BE PREPARED FOR GOD’S
SURPRISES
Scriptures: Acts
Matthew 3:13-17
That great 20th century British philosopher, John Lennon, was famously quoted as saying, “Life is what happens when you’re making other plans”. It became something of a catch-phrase for the latter part of the 20th century. Now, I believe that when Lennon penned that thought he was thinking primarily about the wonderful surprises that can come your way just when you think you’ve got things all mapped out. But if you Google the phrase what you come up with – at least initially – are blogs with reports of sudden, unexpected illnesses, misfortunes which cause a young woman to have to return to live with her parents, the break-up of a marriage, a honeymoon that got interrupted by emergency gall bladder surgery. The impression you get from reading these is that people have a positive, interesting, hopeful life all in place -- and then some sort of disaster intrudes. Life, in these instances, is what happens in a negative way when you’ve got positive plans going for you.
Most of us, I would hazard to guess, like to have things well planned out. I’d be willing to bet that nearly every one of us has a 2008 calendar hanging someplace on a wall or residing on a desk. We like that sense of being able to look ahead and mark down what the future holds. I’ve been sharing with you some of our holiday traditions, and something I’ve done for many years now – ever since our children were relatively small – is to give everyone in our family a next-year’s calendar (it sorta became a joke for awhile when we were opening presents – “Oh, here come daddy’s calendars again”), but I think over the years they came to expect them and looked forward to having something they could use for the next year. This Christmas I gave our older daughter, Kira, a 16-month planning calendar with lots of spaces for jotting down “mommy” activities for her two small children. Someone else I know got a large calendar with categories for keeping track of six different people’s schedules, which made this person feel as though she could be well in control of her family’s activities. As she noted, “We need to know what is coming and when in order to navigate life”.
Of course, these days we also have Palm Pilots and Blackberries and PDAs and ever more increasingly technologically sophisticated gadgets to help us keep our lives on track. This past week ABC introduced a new TV series called “Cashmere Mafia”, about four very Alpha-Female executives who even when trying to coordinate romantic relationships are constantly utilizing their small machines and saying things like, “I think I have an opening between 4:00 and 4:10”. Not a life-style any of us would emulate, I don’t think, but even this over-emphasis on planning and scheduling is something that strikes a contemporary chord. I must admit that I never got into the PDA style, preferring to use a cutesy tag-line like, “If God had intended us to use Palm Pilots she never would have invented Day-Timers”, when my colleagues at Faith & Values Media would all pull out their various Personal Digital Assistants (which is what a PDA means) whenever a scheduling question came up. Nevertheless, even carrying a Day-Timer around with you is an indication of the way planning and scheduling governs our lives.
The thing about planning and scheduling is that it assumes a certain amount of fixity and stability. And when we begin to rely too much on things being fixed and in place we become less open to God’s marvelous surprises.
The early church in
Peter’s day was planning some things, too. After Pentecost, Jesus’ followers not only
found themselves in
This last question was
a difficult one since many of the Jews who had become Christians felt that the
Gentiles were unacceptable unless they converted and followed all of the Jewish
laws and customs. Other Christians did
not agree, and felt that Gentiles could become Christians without being
circumcised and following Jewish law. Finally,
these early church leaders met in
Now, this hadn’t
originally been Peter’s plan. At first he
was quite cool to the idea of converting the Gentiles to Christ. What had changed him? He received a vision from the Lord and was
summoned by three men to come to the house of the gentile Cornelius. The vision in which God told Peter that
whatever God makes clean and acceptable is indeed clean and acceptable was not
in Peter’s plans. It catches him by
surprise while he is praying on a roof top. The visit by Cornelius’s two slaves and a
soldier wasn’t in Peter’s plans either. But
God’s Spirit sends Peter on his way, and the mission of the early church is thereby
changed forever.
This is a particularly
good scriptural story for us to have here at the start of a new year and on the
Sunday after Epiphany. A new year is a
time for planning and thinking about the time ahead, but it is also a time to
get opened up to the surprises that could be ahead of us. Just when we think we have everything planned
out and the future is clear – like Peter did – God stirs us up with new vision
or insight. Just when we think we know
what direction our lives will take, God’s Spirit sends us out into lesser-known
territory. In this new year we who
follow Jesus should keep our ears, eyes, and hearts open to where God may be
leading us.
