The Surprise That Keeps Surprising Us
Luke 24:13-35
I suppose no self-respecting pastor would ever admit in a sermon that she or he religiously watched NYPD Blue, let alone that he or she found redemptive moments in the midst of it. So, I don’t know what that says about me!
But in my husband’s former medical practice, every Tuesday night Chip was on call, and so was usually at the office or hospital until late. So between 9 and 10 pm, when I was tired, the kids were in bed, and I was awaiting Chip’s phone call to tell me his estimated time of arrival, more often than not I would find myself in the earthy company of Detectives Sipowitz and Simone. This is not meant to be a promotion of the show; in fact, I realize by some, this may be experienced as a confession of sin! I don’t know what to tell you, except that sometimes truth comes in the most surprising places.
Well, in one Tuesday episode, Detective Sipowitz and his fiancée Sylvia, a
D.A., were in premarital counseling with Sylvia’s Greek Orthodox priest, a man
she had known since childhood. Sipowitz
was only dutifully present; this was not his idea of a good time.
Finally, the
priest, experiencing that the walls were up, asked Sylvia to leave the room so
the priest and Sipowitz could have some time alone.
Then, the priest gently turned to the hardened
To which Sipowitz replied, almost relieved to get it out in the open, “Yes, I think I have.”
Now there was an openness in the room, and they began to deal like real people.
After a brief but frank interchange, the priest got up and walked with the
detective to the door.
“Don’t give up on God,” he said with empathy. “He may not be through with you yet.
Don’t give up on God… God may not be through with you yet.
This is what Jesus came to tell the men on the road to Emmaeus. But Jesus came to tell them with greater certainty than any priest or pastor ever could.
These men were so discouraged. They had been hopeful; they had had a vision of a world that excited them. But what they had seen on the job in the last several days was hard to deal with, and they had lost their faith. Jesus, the prophet they had counted on to fulfill their dreams for Israel, was crucified, killed right before their very eyes. Their moorings had been pulled out from under them. The nerve endings of their faith had been deadened. They were so confused. They thought they had understood, they thought they had it all figured out. Everything had seemed so ordered and on its way, and now it was all out of their hands; everything was out of their control.
They had lost their faith. But God wasn’t through with them yet.
So Jesus, in risen form, comes along beside them, but they can’t see the forest for the trees. They did not expect to see him, so they didn’t. Still, he quietly stays with them on the journey. They don’t seem to know him. But he knows them. And he stays with them, neither forcing them to see who he is, nor leaving them in their desolate place. He listens to them, and he speaks as they are ready to hear. He is not in a hurry. He doesn’t offer a shortcut. As is the habit of God, Christ never seems to think as we do that what fails to get done now will not get done in its own time.
And, yet, Christ is not all self-restraint and patience either. As he walks with them, he is creating something. Even as he waits, he fashions. Finally, they sense that something is happening. The weight is shifting. They are no longer in charge of this conversation. They have given it over to him.
When they invite him into their home, it occurs to them that they are not the
hosts but the guests, and, gently but clearly, in the breaking of the bread, the
Christ makes himself known. The old
vision is given up and a new one is given out.
At one point in their journey, they had lost their faith.
But along the way it became clear… God wasn’t through with them yet.
What happened to them? And can it happen to us?
Well, I believe that what happened to these disciples is that they reached a place of what John Biersdorf calls “holy despair.” It is the despair at the end of ourselves that opens us to something beyond ourselves. It is not fantasy, it is not optimism; it is the facing of reality. It is the surprise that keeps surprising us… That all we planned, that all we dreamed, that all we thought we had managed into a wonderful life is just that: our plans, our dreams, our wonderful life. Even Jimmy Stewart had to learn it! Only God has for us the gift that we need. Only God can surprise us with true grace and power. Because we are only human… And only God can really play God.
But we keep forgetting, and like the disciples on the road, we get used to a
plan, a scheme of things, and we (sometimes unintentionally, but almost always
insidiously) slowly create a god from our own desires.
We are well-intentioned; most of the time we don’t mean to do it.
But we are seduced, sometimes by the “wily serpent”, sometimes by our
own brilliance and creativity; seduced into believing that the gods we have
created are sufficient to save us. The
problem is… they cannot save us from ourselves.
Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow speaks to this issue when he writes:
At
one time theologians argued that the chief purpose of humankind was to glorify
God. Now it would seem that the
logic has been reversed: the chief
purpose of God is to glorify humankind. Spirituality
no longer is true or good because it meets absolute standards of truth or
goodness, but because it helps me get along.
I am the judge of its worth. If
it helps me find a vacant parking space, I know my spirituality is on the right
track. If it leads me into the
wilderness, calling me to face dangers I would rather not deal with at all, then
it is a form of spirituality I am unlikely to choose.
Ouch!
But isn’t it true?
