A Sermon for the Third Sunday after Pentecost

I wait for the Lord; my soul waits for him,
In his word is my hope.

Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.

If you are a fan of the TV series Friday Night Lights you know this motto.

If you haven’t watched Friday Night Lights, and you like football, honestly if you simply like people, I highly recommend binge-watching this series. Based on a nonfiction book about a team in Odessa, Tex., in the 1980s that was then the basis of a fictional movie, the TV series tracks the lives of Coach Taylor and his team. High school football in Texas is an industry and the show follows this less than affluent team as they work their way through ups and downs, through catastrophic injuries, through indignities, through the pain of being a teenager, through wins and losses and even to the state championships.

Coach Taylor repeats the mantra – Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose – at the end of their locker-room meetings.

He isn’t a cutthroat leader, hell-bent on winning. He’s the kind of coach you’d want your kid to have, a coach more interested in how being on a team can build strength, perseverance, and an understanding of responsibility to community. His expectations for the young men on his team are not tied to the scoreboard no matter how much pressure he gets from administration, parents, and the sports backers.

Expectations are a tricky part of being a human. They can drive us toward wildly successful ends, toward compassionate acts, toward the betterment of our fellow humans. And expectations can also be our absolute ruin when they come from a place of self-service or fear or entitlement.

Sometimes it is hard to know where our expectations even come from. Sometimes they are folly. Like the time I honestly expected a pony one year for my birthday. But other expectations, rooted in hope, can sustain us and feed our imaginations with a sense of the possibilities in this life.

How do we know how to gauge our expectations? How do we know if our eyes are really clear and our hearts are truly full as we move through this life?

Lots of expectations can seem full of good intent, when in fact they are not. Human history tells a long story of people acting with a sense of clarity of purpose, whose actions have been destructive and divisive. Starting right there in the garden with Adam and Eve eating the fruit.

In today’s passage from Mark, we find Jesus at odds with a host of people who had expectations of him that they felt he was not living up to. Both groups expecting Jesus to be something else.

His family has shown up to claim him and bring him home because they think he’s dropped his basket, he’s gone out of his mind. And the scribes from Jerusalem have shown up saying they believe him to be the devil himself. This all happens in the midst of a large crowd with the disciples at Jesus’s side.

Before addressing his family, Jesus first turns his attention to the scribes, showing how ridiculous their argument is that he is Satan. Does it make sense to send a devil to catch a devil? Jesus brought healing and restoration, mending relationships and bringing in the transformative power of God’s love. His house, his kingdom, was not divided, but being redeemed through his love.

Then Jesus gives a very stark condemnation. The Message interprets the verse this way: Listen carefully. I’m warning you. There’s nothing done or said that can’t be forgiven. But if you persist in your slanders against God’s Holy Spirit, you are repudiating the very One who forgives, sawing off the branch on which you’re sitting, severing by your own perversity all connection with One who forgives.

I wonder if one of those scribes confronting Jesus were asked why they were so intent on proving Jesus to be evil would say that they were doing so with clear eyes and full hearts, eyes and hearts fixed on the law of the Lord. Their expectations of who God was and how God acted in the world did not match Jesus’ teachings and actions. And Jesus tells them that they in their commitment to their vision were sawing off their very connection to God who they were seeking to serve.

Then Jesus turns his attention to his family who was there to collect him. One can safely assume that they felt clear-eyed in their concern for him, with hearts full of love for him. They showed up expecting him to respond to this. And what Jesus says is so hard to swallow for me as a mother, as a sister. After being told that his family is outside Jesus looks at those gathered around him and proclaims them to be his mother and brothers and sisters. Again, Jesus is showing his kingdom to defy the expectations that seem reasonable, that seem clear-eyed and heartfelt by the people who presumably loved him most.
So how do we as a people who seek always and everywhere to give thanks to God discern if our expectations are in keeping with God’s will?

How do we learn from the mistake of Adam and Eve and stop trying to conform God to our wills rather than conforming our wills to God’s?

How do we avoid a hardness of heart that really aims to make Jesus like us rather than seeking to make ourselves like Jesus?

My eyes can get clouded, and my heart filled to the brim with a ridiculous sense of self-sufficiency, as ridiculous as Adam and Eve believing they could eat that fruit and gain the wisdom of God.

For me, I have to remember that there is a difference between having expectations and being expectant. There is a difference between pushing ahead and creating a vision of my own making rather than waiting, waiting with expectant hope that God will do God’s work in my life and in this world. Being hopeful and expectant doesn’t mean I get to throw up my hands and I bear no responsibility. It means taking the time to pay attention to what God might be calling me to understand.

As Adam and Eve are hiding in the garden disoriented by their choice, God arrives. He calls to them,” Where are you,” but God knows just where they are and the predicament they find themselves in. God doesn’t curse them but explains how hard things are going to be from that point onward. God, in love and mercy, makes garments for them and clothes them and sends them out to till the ground from where they came. The ground that they will return to. And so they begin the journey that we are all on.

Clear eyes.
Full hearts.
Can’t lose.

I wait for the Lord; my soul waits for him,
In his word is my hope.

Amelia McDaniel