Tuesday, October 18, 2016

In the Meantime

Jeremiah 31:27-34; Luke 18:1-8
October 16, 2016
Reading this parable from Luke during the week my mind kept running to Psalm 27. It’s my favorite of the 150 songs that comprise the psalms in scripture. I am moved by its lyrical opening affirmation: “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” And I take comfort always in its closing lines: “I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!”
But then I am reminded by Tom Petty that “the waiting is the hardest part.”
Most of us, most of the time, do not enjoy the waiting, no matter what we’re waiting for:
·      Children looking at wrapped presents beneath a Christmas tree;
·      A patient waiting impatiently for test results;
·      Candidates on election night waiting for the returns.
The waiting is the hardest part.
So, what are you waiting for these days? For what do you long? I trust that it’s pretty clear that another way of putting this question is, simply, what are you praying for? I invite you, in a brief time of silence, using one side of the slip of paper you received when you came in this morning, to write down one or two responses to those questions: what are you waiting for? For what do you long? What are you praying for?
silence
The parable that Jesus told his disciples according to Luke is about the waiting, about the hardest part. The parable underscores the difficulty in stark terms: there was a widow who came to the unjust judge to petition for justice.
Whenever a widow shows up in scripture we should imagine the most powerless figure. She is a woman in a patriarchal society who has no man, and thus no economic power, no social power, no standing in the religious community, no voice, and no champion.
Justice in Luke is always about turning the economic and political tables, and about the restoration of right relationship. The widow wants to be heard, and she wants to have legitimate power within the social, economic, and religious systems that define her life.
The judge refuses to listen, and refuses to listen, and refuses to listen. Until he does.
As Gandhi said, “first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
And into each comma in that series one pours countless hours of waiting: waiting for the calendar to turn, waiting for minds to turn, waiting for systems to turn.
Jesus spoke to a community that understood waiting. Israel had been waiting for the messiah, for the return of King David or of one like him to take his thrown and restore the glory of the nation.
Luke tells us that this parable is about prayer and faithfulness, but, as always, if we listen for voices from the underside our exegesis will be more faithful and more enlightening. That is to say, if you want to grasp the depth of scripture – or, all the more so, to be grasped by it – listen for the interpretive voices of those long silenced or marginalized.
One African-American pastor, speaking of this passage in Luke, remarked simply, “unless you’ve knocked on a locked door until your knuckles are bleeding you don’t know what prayer is.”
It helps to understand the nature of the doors that we bang on in life, lest all we get from the knocking is bloody knuckles.
In her chapter of Faithful Resistance, my colleague Annanda Barclay names a few of the doors: guilt, shame, complacency, comfort. She argues that these patterns perpetuate injustice, and, in particular, white supremacy. “Guilt, shame, complacency, and comfort act as emotional and physical barriers inhibiting our ability to create change.”[1]
Certainly these are barriers, but they are more like locked doors than stone walls. In other words, they may be locked, and it may take years of banging on them, or, perhaps, of searching for they key that fits, but however long it takes, it remains always possible to open them and, thus, to get through them.
Therefore, Jesus parable becomes also instruction for how we wait, for how we live in the meanwhile this side of the locked door that we so desperately need to get through.
A few minutes ago, I asked “what are you waiting for?” and did so understanding the question to be about the outcome, as it were; about the “what” that awaits on the other side of the waiting.
I’d like to pose the same question again, with a different emphasis: what are you waiting for? In other words, what reason do you have to continue waiting? Why are you waiting?
More to the point of Jesus’ parable, what is going to be the nature of your waiting? How shall we live in the meanwhile? Are there actions, or, perhaps, practices we can engage that make of the meanwhile something worthwhile.
For, you see, how we wait makes all the difference in how we ultimately receive that for which we have longed. Indeed, how we wait for the door to open goes a long way toward determining what we’ll discover on the other side.
Put a bit differently, how we choose to spend the many and lengthy seasons of waiting in our lives determines, to an almost complete extent, how we live our lives on both sides of whatever doors we long to open.
For example, as we wait on pins and needles for the outcome of next month’s election we can spend our waiting time consuming all kinds of rhetoric designed, primarily, to make us fear the outcome – whatever the outcome may be.
You know the stuff I am talking about. It is almost unavoidable in every conceivable form of media. The worst of it arrives as conspiracy tripe or rank bigotries.
We have choices in all this. We can actively engage by volunteering our time with the campaign of a candidate we support. We can get involved in local groups working on the issues that are of deepest concern for us. Perhaps most importantly, we can turn off the stream of commentary.
Let me introduce you all to your new best friend: the off switch!
Seriously, the most important theological advice I can offer you on waiting is this: turn off the streams of vitriol that rain down all around us. This is true no matter what you are waiting for. Do not fill your head with ugliness. Turn it off. Shut it down. Avoid the people in your life who fill your mind with it.
This is not, of course, merely about politics. It is about every aspect of our lives. Choose with care what you put into your mind, into your soul. While we are not computers, that old programmer’s adage is as true for us as it is for our computers: garbage in/garbage out.
I experienced this in a small, insignificant, but instructive way last week. I spent about an hour or so one afternoon re-writing the old Stone Soup folk story for last week’s e-blast. I had a blast in researching the roots of the tale and then in re-writing it for you. It put me in a frame of mind I’d simply call open.
Then I walked over to the post office to drop something in the mail. As I walked up Irving Street toward Liberty Tavern I noticed a man u-turn his scooter into a parking spot on the side of the street I was walking up. He took off his helmet, and, as I approached, he called to me saying, “I am sputtering out of gas and I don’t have my wallet. Do you have a dollar?”
I actually only had a ten dollar bill, so I said, “let me get some change.” I went into a sandwich shop – where I had to buy a chocolate chip cookie to get change … whoa is me – and took the guy a buck.
Was he pulling a really cheap scam? Was he poor or merely careless? Was he “deserving”? I don’t know, nor do I care. What I’m pretty sure of is this: if I had spent the previous hour perusing ugly news and views I would have walked right past the guy. Instead, we enjoyed a brief conversation about scooters and motorcycles and the beauty of that afternoon. I gave him a dollar. I ate my cookie.
As I said, an insignificant little moment, but one that brought a little joy into the world. Joy – the deep joy of true shalom, the joy that we sing about when we proclaim that “God will delight when we are creators of justice and joy” – joy is what lies on the other side of the door that I will keep knocking on until my knuckles bleed.
The color of my own waiting that day was to engage in something creative – re-writing an old folk story after re-reading several versions of it in the midst of reading several commentaries on Luke. In other words, my waiting, my meanwhile, was being shaped by the practice of study, of prayer, of creative work.
Those are among the ways I can keep knocking on that door that the whole of creation longs to pass through.
I invite you to take that piece of paper you wrote on a few minutes ago, and on the other side, jot down a word or two that describe for you a way of waiting, a practice for the meanwhile, that shapes you and sustains you as you knock on whatever doors need opening in your life. In other words, as you consider what you are waiting for, ask yourself what you can do about the waiting by way of either hastening the time when the door swings open, or of shaping your own life such that you can keep on knocking with the same steadfastness of the widow, trusting that “surely we shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.”




[1] In Rick Ufford-Chase, Faithful Resistance, 2016, p. 45.