I Can't Wait!
Sermon
Humming Till The Music Returns
Second Lesson Sermons For Advent/Christmas/Epiphany
Novelist Irwin Shaw was once taking a meal at a fancy French restaurant. Service seemed unusually slow. There were only a few waiters lingering around, and none of them came to his table. Finally the maitre d' recognized him and came over to say hello. He also informed Shaw that snails were the house specialty.
"I know," said Shaw. "And I see that you have them dressed up as waiters!"
Waiting is hard work. Our daughters tell us that all the time: "I can't wait! I can't wait for Christmas to come! I can't wait until we open our presents!"
Most of us have had that experience along the way. John Timmerman, former professor of English at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, said that when he was a boy there was one room in the house that never got heated during the winter. It was too big and much too far away from the furnace. The family never used it except at Christmas. Then John's parents spent time in that "big room" (as they called it) wrapping and storing Christmas presents.
Of course, children can't wait for Christmas to come, so one day, when nobody was looking, John sneaked down the hallway and tried the doorknob. It opened! He slipped inside. And just as he reached for the packages, to feel and shake them and guess what they contained, he heard his Mom calling: "John! Are you in the 'big room'?!"
She had felt the draft of cold air rushing down the hall, and John was forced to wait for Christmas!
Waiting is tough: waiting your turn at the doctor's office; waiting in line at a busy department store; waiting in the traffic on a crowded street. Most of us get irritated when we have to wait very long. We live in a world of instant gratification, and we have lost the patience to wait.
But it's the big waits that can kill us: a childless couple waits for pregnancy or adoption; a family waits for death to take a loved one wracked with pain and cancer; a lonely person waits for someone to call; and we wait to see how many of us will lose our jobs as the recession tightens its grip.
Waiting for time to pass is hard enough. But waiting for other people is harder still. Baptist pastor Stephen Winward says his mother used to recite this poignant poem during his early years:
Patience is a virtue: possess it if you can.
Seldom in a woman, and never in a man!
The hardest waiting, though, is our wait for God. The apostle Peter tells us that people get tired of waiting for God. People lose faith because it seems as if he's not around. We pray, and no answer comes. We hope, and finally give up hoping. We wait, and wait, and wait ... And then we even give up on religion.
A cartoonist pictured it in this way: a man prays, "God, I know that you see things different from us. I know that 1,000 years are like a minute to you, and that a million dollars is like a penny. I was wondering -- could you give me one of your pennies?"
In the next frame are the booming words from heaven: "SURE! JUST WAIT A MINUTE!"
Unfortunately, the "Waiting Game" has ceased being a game for most of us. After all, we wait for something because of promises that were made. We wait with expectation because of the anticipation that has been building. We wait for someone because that someone said his coming would make a difference in our lives.
Every year we wait again for Christmas because we know what it promises. That's why the children say, "I can't wait!"
And every year we wait again for God because we know what he promises. And many times our prayers take their cue from the children: "God, I can't wait anymore!"
Still, saying, "I can't wait!" doesn't mean the same thing to everyone.
Impatience -- Corinthians
The Corinthian Christians, for instance, were very impatient. Their religious commitment was built upon Jesus' teachings and his promise to return soon. Since, however, it seemed as if Jesus had forgotten about them, they decided to take matters into their own hands. They booked in with the latest star attraction on the ecclesiastical scene and engaged in frantic devotional activities designed to show their pious superiority to others who had made similar religious choices.
It was a winning time for the religious press in Corinth. I can imagine the weekend paper burgeoning with ads for the best shows in town: "Apollos Debates The Stoics!" "Snakehandlers Convention -- Paul To Do Miracles!" And each new event would give rise to another sect.
Sometimes we admire impatience in a person. Usually it is refreshing to watch people who actually take charge of things in life, who grab hold of their dreams and fulfill their expectations. We look up to the take-charge leaders of our communities who manage to get the job done while others are still trying to figure out what has to happen.
But sometimes that aggressiveness can destroy our faith. I think of a couple whom I knew years ago. They wanted to have a child. The doctors, however, told them it was medically impossible.
Still, they believed the promise of scripture that if they would just have faith and pray, they could move mountains and receive the things they desired. "We can't wait!" they said. "We can't wait for miracles of medicine that have not yet been discovered! We can't wait for adoption!"
