“We wait. We are bored. No, don’t protest, we are bored to death, there’s no denying it. … A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste . . . .In an instant all will vanish and we’ll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness!”
So speaks one of the characters in Samuel Beckett’s play, “Waiting for Godot”. Estragon and Vladimir have to find things to do while they wait for someone named Godot to arrive. They eat, they talk, they play games, they exercise, they sleep, they argue, all of it to hold back the silence that pours into their lives like water into a sinking ship. They do not know this Godot; they only know that they are to wait for him. And so they wait, frustrated. On occasion, they think Godot is here, and they cry out, “We’re saved!” only to discover that they were mistaken. In their desperation, they even talk of ending it all, but ultimately decide to do nothing, because they cannot even remember what it is that they expect Godot to do when he finally does come. They only know that they must wait.
All of us have to wait. None of us gets what we want instantly. Life is process, not just satisfaction. Life is searching, it is guessing, anticipation, hoping, dreaming, waiting. Struggle though we may, waiting is part of life. We must wait.
The issue is in how we wait. What postures, what attitudes do we bring to our waiting?
Do we wait passively? Passive waiting is staring into space, putting our minds in neutral, just waiting. Passive waiters are like those shoppers that turned up at the Wal-Mart on Thanksgiving evening, full of turkey and stuffed with hopes for a bargain. They must have known that the fine print said, “Only fifteen HDTV’s per store at this price”, but they waited anyway, passively, just in case lightning might strike and they take home the bargain. Passive waiters do nothing but wait and hope against hope that they might receive what they want.
Or do we wait impassively? Impassive waiting involves resignation and despair, knowing that what we wait for is never really going to happen. Impassive waiters include the thousands of children in Sudan who wake up each morning even more hungry than they were yesterday. Impassive waiters include the young women pressed into service as sex slaves in Thailand, knowing that each day will bring another humiliation. Impassive waiters include the young people dragged into MS-13 gangs because they see no other way to survive. Impassive waiters turn on sullen faces and develop bitter attitudes, waiting for somebody to deliver them, but knowing it will never happen.
Do we wait passively, do we wait impassively, or do we wait actively? Active waiters take charge of the time spent waiting. Active waiters make the most of the waiting time. Active waiters acknowledge that they do not have or get all that they want, but they believe it is achievable. Active waiters believe that the world around them is something that they can affect; they sense their own worth. And so active waiters pour themselves into educational programs or political campaigns or financial planning or exercise regimens, anything that makes a difference. Active waiters take hold of life and see what has not yet happened as something toward which they can work. Waiting in the active voice and not the passive or the impassive voice is the kind of waiting that affirms life, trusts God, and sees beyond the here and now.
Did you hear Beckett’s characters in “Waiting for Godot”? “We wait. We are bored. No, don’t protest, we are bored to death, there’s no denying it. … A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste . . .In an instant all will vanish and we’ll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness!” What a horrible way to spend your life! What a disastrous way to wait! But that is the way of the world in desperate times. That is the way anxious and frightened people wait, passive, without hope; or impassive in the midst of nothingness.
But that is not the way of Advent. Advent is a time of waiting, but not passive waiting, nor impassive waiting. In Advent healthy souls wait in the active voice, knowing that there is more than boredom, more than diversion, more than waste, and far, far more than nothingness. Advent is a sign of what it means to wait in the active voice.
Come with me to Jerusalem in the 6th Century before Christ. The city is but a shadow of its former glory. Something like sixty years earlier the armies of Babylon had overrun Jerusalem, had taken its people exile, deposed its leaders, and destroyed its economy. For most of those years, those left behind in the city could do nothing more than wait, passively or impassively, for they saw no way out. Oh, some saw a little hope. There was the prophet whose preaching is contained in the 40th through the 55th chapters of the Book of Isaiah; Deutero-Isaiah, the scholars call him. He waited actively for God’s chosen one to appear. But his voice about the Suffering Servant had been a lonely voice. No one else saw what he saw; all of them waited with hollow eyes and sad voices for something, anything, probably for nothing. Their world, they thought, was beyond repair.
Now, however, as we come to today’s text, the picture has changed. In 538 Cyrus, king of Persia, having defeated the Babylonians, had permitted the exiles of Judah to return and rebuild. The city that had been desolate was to be restored. The highway that had taken the people away in droves would be filled again with homegoing pilgrims. All would be well …!
