Not the Way Things Are Supposed to Go

This wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. There were unwritten rules, there was a way things were supposed to work out. Paul had planted this community at Galatia, had proclaimed the Gospel to them, had seen the Spirit moving among them. Now, the community was finding things in the way of the Gospel, barriers between them and Jesus. The question hanging in the air: am I in or am I out? What am I willing to do to ensure that I am in? Be circumcised? Keep the food laws? Go to synagogue and to the house church meeting?

This was not the way things were supposed to go. Ancient letters had a form, they had rules, conventions that formed a rhythm of what to expect. Perhaps the people were settling in for the meeting, trying to keep children quiet, trying to keep awake or take a nap, or to take a nap while seeming awake after a long night and a morning in which it was about all they could do to get themselves to worship. But when Paul lights into them, “I am astonished…” I imagine them jarring awake, stopping what they were doing. In the place where they were supposed to hear about how their faith was told all over Paul’s communities, that they were beloved, that they were faithful, what they were doing right, they were smacked with Paul’s castigation of their behavior. As they tried to hang on to the good news that had been preached to them – that they had been saved – and as they tried to do what was right to keep that gospel – they found out that they had not been living into the gospel at all: “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel—.” Where there had been no barriers, no external requirements for believers, the community seemed to be starting to question: “But what if we’re wrong? What if we’re wrong about  how this whole grace thing works? What if we do actually have to do something to prove that we are in?” How do you prove something that nobody can see, like belief in God? Like faith?

We live in a society in which we assume we can know something about a person on the inside based on what we see on the outside, whether they wear tattoos and piercings or are clean-cut, whether or not they are petite, whether they have children or not, the color of their skin, the church they go to, their political affiliation, and on and on the list goes. Even though we try to not judge, we measure others and whether they seem to be “enough.” And I don’t think we do this out of legitimate concern or care, but rather, because if we can judge others, perhaps it will hide our fear of judgment. Perhaps if we can make ourselves look like we belong, we actually will. Perhaps by recognizing that others around us aren’t “enough,” we realize that we are. But, dear brothers and sisters, this is not how it works. Judgment of another person, whether the judgment of their external or (perceived) internal features, never makes us feel better. It begins a downward spiral, of us looking at others, determining their worth. And, as things don’t go the way they are supposed to go, we cling to these external things, making rules about how things are supposed to go, trying to force things to happen in a way that we understand, constructing a world in which the people who seem beyond redemption make us more confident in ours. But again, it doesn’t work that way. As people are identified as beyond redemption, we don’t become more confident in our having been saved; we become less confident, more scared, more afraid of our neighbors, more isolated, more numb, more distant, and what we thought was something that only pertained to those people out there starts to seep into our families, of the people we have known and loved, as we start to look at them with question marks when being in relationship with them makes our lives inconvenient or sets them off course, or worse, makes us feel like our worlds are spinning out of control.

The way things are supposed to go. Most of us don’t really have an idea of how things are supposed to go, but we have an idea of how things are not supposed to go. Spouses are not supposed to get sick. Getting pregnant and having children is not supposed to be hard. Children are not supposed to get sick. Friends aren’t supposed to betray us. Businesses are not supposed to go belly up. Crops are not supposed to fail. But all of these things happen, leaving us to live in the wake of them, picking up the pieces of ourselves and our lives when they threaten to break apart or worse, when they do break apart. Because we live in an isolated society, though, when they do break apart, we are programmed to make it look like they are not. We pick up the phone, wanting to call for help, mentally going through the rolodex in our brains of which of our friends’ or family members’ voices will help us keep walk forward rather than staying stuck as things crash down around us. Most people, however, have trouble dialing the number. Instead we try to convince ourselves that we are okay. We make rules and boundaries. We try to keep them and fail. We try to make the good news something we can understand. When it doesn’t seem that Jesus is going to fix our broken relationships or heal the broken people whom we love, we say things like “it is God’s will,” not really wanting to believe it because we don’t want to say what we’re really thinking.

What if this is God’s way of asking us to look at the world in a different way? What if God is looking at the situation with us saying, “That stinks. This is not what I want for you.” What if we looked at the brokenness and, instead of trying to patch it up ourselves, we took a few deep breaths to remember that God does not set up barriers between us and the news that we have been saved apart from anything that we can do ourselves. Instead of thinking “maybe this is because I have been unfaithful, maybe it is because I haven’t done enough or been enough,” what happens when we think, “It is enough.” What if it is all gift? What if it is all free? This life, messy and beautiful, with all of its exhilarating joys and crushing sorrows, is a gift. Perhaps we are being invited to see life as the gift that it is, not a gift to which we are entitled, but a gift to which we nevertheless cling. Nothing ever really goes the way it is supposed to go, in the end.

God wasn’t supposed to love people that didn’t deserve it. God wasn’t supposed to save people who didn’t deserve it. God wasn’t supposed to provide abundance in the midst of scarcity or love in the midst of hate. Instead, each time humans go a way other than the way they are supposed to go, not trusting in God or God’s provision, God continues providing, continues saving, continues loving. Perhaps things don’t go the way they are supposed to go because it would mean a life without joy, a life without hope, and a life without God.