Cultivating Surprise

Cultivating Surprise
Luke 12:32-40
Isaiah 1:1, 10-20; Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16

Just when you think you know what the Bible is saying, it trips you up. We don’t get tripped up by some enemy that gives us something better than God’s word. God’s word gets us. No wonder the writer of Hebrews says that God’s word is sharper than any two-edged sword. I would suggest that working with scripture is like working with a roll of barbed wire without benefit of gloves.

If you take on its own the passage from Luke I just read, each of us would have to be constantly at the ready, day and night, week in and week out, for the Human One, the Son of Man, Jesus Christ, to come knocking at our door. Can you count how many sermons you have heard in your lifetime that preached that point? I know, I’ve waited for that same repairman, too.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t need that kind of stress in my life. In fact, Jesus doesn’t think I – or you – need that kind of stress either. In the passage that Luke placed immediately before the one I read earlier, Jesus says so. We usually encounter it in Matthew as part of the “Sermon on the Mount”:

“Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Therefore, I say to you, don’t worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. There is more to life than food and more to the body than clothing’ ” (Luke 12:22-23). Jesus said that in response to the request of someone who asked Jesus to tell that person’s brother to divide the family inheritance with him. In case you’re having a senior moment, that was the passage that Pastor Bob preached on last week. I didn’t hear his message, but he called it, “Reliable Investment.” And what was the gist of that passage? The problem of being rich – storing up treasure – for one’s self and not being rich toward God. Storing up riches for me and not storing up riches for God says that I don’t trust God and that God needs all the help that God can get.

That my friends, is not where Jesus starts in today’s passage. He says, “Don’t be afraid, little flock, because your Father delights in giving you the kingdom.” God doesn’t want us down and out, God doesn’t want us standing at the intersection holding up a sign begging for food. God doesn’t want us living under a bridge. God doesn’t want us to be ignorant about grace, forgiveness, or eternal fellowship. Just the opposite. When “he arrives, he will dress himself to serve, seat them at the table as honored guests, and wait on them.” That is as delightful for us as it is for God.

So we have these three passages, back to back: Do not worry; lay up kingdom treasure instead of worldly treasure; and wait for the Lord.

Don’t worry. (There’s that admonition again.) I am not going to turn this into a sermon about selling everything you have and putting it into the offering plate. Being rich toward God doesn’t mean that. In fact, Luke records further on in the Gospel Jesus saying that he’d rather have the widow’s two cents than the rich person’s spare change (Luke 21:1-3). (A word of warning: If you don’t like God meddling with your money, don’t read Luke’s gospel. In fact, the Bible says a whole lot more about money than it does about war and peace, etiquette, or sexuality.)

Making moth-proof wallets and rust-resistant purses is a far better business plan than building bigger barns, bigger closets, or more diversified 401K accounts. What Jesus wants you and me to do is to realize that the gift of life is whole lot more than monthly retirement checks, deeds to developer-sought-after land, commissions on sales, or royalties on mineral rights. All of life is a generous gift from God. God desires to lavish life upon us. We are so trained to expect strangers to cheat us and deprive us of what is rightfully ours, that we treat God the same way. It’s like one person’s stewardship plan: “I’ll throw everything up in the air, God, and anything you can catch you can keep.” Like that’s going to happen, and we know it.

On the human side of the equation, none of us can receive or give with clenched fists. On the God side of the equation, Jesus asks us – commands us – to be so oriented to life that we see it, know it, understand it through and through as an abundant gift from a generous God. And that means that having received it, we can give it away with gleeful abandon.

Being “rich toward God” involves a “generosity of spirit” that makes our minds and hearts more sensitive toward the ways in which God’s generosity manifests itself. Those ways are always present, but are often at the edges of our awareness, blurs at the periphery of our spiritual vision. And because we are busy trying to focus our sight on hoped-for large-scale God activities, we miss, overlook, or ignore the seemingly insignificant, small-scale God activities that are going on constantly around us.

What this means is that we have to cultivate the art of being surprised. That doesn’t mean being on a state of high alert nor its opposite which is being zonked out of it. We don’t have to be fixated or fuzzy. There is a difference, as David Schlafer says(1), between being the “lookout” and being “on the lookout.” We have been long conditioned to looking out. We have had it drummed into us until suspicion is the natural filter through which we sense everything. Remember the Sunday school song: “Be careful little eye what you see, be careful little ear what you hear,” and so on. We are to “position ourselves to be surprised.”(2) The surprise in the imagery that Jesus uses isn’t that the master comes at an odd hour. It is that when he comes and finds the servants, he prepares himself, sits them down, and serves them.

When humanity least expected it Jesus came, “matured in wisdom and years and in favor with God and with people” (Luke 2:52). Before that, Simeon and Anna had oriented their lives in such a way that when Mary and Joseph brought the infant Jesus into the temple area, they were immediately surprised – pleasantly – by the Lord’s Christ. He came to serve those who served him. “Desire God’s kingdom” (Luke 12:31) is what Jesus told people. That’s the perspective that will enable disciples to be surprised at all that God has done, is doing, and will yet do. The kingdom for which we are instructed to strive is presented to us just like the feast for the master’s servants. It is not compensation. It is not reward. It is a gift.

I challenge you to be surprised by God’s gifts this week. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if God might surprise you with a gift before you leave the building today. No you won’t find God’s gifts wrapped in colorful paper with neatly tied bows. The gift of God that might surprise you could be a smile, or the beautiful curve of a flower blossom. God’s surprise might be a steadying arm or a breath of peace interrupting anxiousness. God might surprise you with a phone call from a friend or pleasant aroma of fresh brewed herbal tea. Don’t spend the week looking for these things and thinking that you deserved them if they came. Don’t say, “It’s about time.” But rather let your responses be filled with “Oohs” and “Aahs” and “Wows.”

We are disciples of an awesome God who loves to surprise us with grace and love, with mercy and with blessings, with joy and with peace. How surprising is that?

Cultivate surprise and God will surprise you right into the kingdom. Wow!


(1) David J. Schlafer, “Luke 12:32-40, Homiletical Perspective,” Feasting on the Word (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010) Year C, Volume 3, 339.
(2) Eugene L. Lowry, The Sermon: Dancing the Edge of Mystery (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1997), 95-100.

Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com 
Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.