St. Martin’s Davis 8 AM and 10:00 AM Services The Ven. Margaret M. Grayden
Proper 8B—“Holy Waiting” June 27, 2021
I am so grateful to be able to preach in the sanctuary again. The last time that I preached in here in the presence of others (as opposed to on Zoom) was on March 8, 2020. Do you remember March of 2020? It feels like that was a lifetime ago, like a different world. And in many ways, it was. The first stay-at-home order of the pandemic loomed on the horizon. Public health officials urged us to practice something that they called “social distancing.” Hand sanitizer, disinfecting wipes, and even toilet paper were in short supply. Masks were scarce and reserved for health care workers. There was a lot of fear and uncertainty about the future.
My sermon that day focused on Psalm 121, with its assurance that “The Lord shall watch over your going out and your coming in, from this time forth for evermore.” I referred to the Irish priest and poet John O’Donohue’s book, To Bless the Space Between Us, and noted that in a season in which we needed to avoid forms of physical contact that could spread disease, blessings could create new connections across the physical space between us. Back then, like most people, I hoped that the need for distancing would last a few weeks, or a month or two at most—surely we would be back in the building by Labor Day.
Well, we all know how that turned out. We spent not one but two “Holy Week(s) at Home.” We postponed or drastically modified a long list of life-cycle events. Birthdays, graduations, anniversaries, holidays, weddings, even funerals were dramatically different. And we waited…for so many things.
As the saying goes, hindsight is 20-20. If I had known then what I know now about how long the pandemic would last, about the number and nature of the challenges we would face individually and collectively, I would have talked about “Holy Waiting” as a kind of spiritual practice. By “Holy Waiting,” I mean a waiting that is grounded in faith and in hope, a waiting that puts its trust in God’s never-ending love for us and God’s presence with us through better and through worse, in every moment of our lives. Because, looking back on the last fifteen months, it seems to me that we have all done a lot of waiting. Waiting for clarity from public officials about the nature of the threat posed by the coronavirus and for consistent guidance as to how best to respond to it. Waiting for effective treatments and vaccines, waiting for racial justice and reconciliation, waiting for economic recovery, and perhaps most of all, waiting for some sense of a return to “normal,” whatever “normal” looks like in 2021.
The readings appointed for today also raise themes related to waiting in steadfast hope. Psalm 130 in particular invites us to consider what it means to wait for the Lord in a time of darkness and despair. This psalm of lament is often referred to by its first few words in Latin—“De profundis,” or “out of the depths”—because its author cries out to the Lord from the abyss, the place of deep darkness and suffering. At one point or another in life, most people find themselves in the abyss, though it takes different shapes for each of us. In my own life and ministry, I have found that Psalm 130 has a special resonance for those experiencing the darkness of a physical or mental illness, bereavement, abuse, discrimination, or grinding poverty.
The psalmist continues, “I wait for the Lord; my soul waits for him; in his word is my hope.” In the original Hebrew, the word usually translated as “wait”—qavah (“kawvah”)—can also be rendered as “hope.” So this waiting is a hopeful waiting, the kind of waiting done by watchmen who spend the night guarding a city against intruders, waiting eagerly in the darkness for the dawn that will bring the end of their shift, knowing that the dawn will surely come. As Christians, we know that the Lord too will surely come. We see this same kind of “expectant hope”—a persistent, stubborn hope grounded in faith—in both of the healings in today’s Gospel reading. Jairus continues to trust that Jesus will heal his daughter, even after the crowd tells him that his daughter has died. The woman who has hemorrhaged for 12 years continues to trust that simply touching the hem of Jesus’ cloak will heal her.
Waiting is not a one-size-fits-all kind of experience; it comes in different flavors. There’s the waiting that is a relatively low-stakes, no-big-deal kind of waiting—the kind where you are basically okay with however things turn out (think of waiting in line for the next checker at a store). Then there’s the kind of waiting that is excruciating, where the stakes are life and death (think of the people who are waiting for news of loved ones still missing in the South Florida condominium that collapsed earlier this week). And there’s the kind of waiting that is just exhausting, the grit-your-teeth and keep-on-keeping-on, enduring kind of waiting captured by the iconic 1970s poster of a wild-eyed cat clinging to a branch by its paws with the caption “Hang in There, Baby.”
Sometimes we are called to endure; sometimes we are called to actively resist and work for change; and sometimes we are called to abide, dwelling for an unknown time in uncertainty, waiting for clarity as to the next right step, remembering in the in-between times that even God feels absent, God does not hide from us. God hears us when we cry out. God is faithful. God is with us in our places of desolation as well as in our places of exultation. Indeed, God’s faithfulness is the consolation that enables us to keep on keeping on as our pandemic journey continues to unfold and we take our next steps toward reentry, reengagement, reconciliation, and recovery.
There’s a beautiful Taizé chant that really speaks to this moment. It is simple, yet profound. It goes like this: “Wait for the Lord, whose day is near. Wait for the Lord, be strong, take heart.” If you find that in this season of your life, you are like that cat in the poster, some days just barely hanging on—if you are weary of the waiting, I invite you to rest in that Taizé chant. Say it as a meditative prayer. Allow it to sink into your bones, into your very soul. “Be strong, take heart.”
AMEN
