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"Expect the Unexpected"
Pr. Paul Swartz - December 1 & 2, 2007
The trouble with ordinariness is . . . is . . . is . . . well — is that it is so ordinary!
On the one hand, of course, the ordinariness of life is very helpful, for it keeps us from stressing out under changes and unexpected turns that so quickly and easily twist life into utter turmoil. We thrive under ordinariness, for we know very well what to expect day after day. Oh, we all know that unusual things can interrupt this flow of ordinariness . . . sometimes caused by our own actions, good or bad, and sometimes caused by forces outside ourselves over which we have little or no control . . . but when this ordinariness of life fails for one reason or another we become very troubled and we are highly relieved when the confusion and bewilderment pass and we can return to our ordinary life. Ordinariness can be troublesome, however, when it suggests that the way things are ordinarily is the way things should always be. Because it gives us such a high level of comfort, it is quickly accepted as the norm.
That’s the way it was “in the days before the flood” when “people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage . . . and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them away.” Although those around Noah must have been impressed – undoubtedly in a very derisive way, of course – with the strange activity in which Noah was engaged, they saw nothing to compel them to deviate from the ordinary course of their lives. Even Noah’s words, both explaining what he was about and warning them against what was soon to happen, meant nothing to them. There was no reason to think that the comfortable ordinariness in which they were engaged would be disturbed. They only saw a madman foolishly ranting and raving!
There, however, is where we see the problem with ordinariness. It hides from our eyes other possibilities – and particularly the possibilities that God proposes! For God is not especially interested in letting things be as they are, for they are far too distant from what He made them to be or for what they can be when He steps in. God gets mixed into the ordinariness of life in most unexpected ways . . . and that is always disturbing in one way or another! He keeps pressing on the world to look beyond the ordinary, to move into extraordinary ways and have extraordinary visions.
Isaiah presses for seeing beyond the ordinary in the First Lesson for today. God’s will is moving toward new ways for the world. “In the last days . . . “ Ah, what a vision of what is yet to come! . . . when God steps in and ends the ordinary course of human events . . . then “they will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks!” This will be the work of God, for humans are too caught up in their own limited plans and visions. They are stuck in self-seeking ways devoted to preserving the status quo and control that have proved futile in the past and have no promise of anything other than futility in the future. But God . . . yes, God . . . can break the old apart and bring the new to pass. Unless one expects the unexpected, one will never catch this vision . . . nor will one be able to live beyond the ordinariness of the present.
"That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of man,” we read in the Gospel. “Two men will be in the field, one will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left.” God will dip down into the ordinary activities of working in the field and grinding at the hand mill, and the unexpected coming of the Lord will cause a great separation between those expectantly waiting for His coming and those whose lives have been so caught up in the ordinariness of life that they see no reason to expect anything other than the ordinary. That is what it will be like when the Son of Man comes. “Who will He find waiting for Him?” Jesus is asking.
Is there not a similarity at this point with that momentous event toward which we are now pointing as we begin this Advent season? Where was the tension, the expectation, the hope for that which came to the stall of Bethlehem? Mary is puzzled when her ordinary life is so astonishingly interrupted by a messenger of God. Joseph hasn’t an inkling of what is happening until God breaks into his sleep. The shepherds are surprised in the midst of their ordinary activity to hear that something had unexpectedly broken upon the earth. When inquiry is made about this event in Jerusalem by the Magi, nobody is aware of anything having happened. Life had been going on quite as usual, and anything as extraordinary as that of which the Magi spoke seemed quite unlikely. Still, Herod admittedly wondered if perhaps there was more to this than met the eye. He didn’t expect the unexpected, but if the unexpected had happened, he was determined to reduce it back again to the ordinary course of events he had in mind.
Nobody expected anything unexpected, and neither are we normally given to expect the unexpected on the daily level of our existence. Yet, all of a sudden . . . there it was! And . . . there it is!
She had been hit with a terrible crisis that seemed totally to devastate her, even though hers was a crisis that was not that unusual. Her husband died at 52. His death seemed to take a peculiarly high toll upon her. For days after the funeral she could not eat, sleep, or function. A doctor told her she was in the grip of “psychotic grief,” deep grief that is a sort of sickness.
“Poor thing,” noted an older woman in the congregation, “it’s not only that a husband had died, it’s that her husband has died.”
I asked her to explain. “Marilyn always kept the perfect house, had perfect children, a perfect life. Unfortunately, life isn’t perfect. Now she knows. She thought she had everything under control.
