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"Active Waiting" by Rev. Charles Hoffman

November 10, 2002 25^th Sunday After Pentecost
Amos 5:18-24 Matthew 25:1-13

Waiting: we all have to do it, more of it than we want. No one escapes it. Waiting plays an important part in life; more important than we know. And there are all sorts of ways to wait. Some endure it anxiously or restlessly. Some do it impatiently.

Some people simply can't deal with it so they get high blood pressure, or they give other people high blood pressure, or they cause accidents. I was filling my car with gasoline the other day and another car pulled into the service station. The driver was obviously in a hurry. He wasn't there for fuel; I'm not sure what he was after. He parked in the driveway, jumped out of his car, ran into the store, emerged with what he wanted, jumped back into his car, hit another car as he sped away, looked back once and kept going.

I followed him and got his license plate number for the woman who was driving the car that was hit. I hope that man will learn patience before he hurts someone seriously.

I watched a couple of families in a restaurant. It was a restaurant where you could dine in or take out, but not the one you think it was. One family consisted of a father and his little daughter. They sat quietly talking as they waited for their meal. They seemed to have come to terms with waiting.

The other family was a mother and her two kids, a little boy and a little girl. The kids took over the restaurant: climbing on top of chairs, shouting at their mother over the room divider, crawling under the room divider, and screaming when mommy looked over the divider and said, "boo!" They had a whole different idea about lingering than the father and his daughter. I wanted to cheer when they finally got their food and left.

Everyone has to learn how to tarry. And I'm not sure if it's just my age or what it is, but I don't think we're doing a very good job of teaching our children how to do it. It's not easy in our overly stimulated, instantly gratified culture. I'm afraid that our kids grow up in a world of two seasons: the season of now and the season of not now.

Young people are not learning to give time its due, to take the long view of things when that is what is called for. I just finished a novel about what is called the New Forest in England. For eleven hundred years, going back to the time of William the Conqueror, the New Forest has been preserved as a special place on England's southern coast.

The book traces the life of the forest and its inhabitants over those eleven centuries up to the year 2000. And at the end of the book a young man, who obviously has a profound feeling for this remarkable place, reflects on its meaning. "An oak tree," he says, "lives in a four-hundred-year time-frame. Human time-frames are always too short. So we get it wrong, and we don't really understand the natural processes half the time" (Edward Rutherfurd, The Forest, p. 592).

That's why children should learn about nature, about the cycle of life and its seasons, about ecological balance, and about the mills of time often grinding slowly.

Waiting has been with us since the beginning. The prophet Isaiah knew that there was something to the business of waiting. He said, "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. They shall walk and not faint."

Waiting was one of the big issues in the early church. For whatever reasons they believed that the Lord would return in their lifetime. They thought it would happen any day now, that it was immanent. So a lot of them packed their bags, camped at the station, and put their lives on hold. Finally, some of them died and Jesus still hadn't come. It was confusing to everyone, the leaders included. But eventually they realized that they'd been misinformed or that they had misunderstood and so everyone was encouraged to get back to work.

Keep looking for him to return but get to work in the meantime: that seems to be the message of the New Testament.

Now the parable of the wise and foolish young women speaks precisely to this situation in the early church. We just read it and now we look at it more closely. Keep in mind that the story is set against the background of a Palestinian wedding. In other words its mood is joyful anticipation. The Palestinian wedding was a party. They pulled out the stops, not just for one evening but for a number of days.

People looked forward to a wedding. And one of the customs had to do with the bridegroom making his way to the home of the bride and then escorting her to his own home. And to light the way there would be young maidens carrying lanterns.

In this case there were ten of them. Five of them had extra batteries and five of them didn't. And what complicated things was that the bridegroom was delayed. And by the time he finally arrived the batteries had run down. No problem for those five maidens who had been prepared, but by the time the other five got back from the convenience store with fresh batteries it was too late. The party was underway and they were left out in the cold.

Now in case anyone is too dense to get the point of this parable Jesus does something rather uncharacteristic. He explains it. He says to that early church, "Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour."

Watch. Be prepared. That's the point of the parable. That's the stance for those first Christians as they anticipate the Lord's return; not a passive waiting but an active waiting. As the Lord's return is prolonged go about the business of being the church. That seems to be the message.

There's been an interruption in the flow of things but go on with what you've been called to do anyway. There's been a disruption in the action but pay no attention to it. Continue as you were. There's been a delay. That's the word used in reference to the bridegroom in the story: a delay. And it's tempting to speculate what things might cause a delay in the Lord's arrival.

