Many years ago, now, I found myself standing in the middle
of Walmart minutes before midnight.
If you have never been to a Walmart at midnight, don’t
worry, you’re not missing anything except a parking lot filled with a lot of sketchy-looking
people.
But I wasn’t in the parking lot. I was inside, surrounded by about twenty
other people, all of us looking like we’d rather be in bed, asleep.
We were gathered around a giant display of books in the
center of the store, each of us checking our watches, waiting for midnight and
waiting for the store employee who I’m sure wanted to be anywhere other than
ripping off the plastic wrapping on the new Harry Potter book.
Yep, we were there for the new Harry Potter book.
The Harry Potter craze almost seems like a distant memory
now. And yet, we will tell our children
and our grandchildren that once upon a time, there was a book so popular, that
children everywhere showed up dressed as wizards to bookstores in the middle of
the night.
And then we will explain to them what a bookstore was.
And eventually we will have to explain what a book was.
But for a while, Harry Potter was the most popular boy on
the planet and his creator, J.K. Rowling, a megastar that the publishing world
had never seen.
And though everyone has their favorite Harry Potter book and
their least favorite, the one thing you can say about J.K. Rowling is that she
never disappointed her fans. Children
everywhere stayed up past their bedtimes to read about Harry Potter. Children everywhere went without food and
sleep and bathroom breaks just so they could read a book.
J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books always lived up to our
expectations.
In fact, all the Harry Potter books are about expectations,
about challenging our expectations, about asking us to look beyond first
impressions of people and see more deeply.
The man who comes to collect Harry and take him to Hogwarts,
the wizarding school, is a literal giant, unkempt, with wild hair and a
beard. He arrives on top a flying
motorcycle and his arrival terrifies everyone—except Harry.
Hagrid, as we would later learn, turns out to be the
gentlest of giants. Throughout the
course of the series, there is no one more loveable and no one more capable of
showing love in return than Hagrid.
When Harry boards the train to Hogwarts, he meets two
people, Ron Weasley and Draco Malfoy. These
two could not be anymore different.
Draco is from the wizarding aristocracy.
He is slick and polished and talented.
Ron’s family is poor and ridiculed.
You could argue that the most important decision Harry makes
in the series, is the decision he makes on that first train ride when he
chooses to sit with Ron instead of Malfoy.
The beautiful thing about Rowling’s characters is how
complicated they all are. To judge them
on first appearances is to make a grave mistake. The shy and stuttering Professor Quirrell turns
out to be possessed by the evil wizard Voldemort. The loathsome Professor Snape, who seemingly
lives to torture Harry in class, turns out to be, as Harry describes him, “the
bravest man he ever knew.”
That Harry is able to make mostly good decisions about his
friends is a testament to the unselfish and true love shown to him by his
parents when he was a baby, in particular, his mother’s decision to sacrifice
her own life to save Harry’s.
In today’s Gospel reading from Luke 7:18-30, we see Jesus
challenging people on their expectations, specifically what they should expect
from a prophet like John the Baptist and what they should expect from Jesus
himself.
Throughout the Bible, God constantly challenges our
expectations, our expectations as to how the world should work and our
expectations as to who our heroes, kings and saviors should be.
He chose Moses, the son of Hebrew slaves, the adopted son of
the Pharaoh, to lead His people to freedom.
He chose David, the shepherd, the last of Jesse’s sons to be
presented to Samuel, to fight Goliath and to become King.
Just last week, I spoke to you about Jonah and Ninevah. The Ninevites were horrible, violent people
who did not worship God. Jonah told them
they were about to face God’s wrath.
Jonah expected God to destroy them.
Instead, the Ninevites repented and God spared them and showed mercy.
But no one is better at upsetting everyone’s expectations on
how the world should work than Jesus.
Again and again in his parables, Jesus surprises us. The hero who rescues the battered and beaten
man on the side of the road is not the priest or the Levite, but the Samaritan,
a reveal that should have left the listeners to the parable gobsmacked. The Samaritan? Say what now?
In the parable of the Prodigal Son, the son that is praised
and lavished with a party and love by his father, is not the son who stayed
behind to work with his father, but the one who left, frittered away his
inheritance and returned penniless.
The last shall be first, the first shall be last—Jesus
confounds everyone who meets him.
In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus addresses the people and
their reaction to John the Baptist.
Jesus asks them what they expected to see, “A reed shaken in the wind?”
or “Someone dressed in soft robes?” What
did they expect to find in the wilderness?
The warning that Jesus offers here is that we may be so
caught up in our expectations that we overlook the true messengers of God.
Sometimes I wonder if God’s biggest frustration with us, is
our rather limited imagination.
What God has planned for us is so much bigger than we can
hope for.
Look again at our other readings from today, from Psalm 126:5,
“May those who sow in tears, reap with shouts of joy.”
From Isaiah 35:6-7, “For waters shall break forth in the
wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool,
and the thirsty ground springs of water ….”
We’re talking miracles here.
This is what God has planned for us … miracles.
This is the proof that Jesus offers John’s followers. The blind will see, the deaf hear, the dead
will be raised. Miracles, things beyond
our imagination, and if we have any hope, any hope at all, of seeing just what
it is that God has to offer us, we must first acknowledge that everything God
does, He does out of love, He does with a love so great and wonderful and perfect
that miracles shouldn’t seem like magic, but should seem like a part of our
everyday world.
In the Harry Potter books, Harry always makes the wisest
choices when he is motivated by that self-sacrificial love shown to him by his
mother. He makes less wise choices when
he is motivated by hate and fear.
What Jesus shows us in today’s Gospel is that we can only
see the true essence of God when we see through eyes of love, when we see
through eyes of humility and sacrifice.
Imagine. Imagine for
a moment what that would be like.
We live in a world of miracles.
Our failure is setting our expectations too low.
Bless us God, with eyes to see Your truth.
Amen.
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