Prisoners of Our Own
Expectations
Isaiah 40:1-11; Mark 1:1-8
I’ve been reading Smithsonian
magazine’s 35th anniversary issue of late. The issue celebrates 35
innovators who have made a difference in our time. The profiled innovators
range from Bill Gates to Wynton Marsalis, from Edward O. Wilson to Wendell
Berry. As I read the stories, I began to wonder, what does Tim Berners-Lee, who
wrote the code for the world wide web and gave it away, have in common with
John Dobson, a former Vedanta monk whose life’s work has been taking
inexpensive large telescopes around the world to give ordinary people an
opportunity to see “something of the glory that the world sails in”[1]?
What might they have in common with the trumpeter Marsalis, the sociobiologist
Wilson, the farmer and poet
Interestingly enough, I think it is their faithfulness. Now I don’t
mean that these people shared some common religious faith. Indeed, many of them
claim no such faith at all. Nevertheless, they share a common faith, a
conviction, that the way things are is not necessarily the way things will always
be, and each one of them holds that faith tenaciously when the tides of culture
or the reviews of peers or the shifts of taste or market turn against them.
Each of them refused to be held prisoner to the expectations of others. Each
has enough faith to live fully,
completely and without reservation into the life of innovation their particular
gifts and time and, I would say, God call them into.
Their stories inspire me. Now, at the opposite end of the inspiration
spectrum, there was one of those deliciously ironic news stories in the Post last week. You don’t have to be a
partisan to appreciate the dark humor involved in the observation that the
recently disgraced congressman from California – the one who seems likely
headed to prison on bribery charges – floated a bill a few years ago that would
have placed extreme restrictions on the creature comforts granted to prisoners
in American jails. At this point he is probably glad the bill went nowhere.
Whatever his own expectations of prison, he seems likely to experience
the real deal.
The contrast between his sad story and the inspirational stories from
November’s Smithsonian got me to
wondering this week, what prisons do each of us construct for ourselves? Gilded
cages? Depressing cells?
Most of us are familiar with the “prison of low expectations” – the
trap that often ensnares students who meet their teachers’ low expectations, or
employees who meet supervisors’ low expectations. At the other extreme there’s
the prison of false expectations – there was a nice little column in the sports
page yesterday ruminating on the tendency of Redskins fans to believe their
favorite team is way better than its performance would suggest.
Then there’s the prison of cultural expectations. Our own recent
experience in the midst of the marriage debate shines some much-needed light on
its bars, as vocal opponents of Clarendon’s position shout from their cells
that marriage is a gift from God meant exclusively for a man and a woman – as
if gifts from God don’t come wrapped up in and interpreted through human
institutions that reflect cultural expectations bound by time and place.
As I have listened to the critics these past several weeks, I’ve been
forced to reevaluate a few things. Before you get too excited, let me assure
you that I am not reconsidering the stands this community of faith has taken in
support of the full and equal participation of GLBT sisters and brother in the
life and leadership of the church or the culture.
What I am wondering about though is simply this: what expectations am I imprisoned by? Where is my own vision and, indeed, my own faith limited by expectations I
have received from the culture, the church, my critics, my family or my own
self-doubts? Do I have enough faith
to live fully, completely and without reservation into the life and ministry
that God calls me toward?
Do I have enough faith to treat everyone I meet as if Christ might be
incarnate in the one who stands before me as friend and neighbor and the one who stands before me as
critic or as enemy?
In this season when we anticipate and prepare for the coming again of
the one who was anointed to proclaim release to the captives, what prisons of
expectations have I constructed for myself? Where do I need to be liberated?
Where do you need liberation? Where do we, as a particular community of faith,
need to experience the liberation that Christ proclaims and that his Advent
calls us to anticipate?
You see, that’s what the entire Advent story demands of us: a thorough
examination of all of our prejudices, all of our presuppositions, all of our
delimiting expectations. For the coming of Christ turns them all upside down
and inside out. Indeed, the coming of Christ is the great innovation in the
life of faith and the history of human religious impulse. The prison of mind –
the thought that God was decisively separated from human experience – is broken
wide open through the coming of Christ.
