Expecting the Unexpected

The First Sunday of Advent
Today’s Readings: [Click here]

A friend of mine from college named David lives up in Boston, and he and his wife like to travel. He told me a story about how not too long ago they were taking a tour through a pre-Revolutionary War home in Massachusetts. The tour guide was actually a direct descendent of the man who built the house.

David told me that as they were being led through the front parlor, he noticed a beautiful musket hanging over the fireplace. Being a gun collector himself, he reached up as he walked by and reverently touched its stock. David said he was quite startled when the guide yelled at him, “Don’t touch that gun!”

My friend quickly assured her that he intended no harm. “Oh, I’m not worried you’re going to damage it,” she replied, “I just don’t want you to get hurt. It’s loaded!”

“What?!” David asked her what a loaded gun was doing within easy reach of dozens of tourists. She explained, “I didn’t load it. My ancestor who built this house loaded it. He did it one night in front of his whole family. And when he hung it over the mantle he promised, ‘This musket will fire the first shot for the independence of the colonies.’”

My friend asked, “So, he died before 1775?”

“No,” the woman answered. “He lived well into the 1800s.”

“Then why didn’t he fire the gun?”

“Well,” she answered with a smile, “he just never thought Colonel Washington’s little skirmishes with the British would ever amount to very much.”

No matter how much we plan for the future, things rarely come about exactly the way we expect. Sometimes, in fact, actual events turn out to be so different from what we picture in our mind, we don’t even notice that what we’ve anticipated has really happened.

Our three readings today illustrate this nicely. They all speak of a sublime vision of the future and the glory of the coming of the Lord. And the irony is that many of those who for centuries had been waiting eagerly for the Messiah to break into the world never noticed that Jesus was the very one who embodied that event!

Maybe they too literally interpreted the words of Isaiah’s prophecy. In other words, they thought that the desert and parched land would actually exult or bloom with abundant flowers and rejoice with joyful song. Sadly, if they didn’t think the time of the Lord had come until they saw the flow of milk and honey in the streets, then they certainly missed Christ’s presence even when he stood in their very midst and offered them the providence and blessing of God Almighty!

On the other hand, when John the Baptist’s disciples asked Jesus, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?” his answer does seem to be a rather literal reading of that same passage of Isaiah. “The blind regain their sight,” he answers, “the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised to life, and the poor have the good news preached to them”—all the things Jesus was doing.

But then the Lord adds a curious gloss: “And blessed is the one who takes no offense at me.” Other translations put it this way: “Blessed is the person who finds no stumbling block in me.” What Jesus is telling us is that no matter how closely his ministry appeared to dovetail with Isaiah’s vision, it wasn’t a spot-on match with John’s expectations. John still had his doubts, and that uncertainty cast a haze over his eyes.

Bible experts often remind us that even though the prophets speak in God’s name, their words rarely come to pass in the exact way they proclaim. In hindsight, a prophecy might seem metaphorical or whimsical or surprising. But remember: prophets, and even angels, are sent just to deliver the word. God himself decides how to set things in motion, and the believing community—made up of many individuals with free will—determine how that word actually takes flesh and ultimately plays out. It’s a wonderful mystery!

Given all these variables, it’s easy to see how even Jesus could be a source of offense or a stumbling block to John the Baptist—someone who’s not only a prophet, but according to the Lord, the greatest person to ever have lived before Jesus! No matter what God-given word John proclaimed, it’s pretty evident from today’s gospel that he never thought in a million years that he was preparing the way for a carpenter from Nazareth… his cousin, no less. Jesus wasn’t quite the person he was anticipating.

All of this leads to a rather unsettling conclusion: why should we who are “born into the kingdom of God” be any different from the people who came before us in faith? We can’t experience God working in our own lives without first climbing over the stumbling block of our own narrow expectations of who God is and how he’s going to make things happen. We’ve got to be filled with hope, joyful expectation, a sense of wonder, patience, and a commitment to just let God be God for us anyway he happens to decide. In other words, we’ve got to realize that we’re not in charge; God is—and he has a much better plan than we could ever conceive.

If we insist on just waiting for things to play out according to our own rule book, I’m afraid that even we might never fire that musket…