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.”
posted by David Ensign at
6:53 AM
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