Rector’s Ramblings – August 22, 2024
Irony is a thing. Remember a few weeks ago when I mentioned that one of the hardest parts of sending Eva off to college would be that I wouldn’t be there to fix her car? I jinxed myself because that weekend, days before it was time for her to drive it to Sewanee, we noticed a noise that didn’t belong there. Before I knew it, I had the serpentine belt off and was replacing the belt tensioner. That’s always the way it goes, right? Alanis Morisette had a very popular song in the nineties about irony, and people loved it because she was so right!
But alas, Alanis and I are both wrong. The real irony is that her song about irony has a lot of examples of things that aren’t ironic. My story is one of coincidence, not irony. Irony represents when we’re surprised by the outcome of something based on our previous expectations, often a complete opposite of what we expected. The verbal use of irony is very similar to sarcasm when we say one thing but mean the exact opposite, like the assessment of a woman who says, “Why don’t you look lovely,” in a syrupy voice while thinking the opposite.
Irony concerning my worry about fixing Eva’s car would be finding out that it broke down during my planned trip to Sewanee for a Trustee’s meeting this fall so that I could fix it without any problem. Identifying a bad part a few days after mentioning the concern was a coincidence. Regardless of our vocabulary, we tend to struggle with what to make of coincidence regularly. Some of that is the movement of the Holy Spirit, to be sure. Just like I saw pregnant women everywhere when Donna was pregnant many years ago, when we are tuned in to something, we tend to see it all around us.
This is why we pray and ask the Spirit to move in and amongst us. If we believe that it can and does happen, it will. That’s not the same as praying for a miracle, which seems to manifest itself. But it might mean that if we have been praying for a sign of some sort, and then an event happens that we take to be a sign, we can decide with a sense of comfort and ease as a result – often the choice we wanted to make deep down. Is it a miracle, or were we open to receiving a nudge one way or another? I don’t know. One hundred years ago, Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple famously said, “When I pray, coincidences happen. When I don’t, they don’t.” What are we to make of the unexpected?
Can God be ironic? Is that how miracles come to be? We expect one thing, and then a wholly opposite and surprising thing happens? Perhaps. Yet I suspect God’s first choice is not irony. It just feels like irony when we aren’t basing our expectations on a faithful sense of what should or could happen. We misuse the wordy irony as often as we misunderstand God’s ways. When we’re surprised by God, it could be because we didn’t believe something was possible, which might be a faith issue. It can also be because we simply expect the wrong things from God and this world. Our expectations are often out of whack. Nonetheless, God can and does do amazing things.
Wouldn’t it be ironic if this election cycle brought people together? Wouldn’t it be ironic if people would care for the poor if they didn’t feel like they were guilted into by constantly hearing about it? Wouldn’t it be ironic if the gospel of exclusion was so offensive that people would actually come to understand God’s grace? Wouldn’t it be ironic if we actually recaptured the sabbath because stopping one day out of seven made us more productive and happy than stuffing seven days full of work and responsibilities? Yeah, I think all those things would be ironic, and that’s only four examples. In each one of these, I could turn that into a prayer. Maybe I should. Perhaps I should pray for all those things and trust that God can actually do them, especially if we help because every one of them might one day become true. Sure, it’s possible. And that’s not sarcasm.
Tom+
O heavenly Father, who hast filled the world with beauty:
Open our eyes to behold thy gracious hand in all thy works;
that, rejoicing in thy whole creation, we may learn to serve
thee with gladness; for the sake of him through whom all
things were made, thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.