Expect the Unexpected

Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near. (Luke 21.28)

Back Into Rehearsal

A friend and I were discussing Advent, and he summed it up splendidly as, “waiting and watching for the thing we most hope for.” He didn’t elaborate on what “the thing” was. The conviction in his tone made clear that he meant the Second Coming, which surprised me. He’s an alumnus of one of America’s most famously (or, if you will, infamously) liberal seminaries and forged his career not in the ivied traces of highbrow theology, but in the sciences. Therefore, I assumed he viewed Advent as the season when Christians gain entrance to the wonder of Christmas by revisiting Old Testament prophecies that shaped New Testament accounts of Jesus’s birth. As he talked on, however, it became obvious his Advent focus centered on what many dismiss as a far-fetched possibility, rather than the celebrated event that occurred 2000 years ago.

 “Advent has always felt peculiar to me,” he mused. “It’s like we’re cast in this mammoth production and we rehearse like mad to get ready for it. But nobody can say exactly what we’re preparing for—what it will look like, how it will go, or even when it will happen. Year after year, we go back into rehearsal, thinking, ‘Maybe this time.’ But isn’t that how it went with the first coming? They kept praying and watching and waiting. Then—pow!—there it was. Those who were ready saw it. The rest missed it completely. They couldn’t see God, because Jesus didn’t come the way they expected. That’s how it will be the second time around, too, making Advent all about expecting the unexpected. How do we manage that? That’s the question that falls in our laps every year. And if Advent doesn’t gin up all kinds of conflicted emotions, it seems to me we’re not doing it right.”

Uneasy

Somehow my friend’s uneasiness with Advent—his faith that Christ will come again tempered with uncertainty about how that promise will play out—comforted me. Advent should make us uneasy. If we’re “doing it right,” we should feel deeply conflicted about it, because it asks more of us than we can manage. Each year, we reach for prophets of old and renew acquaintances with those who experienced the Bethlehem miracle as prototypes to emulate. Questions that challenge our belief in the Second Coming are no different than the ones that perplexed them. Our discomfort with hoping in a cosmic event that will somehow alter our reality is no different than Mary’s. When the angel describes the pivotal role she will play in God’s redemptive plan, her first question is, “How will this be?” (Luke 1.34) We ask the same thing when pondering Christ’s return. Expecting the unexpected is no simple task.

It’s not entirely wrong to say that those who awaited and witnessed Christ’s birth had a slight advantage over us. Their prophets were first-rate poets whose vivid imagery transformed everyday objects into extraordinary augurs. This weekend we hear the Promised One described as “a righteous Branch to spring up for David” (Jeremiah 33.15)—tipping off the hopeful that His pedigree would derive from Israel’s most celebrated king. Isaiah’s pages overflow with symbols and metaphors that spell out Messianic events with breathtaking precision. Even the minor prophets arrest us with their clairvoyant eloquence.

By comparison, Jesus’s Second Coming prophecies seem decidedly mundane and vague. In Mark 13, He talks about wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes, and famines as “the beginning of birthpangs” indicating Christ’s imminent return. This week’s Gospel (Luke 21.25-36) predicts bad weather: “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.” (v25-26) What are we to make of this? History has never known a time when there weren’t wars and rumors of war. Every generation is dealt its share of earthquakes and famines. Hurricanes, tsunamis, and atmospheric disturbances are part of planetary life. Yet Jesus points to these inevitabilities—and the tragedies they bring—as signs of hope! “Now when these things begin to take place,” He says in verse 28, “stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” It’s here that the conflicted emotions my friend described rear up. How can we know what we’re waiting and watching for if we’re uneasy with what we’re looking at?

Biding Time

The great paradox of Jesus’s Second Coming prophecies is that their veiled randomness makes His message transparently direct. Because the signs He gives us are constant and inescapable, our longing for Christ’s return should also be constant and inescapable. Watching and waiting for the thing we most hope for should become as commonplace to us as turning on the nightly news. Expecting the unexpected should frame how we live out our days. We should believe something bigger is taking shape behind the violence of war, tremors and tragedies born of a groaning planet, disheartening rumors that fill the air, and turmoil roiling above our heads. “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away,” Jesus assures us in verse 33. Troubles that confront us come and go. Yet we remain, constant in hope, steadfast in love, our joy and peace secured by unyielding faith that Christ will come again.

