Sermon for 3 Advent

12/12/2004

St. Luke’s Church

Eric M. Williams

Expectations

Once upon a time a priest was walking down the street and noticed a small boy trying to press a doorbell. After watching the boy’s efforts for some time, the priest decided to help. Stepping over to the boy he reached up and rang the doorbell for him. Crouching down to the child's level, the priest smiled and asked, "And now what?" The boy replied, "Now we run!"

Sometimes things don’t turn out the way we expect.

Last Sunday Susan asked our Sunday School kids

about their expectations of the Second Coming.

If God were coming back, they said, they’d be scared.

If it were Jesus, however, that wouldn’t be so scary.

But they did decide they would clean the house.

We live in a world of expectations.

A company’s stock price rises and falls,

based not on the company’s overall productivity,

but rather on how well it has met or surpassed expectations.

Happy is the student who exceeds her parents’ or teachers’ expectations,

but woe to the student who is labeled an underachiever.

Success and failure are relative concepts—

and they depend totally upon our expectations.

We certainly have expectations of other people.

We expect things from our spouse, friends, coworkers,

and they from us.

But when it comes to expectations,

nothing compares to our expectations of God.

That was as true two thousand years ago as it is today.

By the time of Jesus’ birth there was tremendous anticipation

about the coming of the Messiah.

For generations the prophets had foretold

the coming of God’s anointed one.

He would come with power to right all wrongs,

in particular leading an army to defeat the hated Romans

and drive them out of Palestine.

This was the Messiah John the Baptist had in mind

as he preached his fiery sermons on the banks of the Jordan.

One who would baptize with fire

and enact God’s vengeance on the wicked—

both the Romans and the hypocritical Jewish leaders.

John was convinced that the Messiah was coming

and he preached his heart out getting people ready for this great moment.

But then, his expectations were severely challenged.

When the Messiah came, instead of a military leader,

it turned out to be his younger cousin Jesus.

Jesus? from Nazareth? Joe and Mary’s kid?

No army, no holy jihad against the Romans.

To be sure, there were some good signs.

At Jesus’ baptism, God actually spoke—that was pretty good.

But still, Jesus didn’t meet John’s expectations of what he should be.

And so today’s poignant story.

John was in prison, very shortly to be executed.

He wanted to believe in Jesus but he still had doubts.

And so he asked: “Are you the one?

Or do we need to keep waiting?”

Jesus sent back word:

Perhaps you weren’t expecting the right messiah.

Look deeper in the prophets; look closer at me,

and you will see.

Then he told the crowd: My friend and cousin John is great—

the greatest prophet ever to walk this earth.

Yet what is coming is even better.

Don’t worry about what I am not.

Accept what I am and what I bring—

the Kingdom of God.

Jesus didn’t fit into peoples’ neat picture of a messiah.

Throughout his whole ministry he shattered peoples’ expectations.

Depending on whom you asked,

he wasn’t pious enough, orthodox enough, or revolutionary enough.

Everyone wanted him to be their messiah.

And today, two thousand years later, nothing has changed.

We are like John the Baptist—wanting to believe in Jesus,

but still holding back from following him all the way.

And, like the people of Jesus’ day,

we want Jesus to be our messiah too:

to agree with us, to approve of us.

We want a Jesus who meets our expectations.

There have been a host of books written about the historical Jesus.

These are attempts to reconstruct the “real” Jesus

and to sort out who he was and what he was like in his own context.

As I have read these books, and listened to their authors,

I have noticed something interesting.

Whether they are more liberal or conservative,

more modern or old-fashioned,

each of them ends up with a Jesus

who looks pretty much like themselves.

In every generation we tend to remake Jesus in our own image.

It’s like shopping for a Barbie or a GI Joe.

Do you want Al Franken Jesus, Rush Limbaugh Jesus,

or Jesus with the king-fu grip?

Last week in England, there was a scandal

over a wax museum depiction of the Nativity

in which all of the Biblical characters

were played by contemporary celebrities,

including Samuel L. Jackson, Hugh Grant and President Bush.

This was more silly than sinister,

but it showed that we are more comfortable with a Jesus

whom we can remake in our own image.

And when we remake Jesus in our own image,

we rob him of his power.

The truth is that Jesus always exceeds and transforms our expectations.

He does not fit into our limited ways of seeing the truth,

but always offers more than we can receive

and demands more than we can give.

When we want judgment for others, he offers mercy.

When we want approval for ourselves, he offers judgment.

He continues to turn the world upside down and backwards.

What he wants is to remake us in his image.

That was hard to handle then and it’s hard to handle now.

John the Baptist, the Pharisees, even Jesus’ own disciples,

couldn’t really grasp what Jesus was offering.

And we still don’t seem to get it.

We still want him to be our tame messiah

to give us what we want

and otherwise to leave us alone.

What he offers instead is a transformed life, a transformed world,

where “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk,

the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised,

and the poor have good news brought to them.”

A world where everything maimed has become whole,

where everything bad has become good,

and everything sad has turned into joy.

Now those are expectations worth having.