Like most of you, I have been deeply worried about the escalating tensions between Iran and the US. Watching the conflict unfold on the news this week, I am struck with the predictability of it all. We all know the steps. We learned them on the playground as children, just on a smaller scale. They are engrained in us.
Somebody provokes, the other responds, there is escalating rhetoric, a counter provocation, more rhetoric, a counter response…wash, rinse, repeat.
While this sad little two-step has been unfolding in its latest iteration, I’ve been thinking about the family members from our congregation serving in the Middle East. My prayers go out to them and their loved ones. I can’t imagine their anxiety. How much more pointless this depressing dance must be when all you want is your loved one to return safely home.
The fact that this crisis, like most we’ve faced the last few years, is self-inflicted and could easily have been avoided, only adds to the consternation of those who have so much on the line.
I am startled by the lack of imagination in everything I’ve seen unfold this week. Hanna Arendt coined the phrase, “the banality of evil” when she wrote about the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1963.
I think she was absolutely right. Human evil has a pedestrian dreariness to it. When we’re confronted with evil, what’s most chilling is how easily recognizable it is. We know people like that. We ARE people like that.
By contrast, what lies at the heart of a life of faith is surprise! A profound ‘Aha’ that we never saw coming. A life of faith is like booking a flight Albuquerque and arriving in Seattle, and then discovering that Seattle was where you really wanted to go all along.
When we live our lives in faith, God continually shows up in those places we least expect to find God.
God is there in a manger, a helpless infant.
God steps into the River Jordan to be baptized (over the objections of John the Baptist). We’ll hear about this on Sunday.
God walks among us in Jesus, an itinerant preacher, challenging the status quo of the established religious and political authorities.
And, God is there in the least likely place of all; dying on a cross at the hands of those religious and political authorities who took offense in Jesus Gospel of Love. Yes, they preferred their own predictable banality over the startling love of God that Jesus was peddling.
You know, those in authority generally don’t like surprises. People in authority want to be in control of the narrative. On top of events. ‘No surprises,’ is the mantra of the powerful. It always has been.
Is it any wonder then, Jesus tells us that God is the ‘wind that blows where it chooses’ (John 3:8); the sun that shines on the just and the unjust alike; the tiny mustard seed that grows to give shelter to the birds of the air (Luke 13:9).
Jesus came to turn a self-satisfied world upside down, to subvert all its predictable assumptions, and Jesus invites us to be part of the unfolding, imaginative surprise of God’s love.
May God’s Love startle our world this year. We could certainly use a good shaking up.
Charles Oberkehr 