So they prayed, and they believed that God would do something about their situation. They just knew that she would become pregnant. They were so certain, in fact, that she began wearing maternity dresses to prove to God and to the people of our church how much faith they had.
But she didn't become pregnant. They didn't have a child. And after a while they stopped attending worship services. They lost their faith. "After all," they said, "we told God we couldn't wait, and he didn't do anything about it!"
Waiting is hard. Especially for impatient people.
Despair -- "Mere Men"
The waiting of faith can sometimes lead to despair. Some who say, "I can't wait!" are on the edge of devotional collapse. They mean by it, "I give up! I can't go on! There's no use waiting any more!"
It is the kind of pain found in some of the Psalms. I think of the words of Ethan in Psalm 89. A young king dies and with him the hope of the nation. Ethan's dirge cries like this: "How long, O Lord? Will you hide yourself forever?... Remember how fleeting is my life. For what futility you have created all men!"
I remember when I first understood the pain of those words. A middle-aged bachelor in my first congregation came to me one day and announced his engagement! It was the talk of the community! The wedding was the celebration of the year!
Almost immediately she became pregnant. Then doctors told her that it would be twins! They ordered bed rest to make sure that the pregnancy would go full term. In spite of all their efforts, the two little boys were born several months premature.
But the little guys were fighters. The doctors didn't know how things would go. They gave cautious encouragement to the parents. And, after a while, the stronger of the twins did, in fact, come home from the hospital. Three months later, the other twin died.
When I went to talk with the parents they opened their Bibles to Psalm 89. They read to me verse 45: "You have cut short the days of his youth; you have covered him with a mantle of shame." They asked me to use that text as the basis for the funeral message I was to give.
It is the cry of frustration. It is the pain of those who have waited and waited and waited, but all their hoping is dashed in an instant. This couple never expected to be married. They were each content to live alone. Then, serendipitously, God brought them together. These parents never expected to have children. Then, miraculously, the God of Sarah made the seed grow. The twins were born.
After fighting for his life, little George came home. After fighting for his breath, little Bert died. The promises were shattered. The hope was stopped in midstream. And the parents said to me: "Use this verse for the funeral -- 'You have cut short the days of his youth; you have covered him with a mantle of shame.' "
The mother stopped coming to church after that. She couldn't bear to worship a God who stole away children of promise.
Longing -- Faith
We can all tell stories like that. Some years ago Sean Coxe came to a similar impasse in his life. His wife left. A business soured. Religion left him cold.
He was angry at life. He was upset with people who had let him down. He was most fed up with himself for being such a sucker.
Sean was at the end of his rope. He felt hopeless and alone. There was only one thing he could think of doing, and that was to take the last 300 dollars of his savings and fly to Florida to see his aging father. Sean's father had been the one solid rock in his life during his younger years. Now he needed to see his dad again and try to put his life back together.
That night they stood on a dock watching a glorious sunset over the Gulf of Mexico. The view was magnificent, but Sean's bitterness seethed to the surface. "You know," he said to his dad, "if we could take every great moment like this that we ever experience in our entire lives and put them all back to back, they probably wouldn't last twenty minutes!"
He expected his dad to object. He was sure that his dad would tell him to grow up, to quit complaining, to pull himself together.
But his dad was silent for a moment. And then he said, "You're probably right, Son." Then Sean's father looked at him and continued, "But they're precious minutes, aren't they?!"
Sean felt the anger drain away. In his heart, he felt the longing of eternity. "I can't wait!" became, for him, the call of hope. Some of the things that had happened to him, he knew, were his own fault. Others were a result of the nastiness of those around him. And some of the tragedy of his life came from the complex cancer of sin. Living in this world challenges the hardiest to find resources of hope beyond themselves.
This is the waiting that Paul speaks about in 1 Corinthians 3. It is the waiting of the farmer who cannot see the harvest in the seed, but who must cling to its promise in his heart. This is the waiting of the vinedresser who tastes the wine only in the anticipations of his heart. This is the waiting of faith that refuses to exchange the flash of religious cults for the future of religious confidence.
