Prayerful Waiting

Celebrating Holy Eucharist in the Judean Wilderness

The season of Lent—those forty days before Easter—is about way more than trying not to say “alleluia” or giving up chocolate. This past Lent we gave up our church buildings, a fast that has continued through the Easter season. Many people who have been sitting in the same pew or preaching from the same pulpit for many years and even decades have experienced tremendous loss and dislocation. 

Even so, this past Lent (like all that came before it and the ones that lie ahead) was an invitation to prepare for the new life that the risen and victorious Jesus offers to us. It’s a time to get ready by taking a spiritual inventory of our lives and then making whatever amends and course corrections that will get us to turn (and re-turn) to God.

But Lent also gives us a vital metaphor for the journey of faith: we journey into the wilderness. We head into the desert for forty days. Why? Because the Gospels tell us that after his Baptism in the Jordan River, Jesus went out into the Judean wilderness to be tempted by Satan for forty days. And why did he do that? Because his own people, God’s own people, had spent forty years in the Sinai Desert as they journeyed from slavery to freedom. This metaphor connects us with important aspects of the spiritual life, and gives us a window through which to see our own lives, because sometimes we may find ourselves in the desert. Sometimes life is really hard. Sometimes we find ourselves in the midst of trials and tribulations, sorting through loss and grief. This is simply a part of life’s journey.

If you read the Torah, especially Exodus and Numbers, you see how hard leadership is in the desert. Moses risks burn-out but when he equips others, he also loses control. The people do a lot of grumbling, and they blame Moses. And God. They remember (incorrectly) how great it was to be slaves in Egypt: oh, the melons and the cucumbers.

Lent gives us a way, liturgically, to be assured that when we find ourselves in such places in our own journeys that we can remember that we are not (as it may at first seem) in a godforsaken place. There are dry and uncharted aspects of the journey, to be sure. But even there, God’s blessings and miracles abound. Even there, angels minister to us. Even there, there is manna and water, one day at a time. Even there, God helps us to find the courage and strength to keep putting one foot in front of the other, as we continue to make our way toward the Promised Land. It is a slow and circuitious journey through Sinai, to be sure. But ultimately, as we proclaimed on Easter morning, the Lenten journey leads us to the empty tomb where we dare to make our song. Even at the grave. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

These past forty days or so since then have given us an opportunity (as a Church mostly in pandemic exile) to reflect on the presence of the Risen Christ in our lives. The Easter life we share in Christ’s name binds us together in community, where we experience God-with-us whenever two or three are gathered together in Jesus' name. Even on Zoom. It’s been an Easter season, so far, like none other – and our alleluias have mostly been broken and muted ones. Even so, even now, we make our song. And we trust that Christ is risen indeed and never was confined to our buildings anyway. Alleluia! 

Marking time by liturgical seasons can become silly if we take it too seriously, and sometimes liturgical Christians are literalists not that different from Biblical literalists. But for me this way of marking time, of changing seasons, is a helpful metaphor and lens for living the Christian faith, which is not just one long extended mountaintop experience. Our lives will have seasons that feel like Lent, and seasons that feel like Easter. And of course just ahead is all that “ordinary time."

So, going back to Ash Wednesday, forty days of fasting in the desert and since Easter morning, forty days of feasting as the risen Christ keeps being revealed. But of course there are not just forty days of Easter, but fifty. Forty days into the Easter season (on Thursday) we will mark the Feast of the Ascension. It will still be Eastertide. But the last ten days of Easter will represent a shift. The last ten days are a bit different from the first forty.

As Luke understands the chronology, Jesus goes out to Bethany to say goodbye to the disciples, and then he ascends to the right hand of the Father. Don’t get too stuck on the ancient world’s three-tiered cosmos: the point is that the Risen Christ is no longer so obviously among the disciples breaking the bread and eating fish. Next weekend we’ll celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit, on the fiftieth day, the Feast of Pentecost.

How might we describe these last ten days of the Easter season, this time between Ascension and Pentecost? I want to suggest that it is a time of waiting. It is about letting go of Jesus, even as we pray for the coming of the Holy Spirit. Our collect today suggests some level of anxiety, because an uncertain future always brings with it some anxiety. And so we implored God: “Do not leave us comfortless, but send us your Holy Spirit, to strengthen us, and to exalt us…” As the epistle reading from First Peter puts it, we are invited to “cast all [our] anxiety on [God], because he cares for [us].”

Now I don’t think that Jesus has a calendar in hand, ticking off the days until forty when he goes out to ascend to heaven and then ten days later the Holy Spirit arrives right on schedule. As I said above, liturgical calendars tell a lie in order to reveal a deeper spiritual truth. That deeper spiritual truth is that every day of our lives does not feel like either Lent or Easter. There are also these “in-between” times. And the Sunday after the Ascension, before Pentecost, is one of those times.  Christ has ascended, but the Holy Spirit hasn’t yet shone up. And so we wait. And we pray: Do not leave us comfortless, but send us your Holy Spirit. We do our best to cast our anxiety on God, because we trust that God cares for us.

