Waiting in Darkness

The Second Sunday in Lent
Psalm 27
Genesis 15:1-17
Luke 13:31-35

We are no strangers to waiting, you and I. Our very existence consists of waiting for incalculable events to happen; some mundane, some extraordinarily significant. We wait, sometimes patiently, when the stakes aren’t too high, sometimes pacing the floor, wringing our hands when it is a matter of life and death. We wait, for the weather to change, or for the doctor’s reports to come back. We wait for 5:00 to roll around so that we can get on with our lives in the ways that we want, or we wait to have enough vacation time and money saved up so that we can just get away, or we wait to have enough years in so that we can retire. We wait for our children to sleep through the night, to graduate from diapers, to get out of school, and then we wait for them to come home again. We wait for morning to come during the long nights following the loss of a loved one. We wait for the pain to stop, or the healing to begin or the medication to take effect, or the numbness of our souls to be taken away. In school we wait for teachers to stop teaching, and in church we wait for preachers to stop preaching. (You’re doing it right now.) We are experts in waiting, you and I.
Not that we’re all that good at it. We complain about it to anyone who will listen. We huff and puff when we see a line at the DMV. We complain to the managers when our food takes too long to find its way to our tables. We tap our watches when the preacher has belabored the point. We are experts at waiting, you and I, reluctant experts.
In other words, we take after old Father Abraham. Abraham was a reluctant expert in waiting. It seems that he spent most of his life waiting for one thing or another. What’s worse, most of his waiting was God-initiated. Throughout the ides of the book of Genesis, we get a story of God promising Abraham one thing or another, Abraham doing his part, and then God, seemingly toying with Abraham, making him wait for the promise to come to fruition. The first picture we get of Abraham is him leaving his country and kin to go to a land that God will show him, for God is going to make Abraham “the father of many nations.” So Abraham does. And he waits. And he waits. And he waits. Finally, he stumbles on some land, his nephew, Lot, takes the better portion, and Abraham is left tending his flock and his wife on a barren patch of desert. So there, he waits. For years, eons, Abraham waits for God to follow through, to finish the promise. There, on a dusty patch of desert with no children, Abraham refuses to budge. Perhaps faithfully, piously at first. But by the time we get to the 15th chapter of Genesis, Abraham is belligerently waiting, almost daring God not to follow through.
God does shows up again, “some time later,” as the story goes. God almost seems flippant, “Don’t be afraid, Abram, I’m gong to give you a great reward.” Abraham, sitting in the middle of a barren promise tells God how it is. “What good is a reward from you? You still have not given me a child like you said you would. So any reward that I get will die with me, and you’ve made me wait so long that my death is not far off. No more deals,” says Abraham.
And then the strangest thing happens. God leads Abraham outside, into the dark, and tells him to look up at the stars, to remember the promise, the promise that God will be Abraham’s God, and Abraham will be God’s special one, chosen to father many nations. God reminds Abraham that he is invited to partake in the divine life. And then, almost as quickly as God came, God leaves. God leaves Abraham in the dark, waiting all over again. “A deep and terrifying darkness” comes over Abraham, we are told, as he sits in the dark and contemplates his future. I’m sure that it was dark, and I’m sure that it was terrifying, but I’m willing to bet that the darkest, most terrifying realization that father Abraham came to that long dark night of the soul was this: An invitation to the Divine life is an invitation to wait.
Which is tough for us. As I said, we’re not that good at this waiting thing. We want everything now, quick, easy. Maybe that’s why the fastest growing expression of the faith today is the one that promises that life with God is having everything now…wealth, health, happiness. There is a trend in American religion today that seeks to join us to a god who wants to offer us everything our hearts desire in exchange for faith. Just believe, and you’ll get all you want...”Your best life now!” I understand why that’s so appealing. I’m just not sure that such a faith ushers us into a life with the God of Abraham.
