Samuel Beckett’s play, entitled Waiting for Godot, is a satire on the human condition. As Beckett sees it, humanity is waiting for Godot, or God, to come and save them, but he never shows up. Their waiting is in vain, for although they have been repeatedly told that God is coming, he never has, and never will. The characters in the play are told to wait for Godot, for he might come tomorrow. And so they continue to wait in their dreary existence. The only prop in the play is a dead tree. The implication in all this is that there is no God and no Savior. Life, according to Beckett and his fellow Existentialists is that life is absurd. There is no ultimate meaning to existence, and so we have to create our own meaning, without artificial props like a belief in God. The tradition of God coming to earth to save humankind is very strong so that it pervades our thoughts and conversations. Beckett wants to dismantle this belief for us. He believes that many people live their whole lives waiting for God to show up, but their waiting is in vain.
However, the futility of life apart from God is more than evident in the play. The characters are pathetic and they contemplate suicide several times, even though they cannot even find the emotional energy to carry it out. For people like Samuel Beckett all this talk of waiting in hope is foolishness. God is not going to show up. We have been deceived, so what we should do is stop expecting God to show up. That way we won’t be disappointed when he fails to make the scene. Interestingly enough, Beckett wants people to give up waiting on God, but he never offers anything in its place except despair. Some people become apathetic as the wait goes on. They don’t care anymore. Some lose faith. Some become bitter, angry and hostile toward God.
But this is nothing new. The apostle Peter wrote to the people of God saying, “First of all, you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires. They will say, ‘Where is this “coming” he promised? Ever since our fathers died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation.’ But they deliberately forget that long ago by God’s word the heavens existed and the earth was formed out of water and by water. By these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed. By the same word the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men. But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare. Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat” (2 Peter 3:3-12).
There will always be those who believe it is futile to wait for God. But they deliberately forget that he has already come. He came to the Garden of Eden. He came to Noah. He came to Mount Sinai. He came in the person of Jesus, and he will come again. In fact, God comes to us many times throughout our lives if our hearts are receptive and our eyes are open. There are many who give in to doubt and despair. They grow weary of waiting for God. Others like the charm of the Christmas holiday, but to them believing in a real Savior coming into the world is like a four-year-old filling out a list of things they want from Santa. It is a nice sentiment, but it is only that. Some people give into cynicism. They go through the Christmas season without every having experienced the Christmas Savior.
How do we wait for God? What should our attitude be in this time of waiting for the advent of Christ? The first way that we wait for Christ is: We wait patiently. The hardest part of waiting is waiting. Waiting involves time, and we don’t know when our waiting will be over. If we could wait a minute or two it would be one thing, but it often involves a great deal of time.
I was in the store the other day and the person in front of me wanted to leave, but her receipt was slow coming out of the cash register. She started making motions with her hand trying to speed up the printing of her receipt. As I watched her I was amused until I realized how many times I have done the very same thing. I become impatient waiting for the printer to print, the coffee to brew, and the light to change. We who live in this culture of convenience and instant gratification have lost the art of waiting. People in places like Russia may wait in line for hours for a loaf of bread. People in places like Afghanistan may wait weeks. But we are irritated if the line at McDonald’s isn’t moving fast enough.
Patience is fruit of the Spirit. It is a spiritual quality that God wants us to develop. But often we are irritated if something doesn’t happen immediately, and we lose hope. Yet, hope is essential to life. The Bible says, “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently” (Romans 8:22-25).
Not long before his death, Henri Nouwen wrote a book called Sabbatical Journeys, in which he wrote about some friends of his who were trapeze artists, called the Flying Roudellas. They told Nouwen that there is a special relationship between the flyer and the catcher on the trapeze. This relationship is governed by important rules, such as “The flyer is the one who lets go, and the catcher is the one who catches.” As the flyer swings on the trapeze high above the crowd, the moment comes when he must let go. He flings his body out in mid-air. His job is to keep flying and wait for the strong hands of the catcher to take hold of him at just the right moment. One of the Flying Roudellas told Nouwen, “The flyer must never try to catch the catcher.” The flyer’s job is to wait in absolute trust. The catcher will catch him, but he must wait.
Nouwen said, “Waiting is a period of learning. The longer we wait, the more we hear about him for whom we are waiting.” Waiting is not a static state, it is a time when God is working behind the scenes, and the primary focus of his work is on us. I love Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of Romans 8:24: “Waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting” (The Message). God is creating his life within us, and we must wait for it to come to full term.
It is possible to fail in our waiting and get ahead of God. You wait and nothing seems to happen, so you panic and start to work things out on your own. You start trying to catch God instead of waiting for him to catch you. Waiting is an art, and timing is everything. In Jesus day, there were those who grew tired of waiting for Messiah to come, and they decided to take matters into their own hands. This was the group known as the Zealots. They had heard the promise that God was coming to deliver Israel from the grip of her enemies, but they grew impatient. Occasionally, a flamboyant leader would arise, and everyone would pin their hopes on him. He would gain a small following and they would form a terrorist group until they were crushed by the Roman army. There was even a Zealot among Jesus’ disciples named Simon (Matthew 10:4). Perhaps he had spiraling hopes that Jesus was going to be a political messiah whose purpose would be to establish an independent kingdom of Israel. But nothing could have been further from Jesus’ larger purposes.
There are some who believe that this was the problem with Judas. The line of reasoning goes that he did not see things happening quickly enough and thought he could force Jesus’ hand by turning him over to the authorities. In his mind, Jesus would then be forced to confront the Roman authorities and display his messianic prowess. The revolt would begin in earnest. But this kind of abrupt action was far from being a part of God’s plan. We can’t get ahead of God. We have to wait patiently.
