Fifth Sunday after Pentecost (sermon text)
Scriptures: 2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27, Psalm 130, 2 Corinthians 8:7-15, Mark 5:21-43
Sermon text:
The English author, John Milton, began to lose his eyesight at a young age, and by his mid-40s he was utterly blind. He did not give up writing, but instead began to dictate his works to scribes and even family members. In a surprisingly vulnerable, introspective poem for the 17th century, he reflects on his own circumstances, and concludes, “They also serve who only stand and wait.”
[Pause.]
Well, I’m standing and waiting, but I don’t feel like I’m serving.
Though I’m poking fun at Milton’s words, I think he’s absolutely right, and I hope that will become clear in a few moments. My goal was for us to experience impatience, and I think that got us there.
I had considered having a little contest between the children’s sermon and now, to see who could wait longer. I was going to call it a “wait-off,” and see who could go longer without breaking the silence, but I wasn’t sure we’d have the patience for it.
Nobody likes to wait.
It’s worth mentioning that silence itself can be a true gift: it can redirect our attention to unattended needs; it can make a space for healing; in a world full of noise and distraction, it can draw our focus to the holy. Silence deserves a place in our lives, individually and corporately.
Waiting, though. It’s different, isn’t it? If I asked for a show of hands, I’d imagine that not many people enjoy waiting in line, especially compared to the number of people who absolutely hate waiting in line. And my sense is that, as a society, we’re getting worse at waiting.
At seminary, there was this one professor who always seemed to talk around the point he was making, and who’d fill up hours of our limited class time with his own observations that rarely seemed to relate to the class material. The subject was a critical one to us, as pastors-in-formation, so we students had plenty of questions, but by midterm, most of us had stopped asking, because the answers drifted further and further away from the topic.
This professor also happened to be part of a committee that determined my readiness to serve as a pastor. During my final panel interview with this committee, he gave me his approval, but he had an observation that, had we been standing, would have brought me to my knees.
“Will,” he said, “sometimes I sense impatience from you.” What I wanted to say was, “Well sure! I disagree with your teaching style on a fundamental level. Why don’t you lecture about your subject instead of whatever happens to be on your mind?”
But this wasn’t really a time for me to respond. His words hadn’t been an attack, but even if they had been, they were true. By the grace of God, my embarrassment and humiliation at his statement turned into the most valuable lesson he could have given me: a conviction. A chance to reflect.
Would you have tolerated a “wait-off” at the beginning of this sermon time? Even if so, I’m not a qualified referee.
Why does God make us wait? Moving past the inconveniences of waiting in line or of boring lectures, sometimes we wait months, years, entire lifetimes for release from life’s challenges, and from suffering. Within this community of faith, we wait for repairs to our sanctuary, eager to worship God in the familiar setting we chose to call our “church home.” We wait through a pandemic, a time full of uncertainties and of changes we would not have chosen for ourselves. We might wait on a diagnosis, that itself could be the beginning of another period of waiting. We watch a friend suffer, joining in their pain when we can’t stop what ails them. We suffer a tragedy, and the time afterwards is marked by starts and stops in our grieving process – itself a period of waiting for the wholeness we didn’t know could fracture, until it did.
In today’s Gospel reading, why did the woman with the mysterious, unhealing flow of blood have to suffer for so many years before meeting Jesus? Why did the local synagogue leader, Jairus, have to wait for Jesus to heal this outcaste, nameless stranger, while death knocked at the door to his own home? Even if Jesus raised her, why did his daughter have to suffer death at all?
What hope did the woman, what hope did the synagogue leader, what hope did the daughter have?
In the scriptures that we call the Old Testament, hope and waiting are almost the same idea. The psalms are full of this image; today’s psalm even repeats it! Verse 5, “I wait for the LORD, my soul waits, and in his word I hope.” Verse 6, “my soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning.” The prophetic books, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, all express this same idea.
Hoping in God and waiting on God. The New Testament is also full of this idea, but it uses such familiar language that we risk missing it. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, today’s epistle, verses 8-11. Paul tells these early Christians that their time of waiting has been fruitful, saying, “Hey, you have the resources to share with your fellow Christians in Jerusalem, and as you grow in faith, you say that you have the desire to help others; now it’s time to take the next step, and do something.”
Because waiting on God doesn’t mean to wait in isolation, and it is often not a passive time. In the Old Testament, the relationship between waiting and hoping is not magical or mysterious; waiting is transformative, because God is still present in the suffering, in the silence, still at work in our lives when we feel distant and abandoned or when we feel wealthy and complacent.
The waiting hope of the bleeding woman was not a creedal statement or an announcement of Jesus’ godhood; it was a desperate reach for the cloak of a stranger who just might be able to help. Jesus’ words to her are, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.” The waiting hope the Corinthians had was immature, but ready for fruition.
Though we only have two of his frustrated letters to the people of Corinth, Paul wrote as many as four, and his apostolic successors continued to preach tough love to this ancient, troubled community. Talk about waiting on others in hope. Another of Paul’s undisputed letters, to the people of Thessalonica, takes a different tone. Paraphrasing 1 Thessalonians 4, “Christ will care for your loved ones who have gone before you to God. Like Jesus, they have died, but thanks to Christ, while we mourn, we mourn with hope, because in the resurrection, we will meet them again.”
It struck me as I was preparing this sermon that I’d be delivering it on the fifth anniversary of my father’s death. Today is also the third birthday of my son. Like the stories in today’s Gospel reading, and like Paul’s pastoral word to the Thessalonians, these are stories about life. Life lived in the fullness of God’s promise, not on our human time but in God’s holy time, apart from our human hopes and fears, and with the hope of reunion in the resurrection, living fully as we may into the bounty God provides to share.
Where the church or society have taught us to call “faith” answers, creeds, and certainty, God forgive us, and God help us to see faith where the Gospels reveal it to be, including in uncertainty, in places of pain and fear and desperation, of immaturity and growth, even in times of waiting, whether it lasts for an impossible hour or a lifetime.
When we wait, God help us to do so with hope, aware of the needs of those around us who wait with no hope. God strengthen our witness in word in action to the Good News that gives us this hope: the story and real presence of Christ Jesus.
We are on God’s time. Thanks be to God.
-Pastor Will Bevins