”Wasn’t that part of the depth of our collective trauma a few years ago when, on a New York morning in September, the towers fell? A nation with the most secure borders, the largest army, the biggest economy was no longer in control. And we are a people who greatly value control. Through science and technology, through our expanding knowledge of the way the world works, we have learned to work the world, or so it seems. So we have quality control, and birth control, climate control. Having been so successful, controlling so much of the world, we just quite naturally tend to think that given enough research, enough effort, we shall be in control of everything.
Septemeber 11th came like a thief in the night and revealed that we were not in control. And truth to tell, we are not in control! I’m only a heartbeat away from crisis. This world, my world, that today seems so together, so ordinary, so safe and secure, is not as substantial as it seems.
The prophet speaks out of the rubble of a dashed world, the dust of failed dreams, and dares to see a new world being born, a world re-created by God to resemble the world God wants.
How different is this God who comes, comes at the point where we are not in charge, to take charge. In the modern, ordinary world where we are allegedly in control, we don’t want too much of a God. And most of us, therefore, don’t get much of a God. But oh, when we discover we’re not in control, when things are beyond our control, who do we turn to? (And perhaps we should ask ourselves why we turn to God at those times? Could it be that we want God to restore things so we can be back in control?)
Jesus tells us to be awake, to wake up, to expect the unexpected, lest this “thief in the night” catches us sleeping. Advent is an invitation to wake up, to open our eyes, to get beyond the ordinary, to be open to our Lord’s comings, to His urgings, promptings, interventions, and to expect the unexpected as we give way to a new world He seeks to create through us.
Maybe all of life is a long process of honestly admitting that we are not in control, and then praying for the grace to let God be in control. Maybe that’s what real faith is: a willingness to let God be Creator, a yearning to let the Creator finish what was begun in creation. The world is not in our hands, thank God And yet, to be honest, we have to admit that there is a certain “hiddenness” about God’s intervention, for this most extraordinary and unexpected event we are preparing for was concealed in an infant . . . a most ordinary child to all who viewed him. At first one could only see what was ordinarily expected of human births . . . a baby-boy born to a most ordinary young woman. One would have to follow Him, to listen to Him, to watch an unfolding course of events to even begin to recognize what an extraordinary Person this was. The work of God was wrapped up in this extra-ordinary Man and concealed even on a cross. And what about the waters poured at Baptism and the bread and wine received regularly at the Lord’s Table? Is there not an ordinariness there also that, to the casual eye, means little other than water we use to wash dishes or the bread and wine that make a dinner table delightful?
When one expects nothing other than that, to be sure, that is all there will be to the viewer. But when we hear Jesus speak to us and say that hidden there within the water and bread and wine He is present for us, we believe and know that this is the washing of grace, the bread of heaven, the cup of salvation. To expect the unexpected here is to receive life and hope and a new vision of what our lives can be by the blessing of God.
An important thing about the text that opens to us the secret of the Advent season is this: Jesus never speaks of us going anywhere! We are simply there. We are just waiting. The action is on His part. He is coming to us. That, after all, is what advent means . . . He comes! Five times in today’s Gospel reading a form of “come” is found. Advent is a time of waiting . . . but not just waiting aimlessly. It is a waiting expectantly, a waiting for a word to be fulfilled, a waiting for something beyond our imagination or our dreams, a waiting for the unexpected that will surprise us! He only asks us to expect Him to do what He sees necessary to do . . . and then to receive what He does with thanksgiving.
“Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come.” Just know that He will come unexpectedly like a thief in the night “at an hour when you do not expect him.”
That is why Paul writes to the Romans, as we hear in the Second Lesson: “The hour has come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed." Those who wait for the Lord, who expect the unexpected, know that they are to keep their lives in order. “Let us behave decently, as in the daytime,” Paul says. “Clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the sinful nature.” People who wait for the Lord conduct themselves as though the Lord will appear at any time. That is what it means to “keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come.”
It is amazing how “expecting the unexpected” changes the ordinariness of life into a perpetual flutter of hope. It lightens the darkness. It breaks apart the chains of sin and death with a lively life that leaps for joy! For it knows that the ordinariness with which we are surrounded every day is not the last word. It is not a binding word. Into it and around it and through it there is a God who has transformed this ordinariness into an unexpected extraordinariness. A Child who will be His means of changing the world is at hand! And God asks us to be living birth announcements of Him through whom God is bringing a totally new thing to pass upon the face of the earth! “Keep watch!” Wait and see what God has done – will do – is doing!
Our lives cry out to the world, “Expect the unexpected!” For we have seen the unexpected and we can hardly contain ourselves for joy and gladness!
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