November 28, 2010 | 8:00 a.m.

The Weight of Waiting

Matthew J. Helms
Pastoral Resident, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 122
Isaiah 2:1–5
Matthew 24:36–44

Waiting is not a very popular attitude. . . . In fact, most people consider waiting a waste of time. Perhaps this is because the culture in which we live is basically saying, “Get going! Do something!” For many people, waiting is an awful desert between where they are and where they want to go.

Henri Nouwen
Watch for the Light

In preparing for my sermon this week, I couldn’t help but remember a story that a former pastor used to tell:

A young pastor was getting ready to preach his first sermon from the pulpit, and he asked the head pastor for some advice. The head pastor gave it some thought and then responded, “Just listen for the voice of the Spirit speaking to you from the text, and then preach what the Spirit is telling you.” The young pastor thought this was a great idea, so on Monday he read the Bible passage once and decided to wait for the Spirit, but he heard nothing. Wednesday came around, and he still hadn’t heard anything, so he decided to read the passage and wait for the Spirit once more. Unfortunately, he still didn’t hear the Spirit speaking to him, so he decided to wait until Saturday night to write anything. Saturday night, the same thing—the young pastor read the passage and waited for the Spirit, but the night went on and he had not heard anything. Confident that the Spirit would come, he just went to bed expecting to hear from the Spirit in the morning. On his drive to church that morning, he kept waiting and expecting to hear, but still nothing. Finally, as he waited to go up to the pulpit, he quickly prayed to God, “I’d love some help from you right now.” And then, finally, the Spirit’s voice came to him just as he was about to walk up to the pulpit: “I was trying to help you all week, but you never did anything!”

Now before you all walk out of the pews, this is not a veiled story about my preparation this week. Instead, this story reminded me of the negative view we hold in this culture on waiting. As the Henri Nouwen quote on the front of your bulletin says, most people consider waiting a waste of time, and it is an “awful desert between where they are and where they want to go.” I was struck this week looking around at how much time we all spend waiting. Many of us spend time waiting in commutes, whether it be for a bus, train, or just plain stuck in traffic. We wait in line at the grocery store, busy airports, and even freezing outside stores on Black Friday. We wait to get seated at restaurants and then wait for food to be served. Speaking on the North Side of Chicago, I probably don’t need to tell Cubs fans anything about the pain of waiting, because they have more than 100 years of practice. Let’s face it—waiting is hard.

This idea of waiting is even more real to us in this time caught between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Today marks the first Sunday of Advent on our church calendar, a season that curiously stresses both silent reflection and active preparation. We have already seen the fruits of that preparation up and down Michigan and State streets, as store windows are stocked with red and green, wreaths and holly. It is indeed beginning to look a lot like Christmas here in Chicago. And yet I can’t help but wonder if our impatience to have the Christmas season arrive has more to do with us being uncomfortable being stuck in that “awful desert,” as Nouwen called it. In many ways, we want to accelerate the calendar and we figure out how to fill that unknown void in our lives with a system of holiday rituals. There is nothing wrong with these rituals—indeed I look forward to watching A Christmas Story in front of a roaring fire while eating s’mores almost as much as Christmas itself—but I think inside all of us there is still that impatient, sleepless kid on Christmas Eve asking, ‘Is it Christmas yet?’

Why are we so uncomfortable with waiting? It may be that in a culture that values busyness and motion, waiting is unproductive. This certainly could be. However, I think an even bigger reason is that waiting gives us no control. Like the young pastor from the story, we find ourselves completely dependent on someone or something else, the complete opposite of the old adage that “God helps those who help themselves.” We have no control over when the bus or train will come, or when traffic will magically clear up. We have no control over how fast the people ahead of us in line move. We have no control over the team that Jim Hendry puts together for the Cubs. It is a hard realization that no matter how hard we try to prove to ourselves otherwise, many things in this life are completely out of our control.

Our scripture lessons today come from communities that were facing a similar loss of control in a time of waiting and a period of the unknown. Isaiah 2 comes out of a time when the Assyrian Empire was running rampant through the ancient Near East. The nation of Israel had split into the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah a few hundred years prior, and Isaiah, writing from the Southern Kingdom, had witnessed the Northern Kingdom being taken over by the Assyrians in 722 B.C.E. Fears were looming large around Jerusalem that the Southern Kingdom would meet the same fate, as the growing influence of the Assyrians continued to stretch further and further across the ancient Near East. These fears can be seen even on the opening pages of Isaiah in chapter 1, when Isaiah proclaims the wickedness of the Southern Kingdom and threatens that judgment will soon come upon them. Unfortunately for the small country of Judah, they could do little more than wait; their fate was completely in the hands of the Assyrians and out of their control entirely.

