Holy Waiting - Or What to do with our Tree

 This text is from a teaching delivered on Sunday, December 1 at the First Congregational Church, Rochester, Wisconsin. 

This is the first Sunday of Advent, a church season characterized by waiting, and waiting is what I’m going to talk about today – what it is, what makes it holy, and what in particular holy waiting might look like to us specifically at this church. Advent reminds us that sometimes, God intends us to wait. In many churches, no Christmas carols are sung until Christmas Eve, but lots of churches don’t wait. For them, Christmas carols begin early in December and there’s a reason for that. We don’t like to wait. We just don’t. We’re Americans, after all, and we like to get things done. Waiting just doesn’t seem very productive. And we’re impatient, too. Waiting takes a long time—too long for most of us.

But there are some good things about waiting. Waiting itself can be productive because of what it is – it’s very nature demands that we stop doing whatever we were doing and prepare for something else, some goal or looked-for event - usually something pleasant – waiting to turn 16 to drive, waiting for a baby to be born, waiting for school to be out and summer vacation to begin, even just waiting for a light to turn green or the nurse to call your name in the doctor’s office.

There is a lot of waiting in the Bible. In the book of Jeremiah, the Lord makes a promise to send a savior to the people of Israel. They believed God’s promise and waited for it - they waited six hundred years for this promise to be fulfilled. And then, finally, when Jesus was born, it was.  That’s serious waiting. In fact, it’s not only waiting, it’s holy waiting.

There are also examples of holy waiting in the New Testament.  Mary waited for the birth of Jesus as foretold by the angel Gabriel.  John the Baptist waited for the Lamb of God to reveal Himself.  The old man Simeon and the prophetess Anna waited their entire lives, praying constantly in the temple for the consolation of Israel. Mary Magdalene, too, practiced holy waiting, completely confused and weeping outside the tomb of the crucified Jesus. 

These are all examples of holy waiting and what made their waiting holy is that it is always waiting for God. That’s what makes the waiting holy. Holy waiting is different from the waiting we do for summer vacation or the light to turn green. Holy waiting is different because its goal is God.

My favorite of the New Testament examples is Simeon and the way you can almost feel the relief in his voice. He’s finally seen Jesus and could die happy. “Now let your servant depart in peace for mine eyes have seen the Savior, whom you have prepared for all the world to see. A light to enlighten the nations and the glory of your people Israel.” He had waited and was satisfied. But there was a problem and Simeon didn’t know yet what it was. The problem was that Jesus wasn’t the savior Simeon thought he was getting.

Because there’s another thing about holy waiting.  In every biblical example, the end of the wait came with dramatic change, change that was not expected. The Jews, all of them, Jeremiah, John the Baptist and Simeon, expected a king coming in triumphant victory and instead got first a helpless baby and then a humble carpenter. Mary Magdalen, mourning and terribly confused by a dead savior, certainly expected, at that point, a lord and teacher who would stay dead, but instead got a savior who awoke, very much alive, calling her name. And who knows what Mary, Jesus’ mother expected, because she kept it treasured in her heart, but it certainly wasn’t doing a stint at the foot of the cross watching her son slowly suffocate to death in humiliation and then show up again only to levitate into the clouds.

So this lesson is meant to emphasize two things – first that we are sometimes called to holy waiting for God and second, that if we let God have His way, what happens at the end of the waiting is not predictable. In fact, usually the opposite. Hence, the cartoon.

It shows a squirrel sitting in a tree - a tree he's pretty proud of, and he should be. It's beautiful. He knows the tree has come from God but he has cared for it and nutured its growth for years. He thanks God for it, but all the while we know that he's taking most of the credit for what it's become. Still, he says, have your way with it, God, and sure enough, the Holy Spirit shows up peeking around the corner. I get the feeling that the squirrel anticipates a pat on the back, but then we see what God has in mind. He has a hatchet in His hand and the squirrel is  not happy. 

So, who is the squirrel? He’s us, of course, and the tree is the First Congregational Church of Rochester, Wisconsin and we are in our tree, waiting. During the liturgical season of Advent, we are waiting for God. We are waiting to celebrate the anniversary of the birth of Jesus at Christmas.

But we also waiting for something else right now. We are waiting for a pastor. And this is also a kind of holy waiting, not only because we are waiting for God to act in this situation, but also because we have no idea how it’s going to turn out.

I don’t know about you, but I feel a kind of dichotomy, a kind of psychological tug of war. I want two outcomes at the same time, and of course, that’s not possible. One of those outcomes is wanting someone like Paul back – someone who fits right in, who loves easily, who understands God’s world primarily in terms of mercy and grace, who sings with joy, and whose happiness and friendliness is visible to everyone who meets him. Someone we can grow to love and trust. He is a hard act to follow but follow him someone must.

