Cultivate Surprise
Christian Community Presbyterian Church
Bowie, Maryland
August 10, 2025
Cultivate Surprise
Luke 12:22-40
(Video may be viewed at SERMON—Cultivate Surprise—Rev. Richard S. Hays)
It’s so annoying. Just when you
think you know what the Bible says, it trips you up. We are not addled in our
thinking or roiled in a sea of conspiratorial misinformation by some devilish
enemy. It’s holy writ—God’s word itself—which strikes the devastating blow. No
wonder the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews says that God’s word is sharper
than any two-edged sword. Reading scripture is like working bare-handed with
barbed wire.
The
last piece of advice from today’s reading from Luke’s Gospel would have us
constantly on red alert, 24-7, clutching our phones waiting for the doorbell
camera app to chime with the Son of Man, Jesus Christ, knocking at our door.
That
would stress out the saintliest of the saints. That kind of stress we don’t
need in our lives. Jesus doesn’t want us to be stressed out. In The Message
Eugene Peterson interpreted Jesus’ words this way:
“Don’t fuss about what’s on the table at mealtimes or if the clothes in your closet are in fashion. There is far more to your inner life than the food you put in your stomach, more to your outer appearance than the clothes you hang on your body” (Luke 12:22-23; The Message).
Jesus said that to a person who wanted him to make his brother divide the family inheritance with him. What did Jesus mean? The problem is being rich—hoarding treasure—for one’s self and being miserly toward God. Racking up riches for me and diverting riches from God says that I don’t trust God to take care of me.
That is not Jesus’ message: “Do not be afraid of missing out. You’re my dearest friends! The Father wants to give you the very kingdom itself” (Luke 12:32; The Message). The kingdom is not a bogus land deal in the middle of a Florida swamp. God wants us to thrive. God would be appalled to see us standing at an intersection holding up a sign begging for food or living under a highway overpass. God want us to know fully about grace, forgiveness, and eternal fellowship, so that when the master—Jesus—arrives, “[H]e will put on an apron, sit [the servants] at the table, and serve them a meal, sharing his wedding feast with them. It doesn’t matter what time of the night he arrives, they’re awake—and so blessed!” (Luke 12:37-38; The Message). That’s as wonderful for us as it is for God.
So in today’s scripture reading we
have three inter-connected thoughts back to back: Do not worry; lay up kingdom
treasure instead of worldly treasure; and wait for the Lord.
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 is more than bank
balances. Further on in the Gospel Luke records 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
the Bible, because it says a whole lot more about money than it does about war
and peace, etiquette, or human sexuality.)
Moth-proof
billfolds, rust-resistant purses, and two-factor verification for digital
banking make up a business plan only slightly better than building bigger barns
or diversified 401K accounts. Just ask the rich fool who was the object lesson
in the parable that started this round of teachings by Jesus. Jesus wants you
and me to realize that the gift of life—the life Jesus offers—is more than
monthly retirement checks, deeds to property, crypto-currency accounts, sales
commissions, or royalties on mineral rights.
Life
is a generous gift that God desires to lavish upon us. We are so jaded, so
worldly wise, so once-bitten-twice-shy expecting strangers to cheat us and
deprive us of what is 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.”
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 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 blurs at the periphery of our spiritual vision. Because we are busy trying to focus on hoped-for large-scale God activities, we miss seeing and experiencing the seemingly insignificant, small-scale God activities that are going on constantly around us, which, if given a chance, are surprises.
Jesus calls us to cultivate the
art of being surprised. Surprises have a reputation of being bad news. We are
constantly trying to avoid being blind-sided by something bad. 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.” Sometimes we teach the wrong things. Jesus invites us to orient our
living so that we can be surprised. The surprise in the story that Jesus tells
isn’t that the master comes at an odd hour. The surprise is that when he comes
and finds the servants waiting, he himself sits them down and serves them.
When
humanity least expected it Jesus came. Following his age twelve seminar with
the teachers in the temple (during which he missed the shuttle back to
Nazareth), Luke says that, in the time after he returned home, he “increased
in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor” (Luke 2:52). Simeon
and Anna had oriented their lives in such a way that when the infant Jesus was
presented in the temple forty days after his birth, they were immediately
surprised by the Lord’s Christ and gloriously affirmed to the amazed parents
God’s activity in him.
Jesus
came to serve those who served him. “Strive for [God’s] kingdom” (Luke
12:31) is what Jesus told people. That’s the perspective that would enable
believers to be surprised at all that God has done, is doing, and will yet do.
The kingdom is presented to us just like the feast for the master’s servants.
It is not compensation or a reward. It is a gift, a surprise.
Surprises
are least likely to happen when we know all the ins and outs of a location, of
a group of people, of a list of tasks. Surprises happen when we least expect
them, in off the beaten track places, and with unlikely people. Surprises
happen when we are out of our comfort zones, when we let down our defenses,
when we step beyond our biases.
In
a book which the Paper Tigers group recently read, author Allen Hilton writes
about the work of a mission-minded church in Dallas, Texas. They realized that
there were children along the Mexico-Texas border who needed and wanted
education as well as a quantity of teachers willing to educate them. Only the
resources were lacking. The church heard God’s call to build schoolhouses. They
decided to paint each building a beautiful blue that would say to the children,
“Come and learn.” The church’s mission activity grew, became newsworthy, and
attracted the attention of a church in Houston. That church asked to partner
with the Dallas church and was welcomed to the school-building work.
You
may think that the surprise in this story is the building of blue schools for
children. That’s not it. The surprise is that the vision of blue schools
out-maneuvered the two churches’ avowed theological biases. The Dallas church
was a progressive, “Open and Affirming,” welcome-the-gays, United Church of
Christ congregation and the Houston church was a “homosexuality-is-sin, they
need repentance and repair” congregation of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Neither church realized who the other was until after they had been swept up in
the momentum of mission and relationship. As Hilton says, “A fundamentalist
church and a rainbow church building and painting together to serve their needy
world—in our day, that is miraculous!”(1)
I
challenge you to be surprised by God’s gifts this week. I challenge you to look
at unexpected times and in out-of-the-ordinary—even uncomfortable—places and
situations for the surprises God has waiting for you and for the good of God’s
creation. Don’t spend the week looking for these things and thinking that you
deserved them if they come. Don’t say, “It’s about time.” But rather let your
responses be “Ooh,” “Aah,” “Praise God,” “Alleluia!”
We
are disciples of an awesome God who loves to surprise us with grace and love,
with mercy and with abundant blessings, with joy and with peace. How surprising
is that?
Cultivate
surprise and God will surprise you right into the kingdom. Wow!
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