Great Expectation

“Great Expectation”

Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

First Presbyterian Church of Jamestown , New York

The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet

January 10, 2010

Baptism of the Lord Sunday

Every time I read our appointed gospel lection this week, I got stopped at the phrase at the beginning of it: “As the people were filled with expectation…” I have said on several previous occasions that one of the keys to living a satisfying life is to live expectantly, though without specific expectations. To live with expectation – yes. To live with expectations – no. To live expectantly, with expectation, is to trust that something good or good for us, even if it does not seem so on the surface or at the moment, is going to happen. To live expectantly calls us to wakefulness, to attentiveness to and participation in life around us. To live with specific expectations of ourselves or others or life itself is to court disappointment when those expectations are not met but, worse than that, holding onto specific expectations often close us off to alternative pathways or possibilities that may even be better for us because we are so fixed on the expectations we already harbor.

Live expectantly, but without specific expectations. For instance, do you come to worship expectantly? Do you come to worship with the sense that something is about to happen here even though you may have no idea ahead of time what it might be? Do you come expectantly, ready to be touched by a phrase in a prayer that you might treasure all week, or moved by the beauty of a song that softens your heart or stirs your soul? Do you come to worship open to the serendipity that you might hear some fresh insight that will unclog an emotional artery in you? Or clarify a decision you need to make or a direction you need to take? Or do you come to worship pretty sure that nothing meaningful will occur, expecting nothing to happen really? God can crack even the toughest nut, but, on balance, coming here favorably predisposed makes for a more fruitful experience.

In biblical tradition, a day begins at sundown. At the beginning of the book of Genesis we read – “There was evening and there was morning, the first day…There was evening and there was morning, the second day…There was evening and there was morning, the third day…” and so on throughout all the days of creation. It is why the Jewish Sabbath begins at setting sun on Fridays. That is really the beginning of the day. It is believed that in the womb of nocturnal hours the coming stretch of waking time pregnant with possibility is being prepared for us. So, do you awaken expectant, confident that even amidst the “danger, toils, and snares” of your life that grace will find you and lead you into what the songwriter calls “a more profound alleluia”? Or do your days slip by mostly unattended? Mary Oliver writes of living expectantly like this:

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to

your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –

over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

(from her poem, “Wild Geese”)

“Announcing (our) place in the family of things…” We need to be reminded of our place because we have a way of losing it, the place we have known. When we lose a job or start a new one, when we finish school and strike out to begin a career, when we become a parent or a widow or a husband or wife, a cancer patient, when we retire, when our parents got divorced or we do…each of these are times when we lose our place, the place we had inhabited, the place we knew, and we have to begin to live among the family of things in a new one.

Thankfully, “the world offers itself to (our) imagination…” So we come back as often we do to the importance of “seeing.” “Open my eyes that I may see Glimpses of truth Thou hast for me…” Not just the eyes on our face, but the eyes of our imagination, our expectant eyes.

I think that may be what makes Jesus so special to us. Constantly being displaced or losing his place, the world offered itself to his imagination and he chose to see it, and his own place in the family of things, through eyes made expectant by God’s Spirit, symbolized in our reading this morning by a lone, wild bird in the form of a dove, alighting on him after his baptism. And, for good measure, he also heard a voice bellowing from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

Joanna Adams, a Presbyterian preacher in Atlanta who has spoken at Chautauqua a time or two, tells of seeing a theater production of Clarence Jordan’s Cotton Patch Gospel which, for those who are unfamiliar with it, is the gospel in “southern.” In the production, the actor Tom Key played God which is, as Joanna Adams said, “not a bad role if you can get it.” Tom stood high on a ladder on the stage. The actor playing the just-immersed-in-the-Jordan Jesus stood below looking up with hope and expectation and maybe a little anxiety as well. But it was all to the good as God yelled down from the ladder’s top rung, “You are my boy, Jesus. I am so proud of you.”

Adams said that she could feel in the marrow of her bones the exuberant love and effusive approval in the actor’s voice and that something similar happens between God and us in our own baptisms: “This one is mine” God exclaims. “I see my image in her!” “Don’t you see my image in him?” And then the “Voice” says – inaudibly, perhaps, but surely – to each of us in our turn that that lone, wild Bird of God descends on us to grace us and guide us along our life’s journey.

That is why we can live expectantly. A God so cosmic that we cannot contain or fully comprehend the vast eternal truth, but a God, the same God, so close that we never are alone.

It is not that we who are baptized struggle any less than anyone else to live into the glory of who God creates us to be as we see in the story of the family that was driving home after the worship service in which the family’s infant son was baptized. It seemed that the slightly older brother was inconsolable, sobbing in the back seat. Three times his father asked him what he was crying about until finally he said, “The preacher said he wanted us to be brought up in a Christian home, but I want to stay with you guys.”

One of the novels left over from last summer’s “Novel Sermons” series is one called Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. The narrator of the book is an elderly minister who knows he is about to die after a long and steady but fairly quiet life as a pastor. He is writing to his young son, the child of a later-in-life marriage to a much younger woman, about things like watching his little boy play in the sprinkler and a young couple walking in the rain. He is writing about water, the basis of life. So he also writes to his son about one of his childhood exploits as a preacher’s kid himself who, with another “PK,” decided to baptize a litter of kittens. The boys took this “ministry” very seriously, he says, but the mother cat didn’t, and she interrupted their little service and spirited the kittens away right in mid-baptism. When the boy asked his pastor father “in the most offhand way imaginable what exactly would happen to a cat if one were to, say, baptize it,” his father gave him a stern response that the sacraments must always be treated and regarded with the greatest respect. The old minister remembers that “that wasn’t really an answer to my question. We did respect the sacraments, but we thought the whole world of those cats. I got his meaning, though, and I did no more baptizing until I was ordained.”

Now, at the end of his life and after many years of baptizing the faithful of his flock, the elderly pastor looks back on the day he baptized the cats: "I still remember," he says, "how those warm little brows felt under the palm of my hand. Everyone has petted a cat, but to touch one like that, with the pure intention of blessing it, is a very different thing. It stays in the mind. For years we would wonder what, from a cosmic viewpoint, we had done to them. It still seems to me to be a real question. There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily. It doesn't enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that. I have felt it pass through me, so to speak. The sensation is of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time.”

Well, that minister had a more elevated view of his cats than this one does of his, but the point is taken. It is best stated, I think, in the words of a father to his oldest boy who had begrudged the extravagant grace the father had poured out on his prodigal son, saying, “Son, you always are with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.”

Live expectantly, because all that is God’s is yours. Do not make your life smaller than it needs to be by limiting it to your specific expectations. Be open to it all, to God’s all.

So, two things: Even when we make a mess of our lives, as the prodigal had made a mess of his, we still can live expectantly because God never gives us up for dead no matter what we have done or where we find ourselves. And when we do not think we have made a mess of our lives, like the elder brother who did not know he was sinking in the quicksand of his hubris, God does not give us up for dead. There always is something “more” for us in the grace of expectant living.

Living with great expectations may sometimes disappoint us because the expectations are ours and, as St. Paul says, we too often see as in a mirror dimly. So we find it hard to know what is good and right and best for us in the long run. But living with great expectation never disappoints because it means that we are open to the leading of God who promises us even more than we can ask or think or imagine.

Live expectantly, because all that is God’s is yours.

That is the good news of the gospel for this day.

Amen.

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