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Waiting Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis July 11, 2010, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Isaiah 30:18-26 Romans 8:18-27
Jordon of Saxony, a 13th century Dominican priest of the Order of Preachers, once remarked, “I hardly ever pray.” He was known as a man of prayer, a reputation many of us have who have given our lives to the proclamation of the gospel. For me and apparently for Jordon of Saxony, the reputation is somewhat unwarranted. Once faced with various options on an anonymous survey about the spiritual practices of clergy, I boldly checked “hardly ever pray” when asked about my private religious habits. At the time, my unsigned admission seemed daring, a multiple choice confession sealed and destined for the anonymity of a statistical report. First let me rush to qualify this jarring declaration. I do pray. I pray daily before I excuse myself from a hospital room, nightly at endless church meetings, periodically at the dinner table when asked, and Sunday mornings with as much honesty as I can muster. In these moments my mind leaps, suspended in mid-thought by a great trust. My knees also shake. For who am I, I think, to utter words on behalf of another to God? Still, in these moments I believe God is near to those who cry out, hears when beseeched to accompany this one through the valley of the shadow of death and another through a divorce, or to lead us all in the doing of something brave. I am all praise before the prospect of another day, and awash with thanksgiving at its end. Pray for me, people say, and I do. I just do not do well on my own for myself, cannot find the words before I lay me down to sleep, feel disingenuous, unworthy, self-conscious, tongue-tied. I mention this because I suspect I am not alone. Moreover, I try to imagine what people with disciplined prayer lives mean when they talk about an experience of God’s presence. Is it light, a feeling of warmth, a stirring in the air, a voice? I do not doubt their reports--though that is not completely true. I do dismiss the audacious claims made by true believers who alone hear God’s audible address above the murmurs of some madding crowd. I find it no coincidence that the word they hear mostly announces God’s approbation of their somewhat cranky worldview. Claims from the seriously religious I do dismiss, while the humble and astonished wonderment of one visited by a presence in extremis, a presence that corresponds roughly to the God revealed in scripture, I find literally breath-taking. Here is no practiced spiritual art or dogmatic observance, but the report of a God whose visitations are unimaginable, unexpected and unmerited. To repeat, I believe God is present to those who “call upon Him in truth.” Except once again, to be uncharacteristically personal in the pulpit, I hardly ever call. I hardly ever talk with God by myself for myself in the dark. I hardly ever pray, if prayer is words I say to God on my own behalf. When with the psalmist I sink in the deep mire where there is no foothold, when I come into deep waters and the flood sweeps over me, when I am weary with my crying and my throat is parched and my eyes grow dim with waiting for my God, when I am in extremis myself, I am literally speech-less. Perhaps this is why I was heartened to read this week that the “central Jewish declaration of faith is not ‘I believe,’ but ‘Hear, O Israel.’ The focus is on the ears and not the lips—on listening and not speaking,” writes Barbara Brown Taylor. So at the beginning of a summer of Sundays on the subject of prayer, we begin as creatures who are mute before the Creator of the heavens and the earth: begin with listening, with waiting, with silence. How are we to pray? We are to pray with an awful apprehension of the majesty of God…. This is not easy for some. “Even now,” says Barbara Brown Taylor, “Christians have trouble listening to God. Many of us prefer to speak. Our corporate prayers are punctuated with phrases such as ‘Hear us, Lord’ or ‘Lord, hear our prayer,’ as if the burden to listen were on God and not us. We name our concerns, giving God suggestions on what to do about them. What reversal of power might occur,” she asks, “if we turned the process around,” saying simply with those of old, “Speak, Lord, for your servants are listening”? But listening how and for what or to whom? The unexamined assumption would be that listening rightly leads to hearing God’s address. Techniques abound. Spiritual directors flourish. Bookshelves are lined with guides such as The Art of Listening Prayer, for which you will need a Bible, a journal, two colored pens, a private room and forty-five minutes every day. The examined assumption, requiring of us a leap and a letting go, is that we have been given a word; that we have been addressed by the God of Abraham and Sarah, of Isaac and Rebekah, of Jacob and Rachael through the words of Scripture, the community called out by God’s Word from the beginning, and in the person of Jesus Christ. If prayer is, in some sense, listening, then our listening begins with the words which have gathered men and women and children for almost three thousand years. Together we tell the story and listen for God’s Word. Here I can only liken our listening to the image of Jacob wrestling in the silence and the deep darkness of the night for the name of the stranger who has come upon him. He is at the stranger’s mercy, as are we, because