And so we approach Advent’s rehearsal as God’s great biding time. It's the season when we root out our deepest fears and uncertainties—when we realize there is more to this world than what we see, know, and understand. It is when we follow Jesus’s instructions to the letter: we stand up and raise our heads, because our redemption is drawing near. Maybe this time we’ll see the thing we most hope for. It’s possible we won’t. Either way, Advent’s rehearsal prepares us to move forward in faith that something miraculous is moving toward us. By doing the hard work this season asks of us, we’ll be ready and know it when we see it.

Watching and waiting.

At the Opening

Train children in the right way, and when old, they will not stray. (Proverbs 22.6)

We most often hear this wisdom in conjunction with faith formation. Pastors and lay leaders quote it to urge parents to invest time in teaching their children godly ways. There is a promise in this verse—a guarantee, if you will, that the child who learns to value spiritual principles at an early age will follow them for life. I can’t attest to its validity in other families. But it proved itself in my own. My folks took this promise to heart, and their two sons—along with nearly all of the 50-plus young people they welcomed into their home and nurtured as surrogate parents—grew up to be committed believers.

Still, applying this verse to a strong faith foundation and leaving it there strikes me as shallow. I’m convinced it's meant to stress the importance of an overall solid education. A better translation of the Hebrew is “Initiate the child at the opening of his/her path,” encouraging parents to ensure their children enter adulthood with a strong start. When we couple this with Christ’s repeated command that we, as individuals and a community, care for our children, we are scripturally obliged to meet their educational needs with the best we can offer.

Every child deserves a strong start. Our forebears believed this, which is why they implemented public institutions and laws to provide every American child with a quality education. Yet, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics, nearly one in 10 young people drops out of school. The rate more than triples in many urban areas, meaning thousands of children never reach the opening of their paths. As the Harvard Education Letter recently described, the reasons our children aren’t in school and others receive substandard education are myriad and complex, with most of them directly tied to poverty. Combined with the runaway costs of higher education and enormous debt we inflict on university students at the opening of their paths, it’s all too evident we’ve turned our hearts from what God expects of us. We’ve abdicated our scriptural duty to remove hurdles that prevent our youth from being trained in the right way. Since our neglect isn’t a new phenomenon, we’re already coping with its toll on our young, as well as the prices we pay personally, as communities, and as a nation. We can readily trace the connections between undernourished education and the socioeconomic—and spiritual—malaise that plagues us. And this is chiefly because the American response has been to move away from areas where substandard education is the norm, rather than invest the time, energy, and money to secure first-rate educations for all young Americans.

Most often, our politicians position their education policies in the context of “competing in the global economy.” They seem to believe we can’t be moved to remedy education gaps without threatening loss of profitable trade and innovation that has held the US on the top of the heap. But there’s more to it. Providing children with a strong start is God’s will. For believers, the mandate is non-negotiable. It’s not about us—or our pocketbooks. It’s about our children. If we commit our all to initiate them at the opening of their paths, when they’re grown, they’ll walk in productive, prosperous, and healthy ways.

Watching the Detectives

So the Pharisees and the scribes asked Him, “Why do Your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” (Mark 7.5)

Clinging to the Past

Now and then someone who knows me casually will say something like, “You’ll love this, since you were raised in the South,” or, “Can you explain such-and-such to me? I didn’t grow up down South.” They’re always surprised when I say I grew up in Chicago, raised by Alabamians who viewed their Southern heritage as a sort of ethnicity. When my brother and I were very young, our parents pointed to our neighbors—the Hogans and Leonardis and Borkowskis—and told us that, just as they followed certain customs passed down from their elders, we too behaved certain ways and believed certain things because of where we came from. We talked differently than our neighbors, not only in accent, but also in terms of what was and wasn’t said. Our family dynamic was different. Our sense of hospitality and social obligation was different. And, most obvious, our religious life was different. Nobody went to church more often than the Wolfes—twice on Sunday, twice during the week, with nearly every Saturday consumed by some sort of outreach or fellowship event. So I am a Southerner through and through with remarkably little experience of what living “down South” is actually like.

