Beyond the Patio

ACTIVELY WAITING
Acts 1:6-14 and John 17:1-11

We are used to waiting. I have waited for buses at bus stops. I have waited for plane in airports. I have waited in line in the grocery store, in the bank, at movie theatres, in Doctor’s offices and a hundred other places. I have waited for people to come because they said they would come at a certain time – sometimes they have and sometimes they haven’t – but still I have waited. I have waited in traffic, not knowing why the traffic had stalled, wishing we could move a little faster but not going anywhere. I have waited for that all important letter to come (days and weeks I have waited for that). I have waited for that all important phone call (it seems like hours that I have waited for it). I have waited for that all important opportunity in life that will make all the difference in the world. I have waited for a baby to be born. I have waited for a show to start, a game to begin, for the first hymn in a Service. Much of our lives are spent in waiting.

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Today, the seventh Sunday of Easter or the Sunday after Ascension is a time of waiting.  The disciples have been told  to wait in Jerusalem until the Holy Spirit has come(Acts 1:8).  Then, in Jesus’ high priestly prayer recorded in John’s Gospel (John 17) he anticipates his leaving his disciples on their own.  He prays to the Father that they may be protected and to know the Father the way that he knew the Father, and that they may know the joy that he had. So in a sense at the Ascension they were waiting for God to reveal God’s presence to them. At Pentecost, which we celebrate next week, God’s presence and strength was revealed to them in a dramatic way so it seems that they didn’t have to wait very long.

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Today, we wait for God in our time as well.  We wait for God to come to us and show himself to us in a clear and definite way, but often it seems that God never comes at least not in the way we expect. We wait for Christ to come again and usher in the Kingdom of God – the kingdom of peace, Justice, and well-being for all – but he is a long time coming. People have been waiting for almost two thousand years. Now that is what I call a long wait. Some times in the Doctor s office, it seems like a thousand years but it really is only an hour.

How are we waiting for God? 

We cant just waiting around bored out of our mind for something to happen. We are to actively wait. And part of actively waiting is to be looking for God s activity in the world and in our lives now. One could say that the disciples did not just wait around in Jerusalem getting bored.  They gathered together.  They worshiped.  They prayed together.  They expected to see God.  One could say that they were actively waiting.

To be faithful to God promise in our lives is to look for God’s activity everywhere in our lives expecting to see God. Some times God appears in the most ridiculous places. In the story of Abram in the Hebrew Scriptures, God brought him outside and said, “Look up in the sky and see all those stars, you are going to have as many descendants as them”. That was ridiculous, because Abram was old and didn’t have any children, and Sarah was beyond childbearing. It was so ridiculous that when an angel told them they were going to have a son (in the 17th Chapter of Genesis), it is recorded that Abram fell on his face laughing. You can hear Sarah in the background crackling away also. They must have laughed for nine months. Then they had a child. They called him Isaac which means laughter, because even though it was a laughing matter they knew that they could take God seriously. They knew that the child was a fulfillment of God’s promise. No matter how ridiculous it seemed, Abram knew he would have a son. He believed the Lord. He was actively waiting. O course, he had some part in it also.

If you don’t look for the signs of God’s activity, you never see them.  I wonder how many shepherds passed that burning bush in the Moses story, and didn’t t see it! Moses being a faithful person, expected God to reveal himself, so he did. He was on the lookout, so he found him. That is actively waiting.

We can easily miss God’s activity if we are not actively seeking it 

John Westerhoff of Duke University in his addresses often told the Sufi story of a man named Nostradam who for years went across the border with his donkey drawn cart full of hay. The border patrol knew he was smuggling something. They would stop him and search his cart. Sometimes they would even burn his hay, but they never found anything. Finally he retires. They have a big party for him. The members of the border patrol say to him, “Nostradam!  Now you are retired, you can tell us, what was it that you were smuggling all these years.” Nostradam replies, “Donkeys”. The point of the story is that they were right in front of their eyes, but they didn’t  see them.

That is the same with God’s activity. It is not that it isn’t there. All the data that points to it is either ignored or filtered out and labelled without malicious intent to point to something else.

Are we actively waiting? Are we really looking for God s activity in our lives expecting to find it. If I ask you to write down something significant that you experienced in the last week what would you write? I suspect that it would be things like this “I had something difficult to do in that last few days but I found the courage to do it”, or “While reading a book, or talking with a friend , I had a flash of insight”, or “I wasn’t sure I was going to make it through this month but I did”, or maybe “While out for a walk, I was able to decide what I shall do next year”. They would run something like that would they not?  Throughout the Bible God appears to his people or sends his spirit to enlighten them, to guard them on the way, to bring them to the place that He had prepared for them. If you are not actively waiting for God, you could miss God’s very activity in your lives.

One thing that we can actively do is to take some time to open yourself to God’s activity in your life each morning.  C.S. Lewis said at one time:

The moment you wake up each morning, all your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists in shoving it all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other, larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in.

(C.S. Lewis as quoted in Shoving it All Back, sermon material for June 1 in sermons.com)

Yes, we are always in a time of waiting between the ‘no longer’ and the ‘not yet’. We are continually living between the Ascension and Pentecost, between the absence of Jesus and the realization of the Holy Spirit among us.  Some say, “Seeing is believing” but I say ” Believing is Seeing”. If we believe, and look for God’s activity, we will certainly see it everywhere.

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