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Blank Cryfat Brian January 21, 2001 Suzanne Luper North Raleigh United Church I guess you may be wondering about the title of this sermon. Blank Cryfat Brian. Not a particularly theological title, nor poetic. In fact, it doesn’t make any sense. And so, you’re stuck! That’s exactly how my team felt four weeks ago when we played a rip-roaring, highly competitive game of Charades at the beach. For those of you who don’t know, about 45 of us went to Ocean Isle for the New Years weekend. Those of you who did go may remember how my team (which was a superb team) got stuck. It was a movie title: 3 words, first word (no, that’s too hard, go on to the second), second word, sounds like Cryfat. Third word, someone points to Brian Upchurch. Blank Cryfat Brian? We were screaming, writhing on the floor, we couldn’t get it . . . Time ran out! Unbelievably, we lost. Then the moment when the right title was revealed. It was “Saving Private Ryan.” Ohhhh. So close, but a few letters kept us stuck. I’d like to talk about two other words this morning -- two words which sound so close they might almost be mistaken for each other. But with the slight change in letters, so different . The first has the power to keep you stuck; the second has the power to change your whole life. The two words are EXPECTATION and EXPECTANCY. Now, before I go any further, I need to give credit to my father for giving me this idea. Not too long ago, he and I had lunch together. He had just learned that he has cancer, and that it is in an advanced stage. I felt such disappointment for him, knowing that his dreams for retirement would not be fulfilled in the way he had hoped. Knowing that he had relished thoughts of travel, of leisurely study, of spending luxurious hours with the woman he loves. He saw high adventure just over the horizon. Now and fairly suddenly, all of that has changed. Life is lived close to home. Trips to the deer lease have been replaced with trips to the doctor. And physical pain is more associated with walking across a parking lot than with climbing off a horse or jumping over a tennis net. But he did not want to talk much of that. Physical pain is already being managed by various doctors and medications. He seemed to want me to know that he also experiences happiness -- that there is delight to be found in unexpected places. The insight he shared with me was simple, yet it spoke volumes about how he is living his life, and about how I might live mine. “There is a great difference,” he said, “between a life lived with expectation and a life lived with expectancy.” They are just two words -- sounding so similar that they might be confused -- yet they hold the key to whether one experiences a life marred by disappointments or a life surprised by joy. What is a life of expectation? It is, first and foremost, a closed system. We come up with an idea of The Way Life Should Be. That idea becomes the all, the everything, the only thing that can bring contentment. Then if life does not happen exactly the way we wanted it to, we are left feeling bitter and resentful. Life has once again let us down. This attitude of expectation can infect everything from a simple meal to a whole marriage. If the turkey is dry, the whole Thanksgiving is a failure. If you cannot provide me with a constant supply of tender loving attention (like you used to when we were dating), then you’re not the person I was expecting! If we cannot have the house with the white picket fence, the 2.5 children and the hefty IRA, then we must be doing something terribly wrong. In marriage, expectation can be like a poison which seeps in and begins to kill everything that once had life. It happens in two ways. First, in the way in which we tend to objectify each other. (Men are always one way; women are always one way) I have heard many women clients over the years excuse rudeness or cruelty by saying, “Well, I guess it’s a ‘man-thing,’ or ‘Well, you know how men are.” As though all men are genetically incapable of kindness or sensitivity. Women, of course, are objectified whenever they are either raised up on pedestals as saints, or discounted as nothing more than sexual servants. In all of these ways, and many more, we sin against our partners whenever we stop being curious about them. And when we, in our own minds, render them incapable of growth and change. A second way we harm each other with
expectation is when we begin to assume, in a chronic way, that we know exactly who our spouse is and exactly what they think and feel. We end up
speaking for them, and we slowly cease all curiosity about who they are. What is the antidote to this terrible poison? Because there is one! It is EXPECTANCY. Expectancy is characterized by genuine curiosity. It continually asks the question, “Who are you? What do you think and feel? How have you changed? A life of expectancy is characterized by openness and flexibility. It continually expands, making room for failure, for disappointment, for surprise, and for all the things for which we could not plan. It is characterized by wonder, because we remain fresh and open to all kinds of possibility. When we are not insisting upon how life should treat us, then we do not feel terribly betrayed when it gets hard. And we are much more apt to be delighted when it goes well. Happiness does come, but not in the places where we worked so hard to find it. Instead, it resides in the nooks and crannies of experience, and appears at precisely those times when we are not straining to see it. If expectation is like a fist clenched tightly around life, then expectancy is the open hand, much more able to let go and to receive. As the saying goes, “A bird in your hand will stay until you start to close your fingers around it.” Ultimately life is not ours to control. We do not get to choose much of what happens to us. Our power resides not in what happens, but in our response to what happens. And so it is for my father. He, like all of us, wants a long and healthy retirement. He wants to be free of pain. Now life says to him, “No, it won’t be the way you wanted.” I believe that he is attempting to hold this news lightly, with gentleness and curiosity. My wish for him, for myself, and for this newly forming community comes in the form of a quote by the brilliant dancer and choreographer Agnes de Mille. She said, “Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.” In other words, there is always room for surprise. About a year and-a-half ago, I got a surprise. I had fallen into the ditch of expectations about church --- about what it is, and what it can be. I began to expect that every church was a dead or dying dinosaur, on the brink of extinction, interested only in its own survival, with a huge lumbering body and a pea-sized brain. I had all but decided there was no place for me. And then Harding Birkhead came to see me. And he gave me a brochure. It had naked baby butts on it. Cautiously, I came for a visit, wondering if it was possible to be surprised. I was. Wondering if it was possible to feel excited about church again. I do. Wondering if I could actually make friends with intelligent people who want to worship God with integrity and who care about the world ... I am. The whole of my life is changing. What we are doing here, this whole enterprise, this whole experiment which we call North Raleigh United Church, is an excercise in expectancy. We come here, not so much because we are sure of who God is, but because we are deeply curious. We do not profess to have the final authoritative word on an unchanging God. No, we come here to this border of the holy to wonder, and to worship God who is unfathomable Mystery. Here, we give each other the freedom to question, we acknowledge our limitations, and we celebrate the new and surprising revelations as we move into our hopeful future with joy. Amen. |
Contact Doug Long at (919) 844-6661 or
send e-mail to: doug@northraleighunited.org |