It's Astounding

Fourth Sunday after The Epiphany
1 February 2009
St. Paul's Cathedral, Buffalo, NY
Mark 1: 21-28


Do you remember the last time you were amazed and astounded? Perhaps it was just recently, when this country nominated and then elected an African American as President, or earlier when the nomination battle was between a woman and a black man. Maybe it was longer ago, when Apollo 11 landed on the moon, or when cell phones laptops, and iPods became ubiquitous…..there have been a lot of things invented , developed and discovered in the past 40 years… many of them astounding.
Of course being amazed and astounded isn’t only a reaction to positive things—we are amazed and astounded by horrific things as well….9/11, torture at the hand of Americans, a Roman Catholic priest’s denial of the Holocaust, the utter failure of our financial system in the United States.
Astonishment knocks the socks off of us, throws us off our game, sets our heads spinning….and we see evidence of this throughout scripture. From the act of Creation itself to the wonder of the Old Testament prophets and through to the Good News of the Gospel people have been amazed and astonished. In the NRSV translation the words amazed and astonished occur nearly 100 times throughout the Bible. Biblical folk spent a lot of time being surprised.

It can be disorienting, this being so surprised.

And that disorientation is, I believe, the point. The disorientation of surprise provides an opportunity, an opening for something altogether new to emerge. Without the disorientation, the dizziness and the confusion our well-heeled and hard-wired responses will just kick in as if on autopilot. We’ve all done it, as soon as someone at work suggest s a new way to do something our initial response is to say that won’t work, we’ve tried it before, we’ve never done it that way. The old way, even is it isn’t that effective, is much more comfortable than a new way. Have you ever tried to change a family tradition? Generally this is met with great angst. My poor brother in law suggested a new way for my family to celebrate Christmas and all youknowhat broke out----but the truth is, he was right, we do need to find a new way to celebrate as a family, because I always have to work on Christmas! It would have been a lot easier to just keep it the way it always was, but to do that would be to cut me out of the celebration completely and keep us as a family from trying something new. While he may have felt like the devil incarnate for awhile, our response became more measured and now we’re developing a new tradition to bring us all together on a yearly basis. The surprise of the announcement disoriented us and before we got re-oriented we were on to something new. From our astonished amazement at the suggestion of something different came an ingenuity to create something new.

In today’s Gospel. Jesus does two astonishing things; he teaches not as the scribes, using midrash, but as someone with authority to proclaim something new instead of re-interpreting something old. Then in the exorcism Jesus rebukes the evil sprit and the spirit listened. The witnesses were astounded. And this, their reaction is key to the story. Throughout this Epiphany season we hear various accounts of how the manifestation of Christ came to be. How the Word made flesh infiltrates, impacts and changes the world, as we know it. It begins with the heavens opening up and God’s voice declaring Jesus His Son, as His beloved. It ends with the Transfiguration of Christ on the last Sunday, when God implores the disciples to behold His beloved Son and to listen to him. Epiphany is full of epiphanies of a new awareness, amazing and astonishing, changing us from an old way toward a new.
It is in the upheaval of something altogether new that allows change to gain a foothold.

Is the amazement of the witnesses in the synagogue at Capernaum that day because of God’s love as displayed through Jesus? Or are they amazed and astonished at the bravado of this traveling preacher from Nazareth. Offended by his arrogance, frightened by his new teaching, alarmed that even evil spirits obey him?
What about us? Has the Good News amazed and astonished us into letting go of our fears and doubts or does the astonishment turn us away from God? The lesson today is not just that God so loved the world he sent his Son to be among us…no the lesson today is also about how receptive we are to this gift. Will we let ourselves be so moved, so caught off guard, so astonished and amazed that we will drop our defensives and let the healing power of Christ envelope us, fill us and renew us?

When push came to shove and our economy tanked, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq became unbearable to many of us, we were ready, as a nation to try something new. We were amazed at how our prosperity security and good standing in the world could fall apart so quickly and within that amazement a new thing emerged. An African American President with very little traditional political and governmental experience, but sporting a message which struck something deep within many of us caused us to throw caution to the wind, bigotry to the trash heap so we could embrace a new thing. Out of upheaval, fear and confusion came something fresh…. will we have the staying power to accept this change for good? Or will we retreat to the old ways of partisan politics, with our leaders not so much leading as cow-towing to lobbyists and big donors? I don’t know, I hope this dawn of a new era lasts, but I also know it’s hard to astonish us anymore--
It no longer amazes us that we travel through space or can split an atom, or can communicate instantaneously with texting, instant messaging and twitter. It is no longer outlandish and unimaginable that our leaders become corrupt or that the moral compass of the US seems to have broken. We’ve become immune to so many things…but every Sunday as the Gospel is proclaimed, I pray that we’ll still be amazed that through a carpenter from Nazareth the love of God is presented to the world full of power and grace, surprise and disorientation. Astonishing.
Amen.