God’s Surprise (Advent 4)

Micah 5: 2-5a & Luke 1: 39-55

Roger Lynn

December 24, 2017

4th Sunday in Advent

(click here for the audio for this sermon)

(click here for the video of the whole worship service - the sermon begins at 18:50)

How often do we miss it because we are looking in another direction? In this world of “might makes right” and “bigger is better” and “the one with the most toys wins” - how often do we fail to notice the presence of the God who shows up in backwater towns like Bethlehem and in the lives of marginalized people like teen-age unwed mothers and old women? Brian Andreas is an artist who does a series he calls Storypeople. In the one that showed up this morning in my Facebook feed he writes. “One time on Hollywood Boulevard I saw a young girl with a baby. It was a crisp winter morning & her hair shone dark purple in the sun. She was panhandling outside the Holiday Inn & the door clerk came out & told her to be on her way & I wondered if anyone would recognize the Christ child if they happened to meet. I remember thinking it’s not like there are any published pictures & purple seemed like a good color for a Madonna so I gave her a dollar just in case.” (click here to view this piece) Over and over in scripture we find this message – God will not be contained or constrained by our narrow vision of how the world works. God will continue to show up in surprising and unexpected places and circumstances.

And this is good news, indeed! Can you imagine what the world, and our lives, would be like if God were no more than what we usually expect? I want to have my horizons expanded. I want to be challenged to step beyond my comfort zone. I want to be surprised by God. Because only then am I most fully in touch with what is real and true and powerful – in me, in the world, in God.

Sometimes I fear we have so domesticated God that we are no longer capable of being surprised by God’s wild, untamed grace. We so want everything, including God, to be safe, that we leave no room for anything even remotely unexpected to slip past our defenses. In C.S. Lewis’ book “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” (from his “Chronicles of Narnia” series) four children have wandered into the land of Narnia, and Mr. Beaver is telling them about Aslan, the great lion (the Christ figure in the series). Upon hearing the description of Aslan, one of the children asks, “Is he safe?” To which Mr. Beaver replies, “Safe? . . . Who said anything about safe? ’Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.” 

Both the text from Micah and the one from Luke are most often read at this time of year, which means that we most often hear them through the romantic filter of Christmas. We tend to hear them as vaguely comforting and perhaps even sweet. They have become nice, safe, tame parts of the Christmas tradition. But, in fact, neither of them are nice, safe, or tame. They both offer glimpses of a God who operates on the margins, well beyond the borders of where we normally expect to find the presence of the sacred. And when we begin to look for God in such unexpected places then the whole world as we tend to know it starts to turn upside down – which means that it actually starts to turn right side up again. We begin to discover, for example, that peace will not be found by continuing to rely on the usual strategies of power. We will find it instead when we begin to recognize the healing presence of God in every person, every moment, every part of life. 

We can move through this season of Christmas seeing only what we expect to see. And the experience will be pleasant enough. Or we can allow ourselves to be surprised by the mystery of the sacred in the midst of us. And then we may find that the experience becomes extraordinary. Poet Ann Weems put it this way in her poem “The Coming of God.”

Our God is the One who comes to us

in a burning bush,

in an angel’s song,

in a newborn child.

Our God is the One who cannot be found

locked in the church,

not even in the sanctuary.

Our God will be where God will be

with no constraints,

no predictability.

Our God lives where our God lives,

and destruction has no power

and even death cannot stop

the living.

Our God will be born where God will be born,

but there is no place to look for the One who comes to us.

When God is ready

God will come

even to a godforsaken place

like a stable in Bethlehem.

Watch . .

for you know not when

God comes.

Watch, that you might be found

whenever

wherever

God comes. 

May it be so for us! Amen.