The God of Abraham is a waiting God: “Patient, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love”. Our Gospel reading this morning tells us as much. Jesus, looking over the city of Jerusalem and contemplating the hellacious death that he is about to undergo laments, like a mother lamenting the loss of her child. “How I have longed to gather you under my wings like a mother hen gathers her chicks,” says Jesus. How long have I waited for you to turn to me, to stop your violent, self-centered ways and live the life that I created you for, says God. How long have I waited for you, longed for you, yearned for you to turn your hearts to me and live!
Waiting, Jesus says, is something God has done much longer than we have. God has been waiting on us to be the people we were created to be since the beginning of time. Waiting for Adam and Eve to be faithful. Waiting on Israel to listen to the prophets, turn from their ways and love God as much as God loves them. Waiting on the people to listen to John the Baptist’s message. Waiting on the disciples to follow Christ. Waiting on the Gentiles to listen to Paul. Waiting for the Church to be a peaceful alternative to the violence of the world. Waiting on you and me to live into our baptismal vows. Before you and I were waiting for God, God was waiting for us. It seems that God is a waiting God. And if we are to join into the Divine life, the life of God, we are to join a life of waiting.
So we sit, with Father Abraham, and we wait: especially during the season of Lent. We sit in the dusty, barren world and we wait for God to come through. In this broken mess that we have created, in this world torn apart by wars that we claim are inevitable, by racism that we say is natural, by economic injustice that we say is fair, we sit during Lent and we dare God to fulfill God’s promises to us. We dare to sit in the dark, scary existence of this mortal life and wait. We wait for God to come through with this business of resurrection, of healing, of a New Heaven and a New Earth. We sit and we wait, allowing our empty stomachs and heavy eyes to be embodied prayers, daring God to come and fill us with the deep yearning of our spirits, to offer us the rest that we have been promised. We sit and we wait in this dark and scary place. Though the buzzards of fear and doubt and disbelief swoop upon us preying on our exposed and vulnerable faith, we dare to wait.
And as we do, our eyes adjust to the darkness. As we walk farther and deeper along this 40 day long road of wait, the pupils of our faith grow until they, straining to capture the least glint of light, begin to make out the shape of the One standing there...no, hanging there in the dark of Good Friday. There, in the middle of hell on earth, the embodied culmination of the darkest corners of our own souls, fears and doubts, we begin to see that even there, God is. We travel this ever darkening Lenten path, waiting on God to deliver us from our misery, only to stumble our way to the foot of the dark, bloody cross and realize that God is there, muttering from the midst of our pain, “I’ve been waiting for you.”

The Place Where God Lives

Transfiguration Sunday
Last Sunday of Epiphany
Methodist Home for Children Sunday
Luke 9:28-36
Genesis 1:1-5

If you have ever overbooked yourself, spread yourself too thin, tried to be in more than one place at once, then you can sympathize with the church this Sunday. If you have ever looked at your calendar only to have your stomach sink as you realize that you are going to have to disappoint someone with whom you have made plans, tell someone that you simply can’t make it, scramble to re-shift your plans, then you know the predicament in which the church finds itself today. The church, this Sunday, has done just that. If you look at the church calendar today, there are three major appointments that we have made. It seems that we have overbooked ourselves.
To start, today is the last Sunday of Epiphany. This day, we are to take our final glimpse of the surprising God who shows up in the most unexpected places, like in a manger, surrounded by an unwed teenage mother, donkeys and Gentile wise men. Secondly, today is also Transfiguration Sunday, the day that we are supposed to read about Jesus going up top of the mountain with his three favorite disciples. You know the story, while on the mountain, Jesus’ face is suddenly changed to glowing, and there with him are Elijah and Moses, and a voice from the clouds saying, “This is my son, the chosen one, listen to him.” Finally, on our calendar we see that within the life of our conference, it is Methodist Home for Children Sunday. Today, we are supposed to focus on the work of God in that place, with those children and those families. It seems that we have overbooked ourselves.
Ultimately, the last appointment on our calendar today is what brings me into your midst today. I am here on behalf of Methodist Home for Children. But I’m not ready to throw aside our former appointments just yet.