And this is when I remember my second desired outcome – to do like the squirrel in the tree said he wanted to do - to do God’s will. The squirrel reminds me that God’s will is not predictable, but that God doesn’t make mistakes. I remember that we wouldn’t be looking for a pastor at all if God had allowed Paul to live longer. He could have, after all, but he didn’t. So we are waiting and looking. And I remember that we are not guaranteed someone like Paul. In fact, if I understand the pattern of how God seems to work, it is more than likely that God may offer us someone completely different, someone who will fulfill His desires, His plan, not ours. He’s done it before. Remember the Jews who waited all those years and got a savior completely different than they’d hoped for, and for Simeon who held the baby thinking he would be a conqueror, and of Mary whose pain of burying her son was not erased even when He rose from the dead, and of Mary Magdalen who didn’t understand why Jesus had died and was then stolen from his grave. All this confusion, misunderstanding, and suffering was not an accident. It was God’s will – God’s will for the people He loves.

 But change assumes there’s something about us that needs changing and what in us is there for God to work on? As a congregation, we already click. We get along in genuine affection. And because we feel this way about each other, we also get things done not only efficiently, but organically - naturally, and congenially. We have a kind of system, practiced and cemented into place after long years of implementation. We’re a Swiss watch of a congregation. Humming along and knowing our places together. And this is good. It’s almost a miracle, actually, given the amount of strife churches often experience. Our church family is not broke, and there seems to be no reason to fix it. We are justifiably glad about the love and harmony that binds our church family. But at the same time, we are a tree, a tree that is nourished not by one another, but by God. We run the church, but the church, the tree, belongs to God and God could easily come into our church world with a hatchet like in the cartoon. Just because we are good at what we do doesn’t mean that God doesn’t have more for us, something we haven’t yet considered. If He does, He may be hacking some things apart and we may be in for some surprises.

 It’s easy to say that God is in this place, and I think we all feel that in one way or another, but it’s important to remember that the place where He resides isn’t in these four walls but implanted deep inside every one of us. We will not get God’s love or discover His will from our church building or from our committee work or from the Congregationalist headquarters. They can all help us achieve practical ends, but they will not help us find and follow God’s best for us. That comes by a very different path. It comes only through God Himself. So if we are going to care for our tree, we have to connect with its source of energy, God.

 The funny thing is that He’s already here. In the everyday. I learned this in a really vivid way from a bunch of monks. I once did a week long writing retreat at a monastery, New Mellaray Abbey, in Peosta, Iowa, not far from Dubuque. The monks make caskets there, praying as they work, and they also practice of the presence of God, praying as a community seven times a day. People who stay with them do the same and they helped me to understand what a healthy relationship between spiritual and practical work looks like. It’s a funny thing to watch, because the monks work in the wood shop, but when the bell rings they stop their work and all file into the church, wood shavings hanging off their robes, tool belts banging around their waists, and raise their voices together in prayer and chant. My work there was there to write and even I found that, just when I got deep into my project, the bell would ring for the call to prayer and I’d have to break off what I was doing to trail into the church behind the monks. It was as though priorities had been turned upside down. In a world that works first and often struggles to find time to stop and pray, they lived in a world where work took a back seat to conversation with God. Eventually, days no longer framed themselves around the work. They framed themselves around the prayer, around God. One learned to look forward to the prayer more than the project. In the contest between the practical and the spiritual, both were accommodated, but the spiritual won.

 Something similar is always happening in our lives. Even a church makes a conscious decision regarding how spiritual their lives together are to be. This time in our church life might be an opportunity for us to reevaluate our own dynamics. At the end of our holy waiting, we will probably get a new pastor. But it is not the new pastor that is standing at the door knocking. It is Jesus.  It is always Him, and in the knocking, God is showing us a opportunity for a renewed future. He has already declared it by taking Paul home. Yes, I want a pastor like Paul and I want nothing to change, but in the end, I think I want God’s will more. And that might mean that things will be different, that they’re supposed to be different.

God has already changed our circumstances, and He promises that it is for our own benefit. He is giving us an opportunity for something new, not because the old was bad, but because with God, there is always something more. We can embrace His gift, open our arms to welcome the more and all of the relearning and rethinking that comes with it, or we can remain what we were, but this is when we welcome everything He has imagined for us, or we don’t. I’m pretty sure He will not abandon us either way. He will simply give us as much of Himself as we show Him we want.

 So, we are in the time of Holy Waiting. We wait for Christmas, of course, but we also wait for the unknown to show itself. We do not just wait for a pastor. We wait for God. So I call you all today to pray, to read, to sit quietly before God and let Him show you, and thereby show us, what He wants. And then to communicate that to the rest of us. We can do it alone or together, by email, around coffee or a meal or in a quiet corner by ourselves.  This prayer is not intended toward choosing a minister for this church. The selection committee is already doing the heavy lifting for that. This prayer is intended to find the more God has for us, to grow us in God so that we might become as spiritually adept as we are practically efficient.

 We are so lucky to be the little corner church in Rochester, Wisconsin, already trained by God and good pastoral leadership to be faithful and loving, so who knows? We may become not only the neighborly church on the corner but the light on God’s hill. It’s no accident that Advent sounds a lot like adventure.  It will be an adventure, all right, but God has already built a church well equipped to love each other through whatever He brings us. It is up to us to decide whether we will take the community and warmth He has fostered in us and use it to keep ourselves warm and dry, or to let him wield his loving weapon of change to make us something we never imagined. He will tell us. Let us pray. We can find out together.

 Cartoon Credit: John Hendrix, The Holy Ghost