No Surprise There

Can't believe I never posted this!  I'm in the midst of working on a new sermon as we speak, and I went back to look this over when I realized that only a small handful of people got to hear it at the sunrise service last year at Marsh Chapel on Easter morning. 

I wrote this in response to Matt Schmidt's sermon about being surprised by Christ.  It was a fun little point-counterpoint thing.

Enjoy.

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There is truth in fiction.  In the novel Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett, a prophet enters a cave to encounter the divine, and following his revelation, emerges from the cave a new man, telling his young disciple of the wisdom bestowed upon him:  “There is in truth no past, only a memory of the past.  Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them.  Therefore the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise.  The only appropriate state of the heart is joy.  The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now.  Be glad of it.”  My associate Matt has told you that we ought to be surprised by Jesus Christ, and he is absolutely right.  I say this to preface the rest of my sermon, so that it doesn’t sound like I am outright disagreeing with him.

You see, we serve a Lord of paradox.  The Creator God comes to earth in the form of a carpenter’s son, born in a stable surrounded by livestock.  As a kid, he ditches his parents, like any good delinquent youth, only to go to the temple and school some learned scholars.  His closest allies and disciples were everyday joes, fishermen, tax collectors, etc., and his greatest antagonists the scribes and Pharisees.  He heals afflictions in plain sight, yet in other accounts, he pulls the Messianic Secret card, asking that they tell no one.  He rides into Jerusalem like a king, but replaces key elements with a donkey and palm leaves.  The Messiah himself is willingly put to death in the most shameful way possible.  In his final moments, he grants entry into paradise to a common thief. 

What I’m getting at is that Jesus was unpredictable, enigmatic, confusing.  One of my all-time favorite books, Lamb, tells the story of Jesus’ life from the point of view of his fictional best friend, Biff.  In one particular scene, Jesus is trying to help the disciples understand what it is he’s always going on about, and in a fit of frustration starts talking about coins and sheep and mustard seeds.  And the disciples, thick as mud, just don’t seem to get it.  We see this throughout the gospels as well – Jesus says something and the disciples have no clue what he means or, worse, are too afraid to ask him to clarify.

But hindsight is 20/20, right?  Jesus warned he would die, and so he did.  And he promised he would come back, and he did.  Surely they must get it now!  As we see in our reading from Acts today, Peter is attempting to put the pieces together, but what we don’t see is the rest of the story.  He is preaching to a group of Gentiles following a vision a few days before, in which God tries to tell him – three times, mind you – that he is not to call something God has made pure “unclean”.  He goes to the house of a man called Caesarea, and is a little put off by the idea of eating with Gentiles while he himself is a Jew.  Not until he gets going and actually interacts with them does the lightbulb go off over his head:  Oh!  These are good people, people of God, they aren’t unclean at all!  Even Cephas, the Rock himself, doesn’t always get it on the first go.

But now it’s Easter 2012, and as they say, we stand on the shoulders of giants.  We can look behind us and see the long train of prophets, disciples, saints, theologians, and Christians bringing us to this very moment.  I blink, and see the sunrise.  I blink, and I am surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses.  I blink, but I…  I am not surprised.  I am not surprised to see you all here, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, having rolled out of bed at such an ungodly hour, if you’ll pardon my French.  I am not surprised to hear you singing along, praying along, and listening intently as I ramble along.  And I, with respect to my brother Matt, am not surprised to find the tomb empty, the stone rolled away.

I should pause here and say that this is not the lack of surprise experienced by a cynical youngster, though I suppose realistically that’s a part of it.  When I was in the youth choir at my home church, we did a musical called “Celebrate Life”.  Following a kind of mock-Passion narrative, there was a song we did that involved flooding into the church and going right up to congregants and saying an enthusiastic “He is alive!” over and over.  When you’re fourteen years old, this is incredibly hard to do with a straight face, never mind keeping yourself from over-exaggerating the enthusiasm, which we did occasionally joke about during rehearsals.