When you think about it, who would have planned the elements of our faith in the manner that God did? Who could have imagined that some 500 years after Ethan sang his bitter song, a little baby would be born in Bethlehem, right where great King David used to tend sheep? Who could have thought that this tiny one, born into David's family, would indeed be the king who would reign on David's throne after all the others had lost their lives before bringing in the Kingdom?
Who would have thought that a little child born the son of a carpenter was the King of kings? Who would have thought? But that's the astounding promise of Advent. That above the bright skies of human aggressiveness and even on the dark horizons of human despair shines a light of eternity that puts them both aside. And every time we see one moment of brief beauty in this world, our longing is fostered and our hope nurtured.
Amid the frustrations and darkness of our world, we still wait with hope, knowing that the King of kings will someday return. This is the way that we say today, "I can't wait!" Not with the brash self-confidence of those who trade in religious powers and cultic mania. Nor with the dejection and despair of too many in our world who have lost their place to stand and have been swirling in the waters that have drawn them down the vortex of discouragement.
Instead, we say, "I can't wait!" with the faith that knows things aren't the way they should be, with a faith that knows pain from the things that aren't what they could be, with lives that have felt the tears of unanswered prayer and shattered expectations.
Somehow, the bright spots that leap out at us every now and then are the promise that God's plans are still incomplete, but they are not undone. Bishop Wilberforce once confided to Thomas Carlyle that the older he got, the stronger his faith became. He had, however, one problem, he said. He was sorry that his faith took so long to change the world of his day.
"Ah," said Carlyle, "but if you know what you believe, then you can afford to wait."
And so it is for us. We cling to our anticipation. We nurture our expectation. We tend to the garden of our hope, watering the seeds that evangelists have planted in our hearts. We may not be able to change our world in all the ways we would like to. Yet we have seen enough of God's faithfulness through Christmas past to know that he will make things right once again in our own futures.
One of the earliest hymns of the church offers this encouragement:
Art thou weary, art thou languid,
Art thou sore distressed?
"Come to me," saith One, "And coming
Be at rest."
Hath He marks to lead me to Him
If He be my Guide?
In His feet and hands are wound-prints
And His side.
Finding, following, keeping, struggling,
Is He sure to bless?
Saints, apostles, prophets, martyrs,
Answer, "Yes."
That's how we say, "I can't wait!" this morning.
"I know," said Shaw. "And I see that you have them dressed up as waiters!"
Waiting is hard work. Our daughters tell us that all the time: "I can't wait! I can't wait for Christmas to come! I can't wait until we open our presents!"
Most of us have had that experience along the way. John Timmerman, former professor of English at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, said that when he was a boy there was one room in the house that never got heated during the winter. It was too big and much too far away from the furnace. The family never used it except at Christmas. Then John's parents spent time in that "big room" (as they called it) wrapping and storing Christmas presents.
Of course, children can't wait for Christmas to come, so one day, when nobody was looking, John sneaked down the hallway and tried the doorknob. It opened! He slipped inside. And just as he reached for the packages, to feel and shake them and guess what they contained, he heard his Mom calling: "John! Are you in the 'big room'?!"
She had felt the draft of cold air rushing down the hall, and John was forced to wait for Christmas!
Waiting is tough: waiting your turn at the doctor's office; waiting in line at a busy department store; waiting in the traffic on a crowded street. Most of us get irritated when we have to wait very long. We live in a world of instant gratification, and we have lost the patience to wait.
But it's the big waits that can kill us: a childless couple waits for pregnancy or adoption; a family waits for death to take a loved one wracked with pain and cancer; a lonely person waits for someone to call; and we wait to see how many of us will lose our jobs as the recession tightens its grip.
Waiting for time to pass is hard enough. But waiting for other people is harder still. Baptist pastor Stephen Winward says his mother used to recite this poignant poem during his early years:
Patience is a virtue: possess it if you can.
Seldom in a woman, and never in a man!
The hardest waiting, though, is our wait for God. The apostle Peter tells us that people get tired of waiting for God. People lose faith because it seems as if he's not around. We pray, and no answer comes. We hope, and finally give up hoping. We wait, and wait, and wait ... And then we even give up on religion.
