Not in the expected form

Back when I was young, you learned cursive writing. I barely use it anymore, except when I have to sign something, and as I understand it, fewer and fewer kids are learning it. It was part of the three “r’s,” reading, writing and ‘rithmetic… clearly spelling was not one of the “r’s,” since the “a” at the beginning of arithmetic was viewed as optional. Today, we are teaching a new set of “r’s,” reduce, re-use and recycle. And its a good thing, given the accelerating pace at which the human animal is destroying the ability of the planet to support life. But we’ll get back to the doom and gloom.

In truth, humans have been historically good at the “three “R’s” of reduce, re-use and recycle right up until the Industrial Age. Most humans had to re-use and recycle, poverty and limited supply meant it was what you did to get by, long before the fashionable term “upcycle” was even coined. And we didn’t just recycle hand-me-down clothing and stale bread. We recycled bits of culture too, stories, snippets of music. Britten uses Purcell in his Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. Joyce turns Odysseus into an Irish Jew wandering the streets of Dublin. Warhol turns the Mona Lisa into serialized pop screen prints in neon hues. We add and reconfigure and appropriate. It is good, creative, holy. It is what we do.

And so, we begin with the sentiment, taken from the gospels, that Christ is always with us. We turn it into that story, found on posters, mugs and t-shirts, of footprints in the sand. “But why Jesus,” the traveler asks, “why, at times, is there only one set of footprints? Did you abandon me in my hour of needs?” “No,” Jesus answers. “Those were the times I carried you.” The story is a little over-used, a little too Hallmark for many. But that hasn’t stopped the human enterprise from appropriating, re-configuring. And so we get the new addition to this old teaching story. “And why, Jesus, is there sometimes just a long line dug in the sand?” “Because,” Jesus answers, “those were the times I was dragging you along.”

Jesus sometimes drags us along. Jesus sometimes has to drag us along, because we have dug in our heels waiting for blessing, when blessing has already arrived, just not in the form we expected. We are holding out, not for blessing, but for the blessing of our own choosing. And sadly, for most of us, creation doesn’t work that way. We don’t get to choose how the divine will show up in our lives. But the divine does show up, footprints, one set or two… a long line… and sometimes, claw marks as we try to pull ourselves out of the flow of divine will.

Just as the bumper sticker declares that “Stuff Happens,” so we should each have stickers on our cars, t-shirts, maybe tattoos, that say “God happens.” God happens to us all the time. We just can’t see it, because it doesn’t come in the form we are expecting.

Take Naaman. He has enough faith to head off to a foreign land to seek a cure for his disease. But when the offered cure doesn’t come in the form he expects, he storms off in a rage. He does, finally, relent, because what sort of story would it be if he just walked away from blessing?

No one should know better than a believing Christian that God does not come in the expected form. For we are called to believe that deliverance came in the form of a charismatic, erratic, holy rabbi, filled with the power of God, capable of healing, of changing the reality around him, and that this powerful presence of God faced a criminal’s death, state-sanctioned torture and capital punishment, and, in the ultimate turn to the unexpected, he rose again. The powers of sin and death could not contain him.

No one would write that story. It is insane, Jesus is not what the collective Hebrew people expected. And even now, when we have turned the story into a boring cycle of the routine and commercial, even in a cultural Christianity that has lost all fire for the gospel, Jesus still has the power to surprise. Because, despite 2000 years of effort, Jesus cannot be tamed. God still erupts in ways that are unexpected.

Like Naaman, the Aramean general, like the ancient Hebrews, we have expectations for how we are to be delivered. And we’ll skip the forty days in the desert, thank you very much.

But even if God is the kind of God to micromanage our lives, it is unlikely that God would do so in a way that meets our expectations. And if God doesn’t interfere with the dailies, if instead God created a world that is governed by vast scientific and mathematical systems that are themselves divinely subverted by a certain amount of chaos, randomness, creativity, then divine action in our lives might not even look divine. It might just look like what happens. Or worse, like other people

Church leaders panic over the decline of Christianity in developed countries like those in North America and Western Europe. Politicians and fear mongers look at the state of our nation and ask us to be afraid. But what if this is just the painful birth of something new for our nation and for the church? The Rev. Walter Brueggemann, great prophet of our age, has asked us to see our situation in light of the Hebrew story. He has asked us to wrestle with the ways in which Exile shaped their story and in which it shapes ours. In a recent text, Reality Grief Hope: Three Prophetic Tasks, he compares the situation of America today, our sense of invulnerability and exceptionalism shattered on 9/11, to the plight of the Jews after the first destruction of Jerusalem. To wrestle with Jeremiah, with the authors of Lamentations. But also to learn from them.

Have we not read Jeremiah? Have we not encountered Isaiah and his successors? Sure, the burning coal touches their lips, and that can’t be fun. Sure, they announce doom and gloom and destruction. But then they offer a vision, offer hope. They remind us that divine action does not always come in the form expected.

There is Jeremiah, in the very first chapter, speaking the Word of the Lord:

I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms,

to pluck up and to pull down,

to destroy and to overthrow,

to build and to plant.

Destroy and build, pluck and plant. Jerusalem and Lamentations? Frederic Jameson writes of the “cultural evolution of late capitalism” as “catastrophe and progress all together.” Maybe the Holy Spirit is exactly at work in what we see as the smoking ruins of institutional church. Collapse is not deliverance in the form we expect, but maybe it is deliverance. Maybe what we will find is that when Christ, in bread, in prayer, in the vulnerable, is at the center of our gatherings, there also will be life.

Our God has always been a God that appears in unexpected ways, delivers in unexpected ways. A god who did what you wanted wouldn’t be God! And getting our own way doesn’t always work out, in our covenant life together, in our individual lives. But God is there, re-purposing, re-configuring.

Jeremiah reminds us of what God has said: “Let those who boast boast in this, that they understand and know me, that I am the Lord; I act with steadfast love, justice and righteousness in the earth, for in these things I delight, says the Lord.”

God happens. Get it on a t-shirt. God acts. “I act with…love, justice, righteousness” It just isn’t always in the form expected. And God is, and is here. Maybe not in the form expected. But if we trust, is we hope, if we move from lamentation to praise, if we open our eyes and see Christ with us, when we break bread, when we laugh, when we sing… Then we, gathered around Christ, will, like footprints in the sand, accompany, carry, and sometimes drag one another, to the promised land…