It's a wonder!

And they were amazed...astonished, surprised, aghast, breathless, bewildered, thunderstruck, spellbound, electrified, confounded, startled, astounded...something like that.

And we say “Ho hum, another clever little story about Jesus, and a not especially believable one at that. ...Next.”

We have to trim God down to our size, so that his power, influence, and wisdom are only as big as we think that we can comprehend and influence.

It is a pathetic attitude, and no more effective than it was when Adam and Eve first tried it.

“Where are you?” God asks them as they are hiding in plain sight like toddlers ineffectively trying to hide behind the table leg.

Instead of playing games with God, wouldn't it be refreshing simply to be astounded at what God has done, is doing, and has yet promised to do?

I remember the first time that I heard of a world conceived without God at its center.

In 11^th grade we were assigned a book to read (whose title I have forgotten) that was set in a 19^th century French coal-mining village.

The residents were grimy and hopeless, doing things that they hated, just in order to survive, finally being destroyed in monstrous mob violence.

Is that the end of things where God is not known?

Is that the destiny of things where there is no wonder?

Gilbert Chesterton (1874-1936) was a British convert to Christianity, and one of the last century's most influential and quoted Christian apologists.

He one observed that there are two kinds of people in the world:

When trees are waving wildly in the wind, one group of people thinks that it is the wind that moves the trees;

the other group thinks that the motion of the trees creates the wind.

The first view has been held by most of humanity throughout our history;

it has only been in the last century, Chesterton said, that a new breed of people had emerged who blindly hold that it is the movement of the trees that creates the wind.

There has always been a consensus that the invisible is behind and gives energy to the visible.

Chesterton observed that only in recent times has the consensus fallen apart, so that people think that what they see and hear and touch is the basic reality that generates those things that we cannot verify with our senses.

He summarizes: “The great human dogma is that the wind moves the trees. The great human heresy is that the trees move the wind.”

If one is stuck in that place, of trusting only what one can see and verify with the eyes, is such a person even capable of wonder and astonishment?

Is not the call to us in this season of Epiphany, the time of revealing in light, and miracle, and wonder,

the call to examine carefully what does not fit into our careful systems of organization,

to be astonished at what we do not know, and rightly to discern good from evil in those things that seem not to fit?

Yes, there is good and evil.

The presence of evil itself wants us to be saying that everything is relative,

...who is to say what is good or bad,

...it depends on your point of view,

...don't get excited about anything...

But when Jesus is around, ultimate evil recognizes him and tries to distance him:

What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? I know who you are, the Holy One of God!

The negative side of wonder is dismay, as the demon says Get away from us!

Would it be appropriate for us to wish for wonder in positive ways?

Why not?

Can't we pray, “O Lord, continue to surprise us in telescope and microscope,

continue to call us back to Scripture and hear there the voice that we cannot control,

continue to separate us from the evil inclinations that want to overwhelm and destroy us,

continue to surprise us and stir up in us wonder at the love and presence of Jesus with us.

Jon Shelby Spong , an Episcopal bishop in NJ, is one of those who has given up on wonder, specifically, the wonder of the resurrection.

“If the resurrection of Jesus cannot be believed except by assenting to the fantastic descriptions included in the Gospels, then Christianity is doomed,” he says.

No room for wonder, no room for faith in Spong's world. How sad!

In the famous Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis says that Satan wants to keep us confused as much as possible, and indeed doubting the very existence of evil and its role in the world.

It gives evil more cover for its diabolical work among us.

Dorothy Solee is one of the radical feminists who has given up on a God of wonder, a God who intervenes, a God who can surprise us.

She says, “God is our own capacity to love....We should stop looking for God....We can create a new social order and a new world....To live we do not need what has repeatedly been called 'God', a power that intervenes, judges, or confirms....we no longer need him, because love is all we need, nothing more.”

Unfortunately, that “love” has again and again been demonstrated to be not a love that gives of itself, but is only a self-love that takes and takes until there is nothing left.

How many Towers of Babel do we build until we recognize that?

How much time do we spend in exile until we are ready to hear something so much better?

There are the dramatic moments back through the history of the church.

--a demon driven out of a man by Jesus' powerful words: “Shut up!”

--St. Augustine hearing a child's voice from the garden saying “Take up and read.” and picking up the Bible and reading Paul's words “The just shall live by faith.” and the light-bulb went off for him.

--And Luther 11 centuries later stumbling onto the same passages, and the Reformation is off and running.

--And Wesley 2 centuries after that, reading Luther's commentary on that passage, and his heart being strangely warmed and the Methodist movement is launched.

--And a half-century earlier Blaise Pascal, a French mathematician and philosopher, late in a lifetime of trying to make sense of the Bible, is surprised by God, and is led to write in his diary, “Fire! God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob... Certitude, Joy. Peace. God of Jesus Christ.”

Astonishment, that's what he knows.

And it is not just for persons of past generations; it is available to us when we gather here in the church's worship.

This is the key time when we admit that we are not in control of things, that Jesus Christ is the source and the goal of this life of ours, that Jesus Christ is the gift that keeps coming to us.

Isn't it the most astounding thing of all to each and every one of us here Sunday after Sunday, when God who truly knows what we have been and done during the week past, still asks that bread and wine be placed in our hand with the words This is my Body and Blood, given and shed for you.

How can we be anything but astounded at this? The world's greatest wonder, God in the flesh, ...for me!

It is a lesson in humility for a pastor to read catechetical students' sermon reports.

Sometimes what the students write is insightful and accurate; other times I wonder if they were in the same room with the rest of us.

Our parents must have some interesting conversations with students as they try to sort that out!

A young pastor was discussing this problem with a wise woman in his parish, who said: “Where did you get the idea that a sermon is to be about you and your ideas? The purpose of a sermon is to meet Jesus and to be amazed that he hasn't given up on us yet.”

And so it is.

We're here to be astonished, and we are!

Amen.

Please note: The preceding sermon is provided as a resource for the thought, prayer, and meditation of the members and friends of St. Mark's. It is the residue of a verbal event, and thus it does not have academic footnotes and other details that would be expected in a written document. The writer gladly acknowledges the prior thought and work of many Christians before him.