When miracles become ordinary. . .

The truth is that we have unrealistic expectations of nearly everything in life.  Among them is the idea of certain things being special -- so special, in fact, that every time we experience them we tingle with excitement and are awestruck before them.  And then it all becomes ordinary.  We spend a goodly portion of our lives trying to rekindle the moment and the make uncommon what has become routine.  It is an endless but fruitless pursuit.  Everything special ages into the ordinary.  That is not bad.  It just is.  Life is not lived in the spectacular but in the routine, not on the occasional mountain tops but in the regular valleys.  In some way we all know this but reject it in favor of the pursuit of the raw and edgy feel of the first experience.

This is true of nature.  I grew up in a farming community in a distinctly rural atmosphere.  There is little that is more miraculous than the tilling of the soil, dropping in a seed, and then feeding the world.  When an uncle of mine passed away, the Lutheran pastor who did not know him at all suggested that my uncle had regularly dipped his hand into the soil, lifted his eyes to the heavens and praised God for the miracle.  He did not.  He regularly complained to God about too much rain or too little, costs too high and the price of corn too low, etc...  He had lived too long with the miracle a child sees when he puts a bean seed into a jar of soil and watches it split open and send forth a stalk to the sky and it was all rather, well, boring.  He was not a bad guy but it happens to all of us.  The miracle becomes ordinary.

When you first taste of a perfectly grilled steak or a lobster tail drawn in butter or bread fresh from the oven, it is a magical experience.  But if you eat these regularly, they become routine and ordinary.  It is not bad.  It is life.  Some of us spend our whole lives trying to escape the ordinary and live in the specialness of a moment forever new.  Marriages fall apart because love becomes routine and its not the first kiss or touch.  We reject the ordinary in favor of the constant pursuit of life on the edge.   Thrill seeking seems romantic at first but it is a heavy burden to place upon life and soon the pursuit overtakes the end result.  It is that way with addiction in general but it is also a specific addition to the pursuit of what was or what never was.  It is, like nearly every addiction, a destructive one.  It does not add but constantly subtracts from life.  Like the life lived behind the constant scrolling of the screen, the thing no longer matters as much as the pursuit of what might be or what is behind the next change.

This is also true with the things of God.  We want things to be constantly special.  We have prayerbooks because prayer becomes routine and without the prompting of a form set before us, we lose interest and grow bored with it all.  We have a liturgy because the routine grounds us against the constant church shopping for an experience we have not had before.  It is a necessary anchor for a people constantly shifted by wind and wave, chance and change.  We have the Word near us but a lectionary prompts us to live in it when we put it down as a boring novel or history text and appoints us with a cycle of texts in which to live, to know, and to guide us into the rest.  We have the baptismal font front and center as we enter the sanctuary so that we remember we are baptized when our infant or childhood baptism is not recalled or its significance acknowledged amid all the other things in life that claim our identity.  We have the Eucharist not as something very special but as the regular table and regular food of the people of God.  We come not because it gives us chills every time we approach the Sacrament but because we need its food whether we are hungry for it or need to be called to the feast.  God lives in the ordinary and not simply in the special, in the routine and regular of Word and Sacrament as well as in the moment when their miracle becomes impossible to ignore.

I grew up with a Lutheran Church which had forgotten itself and consigned the Eucharist to four times a year and then not all commune.  While some are shocked by this in an age of more regular Holy Communion, Roman Catholics had the Mass every Sunday but more as a spectator event than a participant by weekly Communion.  They even removed the chalice from the lay as something too special and meant only for those in orders.  But we were fools.  The special character of the Sacrament does not proceed from its occasional encounter but from its life among us as the routine and regular place where we eat the flesh once for all broken for us on the cross and drink the blood that cleanses us from all sin.  It is the foretaste of the eternal feast not because it is so special but to point us to what is coming when every thing around us would point us to other things not so routine.  The Lord never meant it to be special but routine and ordinary, as oft as you eat and drink...  

Oftentimes converts become worn down and disappointed because the enthusiasm of the first experiences in their churches do not last.  Disillusioned by the special become ordinary, they sometimes switch churches in search of the spectacular only to wear themselves out into disbelief.  But God lives in the ordinary and routine, in the boring and common.  In six days of labor and the day set apart for the Lord.  Work becomes routine and so does the Sabbath.  God's work is not to keep propping up the ego for the excitement we seek but to make it plain and obvious that God lives where we live.  When the miracle becomes ordinary, God is still there.  Amid valleys and shadows, disappointment and despair, defeat and loss, pain and suffering -- God is there with grace sufficient and life stronger than death and forgiveness greater than the sin.  Once we begin to recognize this, we relieve ourselves and our faith and our life from the impossible burden of maintaining the chills and tingles of the first even while we are experiencing the last.