In Holy Week, I blogged about Holy Saturday as a similar kind of time. I resonate with this right now, as perhaps you do as well. I also commend to you a superb reflection recently shared by Brother Curtis Almquist, SSJE, which you can read here. Brother Curtis reminds us that...

...the English word “patience,” comes from the Latin patientia which is a “quality of suffering.” And suffering you are as you wait patiently, hopefully, sometimes desperately for a resolution. Patience also means dependence, exposure, being no longer in control of your own situation, being the object of what is done. Living life patiently is very difficult to do.

I find myself reflecting on some of the waiting times in my own life. Some of them even seem to find their way into my dream life lately.

¨      I remember waiting for the first day of school with a mixture of hope and fear? Every year but especially the first day of elementary school, or of high school, or of college. I can also remember, perhaps more appropriate at this time of the year, counting off the days until the last day of school, waiting for summer vacation to begin and longing for wiffle-ball and sand castles and long bike rides and kick-the-can.

¨      I remember waiting after graduating from Wallenpaupack Area High School almost forty years ago, with that same mixture of hope and fear I felt in elementary school as I thought about moving from a small town to attend college in a big city: saying goodbyes to friends I’d known my whole life and wondering what my life would be like apart from the life I’d known forever. Waiting for that next chapter to begin and wondering, and trying to let God carry my anxiety.

¨      I can remember waiting for my wedding day, and waiting for each of my two kids to be born and counting the days. Graham came earlier than expected and James arrived later than expected but both came into the world in their own way, on their own timetables: a good reminder to parents that we are not in charge.

¨      I remember waiting to hear about each job I’ve held and the ones where I was not their first choice, as Hathy and I waited for the search committee to decide, to make a decision, even if it was no; and praying it would be yes.

¨      I have been at enough bedsides to know that there is also another kind of waiting: waiting for death.  I pray that like my old pal, St. Francis, that when death comes for me it will come like a sister or brother, like a friend who is not to be feared. But these days of COVID-19 put all of that up for grabs.

There are times of waiting in every season of our lives. I imagine these last ten days of Eastertide as something like some of these other “waiting times:” a time of expectation; a time filled with no small amount of anxiety and fear about what comes next. A time of waiting that, as Brother Curtis puts it, is so difficult, and yet so promising. 

Cast all your anxiety on God, because God cares for you.

We worry (or at least I do) through seasons of transition that life will not go on. That somehow we will never be comforted. Change can be scary. But I’ve become convinced it is less change itself and more the loss that makes us anxious. Change is about letting go and letting God. But in the midst of all of that powerlessness (and learning to let God be God) it can be pretty scary.   

Notice what the disciples do in our reading from Acts after Jesus leaves at Bethany: they went back to Jerusalem, to the room upstairs. The Upper Room. Peter and James and John and Andrew and Philip and Thomas and Bartholomew and Matthew and James and Simon and Judas and some certain women. (Luke doesn’t seem to remember all of their names, or maybe he doesn’t think their names are important enough to list; except of course Mary, the Mother of Jesus.) They devoted themselves, constantly, to prayer.

They prayed and they waited. We can do that. We need to do that right now, in this time of waiting. In this time of transition. In this time when it is unclear what the future will bring. The liturgical calendar is not an end in itself. It’s a guide that helps us to reflect on the journey of faith. It helps us to reflect on how God is at work in our lives and the life of the Church and the life of this world. May these last ten days of the Easter season, this time between Ascension Day and the Spirit’s arrival on Pentecost, be a time for us of prayerful waiting.

We try to wait with wide-open eyes and with ears that hear. We wait for God to send that Spirit of Comfort, the Counselor, the One who will lead us through all seasons of change toward deeper truths and new insights: that Spirit who gives us strength and courage for facing whatever challenges may come our way. In order to embrace the new we have to learn to let go of the old. We have to navigate our way to a new “normal.” By God’s grace, in part what times of waiting can teach us is that God is always about doing new things. And that God will never leave us comfortless.

What we pray for, as we mature in faith, is not that everything will stay the same, but rather, that our times of waiting will lead us to new places and to new insights and new possibilities. Those, I think, are gifts the Holy Spirit brings—whether She comes like a mighty wind or as a gentle breath.

Come, Holy Spirit…breathe on us, breath of God…and fill us with life anew.

Do not leave us comfortless. Come and empower us for the work of ministry. Come and renew us, and renew the face of the earth. In the meantime, help us to wait: sometimes expectantly and patiently, sometimes pacing back and forth with our blood pressure rising. But always trying, with God’s help, to more and more put our trust in You, the One who has created us from the earth, in You, the One who has redeemed us through Jesus Christ, in You, the One who sustains us through Her very own breath. Amen.