So there I was last Sunday putting up Christmas lights. It was the first week of Advent. I had spent the morning preaching at church. Now I was in my front yard. I was on a ladder. I had my Christmas mega playlist of over 500 of my favorite holiday themed songs set to shuffle on a speaker on the porch. I had the Santa hat on. And I was miserable. I could barely hear the music over how much I was cussing to myself. It was cold. My hands were numb if I wore no gloves, but when I put the gloves on I could not manage the lights. My family had given up and were inside drinking hot chocolate. I didn’t even want to hear the songs that were coming on. Merry Christmas indeed.
Expectations will kill you. Every time.
And that’s what my actual problem was. I had gone into the day knowing how things should go. I had clear expectations of how the kids should feel, how my wife should feel, how I should feel – how the weather should be, how easily the lights should go up. How the music should sound. Nobody did anything wrong. My wife hadn’t even actually given up: She was inside working on our inside decorations. My kids are kids, and sitting out in the cold with very little understanding of what they’re supposed to do isn’t fun. The weather is the weather. I was collapsing under the weight of my own expectations.
I had just returned from a week out of state with my in-laws. They were lovely and wonderful, and also it’s still a week of intensive time with family. Every time we get together, we can feel the weight of our expectations for one another, for ourselves, for how the trip should go.
So much of the stress of family is nested in expectation – what we expect from them, what they expect from us, what we all expect to happen. And of course these expectations don’t exist in a vacuum, but are built up over time and years of being with one another. I remember one friend of mine saying that whenever he went back to visit his parents, after three days his personality essentially reverted to his 18 year old self when he last lived with them. He didn’t like this about himself, but was able to see it happen. Even came to expect it on some level.
And, really, expectations will kill you. Every time.
The story of Jesus is, often a story of frustration. There is a deep frustration that people experience when Jesus does not live up to their expectations. And he frustrates their expectations in a number of (I think interconnected) ways. Jesus frustrates their expectations of who he should be – shouldn’t he be a peasant, a carpenter’s son? What is he doing preaching with authority and performing miraculous healings? Then there’s the frustration of what kind of preacher and healer he is – if he’s going to teach like this, why does he insist so often on being mysterious and inaccessible?
There are multiple moments in the Gospel narratives Jesus sees that a lot of people are following him so he says things like, “If you want to follow me you have to hate your family.” Or “Nobody can really get what I’m about unless they eat my body.” Reading these stories you get the sense that frustrating people’s expectations is a hobby for Jesus.
Now add to that at the cultural frustrations surrounding Jesus’ ministry. In the story, a good number of his fellow Judeans come to believe that he is the Messiah of Israel – the divinely appointed one sent by God to bring justice and peace to God’s people as a fulfillment of the founding covenant of their culture. But even as momentum is growing around the idea that Jesus might be this messiah, he consistently refuses to act like what they believe a messiah should act like.
This frustration of expectations does not begin with Jesus’ ministry. It goes all the way back to the manner of his coming into the world. There are several accounts of miraculous pregnancies in our Scriptures, but Mary’s is unique in that she is unmarried, is a virgin, didn’t ask for a child in the first place. Before Jesus is born he is a scandal, he is inconvenient. Then there he is, born to poor parents on a road trip with no reservations, wrapped in rags and laid to sleep in a trough. From before day one, Jesus is ruining expectations of what divine action would and should look like.
What if this is not an accident? What if Jesus knows – from personal experience – that expectations will kill you every time? What if the upending of our expectations is not only intentional but holy? What if it is divine?
We’re not looking for messiahs today – not officially, I know. But please take a moment and think about what expectations you have – named and unnamed – in this holiday season. Some may be cultural – what people expect you to feel, what family wants from you. But some may also be quite personal – what you are expecting to feel about this time of year – both positive and negative. What does it look like to try to practice letting go of those expectations?
I often rail against new years resolutions. I don’t actually have a problem with you trying to accomplish things or even trying to be better in certain areas of your life. But I wonder a lot about the expectations we have of ourselves, and how those expectations can kill us instead of giving us life. Our obsession with self-improvement often springs from insecurity, shame, and misguided expectations of what our lives and bodies and selves should look like.
This also matters in terms of how I experience God. What I believe God expects of me, how I think I might disappoint God, all that. What does that sense of God’s expectations of me do for me? For my spirit?
Now this gets tricky because I’m about to say God has no expectations for us – and that’s not exactly true. We are in relationship with God, and all relationships have some level of expectation. But when we look at our most life-giving, our healthiest relationships – the ones that give us a sense of belonging, of purpose, of joy – these relationships are with people whose expectation of us is that we be ourselves. The people whose love nourishes us are the ones who love us as we are – not as they want us to be. Their expectations are not exhausting, are not burdensome.
Yet so often we fall into an unhealthy theological and spiritual trap of thinking that God spends most of the time wishing we were something other than what we are. We burden our relationship with God with our own expectations that we are not enough, that we are not lovable, that we are deficient in God’s eyes.
The Christmas story is an absolute refutation of that misunderstanding of God. God comes to us as we are. God loves us as we are. God stands in solidarity with us as we are. God saves us from sin not so that we can be better people, but because the weight of sin is a burden that keeps us from experiencing love as we are. The birth of Jesus subverts all our expectations while fulfilling all our hopes. Jesus does not mold us into better people: Jesus liberates us so that, as we are here and now, we can know what it is to love and be loved.
This is not meant as a feel-good self help tool or a quick fix. I am going to have expectations. And they will be frustrated. That’s it. If I can grasp that the frustration of my expectations is a natural part of God’s divine work, I may be able to hold it all more lightly, to view it all with more grace. I can know my expectations, know that I have them, name them even. But I’d better be ready to watch them be frustrated, ignored, upended. Because that’s where the real transformation happens. Real conversion. God is not elsewhere.
