Expectations

Does the name Sobesky mean anything to you? He’s the winner of $30 million, and he’s in hiding. Is that what he expected when he anticipated collecting his booty? Maybe.
He is the third husband of his second wife. Among her three husbands, she has had four children. Her life has been in the ditch, scrabbling food from the Food Bank, hitchhiking through winter storms to her menial job, able to afford only public housing. When she was 13, dreaming of her future, is that what she expected?

As a 20 year-old who had the world by the tail, I zoomed off to University with high expectations. I took the Empire Limited from Buffalo to Chicago, getting off the train at the Polk St. Station. I really had no idea how far it was from the station to school. So I gathered all my luggage, and started walking up the blistering Clark St. sidewalk. I had to step over homeless people, derelicts, sleeping drunks sprawled on the sidewalk. "This isn’t working," I thought. So I set my luggage down and hailed a cab. When he deposited me at school, I dutifully paid the fare. But as a Canadian, I was used to multi-coloured currency. I handed him a green bill that I thought was a $1 bill to cover the 75 cent fare. In fact, it was a US $20 bill, which he grabbed as he gunned his Checker cab away in a u-turn. It was not what this babe-in-the-woods expected.
Is it ever that way with our experience of God? Have you ever had huge expectations about what God would mean to you, and it didn't work out? What kind of expectations about God and our feelings about God are realistic? Instead of turning to Oprah, or the tabloids at Sobey’s checkout, let’s turn to Scripture. Is there any place in the Bible where God promises an intimate, spine-tingling, life-long experience of being close to God? This is a software program that catalogues every word in the English Bible. I searched it for the words "intimate" and "intimacy" in the Bible. The only thing that came up is a lament by a disappointed, confused and suffering Job who pines for days long-gone: "Oh, for the days when I was in my prime, when God's intimate friendship blessed my house, when the Almighty was still with me and my children were around me, when my path was drenched with cream and the rock poured out for me streams of olive oil." Job has lost something, and longs to get it back.

There are words in the Bible about being a friend of God and God being a friend of us. There are words about moments of experiencing God’s presence. And we can expect that God will give them to us from time to time. But the word "intimate" just isn't there. I wonder if we expect to experience life in which God is never distant, in which we never long for something better? I wonder if that sets us up for a fall when it doesn’t happen in real life?

Let's work on getting our expectations right here. At the very beginning, God and Adam and Eve have a close relationship. They obviously experienced a depth of intimacy, everything in perfect order, as they walked and talked together daily with God in that idyllic garden.

Then, bam! - that catastrophic event in Genesis 3 rattled everything. Eve believed that in herself and her world, she do fine without God. She and Adam were consumed with their own selves and their own world. That intimacy with God went "poof!" They were on the outside looking in while flaming swords kept them away.

An intimate relationship with God doesn’t appear again until all the way to the end of Scripture. In the book of Revelation, Eden is reclaimed. We are restored again to unlimited fellowship in all the depth of joy and pleasure and intimacy in God’s presence. Death is gone. So is disappointment. Tears are banished forever. There’s no need of religion there, because God’s presence is immediate and unhindered.

But in between these bookends of intimacy in Scripture, there is little mentioned. Except for an interception two thousand years ago, when God comes here. God comes in the flesh as Jesus, and builds a personal, intimate relationship with twelve core people. As we read in 1 John, "We saw Him. We touched Him. We heard His voice. We walked with Him." But between Genesis, the coming of God in Jesus, and the final revealing of Jesus at the end, and Revelation, all of history kind of flattens out. What does that say about you and me? It tells me that my expectation that God will explain everything to me about what is happening in life, is not a correct expectation. It tells me not to expect that every moment of every day I will have a keen sense of intimate closeness with God. It tells me to expect longing more than intimacy.
We are so preoccupied with the present, aren't we? We want what heaven will give us, now. By the way, that's not an inappropriate longing, to want intimacy with God, because we're built for it. And the day will come when God will give it to us. But we live in a season that is between the bookends. It is the nature of life that our days are marked sometimes by a struggle with God’s absence. Relationships will weaken and break. Sickness or injury may ambush us when we least expect them. The heavens will be silent when we look for explanations and answers. Chronic illness may plague us day after day after day. There may even be times when we doubt whether there is a God. Or times when we think that if there is a God, he is not good.

We have to be careful we not to put false guilt on ourselves in these times of longing for God. "Well, I guess I must not be the kind of person I'm supposed to be. I mean, God doesn't feel as close to me as he seems to be to others." Or, "I guess I fail all the time. I guess I don't quite cut it as a Christian." We just need to face a sense of reality. It’s true that there will be brushes with the pleasure and presence of God. But for us to experience that all the time probably is outside the scope of what God in the Bible teaches us to expect..

Well, if that's the case, why would I bother to seek to connect with God at all? Why bother with this relationship with God thing?

There’s a hint of an answer in this fourth chapter of Genesis. There, the people of God are outsiders, strangers in a hostile world. They were surrounded by a slick, advanced, godless Canaanite society. That society was also deeply degraded and despairing. Genesis contrasts that chic, sophisticated, degraded society with a godly line started by Seth and Enosh. It is in the story of Enosh, where we are shown what moves and drives us to pursue God. Even if we only get glimpses of his glory and glistenings of his presence, we still desire him. It’s in that little birth notice: "And to Seth also a son was born; and he named him Enosh. At that time people began to call upon the name of the Lord." What caused that turn? Why did they begin to call on God?
The answer is in that name given to the baby, "Enosh." The name means "frail, fragile." Those people couldn’t go to Chapters and get a book of names for their kids. They gave names to their children to depict local realities. When Seth called Enosh "Enosh," he and his wife were admitting to the world that they lived in a time of great human weakness and frailty. So they called their son, "weakling." There he was, living among pagan neighbours who swaggered and flaunted their presumed invincibility, quite apart from any relationship with God. The pagans around them didn’t show frailty. They showed self-sufficiency apart from God. It was a huge contrast. While they are posing and bragging, their true frailty, their true fragility show in the degeneration of the culture around them. They say, "We are strong; look at us." But all the consequences of their fallen culture say, "You are not strong. You are weak." "Enosh" or "Weakling" was a walking rebuke to them every time his name was spoken. The harsh reality that prevails to this day is this: Life, men, women, left to themselves, self-destruct. The Bible writers knew that. They knew that their human weakness and frailty were expressed in opposition to the pride and arrogance displayed by their Canaanite neighbours. And it was this feeling of helplessness that led them to God.

That’s a principle of the Bible that you and I can bank on today. Until we understand and become frontally aware of our own personal frailty, our fragility, our weakness, we will never, ever seek to pursue God. How many of us believe that God's OK as a bit of a good luck charm that might help me succeed? How many of us think, "I have the strength to stand at the centre of my universe and be all my own person, and I can manage life pretty well, thank you, all by myself"? As long as that’s how we think, there will never be an impetus in our lives to pursue the living God. It is not until we know how desperately we need God that we begin to hunger for God.
For a few Sundays, we’ll hear what God says about helping us to come to grips with our own shortcomings as we pursue the God for whom our hearts long. We’ll express that longing in these words of the 42nd Psalm, " As the deer."