But liberation is not easy. Consider the scripture lessons we’ve just
read together. Isaiah cries out to a people in exile: your way home is clear.
The mountains and hills have been made low, and the uneven ground has been made
level. Get up and go home.
Of course, none of this earth moving promises that the journey will be
an easy one, but it does remind us that the greatest barrier to liberation is
often our own expectations. Imagine the Israelites in exile: Overcome by a foe
too strong to resist, they cannot even imagine returning to
In the time of second Isaiah, the prophet whose words we just read, the
Israelites have lived in captivity for several generations and many, if not
most, have become acculturated. They may still be ethnically Jewish, but they
are rapidly becoming culturally Babylonian. They have become resident aliens.
Perhaps the greatest barrier to liberation lies in the truth that captivity has
become comfortable. The way things are is the way things have been for as long
as we can remember and it’s the way things are going to be so we’re making the
best of it.
Then along comes Isaiah to announce: the way home is clear. God has
removed the barriers between you and where you say you want to go. All you have
to do is throw off the shackles of your own expectations. All you have to do is
live into your own liberation. All you have to do is experience a little
transformation. All you have to do is get a new mind for this new time. All you
have to do is journey through the wilderness.
Ah, but there’s the rub. The prophet shouts to them: “there is the way
home; can you not see it, because if you don’t see it you cannot walk it.”
Alas, the people cannot see the way and they don’t want to experience the
wilderness. Better the captivity they know than a journey into an unknown,
unknowable wilderness.
You see, the wilderness is a place of radical vulnerability, of
powerlessness, of testing and of irreducible distance from civilization. If we
enter the wilderness alone it will likely become a place of waiting: waiting to
die. For we cannot pass through true wilderness on our own. It takes a guide,
one who has been there before and knows the way. Even expert wilderness
adventurers only become so because they had guides and teachers so they might
learn the ways of the wilderness. Even the innovators, those who see a way in
the wilderness that no one else has seen, have teachers.
Advent is wilderness time. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from a Nazi
prison cell, “Life in a prison cell reminds me a great deal of advent – one
waits and hopes and potters about, but in the end what we do is of little
consequence, for the door is shut and can only be opened from the outside.”
But the promise of advent is that our waiting is not pointless, for
one is coming who is and will be the way through the wilderness; one is coming
who will open the doors of whatever prison cells we wait in.
The door may be shut at the moment. Think of the various doors that
seem closed to you, to us, at this point. Whether it be personal concerns –
dead ends at work or difficult relationships or troubles with school or
frustration with the slow pace of change on issues we care deeply about, or our
own inability to live with an irreducible trust in the deepest values of our
faith: compassion, love, justice – the question of Advent is not, “will these
doors ever be opened,” rather, Advent ask: “We will notice? Will we be prepared
to walk out of the prison cell when the door is opened? Are we ready to embrace
the liberation promised in the coming of Christ again into our lives?”
Now, by the time of John the Baptist the exile is ancient history.
Nevertheless, the people have come again to think like captive exiles.
Perhaps that is why Mark’s gospel begins by taking confession
seriously. The beginning of the good news, as Mark recounts it, comes in
radical repentance. John calls the people to a wilderness experience, to come
away from the structures of religious practice and power that are not
liberating their lives and spirits. He calls them to begin again, and, in doing
so he points toward the future.
One is coming who will baptize you with the Holy Spirit. One is coming
who will open the doors to whatever prisons you dwell in. One is coming who
will call you to get a new mind for this new time. One is coming to bring you
liberation and reconciliation.
Interestingly enough, crowds of people answered this call to
confession, this call to journey into the wilderness, to experience the radical
vulnerability of such dislocation.
Are we ready to heed that call in our own lives? Can we begin to see,
here and now, a way out of no way? When the prison doors are opened, will we
walk out or remain content within the walls of the familiar cells? Can we cease
being prisoners of our own expectations?
Let us pray: God of liberation, set us free from the prisons that we
construct for ourselves. Open the doors of our hearts, that we might be set
free to love our neighbors as you love us, to love even our enemies as you
would have us love, and to love you with all our hearts, minds, souls and
bodies. Prepare the way, O God, that in our hearts and in our living we might
prepare a way for you. Amen.