Hurry Up and Wait

sermon by Torin Eikler
Acts 1:1-14     Ephesians 1:15-23

As I spent time this past week dwelling with the scriptures for today, I found one image coming to mind again and again – the image of a roasted chicken sitting on our dinner table two weeks ago. 

I realize that that sounds very strange given that our texts have absolutely nothing to do with food and certainly do not mention roasted chicken, but bear with me and you’ll see the connection eventually.

The chicken was one that I made from a recipe titled “Hurry up and wait chicken” in the New Joy of Cooking cookbook.  For a while I wondered why they called it that, but then I noticed a little note introducing the dish.  The name came about because the chicken is roasted at 400 degrees (which is an unusually high temperature for cooking poultry), and so the oven time was cut down to about an hour.  When the cooking is finished, the chicken gets propped up to stand on its head for 15 minutes before it is served.  Thus, hurry up with the cooking … and wait to eat.

 

Hurry up and wait … that seems to be big part of our culture here in the United States.  I see it every day.  I probably do it every day.

I see it when I pick Sebastian up at Suncrest and watch Pre-schoolers rush out the door with backpacks and jackets not quite on in order to make it to the bus line even though the busses won’t be gathering them up for 15 minutes.

I see it at the grocery store as people race to the checkout lines and stand, impatiently, for five … even ten minutes before they have their turn.

I see it in the news as politicians rush into election season whole years in advance and soldiers take up positions facing battles that may never take place in conflicts we pray will never boil over.

I see it written on the lives of eleven apostles and dozens of other believers faced with the departure of their teacher, their friend, their Messiah.

And there’s the connection I promised you.  How are a family sitting comfortably at the table across the street and a motley crew of terrified, enthusiastic Jews gathered on a hill-top thousands of years away alike?  They are both hurrying to wait.

 

I imagine those forty days after Jesus’ resurrection were an exciting time.  Three years of preparation and confusion finally understood in the light of an open tomb.  Three nights of fear and grief washed away by joy of new life.  A mountain of doubt and despair moved by faith born of a promise fulfilled.  Forty days sitting at the feet of the very Son of God, feasting on the sight of him, drinking in the clear comfort of his words, and racing toward a bright future of a world remade by the hands of love.

And then, the final instructions:  Go to Jerusalem and wait. 

Wait for what?  for how long?  That is not for you to know.  You must simply go and wait… wait for the Spirit to come and lead you on.

“But”… “but”…, but before any more questions stumble their way through jumbled lips, shocked mouths and speechless eyes dropped open as Jesus left, rising into the air and disappearing for good.  And then angels standing among them, calling them back from the clouds, reminding them – stirring them – get to Jerusalem.  Hurry up … and wait.

 

But the waiting for them was different.  Our waiting is usually like Dr. Seuss describes it.  “It is a most useless place” - a where we simply sit around or stand, our feet tapping out the rhythm of our detour through boredom and monotony.  We lean against trees or cars or walls.  We sit in chairs.  We lie on our beds or our couches.  Or we stand in lines.  But wherever we find ourselves, our eyes glaze over and our minds retreat into a closeted space as life passes us by while we wait for things to change around us.

The disciples didn’t wait like that.  Their waiting was better.  Where ours is stagnant, theirs was active.  Where ours is vacant and lifeless, theirs was pregnant with lively expectation.  Where ours sets us apart, alone with our thoughts and frustration, theirs joined them to one another and to God.

I say “ours,” but I’m really only talking about mine.  I don’t know about yours…. 

Do you retreat from waiting, using numbers and stories to distract your mind from the anxiety and separating yourself from others at the same time? 

Do you welcome the tension, feeding off of it even as it feeds off itself and using the energy to get things done? 

Does the pressure build in you, resisting all your efforts to hold it down until it spills out onto others who are close to you?

Or is it different than that?  I expect that it’s a bit different for each of us, … but I know that it was entirely different for the disciples waiting in Jerusalem in at least one very big way.  Their waiting was active and engaged.  They must have felt at least some of our sense that this was just time to be passed, but they also felt that it was time to be embraced … embraced and even cherished.  And so they lived into the marching moments of those dangling days.

They gathered together each day to encourage each other and to retell the stories of Jesus’ life … to practice the intricacies of his teachings.  They prayed and studied and waited and prepared.  They waited and prepared so that they would be open and ready to receive the power and the direction of the Spirit whenever it would come.  They waited and in their waiting they forged deeper relationships with each other and strengthened the ties between themselves and the absence that was their Lord.  They waited with anticipation on their breath, expecting any moment to hear their names gently drop into the silence of their hearts … preparing to follow the call that would come with the name.

 

I can’t know how we each are in our own lives, but the life of this congregation often seems to revolve around worries.  Not during worship.  Not during fellowship times.  Those times revolve around worship and relationships (though the anxiety is still there in the background).  But when we leave those sacred moments behind, we worry.

We worry together about budget and expenses.  We worry about the basement leaking.  We worry about the number of people we see each week.  We worry about the nursery and about finding Sunday School teachers.  We worry about any number of things, and they are all important things to take care of, but they are not the soul of our life together … or they shouldn’t be.

I wonder if all those anxieties have so much life among us because we give it to them.  I wonder if that is how we as a congregation deal with waiting.  I wonder if they are our distraction or our motivation or our possessors.  …  I wonder if we could wait better … if we could transform our waiting … if we could be more like those disciples gathered in Jerusalem.

 

What would that look like?  Would we gather daily for prayer and study … probably not.  What would it feel like?  Would we find anticipation on our breath and excitement strangling our anxiety … who knows. 

How would it change us if we embraced the time we have between now and who-knows-when?

 

I don’t know.

I don’t know, but I think we would be more prepared.  I think we would feel more fulfilled.  I think it could draw us together.  It could deepen our relationships with one another.  It could strengthen the faith the faith that ties us to the One we follow and serve and worship.  I think it would sharpen our ears and our appetite so that we are more attuned to the whisper of life that breaths among us.  I’m sure that it would silence some of the noise that distracts us so that we are ready to hear when that breath because a soft voice … ready to hear and to respond when it finally calls our name.

 

One interesting thing about that Hurry Up and Wait chicken ….  It was the juiciest chicken that I have ever cooked.  It wasn’t the shorter cooking time that did it.  It wasn’t the higher temperature sealing the outside of the bird to hold in juices either.  There was a lot of juice that cooked out.  It wasn’t even the butter massage I gave it before it went in the oven.  It was the waiting.  It was those fifteen minutes of waiting as the smell filled the room and called my family to the table.  It was as the chicken rested in the pan, propped up on the bowl that I had carefully arranged and quickly covered with the foil that I had set out in advance.  It was those things that allowed the juices still in the chicken to work its way back down through the meat that made that meal so delicious and enjoyable.

Sometimes … maybe most of the time, waiting is a tedious thing.  But there are times when it can be a gift.  There are times when it and it alone brings richness and savor back to us when we have been toughened and dried up by all our hurrying and worrying.  There are times when the waiting and the silence are exactly what we need to renew our relationships, replenish the energy of our spirits, and restore the strength of our relationships with the Divine One who bring us life. 

Perhaps if we spent less time and energy struggling to hurry up and get there, we could spend more time and energy just … waiting….