I grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons in the 1970’s. I would get up early and claim the television before my brother could.
Some of the best shows weren’t even cartoons, they were these low budget shows made by Kroft Productions and Filmation, shows like Space Academy, and Jason of Star Command, Ark 2, Shazaam, Mighty Isis, Electro Woman and Dyna Girl, and then the best of them all, Land of the Lost.
Land of the Lost was a version of Swiss family Robinson, in this Saturday morning TV version, a family was caught up in a time warp and ended up stranded in a land populated with dinosaurs, and various space aliens. The perfect story really, dinosaurs, aliens, time warps, and family life. What else could you ask for?
Well fast forward to a few years ago, comedy actor Will Ferrell did a comic remake of Land of the Lost.
In this one scene Will Ferrell tries to hide his scent from a Tyrannosaurus Rex, which doesn’t work, and the giant dinosaur chases him all through the woods. As he runs past a friend of his, his friend yells out, “Do you ever get tired of being wrong?” Will Ferrell yells back as he’s busy running and evading, “I do, I really do.”
Do you ever get tired of being wrong? Brilliant.
Being wrong is one of the biggest parts of the journey of faith, perhaps the major defining theme.
Do you ever get tired of being wrong? I do I really do.
For Lent, and Easter we switch from Matthew’s Gospel to John’s Gospel.
A subtitle for John’s Gospel could be, “Do you ever get tired of being wrong?”
From the first chapter, where the darkness does not comprehend the light all the way to the end where Thomas doesn’t believe the news of Jesus Resurrection, all the way through, encounter after encounter plays on the ironic theme of not recognizing who Jesus really is.
The truth stands right there before Pilate and Pilate says, “What is truth?”
Mathew, Mark, and Luke are all about following Jesus. John is all about believing in Jesus. Episode after episode of gasping for the breath that is belief.
How to respond to Jesus? How to believe in Jesus?
How many ways can we not see?
Do we ever get tired of being wrong?
John has this thing about Jesus being rejected, and passed on by. It appears that is we who live in the Land of the Lost.
Nicodemus, we meet Nicodemus today, struggling to be born again into this new creation of wind, and Spirit and breathe that Jesus has brought to save a lost land, worn out from being wrong, of the invisible controlling the visible. “Can’t you see the unseen”, Jesus seems to say.
There is something there to which to pay attention. The struggle to see what can’t be seen, of Jesus making visible that which is invisible. How do we recognize what we have never seen before? Much is expected of us it seems.
Someone once asked a monk, “What do monks do all day?” The monk thought for awhile…and then looked him in the eye and said, “We fall down and we get up again.”
The journey of faith, Abram, the apostle Paul, we hear of them today as well, if we pay attention to their stories, we see that they specialized in getting it wrong, their names even change in the story as their journeys progress. Some say this is to signal a new start, I wonder if it was more like a witness protection program.
The journey in the wilderness, of not recognizing God’s presence, of getting it wrong, of falling and getting back up.
This is what belief is like, of following the wind and breath of God’s Spirit- bringing a lost and dead land back to life.
How do we follow the wind?
How do we recognize what we have never seen?
It all seems to come back not to getting it right, but rather getting it wrong and starting over.
That is what it is like to believe in Jesus. Always starting over. That is something to which to pay attention.
Do you ever get tired of being wrong?
That is where we meet God.