Surprise!

"Surprise"
Luke 1:26-29


Who knows what each day will bring.
A heart attack.
A lottery win.
An accident.
A burst pipe.
A new job possibility.
A visit from an angel.
None of us knows.
We go about our business.
We expect it to be just another,
normal day.
Wake up.
Take a shower.
Eat breakfast.
Read the obituaries in the newspaper,
make sure you aren’t there;
then read the comics,
(make sure you aren’t there)
then go back and read the trivial stuff
on the front page.
Brush your teeth.
Go to work
or school.
Function adequately.
Come home.
Do chores
desk work
or homework.
Relax.
Eat supper.
Hear everyone’s news
if there are others in your home.
Watch KU basketball.
Go to bed,
or fall asleep while watching TV.
Wake up the next morning
to more of the same
do it all over again.
Predictable routine.
We don’t mind routine.
In fact, we count on it.
We like the way our lives play out by a certain, daily rhythm,
until
until something happens
that makes our routine skip a beat.
Once in a while,
our self-fashioned world
gets thrown out of orbit.
Something shifts.
Our poles get reversed.
Time gets wrinkled.
A little--or large--monkey wrench get’s thrown in the works.
Something happens that
 as Jerry Lee Lewis used to sing
     makes us feel like
“There’s a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on.”
A car accident.
One of the kids or grandkids gets sick.
Scary sick.
A bomb gets launched in our direction.
A sudden change in the weather.
A flat tire
while you’re going 70.
Finding out you’re pregnant.
Something, like that couple up in Kansas City
he worked the night shift
she was at home with their one year old daughter
but she had bought a box of wine
and drank the whole thing herself
as well as downing antidepressants
and he came home in the morning
to find the one year old girl gone
and no one knows where she is
or what happened to her.
No one wakes up
at the top of their expected, routine day
and says:
“Something life-changing is going to happen to me today.”
It’s OK to have something different in the day.
But not that different.
Nothing that will change your day to night.
Nothing that will make your river flow upstream.
Nothing that will make your sun rise in the west
and set in the east.
Nothing that will ask more of you
than your current level of functioning would allow.
Nothing that will make you find out
what you’re really made of.
Nobody wants something like that
suddenly thrown into their day.

In Nazareth there is a huge cathedral.
HUGE!
It was built during the time of the Crusades.
It’s called the Church of the Annunciation.
Outside, there is a courtyard,
probably as big as the entire property of this church.
It’s a tile mosaic.
Hundreds of millions,
of tiny tiles
laid by the crusaders.
Inside, a beautiful,
wide open sanctuary.
There are two levels.
The lower level is like a grotto.
Large enough to seat maybe a hundred people.
The rest must stand,
up above
looking down.
Down in the grotto,
inside that HUGE and ornate cathedral,
is what’s left of Mary’s home
or what is assumed to be Mary’s home.
It is one of the holy places for Christians.
A magnificent cathedral
both inside and out.
For what?
To commemorate what?
The day the angel
surprised a teenaged girl named Mary.
It shouldn’t be named the Church of the Annunciation.
It should be named the Church of the Big Surprise!
The surprise that forever changed the life of Mary.
The surprise that not only put a wrinkle in her day,
it was a wrinkle
that would never be ironed out.
Imagine,
Mary’s mother comes in that day and says,
“Are you all right, dear; you look like you’ve seen a ghost!”
“No,” Mary replies.  “It was more like an angel.”
“Yeah, right,” her mother laughs.  “You and that fanciful head of yours.”
Imagine the surprise Mary’s mother gets,
when she finds out Mary was telling the truth.
Interesting,
we don’t read anywhere in the Bible,
about Mary’s mother
and how she dealt with her daughter’s surprise.

That’s the trouble with surprises like that.
They don’t just affect the one who got surprised.
The ripples go farther out than that.
Every surprise,
on Mary’s level of surprise,
always affects many others.
For Mary
her surprise affected the whole world.
Her surprise broke the time barrier.
It has spread its ripples through two thousand years.
What happened to a middle eastern girl
has caused an impact across every cultural boundary.
Mary’s surprise not only changed Mary.
It changed the world.

But it wasn’t just a visit that was the surprise.
If it was just a visit by an angel,
that would be one thing.
But it wasn’t just a visit.
It was a visit with a declaration.
It was a declaration about a mission.
It was a mission that was the surprise.
It was a surprise that changed the world.
The mission was to carry and give birth to a baby boy.
A baby who would grow up
to be the Savior of the world.

