waiting as a mark of discipleship

The following is part of the rough draft for this afternoon's sermon. I never got to finish it as a written sermon, but am offering what I have here in case it can be helpful.

What does it mean to a people who wait? I am going back two weeks to the epistle reading from 1 Thess 1.9-10 that we missed, but that I alluded to last week: Paul writes, “For the people of those regions report about us what kind of welcome we had among you, and how you turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead—Jesus, who rescues us from the wrath that is coming.” Waiting is a theme of the Bible, repeated especially throughout the book of Psalms as an appropriate disposition one ought to have toward the Lord. Psalm 27.13- 14:

I believe that I shall see the goodness of the LORD
In the land of the living.
Wait for the LORD;
Be strong, and let your heart take courage;
Wait for the LORD.

Or Psalm 43 from today’s reading:

Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.

Hope in God. Wait upon the Lord. Wait for his Son from heaven. This attitude of waiting has been criticized in the people of God as a motivation for inaction. Christians, it is said, are a people who wait for their “pie in the sky, by and by…” We sit on our hands while people suffer around us. We wait for heaven, rather than trying to bring a little bit of heaven to earth. I especially hear a version of this when people criticize our stance of non-violence, as if our unwillingness to bear arms against our enemies were somehow a failure to take seriously a responsibility to do everything we can to make sure that good triumphs over evil.

On the other hand, there are countless Christians who have decided that waiting really has nothing to do with how we live in this world, and are impatiently trying to gain as much power in Washington as possible in order to create a Judeo-Christian nation. For these Christians waiting is entirely spiritualized. So, on the one hand we have those for whom waiting means doing nothing, and on the other hand there are those for whom waiting in no way limits an aggressive attempt to gain power to change the course of the world (even though, presumably, their theology teaches that things will get worse and worse until Jesus returns). At several points in our nation’s history the Christian assumption was that the things would actually get better and better and the Millennium would be ushered in through the hard work of either evangelists or those working for a progressive notion of social justice. A Civil War, two world wars, and Vietnam put a decisive end to most of these Christian movements.

So, does waiting mean sitting around on our hands, or does it mean actively pursuing power to change the world? Or something else entirely? I will suggest that it means something else entirely.

Let me give an example from history that might help clarify what I am saying. In the early history of the church the Roman emperor Constantine I decisively ended the brutal oppression of Christians and led the way for Christianity to be the official religion of the Empire. For many Christians this represented what they had been waiting for. The emperor becomes Christian and the Empire soon follows. And yet, this is very different from the Thessalonian church being praised for their willingness to wait for God’s Son from heaven. Constantine was not God’s Son. And the subsequent history of the church after Constantine ought to make us question what sort of victory was really won when the Empire became Christian. The emperor is not the Messiah, nor is the President. Yet this hope is alive and well today. I heard a young woman interviewed this week who was eagerly waiting for Sarah Palin to run for president in eight years. Christians, especially in light of history since Constantine, should not be looking to national politics or to any state for a savior. This is what I take waiting for the Son of God to mean. It may mean other things, but it at least means this.

But how do we describe our waiting? I would differentiate between living faithfully while waiting, and an impatience that seeks power so that waiting is unnecessary. As Christians we do not take the power to determine the outcome of history into our own hands, rather we live faithfully in the meantime—seeking justice, peace, mercy, and hope—while rejecting the tools of power that would coerce those ends. And so the rejection of violence is justified by this just to the extent that violence represents an unwillingness to wait upon the Lord. I can picture the Thessalonian church in their faithfulness, caring for the sick and the poor, bringing equality between differing groups to realization in their fellowships, advocating on behalf of the abused, but trusting on the Lord for the outcome of their actions and hopes....

By being a community that is willing to wait, that is willing to reject the coercive means of control offered to us, we bear witness to the Lord who will come, and we might even convince a few that He is the living and true God who has already come....