Salvador Dali, The Ascension (1958)
Waiting for God
(Easter 7A; Sunday after Ascension)
22 May 2023
The Rev. Fr. Anthony Hutchinson, Ph.D., SCP
Parish Church of St. Mark the Evangelist
Kapahulu, Honolulu, Hawaii
8:30 a.m. Low, 10:30 a.m. High Mass
Acts 1:6-14 ; Psalm 68:1-10, 33-36; 1 Peter 4:12-14, 5:6-11; John 17:1-11
God, take away our hearts of stone
and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
Today’s reading from Acts is about the ascension of Jesus, forty days after the resurrection. The Ascension marks a change in the Church’s relationship with Jesus: before it, Jesus is with them, appearing regularly and teaching them. After it, Jesus is no longer seen, but before leaving he had promised the Spirit, Comforter, or Advocate to re-present him after his departure. It descends on Pentecost, 10 days later. The ascension thus is a joyful occasion, despite its marking Jesus’ definitive departure and absence until he comes again.
After the Ascension, we are asked to wait. We must await the coming of the spirit. We must await being clothed with “power from on high.” We must wait for Jesus’ returning again in glory.
Americans are not a society that waits well. Waiting is seen as a waste of time. Making someone wait for us is seen as the ultimate insult and disrespect. Our common U.S. vision of Hell is the State Department of Motor Vehicles, where we must take a number and wait in interminable lines. As the Tom Petty song said (and here I'm showing my boomer), “the waiting is the hardest part.”
This, of course, is in the context of our cultural obsession with transactional relationships and conditional loves: we expect a relationship we are in to be “fulfilling,” and to meet our needs. If the one with whom we have a relationship does not meet our needs, or makes us wait for our needs to be met, then often our response is to discard the relationship.
I have to tell you, waiting is really hard for me. My ego, ever fragile, gets really hurt if someone makes me wait. And I have learned from hard experience that those about me whom I love expect the same from me: I must not make someone wait for me if I want them to feel love and honor from me.
Not all cultures have such a hard time with waiting. I think Hawaiian traditional culture handles waiting much better, perhaps because of the slightly slower pace of life, even in a big city like Honolulu, or maybe the habit of using public transport, with its built-in wait periods. It may come from the laid-back “what evah!” attitude that lies behind the Hawai’i pidgin expression “dakine.” Or, perhaps, it is because of the mixing of ideas of love, welcome, hospitality, farewell, and kindness in the word “aloha.”
Whatever the cause, waiting here is something more like what I saw when I lived in West Africa. There, a major part of life seemed to be waiting. Sometimes, a person would walk a major distance to talk with someone, unannounced, only to find themselves waiting for the major part of a day, or maybe two or three days, until the person they seek is available. And they do this gladly, without resentment. West Africans value patience. Waiting well is seen as a good exercise for the soul, and a way of honoring the person you are waiting for.
I once heard a great way of summing up this idea: a Missioner from the Episcopal Church told me of a group from South Sudan she had met with. They wanted missioners who came to them to have a collaborative attitude, where both sides shared their good points and benefitted from the exchange, rather than a unidirectional “I have the right way to teach you” sense of mission. The way they summed this up was “You Americans may have nice watches, but we have time.”
Patience is also a highly prized value in the Bible. St. Paul lists it foremost among the fruits of the Holy Spirit. James says that patience, like a farmer waiting for the sown seeds to sprout, is the hallmark of true faith. The Psalmist says it this way, “Wait upon the Lord.”
“Waiting upon the Lord” has been a major value for Christians since the beginning. You cannot read any of the medieval monastic writings, or even the early Anglican Book of Homilies without coming upon the idea repeatedly. The idea is that we should not get impatient with God when our prayers are not answered, when our hopes are not fulfilled, or our fears not avoided. A measure of how impatient North Americans are is that for most of us, it is a strange, almost foreign, concept. But the basic idea is key: God loves us unconditionally and we must love God unconditionally.
I think most of the unchurching of America and its youth comes ultimately from not valuing patience in our relationship with God. We let our disposable approach to human relationships creep over and affect this most important of relationships. We end up explaining this apparently random and accidental life without recourse to any idea of a loving, provident parent of our spirit. We sell cheaply our heritage of a loving God who makes us wait for glories unimaginable. And we sell it for a mess of potage that is a world without God or unconditional love.
But here’s the thing: endurance in loving God, despite disappointment and despite having to be made to wait, is the essence of loving God. Disposable, impatient relationships are a sign of conditional love: I will love you if you meet my needs; I will love you if you don’t make me wait. But God calls us to unconditional love, to him and to each other.
Jesus on the cross cried out “My God, my God! Why have you forsaken me!” But then he went on and finished the Psalm he was quoting, ending with an affirmation of trust in God, “the hope of Israel.” The cross calls us to unconditionally love an unconditionally loving God. And Jesus is on the cross there along with us when we suffer terrible things. God is suffering with us.
Today’s Gospel from John, has the phrase that is normally translated, “This is Life Eternal, that they know You, the only True God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” WE normally think this means “that they come to know you.” But the Greek here of the verb “to know” is the form of the verb that does not mean “come to know.” It means, “continue to know.” A better translation is “This is life eternal: to continue to know God and Christ.” Life eternal lies in maintaining our relationship with God, in not giving up on God, in waiting patiently for God, in walking acceptingly along behind Jesus as he suffers the way of the cross. Because the way of the cross leads to joy, leads to glory. But not yet. You have to wait for it.
This week, I invite us to examine our attitudes and consciences on this point: where do I lay conditions on my loves, and especially, where do I show impatience and an ego-driven desire to have my way now, not later? In finding these areas of weakness, let us firmly resolve to be more patient, more loving without conditions, more accepting. And if we don’t want that quite yet, then at least let’s pray that God give us a heart that wants it.
Let us wait patiently on God, and rejoice in the waiting.
In the name of Christ, Amen.
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