Except that it wasn’t. Except that harsh reality set in. They found out that just because you wish for something, that does not mean you get it. They discovered that there were not enough resources to rebuild a trampled nation and a tumbledown Temple. And so again they had to wait. Those who had had their hopes built up after so long in despair had to wait. Those who had felt the stirrings of national fervor after repression now learned that they would have to wait again. The mood became one of anxiety and doubt, fear and uncertainty.
In other words, a time and a place not unlike our own. A time and a place where, just as with us, there was uncertainty, that nagging sense of incompleteness, that distrust of leadership. Jerusalem may not have had a Wall Street, but no doubt the traders in the gates and the herdsmen trying to sell their flocks felt the pinch. They had thought that all would be well, but suddenly it was not. And they had to wait for a resolution that was terribly slow in coming.
Into that milieu came the prophet responsible for the final eleven chapters of what we know as the Book of Isaiah. Some scholars use the made-up name, Trito-Isaiah, third Isaiah, to identify him. Exactly who he was does not matter; what does matter is that he saw the spiritual peril of the people and taught them how to wait. Not to wait passively, as if maybe by good luck something might happen; nor to wait impassively, as if nothing can really be expected; but to wait actively, working to fulfill their dreams.
This prophet’s cry was simply put, “Come on down.” Not unlike Drew Carey summoning players to “The Price Is Right”, both people and prophet called out to God, as they waited for their lives to be rebuilt, “Come on down.” God, be God, and do something for us. We are waiting. “Come on down.”
I
Notice first, however, that the prophet voiced a yearning that God would come on down and do again what He had done for His people in the past. The prophet’s plea was that the God who had liberated His people in the past, the God who had done “awesome deeds that we did not expect”, the God of marvelous surprises would come on down and do it again. Trito-Isaiah dug into his history notes and prayed that the old days might return.
O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence … When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect, you came down ….
To be able to wait in the active voice starts with knowing some history. It starts with knowing who you are, where you come from, and what God has done in your life. You can wait actively if you know the God who has not sat idly by, but who has done redemptive things for you.
On Thanksgiving evening I was chatting with family, and the conversation turned to the economy, as I am sure it did with many families this year. In our family gathering there was the customary wailing and weeping, as someone said that he had hoped to retire this year, but would now have to work a year or two longer. Someone else linked our economic problems to immigrants, who, it was said, were undercutting our job structure. And that led to a discussion of street gangs made up of young men out to intimidate. By the time that discussion wound down I think the guys around that table had blamed everything wrong on somebody else, anybody other than those of us who have consumed all we wanted and who have felt entitled to be comfortable. The conversation ended with someone saying, “I don’t know how it will all end.”
And yet, in a sense, we do know how it will all end. We know because we have seen it before. I started thinking about my own childhood. My parents were barely past the Great Depression when they married in 1935. They had no choice but to live paycheck to paycheck, and sometimes there wasn’t any paycheck. My dad tried to operate a small business, but it failed; everybody said it was because he let people buy on credit who never came back to repay their debts. My dad never heard of subprime mortgages, but he had plenty of subprime customers at his Shell station! And then almost four years after I was born, there was the war, with all the stress and strain that put on everyone. Food rationing, tires and gasoline on quotas, nightly blackouts, huddling around the radio listening to FDR.
I remembered some history, and not just about the politics and the economics of those days. I remembered how we prayed. I recalled how we at our church and in our home offered up to God this nation and the cause of justice. We believed that God would act to deliver us, in His own time. And so I recall what it felt like, even to a young boy, when I saw splashed across the front page of the Louisville Courier-Journal a huge picture of Hitler with a bold X across his surly face; it told us that this demon was gone and that at least in Europe the war was over. We fell on our knees in prayer. We thanked God for what He had done. We believed that it was not only our military muscle and our political leaders that had gained us this victory. We believed that God had, in His own way and with His own purposes, come down and done this awesome thing that we did not expect.
And so, brothers and sisters, the prophet wants us to see that even if things look bleak now, we are to put our confidence in a God who once delivered us and is capable of doing it again. We wait to be delivered, but we wait with a sense of God’s character because we have seen Him in action. We want this atmosphere of terrorism to be over. We want no more Saddam Husseins, no more Iraqi insurgency, no more Taliban, no more Al Qaeda. And we want this economic disaster to be over. We want no more foreclosures, no more layoffs, no more evictions. So do not despair; our God is a God of justice, and He will prevail. Trust Him. Wait for Him. Wait actively, remembering our history. Pray for those who lead us and for those who are about to lead us. Look to the past and see what He has done, and wait, for He will do “awesome deeds that we did not expect” when He comes down.