A cartoonist pictured it in this way: a man prays, "God, I know that you see things different from us. I know that 1,000 years are like a minute to you, and that a million dollars is like a penny. I was wondering -- could you give me one of your pennies?"
In the next frame are the booming words from heaven: "SURE! JUST WAIT A MINUTE!"
Unfortunately, the "Waiting Game" has ceased being a game for most of us. After all, we wait for something because of promises that were made. We wait with expectation because of the anticipation that has been building. We wait for someone because that someone said his coming would make a difference in our lives.
Every year we wait again for Christmas because we know what it promises. That's why the children say, "I can't wait!"
And every year we wait again for God because we know what he promises. And many times our prayers take their cue from the children: "God, I can't wait anymore!"
Still, saying, "I can't wait!" doesn't mean the same thing to everyone.
Impatience -- Corinthians
The Corinthian Christians, for instance, were very impatient. Their religious commitment was built upon Jesus' teachings and his promise to return soon. Since, however, it seemed as if Jesus had forgotten about them, they decided to take matters into their own hands. They booked in with the latest star attraction on the ecclesiastical scene and engaged in frantic devotional activities designed to show their pious superiority to others who had made similar religious choices.
It was a winning time for the religious press in Corinth. I can imagine the weekend paper burgeoning with ads for the best shows in town: "Apollos Debates The Stoics!" "Snakehandlers Convention -- Paul To Do Miracles!" And each new event would give rise to another sect.
Sometimes we admire impatience in a person. Usually it is refreshing to watch people who actually take charge of things in life, who grab hold of their dreams and fulfill their expectations. We look up to the take-charge leaders of our communities who manage to get the job done while others are still trying to figure out what has to happen.
But sometimes that aggressiveness can destroy our faith. I think of a couple whom I knew years ago. They wanted to have a child. The doctors, however, told them it was medically impossible.
Still, they believed the promise of scripture that if they would just have faith and pray, they could move mountains and receive the things they desired. "We can't wait!" they said. "We can't wait for miracles of medicine that have not yet been discovered! We can't wait for adoption!"
So they prayed, and they believed that God would do something about their situation. They just knew that she would become pregnant. They were so certain, in fact, that she began wearing maternity dresses to prove to God and to the people of our church how much faith they had.
But she didn't become pregnant. They didn't have a child. And after a while they stopped attending worship services. They lost their faith. "After all," they said, "we told God we couldn't wait, and he didn't do anything about it!"
Waiting is hard. Especially for impatient people.
Despair -- "Mere Men"
The waiting of faith can sometimes lead to despair. Some who say, "I can't wait!" are on the edge of devotional collapse. They mean by it, "I give up! I can't go on! There's no use waiting any more!"
It is the kind of pain found in some of the Psalms. I think of the words of Ethan in Psalm 89. A young king dies and with him the hope of the nation. Ethan's dirge cries like this: "How long, O Lord? Will you hide yourself forever?... Remember how fleeting is my life. For what futility you have created all men!"
I remember when I first understood the pain of those words. A middle-aged bachelor in my first congregation came to me one day and announced his engagement! It was the talk of the community! The wedding was the celebration of the year!
Almost immediately she became pregnant. Then doctors told her that it would be twins! They ordered bed rest to make sure that the pregnancy would go full term. In spite of all their efforts, the two little boys were born several months premature.
But the little guys were fighters. The doctors didn't know how things would go. They gave cautious encouragement to the parents. And, after a while, the stronger of the twins did, in fact, come home from the hospital. Three months later, the other twin died.
When I went to talk with the parents they opened their Bibles to Psalm 89. They read to me verse 45: "You have cut short the days of his youth; you have covered him with a mantle of shame." They asked me to use that text as the basis for the funeral message I was to give.
It is the cry of frustration. It is the pain of those who have waited and waited and waited, but all their hoping is dashed in an instant. This couple never expected to be married. They were each content to live alone. Then, serendipitously, God brought them together. These parents never expected to have children. Then, miraculously, the God of Sarah made the seed grow. The twins were born.
After fighting for his life, little George came home. After fighting for his breath, little Bert died. The promises were shattered. The hope was stopped in midstream. And the parents said to me: "Use this verse for the funeral -- 'You have cut short the days of his youth; you have covered him with a mantle of shame.' "
The mother stopped coming to church after that. She couldn't bear to worship a God who stole away children of promise.