I have been humbled over and over in my life by the smallness of my understanding of God. I find myself being a follower of Jesus Christ and at one and the same time a follower of my own design. Years ago I read a wonderful book by Donald McCullough entitled: The Trivialization of God – The Dangerous Illusion of a Manageable Deity; and the truth of what McCullough says is clear to me. “How easy it is to define authentic spirituality according to my own particular expression of it! And when I do that, I end up with a very different god from the One revealed in Christ, a god whose transcendent objectivity has been pared down to the contours of my subjectivity, a god too trivial to lift me out of myself and beyond the distortions of my flawed experience.”
This is not to say that God is not personal. No! In Jesus Christ God came to be clear that our faith is not just about a series of propositions, but about a personal relationship that transforms our life.
But this personal relationship not only transforms us… It also transcends us.
At one and the same time God is intimate with us and magnificently beyond
us. That is what makes God God…
and us us.
Any god who fits the contours of me will never really transcend me, never really be God. Any God who doesn’t now and then kick the walls out of the prison of my perceptions will be nothing but a trivial god.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t really want a bunch of trivial gods running my life. I want the God of the Universe, the One Creator of the Heavens and the Earth, the Creator of me, to shape and direct me. I want a God who is greater than myself who can call me to my truest self.
Many of you are familiar with C.S. Lewis’ book, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe from the Chronicles of Narnia. In one portion of the book, C.S. Lewis describes the first time the children hear about Aslan, who, for Lewis, symbolizes Christ, the Son of God. Listen:
“Is
– is he a man? asked Lucy.
“Aslan
a man!” said Mr. Beaver sternly. “Certainly
not. I tell you he is the King of
the wood and the son of the great Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea.
Don’t you know who is the King of Beasts?
Aslan is a lion – the Lion, the great Lion.”
“Ooh!”
said Susan. “I’d thought he was
a man. Is he – quite safe?
I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.”
“That
you will, dearie, and no mistake,” said Mrs. Beaver.
“If there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees
knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.”
“Then
he isn’t safe?” said Lucy.
“Safe!” said Mr. Beaver. “Don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King I tell you.”
Like Aslan, God is definitely not safe.
But God is good… God is very, very good.
And only God can bring life from death… because… we are only human, and only God is God. The truth of this bears itself out repeatedly in our lives, and for some reason continually takes us by surprise.
I suspect that you, like I, can look back on life and see so many places where the fondest dream failed to come true and where some of the loveliest gifts of life came quite unexpectedly and unplanned right in the midst of the worst situations. Not that we would welcome or invite any of these worst situations. But when Christ comes into fuller view and the weight of our vision shifts, we are no longer trapped in our own meager plan or our own meager power, but have a Companion who is greater than us to help us see where we are going, to help us see who God really is… and who we really are.
Friday was the 40th Anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, a man who had a very big God and lived in to the bigness of his God with deep trust in what God could do both with him and beyond him. So as I revisited one of Martin Luther King’s sermons on Friday I was stopped in my tracks by a quote that always hits me right between the eyes. King wrote:
You may be 38 years-old, as I happen to be. And one day some great opportunity stands before you and calls you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid… You refuse to do it because you want to live longer… you’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab you or shoot you or bomb your house; so you refuse to take a stand. Well, you may go on living until you are ninety, but you’re just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of Spirit.
I don’t know about you, but I want to be alive everyday that I live. I don’t want to miss God and the richest gifts of life because I was so focused on my plan, my goal, or even my failures, that I just couldn’t see.
Architect Frank Lloyd Wright told how a lecture he received at the age of nine helped set his philosophy of life. An uncle, a solid, no-nonsense type, had taken him for a long walk across a snow-covered field. At the far side, his uncle told him to look back at their 2 sets of tracks.
“See,
my boy, “ he said, “how your footprints go back and forth from those trees,
to the cattle, back to the fence and then over there where you were throwing a
stick? But notice how my path comes
straight across, directly to my goal. You
should never forget this lesson.”
“And
I never did,” Wright would say with a grin.
“I determined right then not to miss most of the good things in life
like my uncle did.”
Dreams, visions, goals are rich and vitalizing to be sure. I have them for my family, for the church, for what I want to do on vacation, for what I may enjoy in retirement.
Hope will always dream. But it is faith in God that enables us to go on hoping even when our dreams turn to dust. Faith that God is with us in life – on the road with us, no matter what comes, taking us to places we didn’t expect; miraculously, graciously bringing forth good from the bad, wisdom out of disaster, deeper love out of shared pain – it enables us to go on really living, really hoping, no matter what comes. We hope then ultimately not in our own visions, not in ourselves, but in God.
Oh, by the way… back to NYPD Blue… I’m with that Greek Orthodox priest. I believe God wasn’t through with Sipowitz. And take it from me; no, better yet, take it from Jesus: God isn’t through with you or me either. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Melanie Hammond Clark
Covenant Presbyterian Church
Racine, Wisconsin
April 6, 2008