Second Sunday after Pentecost
June 2, 2024

Sermon

Rocky Supinger
Associate Pastor

Psalm 37:1–11
Isaiah 40:27–31

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My wife and I were engaged twice. The first time, we called the wedding off about a month before the planned date.

We’d already ordered the napkins for the reception, monographed with the wedding date and everything.

Still, after six months of engagement and plane tickets already purchased by out-of-town family and friends, we put the wedding on ice.

The second time, we went through with it. It was nearly twenty-two years ago now and over three years after the first planned wedding date. We still had those monographed napkins, though, so on our wedding date of August 10, 2002, the tables at our reception were covered with napkins that said “July 14, 1999.”

We liked what those out-of-date napkins said about our story, the wait it had endured between two wedding dates. As you can imagine, that wait was a serious challenge.

Waiting is the work of faith, and it always has been. he words of the ancient psalm Gordon read for us charge us to “Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord.”

Waiting is holy work.

Have you waited for the Lord in your life? Are you waiting right now?

Have you had to wait for the way to be made clear, for some painful situation to reveal its purpose in your life? Are you waiting for it just to be over?

Are you waiting for children to do right, for parents to get well, for someone you love to see the error of their ways, for someone to accept unconditional love and grace.

Are you waiting for justice to roll down like water?

Are you waiting for healing?

Waiting is holy work, and we come here to do that work together, with all the holy women and men who have waited ahead of us, waited for us.

Over and over again in the story of the Bible, people are called upon to wait. Go back to the primal story of the Garden of Eden, and what is God commanding the first humans to do by not eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? Wait.

And the story of Abraham and Sarah, promised by God the blessing of a great nation of descendants, yet well advanced in years. And so they wait. And they wait. And they wait.

It’s a pattern that repeats itself time and again in the biblical story that faith and trust are equated with our willingness to wait.

Jesus, praying in the garden on the brink of being arrested, asks what of his disciples but to wait with him a little while.

And then when they encounter the risen Jesus, he commands them not to leave Jerusalem but to stay there and wait for the promised Holy Spirit.

So much of the work of faith is waiting. For the prophet, waiting is what the moment demands; it is the only way forward. Those who wait for the Lord, he says, will renew their strength.

For the first hearers of the Isaiah’s words, it seems impossible that their strength can be renewed, that they can walk — much less run — away from the life they have come to know, the life of exile.

See, their situation was better suited to realism than it was to prophetic enthusiasm, less rising-up-with-wings-like-eagles, more it-is-what-it-is.

The words of the prophet we are attending to today are for us, yet they are for us by way of being for this particular group of Israelites at this particular moment in their history, decades removed from the defining catastrophe of the destruction of their capital city, Jerusalem, and their temple within it. Think around 597 BCE.

In addition to the destruction of the temple and the city, many of them were forcibly taken to Babylon to live as exiles. For a few generations of Israelites, exile was the only existence they’ve known.

And for many of them, the prophet’s charge to “wait for the Lord” rings hollow, because their experience has led them to doubt that God is taking any notice of them and their plight at all, and they have moved on from any hope that their future can be different from their present.

They say, “My way is hidden from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God.” Scholars think these lines from Isaiah are actually a communal lament recited in worship by the exiles.

This lament is connected to others stemming from this same experience. There’s a whole book of the Bible called Lamentations that comes out of this experience and that is filled with expressions like this, like “God has blocked my ways with hewn stones; God has made my paths crooked.”

The only walk that matters to the exile is the walk back home. But what even is home anymore when exile is all you’ve ever known? When you were raised in exile, how can you even imagine renewal?

Have you ever even seen an eagle, much less one like in the prophet’s vision, with its wings completely regrown like a new coat of feathers? Have the people Isaiah is addressing ever known what it is to run — free, with the wind in their face and their heart racing with joy and not fear? Have they ever walked without being compelled to do so by forces they can’t control?

“No,” it must have been easier to say in answer to Isaiah’s rhapsodizing about what shall be for those who wait for the Lord, “that way is blocked. Our way is hidden and our right disregarded. We are on our own. It is what it is.”

Is it though? That’s the prophet’s question. It strikes me that the first word of response Isaiah has for the notion that the way is blocked is “Why?”

