Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Shock and awe(some)


When is the last time you were really wowed by your faith? That's the beginning of Sunday's sermon, called "The Wow Factor." I'm exploring what it really means to be wowed, surprised, shocked, changed, pushed, pulled, upset, or any other expression that describes the joy that can be found when God shows up unexpectedly.

Psalm 68: 20 tells us of Jehovah, who comes around every so often and takes the mistakes we've made and fixes them like a  -- "Our God is a God who saves; from the Soverign Lord comes escape from death."

It's a very warm morning here in Acadiana. I hear the sounds of a riding lawn mower doing it's thing. The smell of freshly cut grass permeates the area around our church, like the fragrence of watermellon on an early Spring  evening. 

Elves and angels are dancing to an old Bruce Springsteen tune as Eunice dresses up for the beginning of summer, and sweat has formed a crown of gold on my forehead. The sights, smells, sounds take me back to a time when each day was in itself a wonderful surprise to a kid who spent much of the days by himself before the evening spent at a baseball game or a practice.

Sleeping late after school ended for the summer, I drank in the country air when I arose, and each day -- I promise, each and every day -- was a map of where to find the surprises of the day. Like a treasure map found by some lost soul, I got dressed with excitement, for I knew, just knew that there was something ahead that would squeeze joy into boredom.

I find it surprising that the Israelites didn't talk about miracles much way back when. the notion of a miracle as a divine intervention, ironically, is a fairly new happenstance. Back then (around the time the calendar spread its wings and started over at zero), before modern science tried its best to flatten the wows out of our day-to-day existence, little was known about laws of nature. Kind of like what I knew of Algebra and such in school.

So, the Israelites pretty much decided God had a hand in everything. From blades of grass shooting up in the foggy days of Palestinean Springs to the droughts of late Summer that fried the same blades of grass, God was involved. God was active in everything. God simply showed up, often.

In Jesus, the activity continued. A God who walks on water? Check. A God who brings kids back from the dead? Check. A God who walks in worn sandals and repairs wooden cribs and washes feet and casts away stones while writing in the dirt? Check, check, check and check.

Every day was not only a celebration for the disciples, it was a wealth of surprise, a covey of awe(some)ness. 

Who knew what would come next? Surely that made rising with the Son a great, great blessing for some retired fishermen whose routine had been just that, routine.

I'm preaching this weekend from Luke's Gospel, about the Roman Centurion who comes to Jesus and shocks the sandals off him by asking The Lord, a Jew, to save the son of one of the Centurion's slaves. Jesus gets all smiley faced and says, "I say to you, I have not found such great faith, not even in Israel."

Shock and awe(some) it was.

So, when was it that you felt something akin to that? 

I remember a few years back when my dear wife, Mary, and I went to Cursillo and things went on at that retreat that set my heart a flutter with awe(some) ness. Those kinds of moments when you're simply living as hard as you can, and The Lord of Life comes sneaking up with a wonderful joy to give away.

I would propose, frankly, that no matter how strong our faith is, God is still a surprising God. Look at Abram, who would father a nation though he had great difficulty fathering one child. Look at Joseph, who was sold down the road by his brothers only to find himself near the top of the food chain in Egypt.    

The list goes on like a spark in dry pasture. 

God, of course, knows exactly where He is headed, knows exactly where we're going, and knows the general plan. 

Henry David Thoreau once said wonderfully, "Men who talk about Bible miracles, do so because there is no miracle in their lives." 

Maybe the answer to Thoreau is that every day is a miracle, Biblical or otherwise. What a shock.

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