The second way in which we are to wait is: We wait expectantly. God is busy bringing about his full plan for the world and for us. In his perfect timing he will birth that plan. I suppose that an expectant mother sometimes thinks, “Is this baby ever going to come?”, especially if she is past her due date. But all you have to do is look at her and you know that it is impossible for the baby not to come. When Jesus was delivered into the world, the world was enlarged with its waiting. The Bible says, “But when the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman” (Galatians 4:4). Before it was time, the birth of Christ would have been premature, but when the time came, nothing could hold him back. When it is time for Christ to return, nothing will be able to hold him back.
Gary Preston tells a story in his book Character Forged from Conflict, that illustrates how we are to wait. He writes: “Back when the telegraph was the fastest means of long-distance communication, there was a story, perhaps apocryphal, about a young man who applied for a job as a Morse code operator. Answering an ad in the newspaper, he went to the address that was listed. When he arrived, he entered a large, noisy office. In the background a telegraph clacked away. A sign on the receptionist’s counter instructed job applicants to fill out a form and wait until they were summoned to enter the inner office. The young man completed his form and sat down with seven other waiting applicants. After a few minutes, the young man stood up, crossed the room to the door of the inner office, and walked right in. Naturally the other applicants perked up, wondering what was going on. Why had this man been so bold? They muttered among themselves that they hadn’t heard any summons yet. They took more than a little satisfaction in assuming the young man who went into the office would be reprimanded for his presumption and summarily disqualified for the job. Within a few minutes the young man emerged from the inner office escorted by the interviewer, who announced to the other applicants, ‘Gentlemen, thank you very much for coming, but the job has been filled by this young man.’ The other applicants began grumbling to each other, and then one spoke up, ‘Wait a minute! I don’t understand. He was the last one to come in, and we never even got a chance to be interviewed. Yet he got the job. That’s not fair.’ The employer responded, ‘All the time you’ve been sitting here, the telegraph has been ticking out the following message in Morse code: “If you understand this message, then come right in. The job is yours.” None of you heard it or understood it. This young man did. So the job is his.’”
The young man got the job because he was not just waiting — all of the other men were waiting — but he was waiting expectantly. We are all sitting in the waiting room. But it is how we wait, and what we do with the waiting, that is important. The young man in that office was listening. And because he was, he was rewarded. Waiting does not mean just sitting down and doing nothing. You have to be watching and looking for God to fulfill his promise. You have to believe he is going to do it. It is possible to get ahead of God when we try to work things out ourselves, but it is also possible that we could miss what he is doing because we are just waiting without expecting God to really come through.
The final way in which we are to wait for God is: We wait faithfully. To be faithful means to be full of faith — faith full — faith that completely trusts and depends on God. It is active faith, not passive. It is a faith that delights in doing the Master’s will. It is love that results in action. It is a faith that keeps doing the right thing even when the waiting becomes long. The passage that follows the scripture we read together today carries the same message. In this parable, Jesus says, “Who then is the faithful and wise manager, whom the master puts in charge of his servants to give them their food allowance at the proper time? It will be good for that servant whom the master finds doing so when he returns. I tell you the truth, he will put him in charge of all his possessions. But suppose the servant says to himself, ‘My master is taking a long time in coming,’ and he then begins to beat the menservants and maidservants and to eat and drink and get drunk. The master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he is not aware of. He will cut him to pieces and assign him a place with the unbelievers” (Luke 12:42-46). Waiting in faithful obedience is essential in our walk with God.
Gordon McDonald writes about an experience in high school. He says, “Running track in my prep school days taught me a valuable lesson. I was at the Pennsylvania Relays, a famous Eastern track meet, and our relay team was going to run in the championship race. I was the lead-off man and in the second lane. The man in the first lane held the 100-meter dash record for prep school runners. He also held a record for arrogance. . . . When I got to the line and we were putting our starting blocks down, he said, ‘May the best man win. I’ll be waiting for you at the finish line.’ We went into the blocks. The gun sounded. He took off, and the other seven of us settled in behind him. We went around the first turn and down the back stretch. About 180 meters into the race, I suddenly saw the record holder in front of me, holding his side, bent over, and groaning as he jogged along. We all passed him like he was standing still. Because I’m such a gentleman, I waited for him at the finish line. At the end of the race my coach took me aside. ‘I hope you’ve learned a lesson today. It makes little difference whether you hold the record for the 100-meter dash if the race is 400-meters long.’”
The race we are in is a long one, and it calls for endurance not speed. It’s not how you begin the race, but how you finish that counts. As the Bible says, “This calls for patient endurance and faithfulness on the part of the saints” (Revelation 13:10). When McDonald was running that race, he could have given up. He could have said, “This is useless, I’m not going to win the race anyway.” He could have let what others said discourage him, but he ran the race with his whole heart. He did not give up. He did not quit. He did not run half-heartedly. He gave it all he had. His coach commended him for it, and reminded him at the end that it was because he was a long distance runner that he finished the race well. The Bible says, “The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong” (Ecclesiastes 9:11). The race is to those who have learned to endure. They wait with patience. They wait expectantly. They live in faithfulness to God whether their faithfulness seems to be noticed and rewarded or not. Hear the Word of God that says, “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint” (Isaiah 40:31, KJV).
Rodney J. Buchanan
December 23, 2001
Mulberry St. UMC
Mt. Vernon, OH
www.MulberryUMC.org
Rod.Buchanan@MulberryUMC.org