In our Gospel reading today, we hear the story of the Transfiguration. We, along with churches around the world are listening to this story today. This odd story of Jesus trekking up the side of a mountain to pray with his closest friends. Suddenly, while on the mountainside, he changed. There’s really no other way to explain it. He just changed. Luke says that suddenly, his face changed, and his clothes, too. They were white, dazzling, brilliant. Then, out of nowhere, Elijah and Moses are standing there, chatting with Jesus about what is about to happen to him. Moses and Elijah, the writer of the Law and the chief prophet, dead for generations are standing there conversing with Jesus. Finally, just when the story seems to have reached its apex in mystery, a voice from the clouds…God’s voice from the clouds, booms forth, “This is my son, listen to him.”
With all of this wonder and splendor, with the gathering of Jesus and Elijah and Moses, with Jesus aglow with light, it is easy to be temporarily blinded by the majesty of it all and forget to ask the question that this story begs. What in the world is God doing showing up there?! On a mountain…and not in the temple? With Jesus, a renegade rabbi, instead of with the trained religious leaders? With fishermen, and not religious people? What kind of a God hangs out in barren mountains with poor fishermen and a wanna-be teacher?
Apparently, the God of Jesus Christ. The most telling aspect of the story of the transfiguration is the location and the company therein. The God revealed in Jesus Christ lives in barren places, and with broken people. The God of the Transfiguration shines forth when hurting, and pain and hopelessness are most prevalent. As Jesus stands atop that barren hill and contemplates his hellacious death, God shows up. Or maybe God doesn’t so much show up as Jesus and the Disciples enter the place where God lives. As the rag-tag group of fishermen stood on the barren hill, bracing themselves for suffering unimaginable, suddenly they were standing in the very presence of God. As they followed Christ up the desolate mountainside of despair, they followed Christ into the place where God lives. God lives in places such as this.
We first catch a glimpse of this God making his home in the midst of despair in the opening verses of Genesis. In the beginning, God looked down on the world and saw that there was nothing…a giant void…poverty personified. Our Bibles read that there was “an empty, formless, dark void.” The Hebrew is “tohu-wa-bohu. You don’t have to know Hebrew to know that it is bad. God, standing far off, looking down on the empty, impoverished world, decides to make a home there. God meets the poverty of nothing by creating the most wonderful things…trees, aardvarks and pterodactyls. God keeps creating, meeting the poverty God sees. Soon, God sees that there is a poverty of relationship, so God creates humans to love God and one another and makes a home for Godself there, among the humans. God seems infatuated with burrowing down and making a home for Godself wherever there is poverty.
The rest of the Bible, we see God running around meeting poverty. Poverty of covenant by creating Israel, poverty of hope by raising up the prophets, poverty of our mortality by creating the Incarnation and the resurrection. Throughout scripture, we find out time and time again that when you stumble across poverty of any sort, you are knocking on the door of where God lives.
And it’s always in the most unexpected places, like in a dusty stable, or a desolate mountaintop, or in the Millennium Hotel in Durham. On Saturday, December 10th, my wife and I were driving around, running our usual Saturday morning errands and minding our own business. The radio was scanning along when suddenly it stopped on Sunny 93.9. The DJ said that they were broadcasting live from the Millennium with Methodist Home for Children who were there wrapping presents for kids in our area, and that anyone listening should swing by. Molly, my wife, quickly turned the car into the nearest store parking lot, ran inside bought a toy or two and carted us over to the hotel. I complained the whole way. “Honey, this is my only day off. Can’t you just let me have one day?” She, always the wise one, didn’t listen. We pulled into the hotel, Molly had a package in one hand and me by the other and we climbed the stairs to the third floor ball room. When we got up there…well…chaos is all I can say we saw. Hundreds of people were there, thousands of presents and wrapping paper and bows were everywhere you looked. Elvis was singing on stage and throwing teddy bears out to the crowd to be wrapped and given to a child in need. The only order we saw were kids in red t-shirts. They were everywhere, directing the chaos, helping people wrap gifts, and then stacking the gifts in the corner. I finally saw Bruce Stanley, a friend of mine and the CEO of Methodist Home for Children, and he explained to me that the kids in the red shirts were all residents of Methodist Home for Children. They were there to help the day go off without a hitch. Not so much so that they could have presents, but because they wanted other kids who wouldn’t get anything to have something to open for Christmas.