The surprise is,
you never walk away from a visit with God,
or one of the angels
and stay the same.
The surprise is
your life shifts.
Something is demanded of you.
Everything will be different
from that day forward.
As Jacob found out
after wrestling with God
after being touched by God,
that his hip would never be same.
  You never walk away from an encounter with God
without a limp.
Your personal mission
the one you fashioned for yourself
the one you thought was your own
the one you even thought was given you by God
the one your daily routine is designed around
that mission
could be gone.
In one single moment.
A new mission will take its place.
God’s mission.
The mission that is authentically
and really
from God.
And maybe,
that’s why we’re secretly afraid of God.
We’re afraid if we get too close to God
we will have to change.
Our mission will have to change.
Our reason for being will have to go.
We don’t want any surprises
on God’s scale of things.
We don’t want to change.
We like our lives.
We don’t want to see any burning bushes
like Moses saw.
We’d rather tend our sheep
out in the middle of nowhere
than lead a people
on a crazy journey
across a desert peninsula
to God-knows-where.
We don’t want to hear the surprise voice of God
asking us to take our family
and leave for another land,
not knowing where, exactly that is,
like Abraham.
We’d rather stay settled.
Deeply rooted in place.
We want to live out our lives
with our own people
in the way we choose
in the place we choose.
We don’t want to hear the voice
of some crusty old, curmudgeon prophet
sent by God
making a surprise visit to our family
and find out the surprise is
that God wants you to be King
as young David found out.
We’d rather play our flute
to the sheep
kill a wolf every now and then
but let that be the limit of our activity
or courage.
We’d rather not take on leadership
that asks more of us than we want
or feel we’re ready
to give.
We just want to do this much
and no more.
We don’t want to be knocked off our horse
by a bright light
and a strange voice
asking us why we’re fighting
what we know is the right thing to do
like Paul was.
We don’t want to find out
that everything we’ve been doing
up to that point in our lives
has been wrong.
We’d rather fight the demons
of our own creating
call the people we don’t like
or don’t agree with
the devil
and chase them down
so we can ram our religious ways
down their throats.
We’d rather stroke the institutions
rather than live by faith
led by a free God
who wants to give us a new name
and a new mission.

Maybe you think what’s being asked of you
is way too much,
beyond your capabilities.
At least,
beyond your willingness.
But that doesn’t matter to God,
and God’s surprising choices.
God doesn’t wait for your approval.
God simply comes
and thrusts you into a position
which you would not normally choose on your own.
We, really,
deep down,
don’t want God making those kinds of choices for us.

Mary is no different.
She is “thoroughly shaken”
by the angels visit
and God’s surprise mission.
She was “wondering what was behind” words like that.
She wondered,
as we all would
what impact those surprising words would mean for her life.
How would they change her?
How would they shape her life
from that day forward?
Because the surprise
was not just that one time visit.
As Jacob and Moses and Abraham and David and Paul and Mary found out,
there is no job description.
That’s part of God’s surprise.
The job description
for what God was asking Jacob, Moses, Abraham, David, and Mary to do
was written out as each day went by
after that initial visit.
None of them knew,
exactly,
what God was asking of them.
or,
how that surprising mission from God
would affect each day.
They didn’t know
until they got up each day.
All routines are out the window.
In place of routines
there is God.

A fellow Presbyterian Pastor I knew,
up in Nebraska,
Wally Easter was his name
was as short as I am tall.
He was a wonderful, witty man.
When he was on the nominating committee of presbytery,
looking for people to fill committee positions,
he would call a person
and say to them:
“Just say, ‘yes’ and I’ll tell you what you agreed to later.”

That’s why we don’t want to get too close
to God.
That’s why we don’t want to see any
angels.
Even though our culture is angel ga-ga these days;
benign little figurines,
chubby cherubs,
with tiny wings
that would barely be enough
to flutter around
infantile in their appearance
unable to
protect you from mayhem.
That’s not an angel.
When you read the Bible,
you find out the angels are the ones who are fearsome
fall on your face fearful
who often bring danger
and a dangerous
life changing message.
Angels are the ones
whose surprise visits
come with an open-ended job description,
with a sword in the hand
on which we are to pledge our lives
and
on which we are asked to simply say,
“YES”
and then,
forever after,
when you are questioning God, saying
“What exactly did I sign up for?” or
more blatantly:
“I did not sign up for this!”
God will reply,
“Ah, ah, ah; you said, ‘Yes.’”
And we think to ourselves,
“I will never say ‘yes’ to God again.”

Now,
with a sigh of relief,
we realize not all of us are needed by God
to be a Mary,
or a Moses
or a David
or a Paul.
Those were people God chose
to carry out a special mission.
Not special people.
Ordinary people.
People like you and I.
It was the surprise,
It was the mission,
given by God
that was extraordinary
not the person.

And yet,
guess what?
Surprise!
God has visited each of us.
That’s why you are here today.
Because,
somewhere,
somehow,
God got through to you.
God touched your life.
Deep down
something shifted.
God said, “I need you.
     I want you to be a disciple of my Son, Jesus.”
God said, “Don’t think about it;
Just say ‘Yes.’
You’ll find out later what it means
to say that ‘yes.’”
Did you think God was going to just let you go on
with your mediocre life?
Did you think God would not come back at you
with some demands?
Did you think you understood the job description
when you first said, “Yes?”
Did you think your life would not change that much,
when you said “yes” to discipleship?
Did you think you would never be confronted,
or have to face anything of any difficulty?
Did you think you wouldn’t have to make any tough choices?
Surprise!