Longing -- Faith
We can all tell stories like that. Some years ago Sean Coxe came to a similar impasse in his life. His wife left. A business soured. Religion left him cold.
He was angry at life. He was upset with people who had let him down. He was most fed up with himself for being such a sucker.
Sean was at the end of his rope. He felt hopeless and alone. There was only one thing he could think of doing, and that was to take the last 300 dollars of his savings and fly to Florida to see his aging father. Sean's father had been the one solid rock in his life during his younger years. Now he needed to see his dad again and try to put his life back together.
That night they stood on a dock watching a glorious sunset over the Gulf of Mexico. The view was magnificent, but Sean's bitterness seethed to the surface. "You know," he said to his dad, "if we could take every great moment like this that we ever experience in our entire lives and put them all back to back, they probably wouldn't last twenty minutes!"
He expected his dad to object. He was sure that his dad would tell him to grow up, to quit complaining, to pull himself together.
But his dad was silent for a moment. And then he said, "You're probably right, Son." Then Sean's father looked at him and continued, "But they're precious minutes, aren't they?!"
Sean felt the anger drain away. In his heart, he felt the longing of eternity. "I can't wait!" became, for him, the call of hope. Some of the things that had happened to him, he knew, were his own fault. Others were a result of the nastiness of those around him. And some of the tragedy of his life came from the complex cancer of sin. Living in this world challenges the hardiest to find resources of hope beyond themselves.
This is the waiting that Paul speaks about in 1 Corinthians 3. It is the waiting of the farmer who cannot see the harvest in the seed, but who must cling to its promise in his heart. This is the waiting of the vinedresser who tastes the wine only in the anticipations of his heart. This is the waiting of faith that refuses to exchange the flash of religious cults for the future of religious confidence.
When you think about it, who would have planned the elements of our faith in the manner that God did? Who could have imagined that some 500 years after Ethan sang his bitter song, a little baby would be born in Bethlehem, right where great King David used to tend sheep? Who could have thought that this tiny one, born into David's family, would indeed be the king who would reign on David's throne after all the others had lost their lives before bringing in the Kingdom?
Who would have thought that a little child born the son of a carpenter was the King of kings? Who would have thought? But that's the astounding promise of Advent. That above the bright skies of human aggressiveness and even on the dark horizons of human despair shines a light of eternity that puts them both aside. And every time we see one moment of brief beauty in this world, our longing is fostered and our hope nurtured.
Amid the frustrations and darkness of our world, we still wait with hope, knowing that the King of kings will someday return. This is the way that we say today, "I can't wait!" Not with the brash self-confidence of those who trade in religious powers and cultic mania. Nor with the dejection and despair of too many in our world who have lost their place to stand and have been swirling in the waters that have drawn them down the vortex of discouragement.
Instead, we say, "I can't wait!" with the faith that knows things aren't the way they should be, with a faith that knows pain from the things that aren't what they could be, with lives that have felt the tears of unanswered prayer and shattered expectations.
Somehow, the bright spots that leap out at us every now and then are the promise that God's plans are still incomplete, but they are not undone. Bishop Wilberforce once confided to Thomas Carlyle that the older he got, the stronger his faith became. He had, however, one problem, he said. He was sorry that his faith took so long to change the world of his day.
"Ah," said Carlyle, "but if you know what you believe, then you can afford to wait."
And so it is for us. We cling to our anticipation. We nurture our expectation. We tend to the garden of our hope, watering the seeds that evangelists have planted in our hearts. We may not be able to change our world in all the ways we would like to. Yet we have seen enough of God's faithfulness through Christmas past to know that he will make things right once again in our own futures.
One of the earliest hymns of the church offers this encouragement:
Art thou weary, art thou languid,
Art thou sore distressed?
"Come to me," saith One, "And coming
Be at rest."
Hath He marks to lead me to Him
If He be my Guide?
In His feet and hands are wound-prints
And His side.
Finding, following, keeping, struggling,
Is He sure to bless?
Saints, apostles, prophets, martyrs,
Answer, "Yes."
That's how we say, "I can't wait!" this morning.
