Why Are We Surprised?
Text: Acts 3:11-26
Rev. Dr. John E. Manzo
July 30, 2006

Just previous to the passage we read from today, Peter healed a lame man just outside the Temple. They were going in for the 3PM prayer time and when Peter and John were approached by the beggar a miracle took place and the lame beggar was able to walk.

Now the lame beggar is on his feet, holding on to Peter, excited and thrilled, and the crowd is bewildered. “How did this happen?”

And Peter’s speech is a question and a calling to task?

Why are you surprised at this?????

Peter’s speech is summarized like this. Jesus walked these very streets and performed signs and wonders just like this. And, of course, because Jesus did such great signs, he was perceived to be a problem and was thus put to death. Now you are surprised, that we who followed him are doing the same things?

Luke wrote Acts of the Apostles and what we know about Luke is that Luke liked to tell stories of surprise about people who should have known better.

If you recall the opening of the gospel of Luke, an angel appears to two individuals to tell them about a miraculous birth. They are Zechariah and Mary.

Zechariah is one of the priests in the Temple. A holy learned man. The angel of the Lord appears to him and tells him that he and his wife Elizabeth are going to have a child. Zechariah is shocked and totally surprised and makes a truly faithless statement: Prove it! Instead the angel strikes him mute. Zechariah was a high priest in the Temple and when God came to work signs and wonders, Zechariah was the first to be skeptical.

Mary was a peasant girl. Completely unlearned in the ways of God. Completely oblivious to the stories of God’s signs and wonders. The angel of the Lord tells her that she is going to have a child. Her question is a question of process----how can this be, I’m a virgin? The angel assures her that God has chosen her and Mary simply says, “Let it be.”

The person who knew of God’s signs and wonders is skeptical, the one who couldn’t have known any better has faith. The person who should not have been surprised is surprised.

Luke does this theme again.

If you recall the story of the resurrection in Luke’s Gospel. Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb, encounters an empty tomb, encounters the risen Christ, and announces to the apostles that the had ‘seen the Lord.’

Jesus had, after all, prophesied all of this and there might have been a lingering thought...

But Mary returns to the apostles, proclaims that she had ‘seen the Lord,’

But Luke tells us that Mary’s words to them “seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.”

The translators of this are kind.

The Greek word lêros is used only once in the entire Bible. It is translated here as ‘idle tale,’ but, in truth, the word has a more locker-roomesque kind of feel to it. Imagine a group of adolescent boys in a locker room and someone comes in and tells them that something remarkable and unbelievable happens. The boys would yell out the word lêros and the day when adolescent boys yell out ‘idle tale’ is that day that the translation is correct. It’s true definition is nonsense, or complete and utter, well, I’ll love what word comes to your mind after you hear the words complete and utter...

These were the apostles. These were the people who followed Jesus around day by day and saw all the signs and wonders and should have known better.

Which brings us back to Peter. You have seen the signs and wonders. You have seen us with Jesus. You knew the stories, you saw the miracles. Why are you surprised?

Sometimes, we too are surprised by God’s signs and wonders. We may have grown up in church, we may have read so many stories in the Bible, we may have deep faith, but we are still skeptical of signs and wonders in our midst. Something good happens and we wonder and question if it’s true or lêros.

Sometimes this happens because, well, frankly, we enjoy nonsense. St. Paul in his words to Timothy wrote these words:
For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, -2 Timothy 4:3

People enjoy nonsense and want to believe what they want to believe. We often live in a culture that lives by the adage, “Don’t confuse me with the facts, my mind is already made up.”
Nonsensical stories swirl around us all the time.

We’ve probably all heard the variation of a man driving a new Ford and he happens to stop at a gas station in Kansas and says, “Wow, my new car is amazing. I just got it and I drove all the way from Pennsylvania to here in Kansas and I still have a half a tank of gas.” The story continues that the man left and the gas station attendant made a quick phone call. The driver of the car was pulled over by police and they waited for a helicopter to come and two men in white coats removed the experimental chip from the man’s car and flew away.

That story and variations of it has been around for thirty years. And a lot of people still believe it.

A few years ago the Fox TV network did a special ‘proving’ that the July 20, 1969 moon landing by Neil Armstrong and the subsequent moon landings were all hoaxes. Despite the fact that so many of the greatest minds in the country worked on that and validated the moon landings; despite the fact that geologists demonstrated beyond any doubt that the moon rocks were indeed moon rocks, despite the fact that NASA, concerned about this, chose astronauts of integrity beyond reproach, and despite the fact that NASA showed how Fox TV had altered pictures or misread pictures to prove their point, people still bought it. People watched the show and to this day are convinced that the moon landings didn’t take place.

In 1945 then General Eisenhower in one of the wisest moves in history, made the army take copious pictures of concentration camps and made the Nazi records of their atrocities public because Eisenhower knew there was going to come a day and age when people would question whether the Holocaust ever really took place. He was so right. But despite all of this, there are people who question the Holocaust.

We often do have itching ears for nonsense. We often do choose to believe that which we want to believe, and demonstrate great ability to disregard facts for what we want to believe.

Why are we surprised? Nonsense is something easier to believe than truth.

Secondly is the God’s will thing. We struggle with the whole concept of God’s will.

Some people say and believe that they know God’s will for their lives. Frankly, they seem to know it for everyone else’s life as well. I’m not so sure God’s will is that easily knowable.

Others will say, “Well, there’s really no such thing as God’s will” and frankly, that doesn’t work either. God not having a will makes God pretty inert and indifferent to humanity and that doesn’t make sense either.

We struggle with God’s will because, frankly, we pray for things that don’t come to pass.

Often the place that has some of the most heart-felt fervent prayers in this region is up the street at Caesars. A lot of people pray to ‘hit it big,’ and they pray to ‘hit it big,’ and they don’t.

If you are a sports fan you’ve probably prayed for your team to get a big hit, or to make a big play so that your team would win. A lot of people will tell you that God doesn’t seem to intervene on their behalf a whole lot.

And, more seriously, we’ve all prayed, at times, for people to get well, and they don’t and we wonder about God.

The problem we have is that we presume that God’s will is a lot like our own and we confuse God’s will with our own will.

When we lived in Ohio there was a bakery downtown that had great jelly doughnuts. I would sometimes pray that if there was a parking space open in front of the bakery, God was willing me to stop and buy some jelly doughnuts to eat. And often God willed me to stop. Sometimes it took circling the block 6 or 7 times, but often God’s will prevailed and I’d buy the jelly doughnuts. Or, maybe, I just blamed God for my own behavior.

Often when I hear of people speaking of God’s will in their lives, I’m truly amazed on how God’s will benefits them so greatly and offers so little sacrifice. I have seen people be unabashedly and unashamedly mean to other people and say they were merely speaking “God’s will” where it sounded just plain mean to me.

God’s will, in my mind, is often subtle and nagging and never as clear as we’d like it to be.

The problem people had with the signs and wonders of Jesus and with Peter’s healing the lame man was that they were so convinced that they understood God and God’s will, and that Jesus death ended this nonsense, they were stunned to see that there was more to come. Who were these apostles to prove them wrong?

So, why are we surprised?

We are surprised, at times, because our ears are itchy to hear what we want to hear as opposed to the truth.

We are surprised, at times, because we are so convinced we understand God’s will, that we have a difficult time fathoming we might not.

God’s realm is filled with signs and wonders. It is, at times, up to us to open our eyes to see them, to open our ears to hear them, open our minds to understand them, and, most of all, open our hearts to live them.