Disappointment, the Election, and the Incarnation

God often disappoints.

I don’t know of a person who has not been disappointed by God at some point in their lives.  It is a universal experience.  We pray—desperately so—for some need or desire that seems right and good.  But God remains silent.  We cry out to God to help us kick some habit that has been eating away at us for years.  But we keep failing.  We appeal to God to defeat our enemies, assuming they must be God’s enemies, too.  But God ignores us.

Where is God when we need him most?

But what exactly do we expect God to do for us?  We convince ourselves that we want God to perform as we assume God should, though the God we appeal to looks very much like a God made in our image—a God who plays a role in our script, speaks lines we have written, acts according to our direction.  A God who does our will.

Which is why God always disappoints us.  He will have none of it.

American history—you knew this was coming!—provides many examples.  The best—or worst—is the Civil War.  Both North and South claimed that God was on their side, and behaved accordingly.  It was Lincoln who identified the problem in his Second Inaugural, perhaps one of the greatest examples of political theology ever written.  “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other.  It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged.  The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully.  The Almighty has His own purposes.”

Both sides claimed that God was on one side—their side.  But God seemed to be on neither side, or on both, depending on what we mean by “side.”

The election of 2020 is past.  It has made some people gleeful, or at least relieved, and others outraged, or at least disappointed.  The craziness continues, too.  Some think President Trump a menace and threat, and they want him to go away.  Others want the results of the election overturned so that fraud gives way to fairness.  In their minds President Trump really did win.  There is anger on both sides.

There are also Christians on both sides.  Yes, on BOTH sides.  Both sides see things very differently, and they think God agrees with them.  How could God not agree with them?

Well, because God is God.  And we are not.  God always disappoints because God insists on being who God is.

Last Sunday was the first Sunday of Advent, which means “coming.”  It marks the beginning of the Church Year.  Christians observe the season of Advent to prepare them for the birth of Jesus.  It awakens longing and hope.  We see how troubled the world is.  We want God to come, deliver, and save.  We sing, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel . . .”  

Yet God chose to come in a profoundly inauspicious way.  God disappointed nearly everyone.  If we want to know who God is, we must look into the face of Jesus Christ, who is God become human.  Jesus is God’s advent.  When we see Jesus, we see God.  When we worship Jesus, we worship God.  When we pray to Jesus, we pray to God.  When we follow Jesus, we follow God.  “He who has seen me has seen the Father.”

What do we see in the face of Jesus Christ?  God does not come to us as we would like.  God does not play a role in our script.  God does not perform on cue.  God does not follow our directions.  Instead, God insists on writing his own play.  In this play Jesus plays the lead role.  God as author becomes character, outsider becomes insider, transcendent becomes imminent.   God chooses to enter the human story.

But not as anyone imagined.  We want God to be the “big man” and bully who does our bidding.

But God did not follow that script.  God came as Jesus Christ—not as a wise man, like Socrates, not as a strong man, like Hercules, not as a powerful man, like Augustus, not as a military commander, like Alexander the Great.

Instead, Jesus came as a humble, foolish, weak man who was born in a stable and who suffered on a cross.  No one expected a divine appearance (“incarnation”) of this kind.  As Paul writes, both Greeks and Jews assumed that God is by definition bigger, stronger, and wiser than the biggest, strongest, and wisest on earth.  The incarnation surprised and baffled everyone because it departed from traditional expectation of the divine.  “For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength” (I Corinthians 1:25).

The Incarnation exposes and confronts our idolatry.  It seems especially important this year in light of the election.  Swagger or pout, cheer or jeer, cry victory or cry foul—all are inappropriate from a Christian perspective.  The Incarnation demonstrates that God’s way is humility and sacrifice, which seems in short supply these days.

It is God’s way because it is what God did.  Disappointing?  Perhaps.  But redemption might just be worth it.