There’s this old story I heard about a wise old rabbi who everyday of his life would walk through the town square on his way to the synagogue. One morning he is accosted by the local policeman who says to him, “And where do you think you’re going?!” The rabbi pauses to ponder the question, looks the policeman in the eye and says, “I have no idea.” This angers the policeman. “Every morning I see you walking through the town square on your way to the synagogue, and I today you have the audacity to tell me you don’t know where you’re going?! Well, for such disrespect, I’m going to teach you a lesson!” He takes the old rabbi by the arm and quickly drags him to the town jail, where the policeman tosses him into a prison cell. “There,” says the Rabbi, “It’s just as I said. This morning I thought I was on my way to the synagogue, and here I end up in jail. You never know where you’re going to end up!”

I want to say a good word this morning about surprises. I want to say a good word for cultivating a taste for the mystery that is knit into the very heart of life. Just when we think we know what to expect, life has a way of surprising us.

It is possible, of course, to try and avoid surprises -- to attempt to make life as predictable as possible so that we think we have everything all figured out. But to live this way is to be, in some sense, already dead. And sooner or later, surprise and the unexplainable creeps back in.

The story of the rabbi reminds me of another story I heard just this past week. Our office minister, Fred Coleman goes out walking every morning with Al Booth. This past week they were walking in nearby Reynolds Park, when Fred suddenly felt the urge to turn around, where he saw this snarling animal, which he took to be a rather large fox, bearing down on him. With Fred facing the beast directly, it swerved off into the forest. When he told me the story I assumed it couldn’t be a fox; it had to be a coyote, of which there are reports of sightings in our area. Fred called the Parks Department, and they informed him it must have been, incredibly, a wolf, picking on him cause he walks with a limp. Understandably, the experience was frightening to Fred, but he was convinced that God, whispering in his ear, had protected him from the danger. And besides that it gave him a great story to tell.

It seems to me there are two ways to hear this story. The most common would be to say, how horrible! there are dangerous wolves roaming about our nice suburban neighborhood. To hear the story this way is understandable enough -- there are some surprises of which we would just as well stay clear.

Now of course I’m not the one the wolf came after, but it seems to me possible to hear this story in a different way -- as evocative of a wonderful sense of mystery. Just
when you think you know what to expect on your daily walk, a wolf comes charging out of nowhere! Boring life is not, thank God! You never know what the day may bring! And if we pay attention, God’s grace will be there, in every surprise, waiting to be discovered.

Both of our scripture stories this morning are laced with mystery and surprise.

The story of calling of Samuel is introduced with this verse: “The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.” Perhaps this is another way of saying it was a time when people resisted being surprised -- a time when people fled from mystery.

Night after night the boy sleeps soundly in the temple of the Lord, until one night he is surprised to be awoken by a voice calling his name. Relying on his limited, past experience, Samuel assumes the voice must belong to his mentor, old Eli. Eli, to his credit, helps Samuel realize a far greater surprise: the voice he is hearing belongs to none other than to that great mystery behind the universe whom we refer to as “the Lord.”

In the Gospel lesson we hear of a man named Nathanael who is weary of the same old same old, and yet over time has come to be cynical, doubting that anything truly new and surprising can occur in his life. When Philip tells him the remarkable news that they have found the messiah, one Jesus of Nazareth, Nathanael’s skepticism kicks in, asking, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?”

Philip’s response is instructive. “Come and see,” says Philip. Unlike some Christians, particularly those you hear on late night radio call-in shows, Philip doesn’t try to explain everything to Nathanael. In the end, mysteries can not be explained, though they can and should be explored. He says, in essence, “Come and experience this mystery for yourself.”

It is at this point that mystery and surprise really kicks in for Nathanael. Upon meeting the stranger named Jesus, he is stunned to discover that the stranger knows him through and through -- tells Nathanael stuff about himself that absolutely blows him away.

Now the way I hear what comes next is that Nathanael tries to solve the mystery. He makes a quick, knee-jerk statement of belief: “I know who you are: you’re the king of Israel, the messiah!” He reaches for a familiar category from his tradition as a way to sort of nail down the mystery. “Oh, I get it -- I understand what is going on here.” To this Jesus’ responds by saying in so many words, “Oh, you believe, do you? my friend, you have only begun to be surprised. I have got more surprises in store for you than you know!”

To walk with Jesus is to open yourself up to surprises which can sometimes brings danger and difficulty, so it’s understandable that we might want to flee the great mystery of it all. Mary and Joseph’s life got turned upside down when they said “yes” to the mystery the angel announced to them. For Martin Luther King, Jr., saying “yes” to Jesus meant stepping out of the relatively comfortable life he had as the pastor of a local church to lead a great movement of justice which eventually led to his premature death, and at times I’m sure the urge to flee was strong. The alternative, however -- a life lived without surprise and mystery -- is, as I said before, a kind of living death. Thoreau called it a life of “quiet desperation”, and believed most human beings get trapped in this kind of life. I suspect that it is a big part of the motivation that leads people to enter into wars and other violent behaviors -- it provides an escape from the seemingly surprise-free tedium of ordinary life.

But opening ourselves up to mystery doesn’t necessarily mean we get called on some great adventure in time and space. The writer who wrote Psalm 139 which we read together this morning seems to be reeling from a sense of astonishment by nothing other than the extraordinary design of his own body and the simple fact that he is alive.

