Sermon: “Worthwhile Wait”

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable to you, O God, our strength and our redeemer.   Amen.

There is something about this time of year that does things to us.   Call it the winter ‘blahs’ or the February ‘blues.’   Many years ago when I worked as an insurance adjuster, I came to dread the month of February because clients were particularly irritable and difficult to deal with.     Have you noticed it, perhaps in the workplace; perhaps at home – more frequent flaring of tempers, people being edgy, grumpy.    Perhaps it is a matter of being fed up with winter and spring still a long way off; some of us feel burdened by Christmas bills now due.   February seems to be a month when a lot of us are sick or depressed.     We might experience the feeling of being closed in, of being trapped.   We may even start feeling that there is nothing to hope for, even no one to trust.

All kinds of easy answers abound, of course.   Head for Mexico.  Get your hair done.  Take a pill.   Have a drink.  Lose 15 pounds.   Get a massage.   

Try some ‘new age’ path to spiritual fulfillment.   Any or all of the above.    But it’s not usually all that simple, is it?  And then we come to church, only to hear some author from long ago make it sound so easy.  How does he put it, “even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for God shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not be faint.”   We may well find ourselves thinking, “Well, that sounds really good, but who is he kidding?  Besides, why should I listen to that kind of wishful thinking?  What credibility or authenticity does that passage have for my life?”   Wayne Hilliker, to whom I am indebted for  much of what I have to say today, writes that to answer these questions we need to consider the reading’s original context.   These closing sentences of the 40^th chapter of Isaiah are words that were addressed to a community of people more than 550 years before the birth of Jesus.    The king of Babylon had rolled into the biblical lands in successive waves of conquest.   Torches were set to the crops, axes were laid to the trunks of the precious olive trees, the holy temple was ransacked, the treasury emptied.  significant numbers of Israelites were deported to Babylon, especially the leaders of the people.       And the Israelites, now some 40 years later  are still living in exile in Babylon.  

Not surprisingly, the prevailing mood is agnostic, skeptical.  One of the exiles spits out a lament:

“My way is hidden from God, and my right is disregarded by my God.”   many had forgotten or disregarded the memory of God’s saving acts in history – the promises given to Abraham and Sarah; the deliverance from Egypt; settlement in the promised land; the rise to nationhood.   Many ignored the fact that it was the rebellion and sinfulness of the people, and in particular their leaders, that led to their conquest and deportation.

The attitude of the Israelites reminds me of an old story of an elderly spouse who was quite ill who said to the other spouse, “you know Jamie, you’ve always been with me --- through thick and thin.   Like the time I lost my job – you were right there by my side.      Then I was injured in that car accident and you were right there by my side.  Then there was the time when we were so poor; we had nothing – but you were there with me.  And now here I am, Jamie, sick as a dog, and as always, you are right beside me.  You know something, Jamie, you’re bad luck!!

There is a part of us, isn’t there, that is tempted to look for somebody or something to blame for all the things that go wrong with our lives.    I have a friend whose most favourite saying is, “if I didn’t have bad luck; I’d have no luck at all.”     Sometimes we blame our luck; sometimes fate; often we choose to blame the very people we once looked for to answer all our problems.  

With a similar kind of bitterness, the ancient Jews in Babylon were claiming, “it’s god’s fault we’re still living in Babylon.   God doesn’t care about us!   God has abandoned us.”    It is within this agnostic attitude of the people, this questioning of whether God cares or even really exists, that Isaiah counsels his people “wait for God.”   “...those who wait for God shall renew their strength.”   

To “wait for God.”   Just what does it mean to ‘wait’ for God?   Does it mean sitting on posteriors and twiddling thumbs, expecting God to get us out of the mess.  Regretfully, some Christians take that attitude.  Their faith is characterized by inaction.  They wait for God to put things right.   That is hardly fair to what the bible means by waiting for God.  Behind the word translated “wait” lies a particular Hebrew verb that originally had to do with twisting or plaiting strands together, as in making a cord or rope.   Here we get a sense of the strength that comes from binding things together.    There is also a feminine form of the word used to denote a place for collecting water, such as a cistern or reservoir.     

