The Second Sunday of Lent, Year B March 4, 2012
I Come Expecting Jesus The Reverend Dr. Howard J. Hess
Introduction: Many of us here this morning, including myself, have been taught to win and to aspire to become movers and shakers. By no means have we agreed to be limited by our circumstances; in fact, we have been taught to rise above them. Many of us have read self-help books, attended development seminars, and often built our lives upon the strong values of prosperity and professional success. One of the books I read earlier in my adult life was Dale Carnegie’s How to win friends and influence people (1937). This book, like many others of this genre, such as Stephen Covey’s The 7 habits of highly effective people (1989), attempted to provide formulas for success. Consequently, many of us have become wise about the ways of the world, but I might add not equally wise about the workings of the Holy Spirit.
I can still hear my father’s well-intentioned voice: “You must succeed and go further than your mother and I were able to go. No one else will take care of you. You must learn to do it for yourself.” My father’s belief in me and his persistent urging have had a huge influence upon my life. Others of you might have experienced the same expectation from your parents to surpass their achievements. At times in my earlier life, my father’s voice had the sound of a mandate, and it predisposed me to strive “to succeed” rather than to “live and savor life’s richest experiences.” Perhaps this is one of the lessons that God knew I needed to learn before entering the priesthood: that God had called me to serve Him, not to win for him and not to count on the world for my security. In fact, as Peg can attest, one of the most powerful challenges to my sense of call to ordained parish ministry came from several folks at various points in the process toward ordination, who strongly cautioned me not to give up my university tenure to answer God’s call. Over time I discerned that the power of that challenge was the way in which it resonated with what my parents had taught me – to work hard to achieve success and financial security. What I have learned is that there is a profound difference between God’s eternal values and the values of this world. It is paradoxical that when one is willing to relinquish the desire to succeed and instead follow one’s vocation, the need for success remarkably takes care of itself. In today’s gospel, Jesus was trying to teach his disciples about the Great Reversal -- that one has to be willing to give up one’s life in order to save it, and that concern about one’s security and success can lead to spiritual blindness.
II. Blindness. For Jesus’ disciples, their blind spots had to do with their pre-existing Jewish views and yearning for a political Messiah. They saw in Jesus that figure – a man who could “win friends and influence people.” The crowds had followed him. He knew how to heal, how to feed, how to defy political traps, and he was a persuasive teacher. And here was their chance – the journey from Galilee to Jerusalem that would culminate in a triumphant entry into the capital city during Passover. The stage was set.
In the publication Synthesis, dealing with this week’s lectionary readings, we are asked to think of Jesus as a military leader and to envision Peter as his Chief Lt. One day, Jesus called his primary supporters together and told them that he was going to be betrayed by the Jewish leaders, undergo great suffering, and die. Further, he told them that if they wanted to follow him, they would have to accept the same fate. They were incredulous. This was not their game plan. This is not why they left their boats and fishing businesses and their families to follow him. You see their fathers had most likely given them the same kind of mandate to succeed that my father gave me. In their case that meant casting out the oppressive Romans. Consequently, their blind spots had prevented them from truly comprehending who Jesus was and what he was trying to tell them. So Peter objected – “we won’t let that happen.” Jesus rebuked him, “Get thee behind me Satan” or “Do not strengthen my own temptation to turn away from Jerusalem and what awaits me there.”
Blindness is the key -- their blindness, our blindness, and the blindness of all the generations in between. In the gospel of Mark, the journey from Galilee to Jerusalem is framed, began and ended with two healings of the blind. As the journey started, Jesus healed the blind man from Bethesda. As the journey ended, Jesus healed blind Bartimaeus. Hebrew texts often used parallelism to communicate a key theme. The message of Jesus was enacted as well as proclaimed: Be healed from the blindness that prevents you from seeing who Jesus Christ truly is.
III. What is our blindness now? I believe that we are often so busy and preoccupied in our lives that we are at risk for losing our spiritual grounding. Current research indicates that only 11% of our young people and 32% of all adults regularly attending church have developed a mature sense of their own spirituality (White 1997). There are many competing voices in our world at the present time. I hear echoes of my own father’s voice in the stories of those around me. Even in the church, by concentrating on positive goals and accomplishments, we can wear ourselves out and lose focus upon our spiritual mission.
Fr. Robert Rohr, Director of the Center for Action and Contemplation, recently wrote a column on his blog entitled “Lent is about transformation” (2012). Rohr stresses that when we commit ourselves to making particular behavioral changes, even though these changes are positive, we can lose sight of the transformation offered in an encounter with Jesus Christ. He writes, “We can try harder, do better, and think more, but not really change in any substantial way.” Rohr continues: [the] “ultimate irony is that [transformation or conversion] is not about trying at all but [is] an ultimate surrendering, dying, and foundational letting go.”
In other words, letting go is built upon the spiritual wisdom that Christ will do perfect and wonderful things within us if we don’t fill our inner and outer space with too much “stuff.” We will see Jesus in those moments when we are willing to set aside our strivings and our worries to give him the space we need to comprehend what he is trying to teach us. This is well captured for me in a scene from “The Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Harrison Ford’s character needs to save his life by crossing a deep cavern over which there is no apparent bridge. The lesson he is being asked to learn is trust: to walk out into the empty space and rely upon a bridge that he cannot see until he places his feet upon it. Jesus is that bridge for us; the distractions and desire to succeed can hold us back; but the promise of ultimate redemption and resurrection call us forward.
IV. Conclusion. Therefore, on this Second Sunday of Lent, I’d like to offer you a simple invitation – to come to this rail today to meet Jesus Christ and to be transformed by that encounter; to offer up whatever is weighing you down or distracting you from seeing Jesus more clearly. There is a beautiful song I first heard while serving as a spiritual director at a Cursillo weekend in South Carolina, entitled “I Come Expecting Jesus.” I’d like to share the lyrics (by John Chisum) with you in the hope that they will echo in your prayers during the Eucharist this morning:
“I come expecting Jesus
To meet me in this place
I come expecting to receive
His mercy and His grace
When I eat the bread and drink the wine
It will be a holy moment in time
I come expecting Jesus
To meet me in this place.”
Amen.
May it be so for us this morning.
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