We see a similar context in our New Testament passage from Matthew’s twenty-fourth chapter. In the twenty-fourth chapter, Jesus is describing the destruction of the temple of Jerusalem and the chaos that will ensue in the city. Matthew, modern scholarship agrees, was written in the wake of the temple’s destruction in 70 C.E. by the Romans, a powerful military empire unlike any the world had ever seen. Israel’s fate was completely out of its control and in the hands of the Romans, and when unrest broke out in Jerusalem over this, the city was leveled. We can feel the uncertainty of the age in Jesus’ words to the disciples as he warns them to be watchful in waiting for his return.

The parallels to our own age, I think, are striking. The optimism that our country closed the twentieth century with has given way to economic crashes in the tech bubble in 2000 and our most recent collapse in 2008. Our sense of safety and security has been diminished by the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the continued uncovering of bomb threats across the globe. We are left waiting; and just like the ancient Israelites, we wait without any sense of control. Unlike the earlier examples of waiting for a bus or waiting for Christmas, there is no clearly identifiable end goal in our waiting on the economy or terrorism. What we wait on in our time, and what Isaiah and Matthew were waiting on in theirs, is an unknown future.

I also can’t help but note that this church is facing an unknown future right now as well. Preparatory works are about to begin on our new building, a project appropriately named Project Second Century, as our church looks forward into our future here on Michigan Avenue. There is a clear sense of excitement around the building, as there should be, but there is also a sense that we are forging into the unknown. We have never undergone a building project of this scope, and so there have understandably been hesitations and fears. Will we be able to raise the funds to finance this building? Can this building enhance the ministry and mission of this church? We are feeling, I suppose, the weight of waiting.

Adding to this weight are fears over the retirement of John Buchanan after twenty-five years of wonderful ministry here at Fourth Church. John is obviously a gifted and phenomenal leader, teacher, and preacher, and it is difficult for us to imagine what is next for our church as a new pastor will be called in a few years. For those of us not on the search committee, we have little control over whom our next senior pastor will be and the vision that they bring to Fourth Church. We wait on an unknown future for this church, much like the desert between Thanksgiving and Christmas, much like this season of Advent.

But although Advent is a season of waiting, we are also reminded by our scripture passages today that Advent is also a season of preparation and a season of hope. In our passage from Matthew, the disciples and early Christians received a promise, a promise that no matter how dire the world looked around them, whether by economy or by attack, Christ would return. Matthew emphasizes preparation for this unknown future, but we should not think of this preparation as being the same as our normal holiday preparations. Instead, Matthew reminds us in strong language from the wider context of the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth chapters that we are called to prepare our hearts. We are to maintain a light of hopefulness in a world that has seemingly lost all hope. We are called to help our brothers and sisters in a world that has told us that it is every person for themselves. We are not called to worry about the future but to live fully in the present, trusting in the promise and love of God to sustain us and to sustain the whole church in times of uncertainty.

We see this message spoken even more clearly in our passage from the second chapter of Isaiah. Although Israel and Judah’s future had never looked worse than it did during Isaiah’s time, Isaiah speaks with bold words in this time of uncertainty: “In the days to come, the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it and many peoples will say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord.’” In a time of war and fighting, Isaiah boldly proclaims that the nations “shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” Stuck in an awful desert of waiting for peace in the midst of so much warfare, Isaiah was nonetheless filled with hope. Stuck in an awful desert of waiting for political and economic stability, Isaiah nonetheless proclaimed the absolute stability of God. It was and still is a bold vision for the church and for the world.

If Fourth Church is going to be a Light in the City as we move into our second century, we would do well to share Isaiah’s bold vision. Our city, nation, and world are stuck in a malaise of uncertainty and fear. We wait for economic recovery and a world without terrorism and war. Fourth Church, too, is in a period of uncertainty and waiting with funding for our building and John Buchanan’s retirement. But in the midst of all of our uncertainties and troubles, we know that we do not wait alone. We wait with each other, boldly hoping and trusting in God’s stable hand over our future.

Henri Nouwen, in his devotion “Waiting for God,” stated that “the whole meaning of the Christian community lies in offering a space in which we wait for that which we have already seen.” “In this way,” he says, “we can live with courage, trusting that there is spiritual power in us that allows us to live in this world without being seduced constantly by despair, lostness, and darkness” (p. 36). The young pastor from the opening story may have trusted that God would speak, but he made a mistake in that he waited to hear God’s word alone. We are mistaken if we think that the outcome of our building project rests on the donations of a few wealthy members or that the life and mission of this church will cease once John Buchanan retires. We enter into our second century more aware than ever about how important each of us are to this church and how we are all called to participate in building this place during this season of Advent in our world and during this season of advent in our church. We are waiting in hope for Christmas, just as we wait in hope for our world and for our church. It is a difficult thing to be in a period of waiting, but we do not wait alone in this season of Advent. We wait together in trust and in hope, waiting not only for the baby in the lowly manager, but waiting on the vision of Matthew and Isaiah that will lead us into our second century. Amen.