Although my parents were grateful to serve Chicago congregations and adapted very well to their urban surroundings, they mourned the slower, more genteel life they left behind. And they kept their Southern identity alive by transmitting its values and practices to us. Common courtesies—saying “please” and “thank you,” “ma’am” and “sir”—were drilled into us, along with very specific shows of gallantry and refined table manners. (To this day, I walk nearest the curb when accompanying a lady down the street.) This is not to say our neighbors didn’t raise their children do likewise. The difference was we weren’t taught to be mannerly because it was polite. Our manners grew out of who we were—or perhaps more accurately, out of the past my parents were clinging to.

In Sunday’s Gospel (Mark 7.1-8,14-15,21-23), we see a very similar situation, as a few Pharisees and scribes, desperately clinging to the past, confront Jesus about His followers’ poor table manners. The disciples don’t wash up before dinner. That deeply offends the Pharisees. To understand why they’re offended and why Jesus responds to their complaint as He does, we need to understand what they’re trying keep alive by perpetuating ancient traditions.

Ferreting Out Scofflaws

Palestine is unique among Roman conquests in that the Jews are permitted to practice their faith and customs without interference. While other conquered nations must swear allegiance to Caesar and adopt imperial beliefs, the Jews’ willingness to die for their faith tradition has resulted in a somewhat schizoid way of life. First-century Jews live under two governments and legal codes: their own religious law and Roman occupation. On the surface, life is not much changed under Caesar: temples and synagogues stay open, social customs remain intact, and civil justice is administered in Jewish courts. At the same time, however, Roman presence in Palestine is undeniable and the Jews recognize that any bold move outside the status quo could bring down Caesar’s fist. In next to no time, Israel and Judea—the Jewish twin kingdoms—could become like their neighbors: impoverished replicas of Rome. The largest Jewish sect, the Pharisees, are obsessed with preventing such a fate by safeguarding traditions of their past. Jewish identity is everything to them, and they make it their lives’ work to preserve it. In many ways, they operate like detectives, ferreting out scofflaws and confronting their non-compliance to Jewish law in public.

Word of a new, radical Rabbi’s success in the provinces compels a group of Pharisees and scribes—i.e., Temple academics—to leave Jerusalem and investigate. As a rule, people clean up their acts when they see the Pharisees coming. Jesus and His followers don’t do that. The Pharisees arrive and are appalled that this rough-and-tumble bunch ignores one of their most basic traditions: they don’t wash their hands before they eat. They challenge Jesus: “Why do Your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” (Mark 7.5) Ordinarily, that would be enough for any leader to apologize and promise to do better. Not Jesus. He disregards their complaint, and challenges their obsession: “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, ‘This people honors Me with their lips, but their hearts are far from Me; in vain do they worship Me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.’” (v6-7)

Accommodating the Pharisees' tendency to feign obtuseness when it’s convenient, He breaks it down further. “You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition,” He says. (v8) He does a bit of legal gymnastics to prove He’s as fit as they in manipulating the law to find fault with others. Then He addresses the crowd collecting around this brouhaha. “Listen to Me, all of you, and understand,” He says. “There is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.” (v14-15) And what might those “things that come out” be? In this context, they’re self-righteousness, slavish observance of archaic customs, and myopic judgment of others’ behavior.