hearing God’s address in Scripture, in the community of faith, even in the Word that has become flesh, is humanly impossible, according to Paul. “We do not know how to pray as we ought,” he says. But if, in the night, we should have dealings with this stranger at all, “We talk to somebody who is not somebody else, but who is nearer to us than we ourselves are. We address somebody who can never become an object of our address because [this somebody] is always subject, always acting, always creating,” writes Paul Tillich of the Apostle Paul’s words in the eighth of Romans. Sometimes on a Wednesday morning or evening, as a dozen of us roll up our sleeves, open our Bibles and begin to wrestle the words on the page to the ground for the blessing of understanding, sometimes to our surprise the Spirit does intercede, unstopping our ears through something as ordinary as a footnote in Dolores Edwards’ study Bible or a curious translation of the Greek in John Armbruster’s ancient, yellowed text or an anecdote from Jean Elliot prompted by a story in the Book of Acts. The effect is to silence our preconceived notions, to astonish our jaded imaginations, to awaken our slumbering minds until, with one accord, we listen anew for a word not our own. I think this is some of what Paul means when he speaks of prayer as the Spirit interceding for us with sighs too deep for words. The Spirit’s intercession is our hope for a holy conversation, says Tillich, “Just because every prayer is humanly impossible, just because it brings deeper levels of our being before God than the level of consciousness, something happens in it that cannot be expressed in words. Words created by and used in our conscious life, are not the essence of prayer….Only in terms of wordless sighs can we approach God, and even these wordless sighs are [God’s] work in us.” God alone, God in three persons, the conversation that is God is the “how” of our listening. In the second place, there is an element of expectation in our listening that is best described as waiting. Waiting presumes not having, not seeing, not knowing and not grasping. It presumes a God whose face is hidden from us by our sin and whose mercy we forget in the blindness of our hearts. It presumes the God whose presence is paradoxically known in absence. But it also presumes, for any who once have heard God’s address in Jesus Christ, an eager longing, a waiting for the realm we have glimpsed in him, the place in God he has prepared for us and those we love, the eternity where all tears shall be wiped away and there shall be no more pain. Whoever wrote the verses we read this morning from Isaiah was someone whose waiting was awash in hope. Though the bread of adversity and the water of affliction had been Israel’s lot, the prophet waited for the day when God would “bind up the injuries of his people and heal the wounds inflicted by his blow.” Like the prophet, we have waited with those whose names we know and without whose embrace we cannot imagine the world. I think of the vigils I have been privileged to join at the side of a bed as the living breathe together each breath of the dying until the last breath is taken. Together we wait not as those who have no hope. Yet often and most profoundly, we wait without words. We pray. “Waiting is certainly a kind of prayer,” writes Barbara Brown Taylor, then adds, “especially if you can stand howling, wide-open spaces.” She recounts her own experience of waiting between diagnosis and discharge from the hospital when she says she found it “possible to love my life in ways that had never occurred to me before….Waiting, I found speechless intimacy with other people who were living in such wide-open spaces themselves. We lived in a whole different world from those who thought they were fine. We could spend fifteen minutes admiring a rose, a whole hour enjoying a meal. Even if my news had stayed bad instead of getting better,” she says, “I like to think that these simple pleasures would not have lost their power to console me. They constituted an answer to my prayer for more life, even if that life turned out to be shorter than the one I thought I wanted.” We listen. We wait. But still there is the silence—not only our silence, but the silence of the God who “waits to be gracious to you,” says the prophet. “Blessed are those who wait for him.” In the dark, every night, I listen and wait. I do not wait for a God who has the answers, fixes the problems, supplies the solutions. I wait for the God who listens and hears the groaning of creation, the cries of God’s creatures that wait for adoption, the howls that are all I can muster. Together we wait for the God who, in the fullness of time, spoke a word born into our wordless flesh to make the God who is God audible. “In him,” says Fred Craddock, “the revelation of God comes to us in a whisper. In order to hear it, we must hush, lean forward, and trust that what we hear [in him] is the voice of God.” “There are nights that are so still,” writes the late Anglican priest R. S. Thomas, poet of the hidden God,
far off and a fox barking miles away. It is then that I lie in the lean hours awake listening to the swell born somewhere in the Atlantic rising and falling, rising and falling wave on wave on the long shore by the village, that is without light and companionless. And the thought comes of that other being who is awake, too, letting our prayers break on him, not like this for a few hours, but for days, years, for eternity. |