Expecting the Unexpected
March 2, 2022
EXPECTING THE UNEXPECTED – LUKE 2:1-21
N.T.Wright asks us to “Pause and pray about the quiet messages you get from time to time…a soft whisper that tells you to go somewhere unexpected…” (p.7) Immediately I remember the complementary ticket to a Casino Night at a local hotel, given to me by a colleague. It sat on my desk for days and as I looked at it, I sensed Jesus peeking around the office door saying, “Go.”
But I knew it couldn’t be Jesus speaking. My church disapproved of gambling and drinking. What if someone from church, dining at the hotel, saw me? Yet, the whisper persisted. Then a friend begged me to go with her group, so sheepishly, I went. “OK, Jesus, I do hope this is your voice I hear!”
A colleague saw past my fake smile and asked, “Can we go to the quiet bar and talk?” Not only was I going to a casino, but a bar! While not an issue for me now, then it was. Still, I felt the gentle prickle that was, for me, a sign of the of the Holy Spirit. In the shadowy corner of that bar, I listened as one of God’s wandering children made their first shaky steps towards Home. A colleague became a friend, and in time, those first steps become a lively, joyful relationship with Jesus. I could only give thanks for being pushed into a place I didn’t expect to be.
Will Willimon reminds us that if we want to be in conversation with God, we better be willing to welcome the unexpected.
“To make room in our cluttered lives for the romping of the Holy Spirit—to focus amid our distraction upon what God cares about— is to put ourselves at God’s disposal. Thus, in one way or another, every prayer “in Jesus’s name” concludes as Jesus ended his most fierce conversation with his Father, “Nevertheless, not my will but thine be done.” Don’t pray if you are unwilling for your prayer to be answered, as Jesus’s prayer was in Gethsemane, “No.”
Persist. Go ahead and knock. The door will be opened just a bit more, though not always leading into a place you expected. Sometimes what seems to us as unanswered prayer is an unexpected answer. What sounded like no was God giving us not what we thought we just had to have, but what we had no idea we needed. (W. Willimon: God Turned Toward Us)