And there, high atop the Milleneum Hotel, amid the chaos and bustle of people and presents, suddenly everything was changed. Those children with red shirts glowed, bright white. Even their clothes seemed dazzling. There, as we stood with people in poverty, and sought to help meet the poverty of others, we were standing in the place where God lives. And as we stood there, suddenly, the poverty within my own soul was met too. Suddenly, I was transfigured.
That is what this day is about. That is why this day is on our calendar alongside Transfiguration and the Last Sunday of Epiphany. Because they are all in the same place. The Mount of Transfiguration, the last Sunday of Epiphany, Methodist Home for Children…they are all in the same place. They are all where God lives. God lives in those places in our world where hurting and poverty are most prevalent. God lives in those places within our own hearts and souls where we are most broken, most hurting, most impoverished. Like on a barren mountaintop with a renegade rabbi, a vacuous formless void screaming for life, with the children who are cast aside by our society, thrown to the curb because they are too much trouble, they came at the wrong time, they can’t seem to get it together. Wherever those children are, God is.
Today, we are invited into the place where God lives. We are invited to join in that Godly work of meeting the poverty that we see and helping the least and the last of our world. We are invited to give to Methodist Home for Children, for they are in that holy space of poverty, that holy place where God lives among the children with no family, no home. We are invited to join in climbing that mountain of despair and sit alongside those children by giving to the work of that place.
As we do, we like Jesus before us, will shine.

Mainstream Prophets

Jeremiah 1:4-10
Luke 4:21-32

“She just used to be so normal”. One of my parishioners wept as she sat in my office and told me about her daughter’s recent change of character. “We did the best we could to raise her right, we took her to church, she did well in school, she was well liked by all of her friends…you know, she was just a normal girl.” I sat there, passing this sobbing mother Kleenex and bracing myself for the worst. “We paid for her to go to college, and then law school, she was doing so well. And then, in law school she got involved with the immigration issue. We thought, this is great! She is going to put her degree to good use and help keep our country safe. But she didn’t. She started helping these illegal immigrants get healthcare and find ways to get jobs and greencards. Now we just don’t know what to do with her. Instead of having a respectable law practice, she is spending all of her time running around speaking on behalf of these people she doesn’t know and advocating for these people who will never be able to pay her for her work. I mean, I could understand if a foreigner wanted to do that kind of work, you know, for their own people, but not our daughter. She’s never been a radical. She’s unassuming and quiet and usually just blends in. She’s just so normal!”
I sat there thinking, "well, what did you expect?! You took her church." You take a normal kid to church, and somebody along the way is going to read them the story of Jeremiah. If Jeremiah’s story has anything to teach us it is that God has this knack of making prophets out of seemingly normal people. God seems to delight in catching everyone offguard by taking mainstream people who would otherwise blend in, not rock the boat, and making prophets out of them, people who by their very presence re-shape the world around them. People who look for all the world like they should just help perpetuate the culture, who’s normalcy is almost staggering, God takes them and makes world changers out of them.
Like Jeremiah. He was from a normal family of good heritage. His parents had raised him well in the traditions of their faith. He had priestly lineage, priestly training and was well equipped to fit right into the culture. You know, he was just normal. And then, out of nowhere, the word of the Lord comes to him. “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you and before you were born I consecrated you: I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” Jeremiah tries to reject it, say that he’s too normal to do such work. “But I’m just a boy. I’m a dime a dozen. No one is going to listen to me, I’m too normal.” “Exactly,” says God. “You are going to sneak into the world and no one will even notice you are there at first because you look so normal. But I will be with you. And you and I are going to turn the world upside down. See today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build up and to plant.”