“Why do you say our way is hidden from the Lord?” Why do you say that?

He will get to mounting up on wings like eagles and running and walking, but he starts with a single word of interrogation for his fellow exiles: why?

A prophet is always asking why. “Why” is one of the most powerful words in Jesus’ teaching arsenal, so maybe he learned it from his prophetic predecessor.

Jesus and his disciples are in a boat on the lake at night and it begins to storm. Jesus sleeps right through it, but they wake him up in a panic: “Do you not care that we are perishing?!” He wakes up, calms the storm, then asks his friends, “Why are you afraid?”

Jesus enters the house of a man whose daughter has died. We know he’s there to heal her, but first he is going to ask the gathered mourners, “Why do you make a commotion and weep?”

A man asks Jesus, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” and the first thing Jesus says in answer is “Why do you call me good?”

“Why” rattles the cage of untested faith and piety. It forces us to interrogate our assumptions about what’s actually going on and what our role is in it all.

A community organizer I read about uses “Why?” as a whole educational method. She starts with the statement “Rosa Parks’ feet hurt,” and then asks her class, “Why did Rosa Parks’ feet hurt?” Author David White describes what happens next:

“The group might respond, ‘Because she had to give up her seat on the bus in Alabama in 1955.’

“The facilitator might push, ‘But why did she have to give up her seat?’

“The group might respond, ‘Because of the racist policies of the City of Montgomery that required her to sit at the back of the bus.’

“The facilitator might counter, ‘But why were there racist policies?’

“The group might say, ‘Because the folks in power were white, and they had a history of seeing Black people as inferior.’

“The facilitator might push behind this: ‘But why did they have a history of seeing Black people as inferior?’”

But why? You can imagine how far this can go. But it starts with “Why?”

Maybe faith is founded on “Why?”

I was having lunch with some parents of church youth years ago, and I was explaining to them how important I thought it was to equip young people to ask “why?” about faith and church and God.

They nodded along politely as I declared, “I think it’s good to ask questions.” And then one of them added, enthusiastically, “Yes! And it’s also good to have answers.”

That parent was right, of course. Faith has questions and answers.

So much of what we are experiencing today feels like nothing that’s come before. It’s unsettling. I felt unsettled hearing the verdict in the former President’s criminal trial read out on Friday afternoon, because this is a thing that hasn’t happened here before.

I didn’t feel jubilation or outrage. I felt deeply uncomfortable, like we are in unchartered territory now and I don’t know what might happen. There are so many questions, and I don’t feel like I have any answers.

To be sure, there is a buffet of answers that I can gorge myself on to deal with that discomfort. There are podcasts and news commentary shows and Twitter threads and messaging boards to tell me what might happen and how I should feel about it.

It’s tempting to put my headphones on and zone out to all of that analysis and commentary, to spend half the night scrolling for the takes that make me feel what I want to feel about it.

And that is why I am here, with you, attending to the ancient words of scripture, the Word, who was and is and is to be. The word that probes our outrage or our jubilation to ask, again, “Have you not known? Have you not heard?”

The word that cuts through cable news commentary to declare to us, again, what people of faith have known from the beginning: “The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.”

We faint and grow weary living in times when so much seems so uncertain, law and political leadership, sure, but also church and work, housing, food, friendship, school. We faint and grow weary from it, but — have you not known? — God does not. God gives power to the faint and strengthens the powerless.

Our understanding is limited by so many things. There is misinformation and disinformation, things taken out of context, not to mention our short attention spans and confirmation bias; we have more explanation available to us now than ever before, yet it seems we understand so much less than we should.

But — have you not heard? — God’s understanding is unsearchable.

These are the prophet’s words for us and for people of faith in all times, but they are also not his words. They are the Word, the bedrock word of trust in God, who is everlasting, who created the ends of the earth before all of this, who is still creating new life and possibility in the midst of it, and who will not be done creating long, long after it has had its way with us.

Speaking to the community of faith at the mercy of historical and political forces much, much bigger and stronger than them, the prophet recites again the truth that formed them as people of faith: God. Everlasting Creator, power to the powerless, unsearchable understanding— God.

Who was, who is, and who is to be. Amen.

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Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church