Probably there are a lot of things that we, the church, have left undone. Let's face it. Humanity has made a mess of things in this world. Why would Jesus not want to delay until we had the place cleaned up a little? I don't know; it's only a thought.

Whatever we do with the parable now, some twenty centuries later, it does serve to raise the question about waiting. That is, how do we wait? And maybe before that, what do we wait for?

Of course, there are some things that don't make a lot of difference. I mean, some things we await aren't that important in the long run. We linger over mundane things; we also do it over momentous things. Some things are very important and they can easily become our preoccupation. For what do we wait? We wait for an illness to run its course or to take its toll. We wait for a cure to be effected or for a verdict, an answer that will determine our future. We wait for birth as well as for death, and often a family will wait for both at the same time.

We wait for employment and we wait for retirement. We wait for arrival and we wait for departure.

In this life we tarry for an answer to our prayer, a solution to our problem, and comfort for our pain. Those are important issues to us, but others have universal importance: peace in our world, justice in the distribution of bread, and welfare of all people of the earth.

The Bible names this thing for which we wait and calls it the kingdom of heaven. And that's what the Lord is talking about when he says: "The kingdom of heaven shall be compared to ten maidens who took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom."

You know, when I first worked on this sermon some weeks ago I projected it under the title of "Active Waiting." Now, I'm not sure that title carries the best implications. In fact, I think it is better to talk about productive waiting.

You see, waiting can indeed be a waste of time; even active waiting can be a waste of time. I always remember one of our trips to Europe back in 1990 just prior to arriving in Encinitas. The tour escort would give us instructions each evening and tell us at what time we were to gather in the hotel lobby for the next day's excursions. It never failed. Sharon and I would arrive about five minutes before the announced time only to be met by a chorus of people telling us we were late. That group always showed up about fifteen minutes early and then twiddled their thumbs until it was time to board the bus. That's not productive waiting.

In the evolution of the Christian church there has always been, to a greater or lesser degree, a certain tension between the present and the future. And I don't think that this tension is ever resolved. In fact, I'm not sure it's supposed to be. It grows out of the fact that the Lord has come but the Lord is coming. The Lord has saved us but we're not yet where we ought to be. We have not yet fulfilled our purpose. We have not yet arrived, so to speak. We still wait for that.

The practical problem in the early church, as I said earlier, was that some of the faithful just sat down and waited for the Lord to come and finish the job. And variations of this sort of thinking have plagued the church ever since. I still hear people say that they don't worry about the political or economic problems of the world. They say, "O the Lord will take care of it," and they go blithely on their way.

Some people are intimidated by the specter of perfection. They take the position that because they can never get it right they just won't try. With those people it is perfection or nothing so they cool their heels while the world goes to hell in a hand basket.

I knew a man who went through his whole life not attempting things because he knew he wouldn't get them perfect. He was paralyzed to life. "I can't do that," he would say, or "you can't do that," he would tell others. "So what's the use in even trying?"

Mr. John Adams of Massachusetts almost forfeited the Declaration of Independence because certain members of the congress weren't willing to grant him what he believed was perfection, i.e., the ideal of freedom for all the citizens of the colonies. Eventually, wiser if compromising minds prevailed and convinced him to put the slavery issue on hold. Finally, he had to wait. And the waiting was unbearable for him and more so for those who were enslaved.

Adams had to wait for perfection but in the meantime he and his colleagues worked for progress.

Here's our dilemma: Just because Jesus hasn't returned doesn't mean that Jesus is not here. This is the mystery, the paradox in which we live: absence and presence at the same time, expectation and fulfillment fused into one experience. And what this means is that while we wait for God, God keeps showing up all around us, inviting us to participate in his will.

The Bible tells us that we are to redeem the time at our disposal. Apparently, there are a couple of men in Chicago who have devised a way to do that, to redeem the time, to make the most of the time we have.

They have invented what is called a Life Clock. Once you get your clock you program your age and your gender into the memory. From that point on the clock lets you know how much time you have left until you die: hours, minutes, and seconds. It's based on seventy-five years for men and eighty years for women. Along the way, the clock flashes inspirational messages: Watch your diet, eat your vegetables, get your rest, and so on.

The clock is supposed to motivate you to make the most of your life. Which is a good thing, but I'm not going to get one and I don't want one for Christmas! I prefer to let the parables of Jesus motivate me.

As we bide our time and if we are alert we will catch glimpses of heaven (see Robert Frost's poem, A Passing Glimpse). We will ensure that the leaven of love is at work in the world. We will sow seeds of peace and justice. And we will work hard, think clearly, and choose responsibly.

All of which is to say that we will wait productively. Even so, come, Lord Jesus. Amen.