God has an extraordinary ability to defy our expectations. Especially if he really wants to get our attention.

Beyond Expectations
When I was a college student, I went to try a large Episcopal church not too far from where my family attended. It was an 8:00 a.m. service held in a small chapel, and the liturgy was Cranmer, or what we call Rite I: very formal, Elizabethan language with lots of thees and thous. And I was the youngest person there by at least thirty years. At least.

I was sitting in the back, obviously a visitor. Everybody else sort of looked like I do now, or older. I didn’t know what was going to happen; I just thought I should go. So I went.

Well, to my astonishment, the language, the thees and thous and Elizabethan English words, struck right to the core of my being. Yes, God was using that language to pierce my heart.

I was shocked. I didn’t expect anything like that to happen. And then, the biggest shocker of all was when we came up to receive Communion. Since I was way in the back, I was last to receive. And I put up my hands, the priest put the bread in my hand, I put the bread in my mouth, and I had this experience (it was almost terrifying) of God, in my mouth.

I actually didn’t know what to do. It was such a deep experience that I didn’t know how to handle it. I received the chalice, and then I got up. As I made my way back, I put my hand on each of the pews to steady myself. That’s how powerful it was.

Of course, everybody out there was almost motionless, their heads bowed in prayer. And a part of me wanted to yell, “Do you realize what’s happening in here?”

Now for all I know, there were profound intercessors among that group of people who saw this college student at the back of the room and thought, “Ohhh! We ought to be praying for him!” And did. Maybe everything that happened was a reaction to the prayers by people I will never see again until I get to heaven. Then I’ll know. But I sure don’t know now.

What I do know is that I had no expectation for anything like that to happen at all. My expectation was to go through the service, and that was pretty much it.

A Sense of Expectation
But expectations, in fact, actually matter. And I have come to believe that we should approach Sunday-morning worship with a sense of expectation. As followers of Christ, must dare to believe—and it is a dare—is that through the very simple things that we do, often half-hearted, sometimes broken, that Jesus actually does show up, and that he is here. And if he is here, if he is true to what we know of Him in the scriptures, that means he wants to do things with us, In us. Through us. By us. And if somehow our expectation level is way down, that church is in essence something to get through, a place where we hope maybe we’ll get something out of a sermon or have something happen to us somehow, then we miss out.

But God also delights in surprising us. We see this again and again in scripture. In the book of 1 Kings, chapter 17, Elijah raises from the dead the son of the widow of Zarephath. Raises him from the dead. Now, that’s what you call a surprise.

And in the New Testament, in the first chapter of Galatians, Paul relates his conversion story. “Here I am, persecuting the church of God. But guess what I’m doing now? I’m actually an apostle of the very faith that I was persecuting. Reaching out to Gentiles, Goyim, meaning ‘dogs,’ people who should not in any way be a part of the covenant promises of God.

And finally, there’s a story in Luke 7 that actually mirrors 1 Kings 17. This is the story of Jesus coming in and healing the son of the widow.

And every single time, in every one of these stories, people—including the recipients—did not expect anything to happen. At least not anything like what did happen.

Let’s take a look at the story in Luke. When it opens, a great crowd, including the widow, is heading out of town. Why? Because you don’t bury bodies in town. There’s no such thing as a funeral home getting a body ready. They wrap up the body, and it has to be in the ground within twenty-four hours. Otherwise the desert heat does bad things. And so they’re going to get the body in the ground as quickly as possible.

But this woman is known in the community, and they love her. And they’re there out of profound sympathy. She’s a widow, and this is her only son, meaning she has no visible means of support now that her son is dead. The son’s the breadwinner; she has nothing. So what is she going to do? And so they’re actually there because they care, and they know that what she’s facing is awful.

Wrong Expectations
But there’s also that sense among some who are there, because this was so much a part of the Judaism of the time, was that there’s a kind of quid pro quo about this. In other words, did something happen to cause this woman’s son to die? What went on in the household? Did the widow do something? Or was something going on with the boy?

You see, the thought would have been exactly what the widow in the Old Testament story said to Elijah, “Did you come to remind me of my sin and kill my son?” (1 Kings 17:18b, New International Version). That would have been what some might have assumed. Even though the character of God is not like that.

Not at all. Psalm 146, in fact, says something very, very different. “The Lord sets the prisoners free, the Lord opens the eyes of the blind, the Lord lifts up those who are bowed down, the Lord loves the righteous, the Lord watches over the strangers, he upholds the orphan and the widow” (Ps. 146:7b-9a).

At the very heart of who he is, God’s character has always been one of mercy. Not, “You do this wrong and therefore this bad thing happens to you.” If that view of “What goes around comes around” is a part of your understanding of the nature of God, you will never want to draw close to him. Because there will always be reasons in your heart to show you that you don’t qualify for answered prayer, for the grace of God, and for his mercy in your life. And therefore, you will always keep him at a distance. You’ll always have wrong expectations about what he wants to do in your life and wrong expectations for worship, too. Instead of approaching a service with an attitude of openness and expectation, you’ll think, “No, because if I get close to the presence of God, something unbelievably terrible might happen to me. I know what I did yesterday, or maybe even this morning.”

