the Magnificat, is cut out of the same cloth as countless prophetic texts in the Bible. It speaks of the powerful being brought down from their thrones, and the lifting up of the lowly. Surprise! It speaks of the hungry being filled with good things and the rich being sent empty away. Surprise! It speaks of God’s mercy being made manifest in accordance with God’s promises. Surprise! That baby Jesus got born, as we know. And yet there are still powerful people ruling unjustly; the lowly haven’t been lifted up, the hungry aren’t filled with good things and the rich are getting richer every day. Same ol’ same ol.’ Nothing new under the sun. What gives? Surprise! God is still waiting, trembling, for some more of us to say Yes. For more of us to say, like Mary, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” For more of us to “stub our souls” on the world’s need. For more of us to allow God to ransack our hearts and carry all our fears away in His pocket. For more of us to follow God out the open door into Her kin-dom. Why not surprise God this year with the gift of yourself?
[1] Stookey, Laurence Hull Preaching: Word and Witness, December 19, 1999, Vol. 00:1, p. 16 [2] Shuman, Thom M. “Intruder” Alive
Now January/February 2006, p. 20-21
|