Waiting … Faithfully

sermon by Torin Eikler
Luke 24:44-53             Acts 1:15-17, 21-26

‘Tis the season of graduations, and everywhere I go (or at least in the shops), I see all the merchandising that goes along with marking those important steps in our education.  Most of it seems … a bit much to me – jewelry, watches, tablets (the computer kind, not the paper ones), engraved pens, and stuffed animals.  There is one particular gift, though, that I really do approve.  It’s this book … “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” by Dr. Seuss.

I got a copy of this book when I graduated from high school.  And, I think it’s probably the best gift I received.  I certainly used the dictionary and thesaurus a lot, and the luggage saw me through my college and volunteering days admirably.  But those things have either worn out or become outdated.  What’s still left for me … and my boys to enjoy is this bit of wisdom right here.

And there’s one particular section that hits me every time I read it.  It’s about the dangers of getting stuck in a holding pattern in life – of disconnecting and just letting things slide by.  Other people talk about that as lacking ambition or as just trying to “make it through” until “this too passes” depending on the circumstances, but those words carry freight and judgment with them.  Dr. Seuss  goes a different route.  He calls it “the waiting place” (and it’s not a very good place to be.)

It’s a place “for people just waiting.

            Waiting for a train to go …

or a bus to come, or a plane to go …

or the mail to come, or the rain to go…

or the phone to ring … or the snow to snow…

or waiting around for a Yes or No…

or waiting for their hair to grow.

Everyone is just waiting.

Waiting for the fish to bite

            or waiting for wind to fly a kite

            or waiting around for Friday night

            or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake

            or a pot to boil, or a Better Break

            or a string of pearls,

                        or a pair of pants

            or a wig with curls,

                        or Another Chance.

Everyone is just waiting.”[1]

It seems to me that the Disciples were in that kind of place during the ten days in Jerusalem that we read about this morning.  They are coming off a roller-coaster couple of months.  First the triumph of their entry into the city and the rebuke of the money changers followed by the horror of their last supper with Jesus, the trial, and the crucifixion.  Then, grief when the Jesus’ body disappears followed by unreasoning joy at the appearance of the risen Christ.  After forty days of growing understanding and wonder, the sense of loss as they stood and watched Jesus rise into the sky and disappear.  Finally, the trek back to Jerusalem filled with hope and anxiety by the promise of power to come.

At that moment, though, they were waiting … rung out or hyped up or however they were feeling, they were waiting … just waiting. 

Katherine Willis Pershey talks about these ten days as a “somewhat Godless time.”[2] Caught as they are between the Ascension and Pentecost, the Disciples have neither the risen Christ nor the Holy Spirit to guide them.  They were told to go and wait, and I suspect they may have felt a bit anxious – anxious to get on with the mission that Jesus had given them … and anxious about when the Spirit would come to them.  They were alone and waiting for God.
 
I think we’re a little like that too.  We know that we have been given a mission to share the good news of God’s love with the world, and we want to embrace that work.  We do embrace that work.  And yet we feel anxious.  How, exactly, are we supposed to do it?  Why don’t we feel the Spirit falling on us like it did with the Disciples?  When will we feel that promised sense of empowerment we long for?

When I lived in South Carolina some years ago working to rebuild a church that had been the victim of arson, I attended the Prodigal African Methodist Episcopal Church on Sundays.  It was a small rural church made up of several extended families that had lived in the area for a long time.  So, it wasn’t all that different from the churches where I had grown up … at least in that way, but it was very different in other ways.

This was a very “Spiritual” church, and by that I mean that the people in this congregation were very connected to the Holy Spirit.  They weren’t exactly Pentecostal in that I never heard people speaking in tongues and stories of that particular spiritual gift were not part of their history.  But, there was a whole lot of spontaneous clapping and many “Thank you Jesus”-es during worship.  And there was one older woman who sat up front who regularly “went out in the Spirit,” slumping back in the pew and sliding onto the floor where her daughter would kneel and fan her back into the present.