Especially those with us who wrestle with a kind of secret life. You know, there’s the public persona, and there’s who I really am on the inside. And since we know, as we say every single Sunday, “Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, from whom no secrets are hid,” I’m dead in the water. Right?

But if I understand in the depths of my soul that who God is in the very heart of his character is a God who gives and acts in mercy, then I can come, I can be in his presence and know that what he will bring me is not what I deserve, but mercy. Mercy. Forgiveness. Kindness. “Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

Because you see, more often than not, the reason we come weary and heavy laden is because life is hard, and we beat ourselves up to boot. We have all this fighting on the inside as well as on the outside, and it’s a real struggle. And we show up for church, and our attitude is, “Man, don’t ask me to enter in. It’s big that I even came at all.”

Well, if you know that you’re coming to be with a God who comes and speaks mercy, it’s worth it, it’s always worth it. It is in all ways worth it.

And it doesn’t even matter in the end how big the stuff is that you’re wrestling with on the inside. We see that in all of the stories from the scriptures we’ve discussed, God is consistently doing the impossible: raising dead people to life. Converting a persecutor into a man who knows compassion, maybe even for the first time in his life.

So when you come into the church, when you think about your day, don’t hem God in to the manageable. I’m like you. My life is busy, even overscheduled. But if all I’m trying to do is get through my routine, that means my expectation level is way down. I just want to get through it, do the best I can with what I have.

But if I know that somehow God is in my day, and that he wants to do things, regardless of how I feel, that changes everything. It’s a very different way to think about your day and the people you meet as you go through it.

Great Expectations
In other words, your expectations have everything to do with your availability. If you live around a life of managed and low expectations, you’ll go through your day and you’ll get things done. You’ll be efficient and proficient and things will happen. But why would you want to live such a boring life?

You see, to be available for God to use you is to have an expanded vision of God. It means believing that yes, I am, in fact, the object of God’s mercy.

There is a kind of demonic, condemning voice that wants you to live at the level of low expectations. To be somebody who basically fits in, doesn’t stir up trouble, manages your day, and just goes through the day trying to be the best husband, employee, dad, student, ____________ (fill in the blank) that you can be.

But why live that way? If you know that you are the object of God’s mercy, and the One who’s had mercy on you can do the impossible, that changes everything, including your expectations. Then all kinds of things can begin to happen both in you and through you.

So what’s your picture of God? Do you see him as one who, in fact, wants to give you mercy? Not just mercy to the person you think deserves it, but to you.

I saw this just yesterday. I was up at St. George, our church up in The Villages for the end of a three-day seminar led by a guy named Nigel Mumford. Originally a British subject, he is now an American citizen. He was in the British Marine Corps and saw serious horror in combat that brought on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

And through a whole series of circumstances, God began to do great healing in Nigel’s life. And he knew the stats: twenty-two vets commit suicide because of PTSD every day in the United States of America. Twenty-two. Sounds impossible, right?

But Nigel knew he had to do something about it, so he started a ministry for veterans called the Welcome Home Initiative. And I was privileged to be a part of the closing ceremony for this event.  Vets had come in from all over the country, and it was astonishing to hear them tell their stories about what they had been and what God had done. It was an honor to listen, to be a part, to see how the wounds of Jesus were touching the deepest wounds in the lives of these men in a way that was changing them on the inside.

You see, only Jesus can do that. And if all these men believed that they had to qualify to receive such mercy, they would have said, “Ah, my record says ‘no way.’ You don’t know what I’ve done, Jesus.”

“Well,” he would have answered them. “Yes, I do.  Come anyway.’” And they became the recipients. For some, it was transforming. For some, it was gradual. For some, it was the beginning of a whole new journey. But the fact of the matter is that Jesus was breaking into their lives in a way they never expected or thought possible.

No matter what the trauma, if you’ve been in it and it’s still inside, you should know that light and love and healing can come into your life in a way that reduces the fear, brings a greater sense of calm and hope, and gives you a level of purpose that will rob you of the curse of living an in-between life, of trying to manage the inner you and the outer you in a way all those who know about trauma understand. Jesus can begin to break that yoke.

What do you believe about God? Do you believe he wants to impart mercy to you? And do you believe that because he is the God who breaks into the impossible, that no matter where you’ve been or what you’ve done, or what’s going on in your life right now, he can take you by the hand and begin to bring life, real life, in a way you never thought possible? Are you ready to leave your no-expectation and wrong-expectation life behind?

If so, you can begin to live a life focused not on managing routine but on being a part of the adventure God can and will do both in you and through you. When you believe in the God who loves you profoundly, wants to give you his mercy, and can do the impossible, you move into a new life. A life of great expectations.

So come on. Be a part of that. Ask God to reshape how you think about him. Ask him to open your heart to the new things he wants to do in you. That some more of the life, and the joy and the adventure, can, in fact, be yours.

Not just somebody else’s. Yours.

What do you believe about God? How does that affect your expectations for his work? Share this blog and your response on Twitter. Please include my username, @revgregbrewer.

(This post is an adaption of Bishop Brewer’s sermon on June 5, 2016, at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Lake Mary.)

Unless otherwise noted, scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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