A Fourth Church Sermon by Alice M. Trowbridge

July 20, 2008 | 6:30 p.m. Vespers

To Labor and to Wait

Alice M. Trowbridge
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 139:1–12, 23–24
Genesis 28:10–17
Romans 8:12–25

“But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”

Romans 8:25 (NRSV)

Waiting for the inbreaking of the kingdom is like no other kind of waiting. It is not the routine, humdrum marking of time in our daily lives. . . . It is waiting in hope for something that is not seen, yet yearning for it with a longing that is beyond words. This yearning for the coming of the kingdom is yearning for God.

Margaret Guenther

Eternal God, source of all light and love,
by your word you give light to the soul.
Help us to hear your word that we may truly understand,
that understanding, we may believe,
and believing, we may follow in your everlasting way,
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Today’s lectionary texts offer what seems like two distinct views. Paul’s text tells us of the groaning of creation in our present suffering and at the same time calls us heirs to the promise and children of God. It leaves us with a charge to trust in a good that is yet to be, a future that is, as yet, unknown.

In the same duality we meet Jacob again this week, a fugitive, one commentary called him, on the run from his brother from whom he stole the family blessing. And yet in his sleep, there is an encounter with God, who meets this loner in his tracks and reiterates the promises of that future fulfillment and restores his hope. Surely God is in this place, Jacob says.

Likewise in our morning psalm there is the dichotomy of the human impulse to launch out on our own tracks, to go it alone, only to be met, at every turn, by a God whose love for us meets us at every extremity we might find ourselves in.

Today we are asked to ponder this duality and to live into a future with hope. We are asked to try to trust that God holds that out to us, invites us to believe this. And yet our instinct is often to go it alone, to rely only on ourselves to get us where we think we need to be to reach the fulfillment we have in mind for ourselves.

There’s a poem called “A Psalm of Life” by Henry Longfellow. In it he calls this a fugitive existence, and he talks about the bivouac of life. A bivouac, a temporary shelter, to protect us from the elements. Just as it is intuitive in us to go it alone, it is also intuitive in us to seek protection. We long for the hope and the promise that we are not alone in the bivouac of life.

And the poet’s solution is to be up and doing, still achieving, still pursuing, learning to labor and to wait. Even amid the rocks of life, as T. S. Eliot writes, the hope is to be still, to cultivate the stillness that is the place where our yearning and God’s grace can meet. Margaret Guenther calls it the inbreaking of the kingdom.

Guenther is an Episcopal priest and professor emerita at General Theological Seminary in New York City, and in her writing on these passages this week in the Christian Century, she relates the groaning creation to the groaning we know in our own times: those global concerns—poverty, hunger, homelessness, and disease; the economy, the price of fuel, the housing market; the wars. We are groaning, and we are all affected. We are living in a not-yet time, Guenther says. On the one hand we are children of God, heirs of the promise, as Paul writes and as God affirms for Jacob in the dream at Bethel. But on the other hand, we are in a time of anxiety, of groaning pain, and in our attempt to handle it on our own, we realize our own weaknesses. We too are yearning.

Sarah Coakley is a priest in the Anglican church and teaches at Cambridge University. In an article in the Christian Century, she advocates for prayer. Quoting from a poem by R. S. Thomas, she says that God is indeed at work in us, that God has never promised us tomorrow but God has promised us eternity, and so to live in this not-yet time calls for the practice of prayer and patience. Coakly says, “Patiently with invisible structures, God builds, and patiently, we must pray.”

I don’t know any better way to exist in a not-yet time, to contend with the groaning of creation, and to live into hope, than to pray.

One of the ministries which we hold dear in this church is Morning Prayer. Every weekday morning in Stone Chapel prayers are held—all are welcome, by the way—and there we pray for one another, one by one. There is a prayer list, a list of those for whom we have particular concern, and there is the mission yearbook from our denomination, with lectionary texts and a mission entry about the connected church around the world, and sometimes there is hymn singing, but always there is a communion in this place, a communion with all who have gone before us, who have come through these doors and sought the word of God in the place, who have experienced the inspiration of the Holy Spirit in this place. We who gather in prayer also tap into that communion.

We also commune with those who are not physically able to come to church—those who are ill, waiting for medicine to work, for joints to heal, for tests to come back, and, in some cases, there are those who are in the final stages of life. For all these there is communion in prayer.

The ministry of the Deacons in this church offers prayer every single Sunday at noon in Stone Chapel—prayers of intercession for others, of praise and thanksgiving, for anyone who would like to enter into this communion and carve out in daily life a place where we can be attentive to God’s will for the now and also to cultivate a place where we can hope for a future that we cannot see, waiting for it, together and alone, with patience.

The Trappist monk Thomas Merton says that our faith is like a light that shows us that God’s will is to be found in our everyday life. The hard part is seeing where we are to go, is taking steps toward the future, is hoping and trusting that we are on a path toward well-being. He writes, “We are like pilots of fogbound steamers, peering into the brooding seas in front of us, listening for the sounds of other ships, and we can only reach our harbor if we keep alert. The spiritual life is, then, first of all a matter of keeping awake” (Thoughts in Solitude, p. 39).

God’s presence is not only perceived through attentiveness to the mystical and spiritual; God’s presence is active and even intrusive, like Jacob’s dream, like the psalmist’s introspective testimony. God isn’t afraid to disturb the slumbering spirit, to awaken us to new plans and hopes for the future.

One of the most powerful interventions in human history happened about 2,000 years ago, when God sent his only son into the world to engage in a specific enterprise, and that was to love and serve humanity and to show us how to live. Early in his ministry, Jesus went throughout Galilee teaching in synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God. And news began to spread throughout all of Syria, and great crowds followed him from Galilee, Jerusalem, Judea, and from beyond the Jordan, up to a mountaintop, where Jesus sat down and taught his friends about how to really live, how to exist in this not-yet time, and how to hope for a future that is promised but not seen.

And this sanctuary where we are gathered today, this place was built to remember and retell God’s stories and to provide a place where we can come and find our place in them and know that we are indeed, as Paul says, heirs of the kingdom, God’s very own.

It is a place where through Word and Sacrament we are sustained in the life of faith, and it is a place where, through prayer uniting generations past, present, and future, we can approach God and realize that just as we yearn for the kingdom of heaven and just as we labor and wait for it with our lives, we also exist in it even now, for this time and for all time, through the gospel Jesus proclaimed on that hillside so long ago, where Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount. Through the Beatitudes, the blessings, he explained to his friends about being humble and pure in heart, about being merciful and forgiving, being peacemakers. Jesus was telling us about how to handle the yearning; he was telling us how to live. For he said those who live this way—theirs is the promise of the kingdom of heaven.

And so today we come to the table again, and in preparation for communion we turn to our lectionary text today. Just as the poet wrote about a psalm of life, we turn to our psalm for the day, Psalm 139, to find an answer to the yearning of this not-yet time. This is really a contemplative psalm about the ever-presence of God’s love. It is, in and of itself, an act of engagement in the yearning. It is a communion of sorts. It is a psalm that is a prayer, really, without petitions. A prayer that thinks profoundly on the mystery and the miracle of being the subject of God’s attention and love, as one commentary puts it (Texts for Preaching), where we can ponder the dualities of our groaning existence, as Paul puts it, and our future of hope.

We labor, we wait.

And in mist and through the fog, the light of our faith points us to seek God’s will, even amid the rocks, and to be still, so as not to miss the inbreaking of the kingdom.

And we will say with Jacob, surely the Lord is in this place.

The inbreaking of the kingdom.

Even now.

Amen.