Expectations

The light came to his own people,
    and his own people didn’t welcome him. (John 1:11, CEB translation)

I can’t see dirt.

I mean, of course I can see a giant mound of earth. Or even mud in puddles, things like that. What I struggle to see are things like dirty baseboards or dust bunnies gathered under tables or cobwebs in corners. I can be around such things every day for months, and I will never notice them. Why? Because I was raised in a home that did not value seeing such things.

Oh I didn’t grow up in an unsanitary house or anything. Our home was always safe and especially after we stopped living in rentals bug free. But there was clutter.  And there were the aforementioned cobwebs and dust bunnies. And I didn’t even know cleaning baseboards was a thing.

That is, until a friend moved in with us for almost a year. She was raised in a very different household. While she was grateful for my hospitality, the state of my house drove her a little bit insane. One day, she finally confronted me.  

“You are such a warm person, and you make me feel so loved. It is just hard to square with the fact that your home is so unwelcoming.”

She was exasperated, and thankfully that happened to land at a time when I was feeling extraordinarily open and not overly defensive.  “What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean, all this clutter. And the dust on your baseboards. To me it feels like you haven’t put effort in making your house the nicest it could be for people.”

“Huh. That’s funny. Because actually if I walk into houses that are too clean, my anxiety rises. I do not feel welcome there. I feel like if I step the wrong way or if one the hairs falls from my head onto the pristine carpet, I won’t be invited back. I don’t feel like I can breathe in houses like that.”

What we realized that day was that the two of us had very different expectations about living spaces. We had both come by them honestly. They were shaped by the ways we had been raised. We had a normal, and anything outside of that normal just seemed weird.

We are in the middle of a not normal Holy Week. Everything has been disrupted. Traditions that churches have had as long as most people can remember are not happening this year. Worship does not remotely look the same. So into that space my friends and colleagues and lay people all over have had to get creative. We have had to look at Holy Week with different eyes. We have had to decide what is important about the story to share. And in many cases we have opened the doors for many people to share in that story in new ways.

We cannot anticipate how this will shape our faith journeys. But it will shape our faith journeys. The story of the pandemic Holy Week will imprint on us just as the Gospel story has imprinted on us in the years before.

But there will be a temptation to resent this space. There will be a temptation to hate this disruption. Maybe temptation isn’t even the right word. Maybe the right word is tendency. And I really don’t mean tendency in a judgmental way. I just mean to name that reality. A lot of traditions are getting replaced this year, and there is pain and loss in that, even if ultimately it needed to happen, and it is happening for good reasons.

But I also want us to remember that Jesus came to us and disrupted expectations. He was the Messiah, but not the political and military ruler everyone expected. He was born a king but born not in the palace but in a manger. He had all the power of God at his hand and he put it to the side to accept the unjust punishment for simply loving people fiercely.

He came, and so many of us didn’t recognize him. We didn’t see him because he didn’t fit our expectations.

We cannot have our expectations this year. That is disruptive. But it is also an opportunity to really see Jesus again. To see Jesus in the new ways the Gospel is being shared and the new people it is reaching. To see Jesus in the kindness extended to each other as we all collectively walk together through loss. To see Jesus in the way we are choosing to fiercely love the most vulnerable among us by giving up our own privilege and freedom.

What a blessing this moment is. So unexpected.  

Photo by HS Spender on Unsplash