The rest of Jeremiah’s life is anything but normal. He goes around telling kings and rulers that God is against them and that they are about to be overthrown because they have made for themselves kingdoms of wealth at the expense of others. He tells priests and religious leaders that their ceremonies and prayers are useless in the sight of God and that as long as the oppressed are ignored and the outsider is rejected. Jeremiah, this used-to-be normal kid, looks the community of faith in the eye and says that as long as they remain inwardly focused, as long as they are more concerned with themselves than they are their neighbor, the widow, the hungry, their religiosity is of no account and God is not with them. With his words, he was tearing down the world in which they lived and building a new reality. This boy was destroying oppression and rebuilding peace. Can you believe Jeremiah?! He used to be so normal!
Jesus’ normality threw the people in our Gospel reading today off, too. Luke tells us as much. It was just another normal Sabbath. The community was gathered together like they always were. Jesus was standing in the synagogue, and reading from the prophet Isaiah, nothing abnormal so far. And then, all of a sudden, Jesus starts talking about the prophet’s words coming to fruition in him. Everyone looks around at each other and are amazed. After all, this is just Mary and Joseph’s boy, they say. We know him, he’s one of us. As they sit there, trying to figure out what Jesus was talking about, God begins to re-shape their world. God had invaded their normality in the seemingly normal looking person of Jesus and now was seeking to tear down their comfortable normality and build up a new reality in their midst. Jesus begins lambasting that group of people for their lack of faith. He calls them to account for mis-reading scripture, for making God their servant instead of the other way around. I’m sure that they would have happily kept Jesus out of the synagogue if they had known what he was about to do in their midst. But how could you tell? He seemed so normal! So harmless. So innocuous. So mainstream.
He seemed almost Methodist! There is no more normal, harmless group of people than us Methodists. If you don’t believe me, go to Annual Conference one year. You enter that room and look around and say, “these people wouldn’t hurt a fly and couldn’t turn a piece of paper upside down.” We Methodists are perhaps the most innocuous group of people ever compiled. We look like the normal population. We think like most people. We live in normal neighborhoods, drive normal cars. We work in normal jobs and live normal lives. We Methodists personify the word “mainstream.”
Which makes us just the sort of people that God delights in using to turn the world upside down. Think about it. Nobody expects the Methodists! We are the last group of people to rock the boat, to challenge the norm, to go against the stream. So, in God’s divine irony, we are in the perfect position to be mainstream prophets. And you know, it happens all the time. If you stay at Annual Conference long enough, you hear the most amazing stories of the world being turned upside down by a bunch of normal Methodists. Stories of thousands of orphans being fed in Zimbawe, while the rest of the world just watches, as though abject poverty is just normal. Stories of racial reconciliation happening in downtown Durham, while the rest of the community is calling for more division, because that, after all, is the norm. Stories of people working for peace and justice, and refusing to accept the war and oppression that we are surrounded by. God taking us normal Methodists and injecting us into the world to change what the world thinks is normal. Mainstream prophets.
I understand that you here at St. Mark’s are discerning where God would have you go and who God would have you be as a church. In other words, you are listening for a word from the Lord. Just, as you go through that process, be warned. You are joining the ranks of some people who had their normality turned on its ear when God’s word came to them. People like Jeremiah, St. Luke, Mother Teresa, that poor lawyer who’s practice was turned upside down. As you wait for a word from the Lord, know that God delights in taking normal, ordinary people just like you and using you to “overturn nations and kingdoms, to destroy normality and build up the Kindom of God.” God just loves reshaping the world with normal folks like you.
Here you are, perched in just a normal church building along Six Forks Road. Singing your normal hymns, going about your normal lives. Watch out. God is sending his word into this place and is determined to make prophets, world changers, out of you. I can almost hear people talking now…”What happened to St. Mark’s? They used to be so normal!”