There is mystery laced throughout in the commonplace of our lives, if only we can open our eyes tosee it. Those of us who have been privileged to be present at the moment of birth can testify to a sense of the mysterious. Questions that can be explored but never definitively answered tumble into our head: Where did this little baby I hold in my arms come from? Why is this child here? Who is this child? If we were so inclined, we might find inspiration in this moment of wonder to devote our lives to the study of reproductive biology or some other field, indeed, to get a Ph.D. in such areas of inquiry. But the knowledge gained in such study, although useful would not take away the ultimate mystery of life; it would simply open up more and more questions to explore. And as the baby grows into a self-absorbed teenager, these questions and the mysteries they represent don’t disappear, though we ourselves often lose sight of them.

Human beings are mysterious. Each of us has this capacity for great good as well as great evil. Can we ever truly say we “know” another person -- that we’ve resolved all the mysteries of that person? We are like icebergs in the sense that the portion that is seen and known in no way compares with the depths hidden beneath the surface. We can live fifty years with someone and in the process come to recognize countless patterns of behavior, but the moment we say to ourselves this person can no longer surprise me, the relationship gets stuck in the mud.

More mystery: How is it that one person goes through a time of intense suffering and ends up embittered, and another person goes through a similar experience of suffering, and comes out more loving?

While we’re on the subject, what about this common place phenomenon we call “love?” Try giving a definitive explanation or definition of what “love” is. Enough said.

Or how about “humor?”

Death, of course, is the great mystery beyond the mystery of this life. Both the atheist who will swear to you that there is absolutely nothing beyond the extinction of our bodily life, and the believer of a particular religious orthodoxy who thinks they can tell you exactly who is and who isn’t going to be in heaven are running away from the mystery. Dr. Raymond Moody in his book, The Light Beyond, records lots of peoples’ descriptions of what they experienced during so-called “Near Death Experiences”, and they all testify to the fact that words are ultimately inadequate to convey what they encountered on the border of life and death. One of my personal favorites is this one by a man who thought he knew more than he did:
 

"My doctor told me I ‘died’ during the surgery. But I told him that I came to life. I saw
in that vision how stuck up I was with all that theory, looking down on everyone who
wasn't a member of my denomination or didn't subscribe to the theological beliefs I did.
A lot of people I know are going to be surprised when they find out that the Lord isn't
interested in theology. He seems to find some of it amusing, as a matter of fact,
because he wasn't interested at all in anything about my denomination. He wanted to
know what was in my heart, not my head.”

Betty Polen told me a delightful little story about her husband Ray when I was writing his eulogy a couple of years back. Years ago Betty had been to a UMW meeting where the pastor had told the women gathered that they should be intentional about planning in advance for funerals. Betty came home and promptly asked Ray, “If you die before me, I need to know: do you want to be cremated, or do you want to be buried in a coffin?” Ray thought for a moment, and then, with a twinkle in his eye said, “Surprise me.”

Death, I believe, is the greatest surprise of all, and a wonderful one at that if we enter into it with our hearts soft and open, ready to receive the gift like little children.

Exactly one year ago I had just begun my three month sabbatical, so recently I’ve found myself remembering what I experienced during that time. The need for a sabbatical -- the need for renewal in general -- arises when a weariness overtakes us that makes life seem all too routine. Sometimes this comes about when the stress level reaches a point where surprises -- the very thing that could break up the routines -- are experienced as enemies. To some extent I had reached such a place, and I was grateful for the opportunity to step out of the routines in order to rediscover mystery.

One of the highlights of my sabbatical was a very quiet moment. I had been spending a morning alone in a retreat house reading poetry (a new experience for me) and became drowsy. I lay down, when, on the edge of sleep, like Samuel, I heard a voice in my head. Curiously, the voice I heard was a woman’s voice, and what she said was, “Ready to dance.” Could it have been the voice of the holy spirit? I want to remember those words. Always.

Later in my sabbatical I came across a passage in a book by Gerald May, The Dark Night of the Soul, that seemed like it was a commentary on the voice I heard. I wrote it out and it now hangs on the wall of my study:

“When we were children, most of us were good friends with mystery. The world was
full of it and we loved it. Then as we grew older, we slowly accepted the
indoctrination that mystery exists only to be solved. For many of us, mystery became
an adversary; unknowing became a weakness... (The Spiritual life) is a slow and
sometimes painful process of becoming “like little children” again, in which we first
make friends with mystery and finally fall in love again with it. And in that love we
find an ever increasing freedom to be who we really are in an identity that is
continually emerging and never defined. We are freed to join the dance of life in
fullness without having a clue about what the steps are.” (pp. 132 - 133)

The surprises the holy spirit would lead us into are wonderful. Two weeks ago on New Year’s Eve I found myself dancing my butt off at my niece’s wedding in North Carolina. Because of the brokenness that all too often characterizes families, I went eighteen years without seeing the bride’s father, my brother. I hadn’t seen my niece since she was a little girl. But here I was having a heck of a good time at her wedding. Who would have guessed it?

Our mysterious God has got some really, really good surprises in store for us. Let’s try and stay open to them.

In the kindness of Jesus,

Pastor Jeff