At first the whole thing scared me more than a little.  I would tense up, and as worship went on, I would have to fight the urge to get up and leave.  After a while, I got accustomed to it.  I even stopped dreading Sunday morning and started to look forward to going to worship there.  But, I was never completely at home … because I didn’t feel it.  And, … I worried that the rest of the congregation saw me as a bystander – a gawker who was there for the show more than for any real desire to worship.  It wasn’t until I read this poem by Thom Shuman called “Justus” last week that I realized what I was really feeling was … left out.

(Justus – Thom Shuman)

my fingers intertwined with the chain link fence,
  i watch the two teams play one another,
         casting me aside,
   as there was only one position left
         and two had shown up to play . . .
. . . so i'll go home, toss the ball with the kid  next door,
        whose mom works two jobs;

after all those years of practice (so many hours!),

      i was so hoping to get one of the leads,
         but the director chose someone else . . .
. . . so i'll take my place in the back row of the chorus,
   helping those on either side
      when they stumble;

i thought this would be the year

   when i would be chosen
      to be one of the leaders in the church,
   but when the ballots were counted
      one of the pastor's 'pets' had won . . .
. . . so i'll keep on
   handing out the bulletins
      and cleaning up the sanctuary,
   teaching the youth class
      for the 23rd year,
   showing up for all the work days;

i may have lost the toss of the dice,

   but i haven't lost my
            faith.

WE don’t do miracles of healing.  WE don’t prophesy or speak in tongues.  The Spirit has never moved me to clap or to speak out in praise during worship, and I certainly never came close to “going out” … at least as far as I know.

Don’t get me wrong, most of the time I am really o’kay with that.  … Most of the time, I’m relieved.  But once in a while … once in a while, I feel left out, and I wonder, “Why?”  Why am I not “blessed” by the Spirit like my brothers and sisters in South Carolina?  Am I not good enough?  Is my faith not strong enough?  What is it that set me … that sets us apart?

Brian Donst suggests that our problem may be that we spend too much effort trying to fill in the hole left by Jesus’ ascension.  He suggests that we sometimes fail to keep open Jesus' place – that we fill it with other things instead.[3]  …  That may be part of it, but if we do fill in that space too readily, I think it’s because we just don’t like waiting.

In our culture, we fill our schedules with things to do.  We can get most of the things we need or want at the cost of only a little time and effort.  We have just about everything at our fingertips. 

If it looks like we may have to wait a few minutes in the check-out line, we immediately look around to see if there’s another line that’s moving faster.  If we have to stop at an intersection for the minute or two it takes to get through an extra cycle, we get frustrated.  If it takes more than … say … 10 seconds for a webpage to load onto the computer, we start to think it might be worth it to get that dedicated high-speed connection.  Just watch what happens when I tell my children “just wait,” and you’ll get a pretty good indication of how we all feel when we are faced with even a small delay.  When we need to wait … (pause) … we really don’t like it. 

But waiting is exactly what Jesus told us to do.  His last instructions to his followers were “wait.”  So, we’re kind of stuck with it.  But, if we look to those first disciples as any kind of an example, we are not meant to “just wait.”  We should be preparing as we wait.  We should be getting our leadership in order.  We should be planning and building relationships and praying for a greater sense of understanding.  We should be worshipping and eating together and praising God for the gift of grace that came to us through Christ.

And … good news ….  We are doing that.  This congregation is great at doing that – especially the eating together part.  We may need to work on our communal prayer life a little, but we are good at the rest of those things too.  To paraphrase Shuman’s poem: 

“we may have lost the toss of the dice … this time,

                    but we haven't lost our faith.”

Let us live in the embrace of that faith,

            leaving space for the Spirit to come to us,
            praying for inspiration and understanding,
            praising and thanking God for all that we have been given already,
            living the good news of hope and salvation,
and waiting … but not “just waiting” … faithfully waiting for God’s guidance … in God’s time. 

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[1] Dr. Seuss, “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” (Random House, New York), 1990.

[2] Living by the Word, “Sunday, May 20.” The Christian Century: Thinking Critically. Living Faithfully. Vol. 129, No. 10.  20.

[3] Sent to Midrash list serve by Brian Donst, May 15-16^th, 2012.