This is not that.  This is the lightbulb experience before the bomb drops.  This is the theological “spider-senses tingling!” that comes from dedicated study and truly understanding Christ Jesus.  This is choosing not to huddle in our homes in fear, but to come out at sunrise, watching the stone roll away before our eyes.

The term Christian was not always a positive thing.  Depending on who you ask, it still isn’t.  But at one time, it is believed that, it was an epithet, a slur, for those zany people who chose to follow and worship a man who died the embarrassing death of the cross.  Little Christs, that’s what we were once called.  I say we co-opt that.  I kinda like it.  We’re not just followers, we’re emulators.  Imitation is the grandest form of flattery.

Having studied theatre in college, I had Stanislavski and method acting jammed down my throat for four years.  Don’t believe the hype, method acting is not what we think of today.  It is a much more intense system, beyond simply getting in a character’s head and thinking what they think.  It’s all about movement and belief, truly becoming the character you’re portraying.  And hey, that sounds kind of familiar.  Word and deed, grace and works.  We are not just a people of belief, but of action.  Being a Christian, a Little Christ, is as much about doing as it is sitting in church and praying.  Ministry in its purest form is holistic, incorporating mind, soul, and body.  And when you start to do that, you become a little more like Jesus every day.

In so doing, Jesus’ methodology for ministry starts to make sense.  We move from surprise to understanding, from expectation to experience.  Were I in Jesus’ shoes, I don’t know that I would have rode humbly into Jerusalem on a donkey.  I would have kicked in the doors of the temple and demanded that they start acting like proper religious leaders.  I’m mature like that.  But as I move ever on to perfection, like a good United Methodist… yeah, I get why he did it.

Yes, we should be surprised by Jesus.  Don’t get me wrong, it still happens to me.  Last semester, while I was in theology class having my every belief examined under a microscope and questioning everything, I had a revelation about Jesus’ final days.  He could have walked away.  Now that would have been surprising!  He spends three years teaching, preaching, healing, helping, and predicting his own demise.  Then, there in the garden of Gethsemene, crying his eyes out and praying God take the cup from him, he could very well have said “No, I will not drink”.  He could have gotten up, walked out, moved far away, and died an old man, working as a carpenter in some far-off country.  He was as human as he was divine, and that was ultimately an option.  But it was not in his character.  The option was there, but as far as he was concerned, there was only one path.

On May 21, 2011, I sat with my brothers in their apartment, watching as the appointed time hit every time zone, laughing as absolutely nothing happened, the capital-E-End never coming; no Jesus for you.  Harold Camping, much like the Millerites a century and a half before him, was lampooned for the rollicking amusement of all. I had my fun, but I must admit that there is a part of me that respects those who try so hard to predict the end, who refuse to be surprised by Jesus.  Yes, they ignored the message that no one would know the hour, that coming like a thief in the night kind of implies a surprise.  But there is a difference between prediction and expectation.  We should expect Jesus; and specifically, we should expect Jesus to be Jesus.  As we read in Hebrews, he is the same “Yesterday and today and forever”.  If he says he’s going to be betrayed, if he says he is going to die, and most importantly, if he says he’s going to come back a few days later, you had best believe it’s going to happen.  There is no need to be surprised.

There’s bacon back inside the chapel, so let me wrangle this sermon back to some kind of cohesive finish.    As I said, we serve a Lord of paradox.  Jesus was God born a man, fully human, fully divine.  He died, and yet is alive.  He clearly said that it is finished, and yet it is never truly done.  We must not be surprised by him, and yet we find ourselves surprised at every turn.  The tomb is empty, the stone rolled away, he is not here.  And yet, here he is, among us, within us, all us diminutive Jesuses, right here, right now.  We have faith.  We have actions.  We have purity laws.  We have bacon.  We’re surprised.  We’re not surprised.  The mystery of faith, brothers and sisters, the mystery of faith.