Great Expectations

4^th Sunday of Advent

Cycle B

Welcome to the season of Great Expectations. It is one week until Christmas and the anticipation of next Sunday is ramping up, especially amongst our littlest ones. These expectations have been raised and stoked by our images of what Christmas should be. We expect to receive gifts in great quantity. We expect our families to be around us and at peace with one another. We expect our Christmas dinner to have all the necessary ingredients and be done to perfection. We expect peace. We expect snow.

Have you seen the YouTube video put out by Jimmy Kimmel where he asked parents to give their kids the worst Christmas gifts ever and then send videotape of them opening their presents in to the show? One kid opened the wrapping to find an empty, dirty juice bottle. Another got a half eaten sandwich. One young man received a pair of Hello Kitty pajamas. Their reactions to these gifts is hilarious, and indicative of what Christmas has been reduced to for our children. The kid who got the bottle said it was “the worst present ever” and flung it across the room. The boy who got the pajamas began crying and ranting and raving that his parents were the worst ever and he hated them. The girl who got the sandwich was more puzzled than anything. It was completely out of her realm of possibility, and she didn’t understand. But her older brother was great. He told her to appreciate what she got and if she didn’t want to eat it he would.

We build our expectations based upon what we think we want to receive. We make our lists of what we want out of life and then think that just because we want it we should get it. Just because we want life to be a certain way we expect it to be that way. We hope it will be that way.

We have set up Christmas as an ideal, not as a reality. We have set life up as an ideal, not as a reality.

Christopher Hitchens died this week. He has been described as a “Ferocious Intellect”, one of the great commentators and authors of the past twenty years. He was also one of the greatest atheists of the modern era. He was especially hateful of the Catholic Church and wrote some horrible things about Mother Teresa. He often sparred with Fr. George Rutler , who finally told him that “he would die either a Roman Catholic or a madman”. To which Hitchens replied, “What’s the difference?”

When he announced he had esophageal cancer eighteen months ago people immediately began saying that now that he was being confronted by his own imminent death he would recant his atheism and have a deathbed conversion of some sort. There was even a worldwide day of prayer for his conversion last September. But Hitchens had no expectations of an afterlife, and he fought the idea of God until the bitter end. I expect that since he expected nothing that’s exactly what he got.

On the other hand, we have Mary. She knew of the promise God had given to her kinsman, David, a thousand years earlier, and like her countrymen she expected the promised messiah to be a king of great earthly power who would restore Israel’s glory. She was puzzled when the angel announced to her that not only would the messiah not be an earthly king, she was to be his mother. Mary had a very simple expectation after her encounter with the angel. Her cousin Elizabeth said it so very well when she greets Mary. “Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled.”

God doesn’t think as we do. His will most often does not meet with our expectations. Like the children in the Jimmy Kimmel video, when we see what God has actually given us we react with anger, puzzlement, and hurt. David expected God to want a beautiful house in which to dwell, when what God really wanted was to offer humanity the chance at salvation by building an everlasting heritage for David. Mary expected a king, she got a baby instead.

We all want the world to be what we want it to be. We all want life to turn out a certain way for us. We all have expectations, both big and small, about all areas of our lives. We expect our families to be just so. We expect our children to grow up to have better lives than ours. We expect that we will find fulfillment in our careers. We expect our marriages to remain as full of promise as they were on our wedding days. We expect to be able to feel safe and secure in our homes and in our country. We expect the economy to always trend upwards. We expect that we will have all our hearts desire. We expect to have peaceful deaths. We expect to go to heaven when we die.

But many times what we expect and what God gives us are not the same. Our lives are full of struggle. Our families are dysfunctional. Our marriages fall apart. We hate our jobs. We come down with cancer. People we love suffer terribly and we look on helplessly. We live our lives full of hope only to see those hopes and dreams smashed on the rocks of reality.

God knows about all this. He knows that sin causes great suffering, and that’s not what he has intended for us. He knows our expectations, and their emptiness, and he knows that the only thing that will fill our emptiness is himself. The last thing we would expect is that God himself would choose to become a human being like ourselves. He would become like us so that we could be like him.

The mighty King David was not permitted to provide a home for the Lord. But his descendent, the poor and simple Virgin Mary was chosen instead. She was not to build a temple for God but to be the Temple of God.

So God's promise comes down to that - a child. Jesus began his human existence like you and me. God fulfills his promise not by politics, not by military power - but by the birth of child: in the city of David, Bethlehem. God uses what seems insignificant to accomplish mighty deeds.

How does it happen? I can only respond with the words of today's Gospel, the words of Elizabeth, words Christians have known for two thousand years: Nothing will be impossible for God. Even Christopher Hitchens is not impossible for God.

In the end we rarely get what we expect. We get much, much more.