II
But it is not enough just to wait, however faithfully, for God to make everything right on His own. Yes, He is Lord, He is God, and we are not. However, this prophet sees that God calls us to wait actively by working with Him. God calls us to cooperate with Him as He works. We do not wait on the sidelines; we get into the game alongside our God:
“From ages past no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who works for those who wait for him. You meet those who gladly do right, those who remember you in your ways.”
What is the prophet’s insight? God works for those who wait for Him and meets those who do right and remember His ways. The way we wait for our God to deal with the issues of our time is not to sit idly by or to make grand pronouncements or to complain bitterly; it is to work for the things God is working for. The way we wait in the active voice for God to override the injustices of our time is to work for justice. We cannot expect God to do for us what we refuse to do for ourselves. We cannot call on heaven to work out our issues if we refuse to face them squarely. It’s fine to call on God to “come on down” if we are willing to join Him in what He does when He comes.
Some day I would like to bring to this church for a visit a good friend of mine, Mrs. Willie King. You need to hear her story. Mrs. King, forty-five years ago, was at the nexus of history; she was a young woman serving in Birmingham as the secretary to Wyatt Tee Walker of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Martin Luther King had just been arrested there and jailed for violating a court order to stop demonstrating against segregation. Although Dr. King had tried to enlist the support of religious leaders, there were many whose counsel was simply, “Wait.” Wait until a more opportune time. Wait until attitudes have changed. Wait for a better day. Wait, wait, wait. Eight prominent ministers in Alabama published a declaration that admonished Dr. King and his followers to wait. To wait passively, maybe even impassively.
Well, my friend Willie – Willie Mackey, as she was then named, was asked to transcribe Dr. King’s response. Dr. King wrote his Letter from a Birmingham Jail on bits and scraps of paper, on the margins of newspapers and even on sheets of toilet tissue, all of which were smuggled out to Willie’s capable hands. Willie testifies to this day that what she learned as she deciphered Dr. King’s thrilling words was that God will move to work with those who seize the moment. God will work with those who line up with His purposes. God will reward the years of waiting and the hours of hardship if we will put ourselves at His disposal and work alongside Him when the time is right. For when Dr. King’s letter was circulated, the conscience of America was pricked, and things moved. Dr. King waited in a cold jail cell in Birmingham, but he waited with an active voice, a voice crying out for justice; and then God moved. “[For God] works for those who wait for Him and meets those who gladly do right and who remember His ways.”
“Come on down”, Lord. Fix Wall Street. It will happen as you and I curb our appetites and rein in our consumptive hearts. “Come on down”, Lord. Fix Iraq and Afghanistan, fix Mumbai. It will happen as you and I fight hate with love and combat terrorism with freedom. “Come on down”, Lord. Fix these mean streets. It will happen as you and I, the church of the living God, get serious about reaching young people. It will happen as we get busy telling the Good News. It will happen as we go deeper with ministry and missions. God will come down because He works for those who wait for Him and meets those who gladly do right and remember His ways.
III
And so in this Advent season, we wait. We wait for peace in a troubled world. We wait for prosperity in a broken nation. We wait for calm in our own anxious hearts. We wait.
Who would think that the answer might come in a tiny squalling infant? Who would imagine that the God the prophet called for, tearing open the heavens to come down, so that the mountains would quake at His presence … who would imagine that that God would pour Himself into so fragile a package as a child? Surely He would come with swords loud clashing, and roll of stirring drums! Surely the God who is to come down to a waiting world will come with fanfare!
But the prophet speaks of a God who hides Himself, hides His face from us. This God who calls on us to wait in an active voice, neither passively without hope nor impassively without fulfillment, this God who calls on us to wait knowing what He has done in the past and to wait committing ourselves to His ways of justice … this God will come and dwell among us, full of grace and truth. And we will see in Him how a compassionate God suffers what we suffer, feels what we feel. We will see how God waits, and waits, and waits.
I cannot go with Beckett, waiting for Godot, bored, wasted, vanishing, alone, nothing. No, that is not Advent waiting. For I know that we have been heard. I cry with the ancient prophet, “Come on down”, for the price is right but terrible, the price of a Cross for the one come down. If He can pay such a price to wait actively for us, then we can wait longer, we can wait to be made useful, as if we were clay in the hands of the potter. It cannot be rushed; but it can be shaped.
Come on down, Lord; come on down. While I am waiting, yielded and still.
