Waiting
Psalm 130:5-7
A Sermon by the Rev. Andrea Davidson

We all find ourselves waiting, at some point in our lives.  We wait for food at restaurants.  We wait for lights to turn green.  We wait for the sun to lavishly decorate the horizon as it sets in the evening, radiating brilliantly burnt orange, amber and gold. We all wait!
 
A story is told of a “homeless man, down on his luck, who went into a church that was known for its rather ‘uppity’ social reputation. Spotting the man’s dirty clothes, the ushers stopped him outside the church door and asked if he needed help.
 
“I was praying,” said the homeless man, “and God told me to come to this church.” “Well,” said the ushers. “Perhaps you should go back and pray some more. You may get a different answer.”
 
The next Sunday the man was there again, and again the ushers stopped him at the door.  “Well, did you get a different answer?” they asked him. “Yes, I did,” said the man. “I told God that you don’t want me here, but God said, ‘Keep trying, son. I’ve been trying to get into that church for years and I haven’t made it either.”  Apparently, even God has to wait sometimes.
 
Waiting is an essential part of our existence.  When I was a small child, I couldn’t wait to be a teenager.  When I was a teenager, I couldn’t wait to drive.  When I learned to drive, I couldn’t wait to go away to college.  When I went away to college I couldn’t wait to turn 21.  When I turned 21 I couldn’t wait to graduate, make some money and be all grown up.  And now… well, lets just say, I’m not in a rush to get older.  At every stage within our lives, there is some new form of waiting we take on.  
 
The act of waiting is inherent in our relationship with God and with one another.  We see, but only catch glimpses.  We hear, but don’t always understand. We know, but not completely.  We seek, like the psalmist this morning, but somehow can’t seem to grab a hold of and grasp the Eternal.  Have you ever found yourself crying out to God like the writer of this Psalm?  Out of the depths, crying in complete abandon?  Reminding Eternity that you are here NOW in need of some help at THIS moment.  
 
Even as people of faith, people who rest in God’s love for us; we can still find ourselves yearning for, pursuing, seeking God.   You see, contrary to what some would like us believe, the Eternal is not a thing that we grasp or control, like Santa Claus or an ATM. Paul Tillich describes God as “infinitely hidden, free and incalculable.”  We can’t make God do what we want, where we want it, when we want it, and how we want it!  As much as we’d like, God doesn’t say “have it your way” like burger king.  Even in our most intimate relationships, there’s an element of not knowing and waiting.   And so, it is in our encounter with the great Mystery, we too must wait.  
 
          But waiting is not easy.  It can actually be an enormous challenge.  You know the saying, “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”   If we could, many of us would just get the whole journey over with, to avoid those points in between of not knowing, and waiting.    Last weekend Epworth’s Youth Group went to Great America’s amusement park.  Now I admitted to them at the start that I‘m not a roller coaster person.  I figured this out at a very young age.  But our fearless youth inspired me to face my fears and go on a few “moderately” exciting rides.  As I stood in line, watching each roller coaster slowly go up the steep incline and then quickly plunge to an exciting end, I grew more and more frightened. One of the young people wisely and profoundly explained to me that the scariest part of the ride is the wait.  The most frightening part of the entire roller coaster ride is waiting.  Waiting… the anticipation… the dread of the possibilities… the fear of the worst.  Rather than becoming overwhelmed with the negative possibilities, the “what ifs”, and continuing to ask “are we there yet?” as we often do on long journeys, the psalmist shows us a better way, by focusing watching, waiting on God.  The psalm writer models for us, vulnerability, transparency, passionately calling for God’s attention, and declaring that hope can be found in the Lord. The word waiting, in English might indicate passivity or an annoying endurance of time. However, the Hebrew qawa has the sense of eagerly awaiting, expecting, looking for, longing for, hoping for.
 
      Biblical scholar and renowned preacher Renita Weems, speaks of the difficulty of waiting on God in her book “Listening for God: A Minister’s Journey through silence and doubt.”  In it she shares very honestly her struggle to hear from God and how she has learned to perceive God in her life in new, amusing, laughable, glorious ways. She says,
 
“I surely learned something about how God’s presence presents itself to me.  Just when I think I’ve stopped believing in God, and can’t figure out why I don’t have the courage to…walk away, something in me happens (a chance encounter, an overheard conversation, an old memory resurfaces) to bring new insight… It is precisely moments like these that leave me tripping up into my purpose, staggering into some insight I so desperately need, and backing up into God.  On those rare and unforeseeable occasions” she finds herself speechless, even embarrassed, and wanting to take off her shoes, as if to stand on holy ground. (47-49)
 
Backing up into God and finding holy ground - what beautiful images!  Tillich describes it as being grasped by the Eternal, the one we continually seek to grasp.          
 
          As we watch and eagerly wait, as we hope against hope, we’re able to see, to perceive the new ways that God is breaking in, as a blade of grass between the cracks in the concrete, breaking into our lives… grasping us, embracing us, transforming us.  This spiritual practice of waiting actively does not entail watching reruns of grey’s anatomy while fungus grows in the toilet bowls… nor is it staying home on election day because nothing’s gonna change anyway…   You know I really like John Mayer’s song “Waiting on the World to Change.”  In it he says:
 

Now we see everything that's going wrong,
 With the world and those who lead it,
We just feel like we don't have the means, To rise above and beat it
So we keep waiting, waiting on the world to change.
 

This song is a lament a younger generation, discouraged that our social and political systems seem too difficult to transform, but it stops there. Just waiting for the world to change.  I do not believe that this is the kind of waiting that the psalmist speaks of.  Indeed we wait for God to redeem this world, to save it, but God uses us in the process.   To wait on God does not entail divesting one’s self from the concerns and challenges of life, counting on God or others to pick up the slack.  The anticipation and hope that is expressed in these writing engage the soul, our whole beings.
 
We are called to enter actively in the thick of life, with eyes, ears, hands and hearts wide open.  We’re called live as fully as possible, inwardly and outwardly.  Henri Nouwen describes this discipline as one that goes beyond our impulse to flee or fight.  In waiting actively, we are invited to stick  with it, to live through it, to listen carefully and be fully present.  Far from passive acceptance, the act of watching and waiting is demanding. It’s assertive.  It’s complex.  It calls for looking at the bigger picture and what is at stake in the long run.  It invites us to consider what actions will help us participate in the waiting.
 
          We can become partners with the waiting.  It is possible to involve ourselves in active waiting so that doors are opened, opportunities are created, and our minds, bodies, the depths of our souls are stretched.  It is in this engaged waiting that we learn that each small step is part of a larger process – a journey we embark upon with determination and hope.

 
          On this day, 64 years ago, the US bombed Nagasaki with an atomic bomb killing over 74,000 persons and many more from radiation.  Some of us fold cranes (as displayed so beautifully here today) and pray, some of us dance (as Susan has so beautifully done this morning), some of us protest, some get arrested, some of us write letters, while together we wait for the day when swords will be turned into plowshares and we study war no more!  Together we labor, together we watch and wait for nuclear disarmament, for a better world, for peace, for the day when God’s will will truly be done on earth as it is in heaven.  But, we actively wait.  Waiting is not a passive activity.   

For what do you pray?  For what do you wait? For what do you cry out to God for?  We can chose to be overwhelmed with the impossibilities and discouraged by God’s silence, or we can chose to partner, actively waiting, engaging our whole selves in the process, opening doors, creating opportunities… partnering with God in the waiting, trusting that God will meet us there.