The defeat of normal

Acts 1:1-14

I want to talk this morning about how God works opposed to what is normal.

            There’s one line in particular from the Acts 1 reading that caught my attention and brought me there. It says, “While they were eating together, [Jesus] ordered [the disciples] not to leave Jerusalem but to wait for what the Father had promised.”

            Lately, I have a pretty good ear for moments in scripture where Jesus tells us to stay put (for some reason, I’m not sure). In this case, Jesus adds a simple instruction: “Wait.” Wait for it.

            Somebody should have told Jesus that we’re not supposed to wait for it in Easter. That was for Lent, now we are supposed to be living in the joy of the resurrection. That’s how the church year is designed. Get with it, Jesus! Nevertheless, that routine has never been a given, because in real life, finish lines move with regularity. The church year tells you: 40 days and then you will get to say “Alleluia!” again, but life doesn’t always tell you that. Grief, for example, lasts however long it lasts; there’s no obvious finish line. In real life, we wait in uncertainty more often than not.

            Right now, we are getting an object lesson in what waiting looks like for us as a society. We wait, and we know that there will be an increasingly large contingent of folks banging on the doors to end the waiting, to reboot the world, you might say, but the normal we are trying to return simply isn’t there anymore. It’s up to us what we do next, which is so tough, because we will grow increasingly impatient to find what was normal. The problem—the big problem, really—is that we are discovering, little by little, that normal is over. What was normal is no longer.

One of the Bible stories that has popped up in my head countless times in the last few weeks is the story of the Israelites wandering through the desert, especially I’ve thought of Moses, who led them for forty years but never reached the Promised Land. That kind of waiting is so brutal, because there are no guarantees you will see the other side—not on this side of life. So, I get the anxiety and the frustration, the desire to return to something that seems normal. It wasn’t long in the wilderness before the Israelites were begging to return to Egypt and slavery. Normal is powerful.

            Easter is the opposite of normal. Resurrection is the antithesis of normal. We are not a church of normal. If this pandemic is going to show us anything about ourselves as a church and as a society, it will show us that normal is not what we thought it was.

            Normal favors those in power. Pontius Pilate was a champion of normal; Herod the Great was a champion of normal. All those chief priests and scribes running around in Jesus’ life suggesting he didn’t know what he was doing were champions of normal. You and I might benefit from what is normal too, but that benefit comes at a cost. The vulnerable stay vulnerable; the poor stay poor; the oppressed stay oppressed. Human beings are much more attuned to the Easter story when things are not normal or when we understand that normal is not OK. It’s why people listen closer at funerals. When our normal is interrupted, we notice the God who has been there all along.

            We are all undergoing trauma right now, so it’s hard to argue against that feels normal but normal isn’t what we think it is. The Bible doesn’t say, “Normal is bad,” but the trend of scripture is God doing new things through often terrible circumstances. It’s not about getting back to where you were but about a new day where things are changed for the better. Those Israelites, wandering through the desert, were thinking, “What on earth are we doing?” Those disciples, hiding in their house for fear of the authorities who just crucified their rabbi, were thinking, “What on earth have we done?” Those early Christians, sitting in jail cells for their faith, had to wonder, “Is it worth it?” Those Christians, like Bonhoeffer in Nazi Germany, who stood up to empire and ended up on the gallows or in front of firing squad, had to ask, “Did it make any difference?” Normal is powerful, because normal takes no chances, but God is God not of the normal but the extraordinary.

            The story of the Bible is the story of God showing up in the ordinary and making it extraordinary. If you tally it up, God shows up far less often in burning bushes than in poverty and mourning places and tombs. In his life, again and again, Jesus walked into a situation where a person was hurting or dying or dead, and he never returned things back to normal. Instead, he demonstrated a promise of a better future—not normal but extraordinary.

            Today, I pray not to return to normal but to be led somewhere better. And I do so realizing that when God moves society it tends to take time. 40 years for the Israelites. We take that as a given, but their entire lives were spent in transition to something better. Generations passed. Our current situation isn’t going to be over in a day, or a week, or even a month. Even when we are back in worship, seeing each other face to face, it won’t be over, and it won’t be normal. Mourn that, grieve it, but also understand that everything God has made new has gone this way. We mourn change, especially dramatic change, but it’s only when we let go of what is normal that we discover that God is moving mountains for what comes next.

            What is normal anyway?

            Throughout history, disease has been normal. War has been normal. Short lifespans relative to what we experience today have been normal. We’re not looking for normal. The resurrection should remind us of that every week. When we come back together to proclaim Christ crucified and risen, that is anything but normal.

            This Easter season, which lasts fifty days, is a chance to embrace the abnormal—to remind ourselves that we will find routines again, but it should never be normal. Resurrection promises better.