Waiting for God, then, implies and experience of allowing God to bind together our strengths, or to collect our resources.   Or as we might say letting God help us “get our act together.”   

God focuses us, gathers the frayed strands of our being, conserves our resources, reinforces us, enables us.   God assists us to get ready for whatever challenges are thrown at us.  Waiting is active, not passive.   It is not waiting with dismal resignation to our fate, but trusting with confident expectation that God will employ the various strands of our life to the strongest and fullest degree possible.    Admittedly, this is not always a comfortable process.  It may involve pain, tough decisions, personal anguish from radical changes as we ask God to reorder our discordant lives.  ‘Waiting’, then in the biblical sense means the capacity to hold on tightly, strengthened and upheld by the belief that even the cruellest experiences of life are not going to scrap the good purposes of God.   Implicit in every situation is a saving possibility.

We all know that life is not all sweetness and light.   Sometimes in our walk, our journey of life, we grow weary, we become faint of heart, sometimes of body.   Courage is what is called for.   And it takes a lot of courage to be a human being.  

When you hold an infant in your arms, you realize that child does not know that yet.   Maybe it is your daughter or granddaughter.   Looking into her eyes it is easy to see she doesn’t know anything about arthritis or cancer or car crashes, or depression. 

She does not lie awake at night worrying about her relationships, or her financial situation, or her death.    She sleeps and eats and sighs when she is full.  Her world is as wide as her mother’s arms.  And as safe.  That is all she knows.    But as she grows she will learn more.   She will learn that bee’s sting and roses have thorns, and that other children push and throw stones.   She will learn about all sorts of annoying, painful illnesses and that when her parents move to another province or get divorced, there is absolutely nothing she can do about it.   All of that is part of growing up.  It is not the only part, by a long shot, but it is the hard part, and it is part of how we learn what it is to be human.

As we grow older we may start thinking we are in control of our lives.   That is, until something happens.  The job and income evaporate, the doctor finds a spot on the x-ray, the child’s grades go down and down, and it is like being trapped inside a car when the brakes fail.  In a split second, in a twinkling of an eye, everything changes.  

One moment we are comfortably and safely in command of our journey, and the next we are being flung down the road in an expensive piece of machinery that will not stop.   And we find ourselves saying, “I’ve lost control of my life.!”   

I’ve said it myself, but it is not true.   What we lose is the illusion that we were ever in control of our lives in the first  place.    It is a hard, hard lesson to learn.    We keep thinking there is some way to master the human condition so that there are no leaks in it, no scares, no black holes.    But as far as I know, it can’t be done.     Maybe that is why it’s called the human condition, that is, being human is a condition we live with.   A splendid one in most respects – but with certain built-in limitations.    Some things will budge for us and some will not.   We cannot control everything that happens to us.   That is the human condition, and it can be frightening, because what it means is we cannot choose all the circumstances of our lives.  All we can really choose is how we respond to them.

It does take a lot of courage to be a human being.  And courage is a gift given to us in our faith.    Remember in our gospel reading today, the people came to Jesus in the evening, at sundown – in other words, they came to him in the growing, gathering darkness, bearing their own darkness.   

They discovered in him a different understanding of reality.   They appropriated beliefs by which their lives were invested with new meaning and fresh vigour.   They discovered not so much release from their burdens as new strength for the bearing of their burdens.    No so much protection as unfailing support.    

Writing from a prison cell German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer expressed it this way: 

“I believe God will give us all the strength we need to help in all times of distress.  But God never gives it to us in advance, lest we should rely on ourselves, and not on God....”   and in his book the screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis lifts up another truth:   “God wants (us) to learn to walk and if only the will to walk is really there, God is pleased even with the stumbles.”   Mark, in his gospel, writes,  “Jesus came and took her by the hand and lifted her up.   Then the fever left her and she began to serve them.”    As we willingly accept Christ’s healing and strength, may we, too, rise to serve as his faithful, courageous disciples.   Amen.

(I am indebted to Rev. C. Wayne Hilliker for the main body of ideas and content in this sermon from his sermon entitled, “One Step At a Time” found in “The Chalmers Pulpit, Chalmers United Church, Kingston, Ontario, Feb. 6, 2006.)