Reach for the Future

Throughout His ministry, Jesus’s problem with the Pharisees springs from disgust with the political motives behind their holiness. They’ve transformed spiritual law and religious custom into a nationalist agenda and appointed themselves the keepers of all things Jewish. Their unforgiving scrutiny of others is basic to their intentions to homogenize Jewish identity in such a way that past traditions are preserved. On one level, this is a noble effort. But on a deeper one, it results in the diminution of those who don’t abide by every letter of the law and excludes anyone who doesn’t fit the Pharisees’ idealized profile. I like to think that even as Jesus challenges His Pharisee accusers, He glances around at His followers. Their hands are dirty. Their lives don’t stack up. But their hearts are close to God. They are the first fruits of God’s kingdom, a new ideal that will survive centuries of political tumult and regime change. While the Pharisees cling to their past, Jesus and His disciples reach for their future. That’s why Jesus keeps such a close eye on the Pharisees, even as they watch Him closely. His Shepherd’s heart will not permit the rude comingling of faith with a political agenda to endanger His flock. Yes, in the current circumstance, Jewish identity is important—but not to the extent that its traditions sacrifice justice and acceptance for the sake of preserving it.

In the current political climate, we can expect challenges from self-appointed keepers of Christianity. They function like a band of detectives, scrutinizing everything we do and say, eagerly hoping to catch us diverging from traditional norms. This text is particularly illuminating for faithful Americans striving to build God’s kingdom amid cries of “taking back” the nation—restoring old values and traditions that no longer promote justice and inclusion, protecting a “Christian” identity that is no longer relevant in a rapidly changing world. We cannot live in the past. We must reach for the future, looking to God to lead us to peace and compassion and equity for all. 

Watching the detectives is vital. When we see them coming, the last thing we should do is tidy up and be polite. We must own our identity as Christ's followers and demonstrate discipleship by removing all rancor and hostility from our lips, even when our non-conformity to the mythic Christian past triggers rancor and hostility. “For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come,” Jesus says in verse 21. Live from your heart. Speak peace and justice. Know that you’re being watched and use that as an opportunity to embody God’s kingdom in a culture overrun with self-appointed detectives. Leave their past behind. Reach for your future.

When we see self-appointed “faith detectives” coming our way, the last thing we should do is tidy up and be polite.

Stumblers

The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The LORD is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? When evildoers assail me to devour my flesh—my adversaries and foes—they shall stumble and fall. (Psalm 27.1-2)

Yesterday Walt and I, along with many members of our Lake View Presbyterian faith community, joined more than 60 churches to walk in Chicago’s Pride Parade. There were hundreds of us—so many that our entourage stretched longer than a city block, far longer than any Chicago Coalition of Welcoming Churches parade entry ever had. It was thrilling, and our joy was made full by the ebullient response we received. Thousands of spectators cheered, thanked us, high-fived us, and more than a few embraced us with teary eyes. As we turned the corner for the parade’s last leg, we spied the Westboro Baptist crowd, a small clutch of people from the infamously homophobic Kansas church that turns up each year. And something marvelous happened. We began to rejoice! Those on the sidelines added to our chorus. The roar that went up overpowered the invective hurled our way through Westboro’s loudspeakers. Not one hateful word could be heard.

Last night, as I reflected on the event, it occurred to me that we witnessed exactly what David writes about in Psalm 27. We saw our adversaries stumble and fall. And there was an important lesson in that, I think. When we embrace God as our light and salvation—as the very stronghold of our lives—we have nothing to fear. There is no reason to suppress our joy and confidence. In fact, facing those who would denigrate our making and beliefs is cause for joy. It incites rejoicing that we are free from gnawing hatred and hollow piety. We are at peace with our God, our neighbors, and ourselves, And out of that realization flows rivers of joy that drown out those who condemn us—especially those who, like the Westboro folks, go out of their way to diminish the wonder of our making.

Our joyful antidote to the bilious attacks was the last hurrah for this year’s parade. No doubt there will be repeat engagements at future marches. Yet our number will continue to increase, and with it our joy. We will rejoice even more vibrantly in the coming years—not to prove a point, but because joy is the point. As I closed the chapter on 2012 Pride, it struck me that this year’s parade ended just as it began. Our service preceding the march closed as the choir sent us out with the “Everybody Rejoice” chorus from The Wiz:

Can you feel a brand new day!

Can you feel a brand new day!

“They shall stumble and fall,” David reminds us. And on we march, into the light, salvation, and stronghold of God’s new day.

The Chicago Coalition of Welcoming Churches prepares to step off at this year’s Pride Parade.