Even when you may think
that you are being led into a detour, God’s surprises have a way of being the
right road after all. Do you remember
the 1995 film “Mr. Holland’s Opus”, with Richard Dreyfuss as Glenn
Holland. His life’s ambition is to be a
classical composer, but circumstances force him to take a job as a high school
music teacher, which leads to tensions with his wife and difficulties relating
to his deaf son. The years pass and somehow
he never quite manages to leave that school where he is having an impact on the
lives of so many students – until on the day he is about to go into a forced
retirement many of those students come back to form an impromptu orchestra and
play the composition that he had been working on throughout all those
years. What looked like it was a detour
in a life that had been well planned turned out to be what God wanted for Glenn
Holland all along.
What makes this a
heart-warming story is that through that concert Glenn was able to know that
the calling which seemed to be a detour was right for him. But we are not always given to know with
certainty that one of God’s surprises is right for us. That’s where faith comes in. We know that God will not ultimately
disappoint us, no matter how much of a curve it looks like we may have been
thrown at the time.
John
the Baptist was certainly thrown a curve in our other scripture passage, which
is Matthew’s version of the baptism of Jesus. This first Sunday after Epiphany
is usually identified as “the baptism of Jesus” Sunday on the church liturgical
calendar, by the way, and so this is our lectionary passage. Here John is the one who is surprised. You can almost hear him: “Whoa.
Wait a minute. I know I’ve been
doing a lot of baptizing here in the
You can also hear the gentleness of Jesus’ response: “Let it be so now.” John thought he had things all nicely planned out: he would get so many hundreds – maybe even thousands – of people to repent, and then he would hand it all over to the one who is coming. But Jesus turns the tables on him. John is going to have a role in the salvation story that he never expected to have – right up to being a martyr for the master he serves. And that master is now asking him to perform a task that marks Jesus as a servant. Then, even more surprising and miraculous: “the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him.” And God identifies Jesus as the Son, the Beloved – the biggest surprise of all.
I
know: we don’t typically have the
heavens open up and the voice of God calling out when surprises happen to
us. For us, I suspect, transformation
takes place in quieter, more subtle ways.
But it can still be transformation – if we are ready to be
open to it and prepared to let God’s surprises lead us where they may.
Jeannette Strandjord tells this story about a friend of hers: “When Betty’s daughter brought a new friend home from college, Betty was delighted. He was a Christian young man; he was bright, kind, faithful, and naturally at ease. In a private moment Betty took her daughter aside to ask if this was a possible boyfriend. Her daughter smiled and hesitated. Betty was wise enough to just wait and listen. ‘Mom, he’s gay,’ her daughter said. All sorts of thoughts raced through Betty’s mind, and her feelings were mixed. Suddenly Betty had a lot of things to think through. During the months that followed Betty and her daughter had many discussions about homosexuality. When Betty’s pastor conducted an evening study group entitled ‘Christianity and Sexuality,’ Betty decided to attend. The class wasn’t always comfortable, but it was always interesting and challenging. Betty’s understanding and faith grew. She never planned for this experience, but the grace of God led her into this new territory.”
What Betty experienced was transformation, even though she might not have called it that, and even though it took place over a period of time. But she was prepared to be surprised, and she was open to the possibility of something new happening to her understanding and her faith.
That wonderful Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann, in his speech to the UCC General Synod last June had this marvelous line: “The world for which you have been so carefully prepared has been taken away from you, by the grace of God.” It is God’s grace that we are talking about when we talk about being prepared for God’s surprises. In Jesus Christ God has come to us so that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins and new life. That’s what God’s grace means, and it is what we receive when we make ourselves open to it. “By the grace of God” means that we don’t have to worry about our carefully prepared and planned schemes. God will, lovingly, smash them all.
Be prepared for God’s surprises. It sounds like a contradiction in terms, doesn’t it? How do you prepare yourself for something that, by definition, takes you unawares? But in a sense, isn’t that what a life lived in faith is all about? Because we trust in God and in God’s Son, we open ourselves up to all kinds of new thoughts and experiences and possibilities. That’s what Betty did when she was presented with a new understanding about relationships. That’s what Peter did when he was confronted with the question of opening up the gospel to the Gentiles. That’s what John did when he was challenged by Jesus coming face-to-face with him and asking him to do something that he couldn’t imagine. And that’s what we can do when we have prepared ourselves to be ready for God to take us by surprise. I hope that you will be ready.
Amen.
Dave Pomeroy
First
Congregational Church, United