Waiting well is one of the hardest things we are called to do as humans.
Maybe you’re in a conversation with a friend or family member. But it’s so hard to actually listen to them speak and let the fullness of what they are saying and how they are saying it soak in. Your mind wants to jump ahead to the kind and smart and interesting things you will say back. It’s hard to listen. It’s hard to wait.
As I work on preparing a sermon, waiting is one of the toughest parts of the process for me. Most weeks I have lots of ideas and words that have bubble up: inspiring threads from the scriptures, wonderings and prayers from your lives and my life. But the hardest process is waiting and trusting God, that out of this messy collage, there will be a word, an image, a story – and that it might be good news to us for this day.
We wait in waiting rooms for life-altering words from doctors. We wait for emails that contain acceptance or rejection. We wait for the end of a school day or school year. We wait for a friend to text us back or return our call. We wait for the coming, inbreaking, Spirit-filled kindom of God.
To be human is to be a creature who waits. And waiting is hard.
In our text for today from the very beginning of the book of the Acts of the Apostles, the author continues the saga first begun in the gospel of Luke. We meet a gathered community of disciples of Jesus, who have been savoring the wonder and mystery of the presence of their friend, resurrected and with them after the horrors of his death.
The risen Jesus has walked with them and conversed with them about the meaning of God’s kingdom, Jesus has broken bread and eaten broiled fish with them. And then Jesus gives them a strange command, an order: “Don’t leave here, don’t leave Jerusalem, but wait here for the promise of God…you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.”
After all of his incredible teaching about liberating the oppressed and loving neighbors and enemies, and his feeding the hungry, after his healings restoring people to community and mobility and sight, after his death and resurrection, and the miraculous togetherness they now share… he now just tells them to stay and wait.
The disciples seemed to have hoped for something bigger and better, something more immediate. They ask Jesus, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”
The disciples are still imagining the overthrow of the Roman occupiers – that now it might finally happen – and the kingdom of Israel in all political, military, and religious power might be restored, with Jesus as its king. Jesus doesn’t rebuke them but Jesus also doesn’t address them directly. Instead Jesus shifts the direction of the disciples’ hope.
Jesus invites them to wait with a different kind of imagination, to wait with an openness to a different kind of holy power.
Waiting for the promise of God, waiting for the coming of the Holy Spirit, says Jesus, means releasing our grasp of the timing of God’s work and reorienting our expectations of what God’s kindom looks like. For our daily work of waiting to be holy, Jesus invites us to wait for God’s promise that is beyond our ability to comprehend.
Timing is the first element of waiting for God’s promise that is beyond us. Jesus models this kind of humility and openness to the mystery of the unfolding of God’s purposes, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set up by his own authority,” he tells his disciples.
Yet trusting God to hold the future, does not mean that waiting means throwing up our hands in the present. Jesus demonstrated throughout his ministry how to live with deep gratitude to God for the daily gifts that sustain us. He teaches us not to pray for sustenance for tomorrow or next year, but to “give us this day our daily bread.”
Jesus, in his teaching and life, held together the call to do justice, live abundantly out of gratitude – not someday, but today – yet also to live by the light of the inbreaking kingdom of God that is beyond any of our ability to control or fully know.
In the gospel of Mark, Jesus told a parable about this, “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, and they do not know how.” (Mark 4:26-27).
We too “do not know how.” We do not know how it is that God’s goodness and God’s life sprouts forth. To wait in the way of Jesus is to be farmers, gardeners, caretakers of a kingdom of love growing beyond our comprehension. This kind of daily, expectant waiting disrupts not just our sense of time and order but also the geographic and social bounds of where we imagine God to be working.
The disciples were waiting for the restoration of the kingdom of Israel, but Jesus promised that when the Holy Spirit comes upon them – they would be empowered to be witnesses far beyond the limits of their imagination.
Jerusalem, that made sense to the disciples, they were already there… Judea, they could understand, it was the surrounding region… and while bearing witness to God’s goodness in Samaria was a bit of a stretch, given the historic troubling reputation of those northerners, it was still conceivable…. But to be witnesses unto the ends of the earth, to people of strange languages, to Syria and Turkey and Rome and Spain and beyond – how do you imagine, prepare for and wait for that kind of promise?
With these parting words, that the disciples were to wait for the promise of God and that they would be Spirit-empowered witnesses to Jesus, Jesus departs from earth – carried up toward heaven in a cloud. The disciples stand stunned, squinting upward in shock.
And when humans are most startled and disoriented, this is when angels seem to appear. In our story, two dazzling figures ask them, “Galileans, why are you standing looking up toward heaven? Jesus will come back the same way you saw him go up into heaven.”
The implication being – trust that Jesus will come back – and get on with your lives. Don’t stand here giving yourself a neck-ache, immobilized by your unknowing. Waiting for the promise of God returns us to the mundane and ordinary, trusting that God’s love is present, working, even here, even today, especially today.1
The early community of folks following Jesus, got back to the work of gathering, praying, and then the task of discerning how to fill the leadership role left by Judas. This is how they waited for the promise of God and prepared for the unthinkable breath and wind and fire and power of Pentecost.
Our church, like the early community surrounding Jesus, is held together not by our ability to gather or pray or fill roles… we are held together and sustained by the loving presence of Jesus in our midst and the surprising arrival of the Spirit when we least expect it. Our call is to wait and to welcome the Holy whenever and wherever and in whomever it comes. We wait for the Spirit to bring about the good news of God’s love and life.
And because the Spirit is beyond our control, and the bounds of Christ’s kindom beyond our Knowing, and the Love of God broader than our imagination – we are called to wait, and to let the everyday work of waiting become our practice of prayer.
Like the first early community of Jesus followers – we do not know with any kind of certainty when and where and how the Spirit will descend, but we cling to the promise of God’s love and choose to embrace Jesus’ command to wait as an invitation to an active life of faithfulness and presence wherever we find ourselves.
My waiting these days looks like waiting for an email reply, or the diapers to dry, the beans for supper to finish cooking, or a word of good news to come, trusting that in all this work of waiting, Jesus is present, waiting to be known too.
Each of you has your own small moments of daily waiting – waiting in your car at a stoplight, headed to work or picking up and dropping off kiddos at activities, or waiting to fall asleep with thoughts racing through your head, or waiting for your garden to grow or waiting for a friend to reach back out.
And in all our small individual acts of waiting and in all the collective waiting we do as a church…we cling to the persistent promise of God that Jesus has not disappeared but has been exalted, the promise that the love of God has indeed been poured out on all flesh and that Spirit is still on the loose and active in the world and that this Spirit empowers us in our waiting, to be everyday witnesses to the great love of God in Christ.
- I was inspired this week to give attention to the ordinary, daily practices of awareness of God’s love as I read Kathleen Norris’ The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and “Women’s Work”, (New York: Paulist Press, 1998). ↩︎