Forever Waiting
Mark 13:24-37

December 1, 2002

A young man approached a Buddhist master and asked, “How long it is likely to take me to attain enlightenment?”

The master said, “Ten years.”

The young man was shocked. “So long?” he asked incredulously. “No,” the master replied, “that was a mistake. It will take you twenty years.”

“Why did you double the figure?” the young man asked.

“Come to think of it,” replied the master, “in your case it will probably be more like thirty.”

It’s all in the waiting – spirituality, enlightenment, wisdom – whatever you wish to call it – is not a station you arrive at but a way of traveling.

The most universal spiritual discipline is not prayer, but waiting. Not everybody prays or wants to pray, and even fewer know how to pray, but everybody waits.

There are very profound people who declare that religion has no meaning for them, yet they wait with great profundity. There are deeply committed Christians who believe that God did not mean for them to wait for anything.

Waiting is the preface to praying. If you cannot stand to wait, you will have great difficulty in praying effectively. Waiting has this way of emptying out your mind and soul of clutter and junk and pretensions that you are the centre of the universe. I once waited for five days in Luxembourg trying to get standby on a flight back home. I was convinced by the end of my own waiting-for-Godot that I was not in charge and having paid money for a plane ticket gave me no important rights -- except the right to keep waiting.

Jesus’ words are his darkest, painting a grim, yet somehow hopeful picture of the end of the ages, the day of the Lord. He does not describe the end of the world; but he does depict the end of the way we have known things, the end of human history, the beginning of the God’s history. Although his words seem to imply that the end of this we world we know is just about to happen, the truth is that we have to wait an indeterminable period of time. We are still in the waiting mode.

Jesus does not use the word “wait” here. Instead, the word is “be alert,” and “watch out.” Something’s happening here. What it is is not exactly clear, but business as usual is not the way it’s going to be.

What Jesus was attempting to combat was the sloth of the world which assumed everything operated in cycles, that if you missed the bus the first time, you just got it the next time around. Nothing is ever new, just retreaded. If the world does not change, you do not have to change or even react.

But Christianity and Judaism have always been convinced that the God’s world is a linear one, not a cyclical world. Things happen uniquely on a line heading somewhere. You and I have to be alert because we may miss something that will not happen again. That’s why Jesus is talking with such urgency about the end of the ages: it’s not a yearly anniversary, but a once and for all event. You have to watch out, be on guard and on alert, for you do not know when the master will return in the middle of the night and ask for an accounting.

In the middle of the night? We are human, after all. We do have to sleep, and rest, and frankly be dull occasionally. If you tried to be alert and watchful and creative for even 24 hours - well, you would not be alert or watchful or very creative at all a certain amount of time. How can you watch out for the most important things to come when you don’t know and cannot know the schedule? This is Advent now; how can you watch for the coming of the Christ child when you have no idea what a Christ child is, where or when the child was coming?

Is this one of those Biblical “camel through the eye of a needle” situations? Not really. It is the art of creative waiting. You have to learn how to live every day to the fullest.

My daughter is learning something I experienced not too long ago myself as a sports reporter. She is the scorekeeper for her high school’s basketball team. She has to write down every basket, every point, every assist for a team that has yet to win a game. Normally, watching such a game would seem interminable and lots of details would be overlooked in the boredom. Yet for her now, the game flies by and she knows exactly what happened in all its gruesome detail.

For this one activity she is living every minute to the fullest, alert to every incident that occurs. I doubt there is anyone here who has not had at least one experience that you can still recall every minute detail of every minute. The birth of a child; a very successful performance; a summer trip; an accident or other misfortune; the first time in a legendary place or at a legendary event. Nothing escapes you. Everything is still sharp and crystal clear.

All this happens because you have learned to wait in expectancy and hope. Something is about to happen and your senses are ready to observe every leaf being turned.

Advent is the first season of the church, a season in which nothing happens until the season is over on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. It is the season in which we develop our muscles at waiting, expecting something to happen. Gathering around the Lord’s Table in a few minutes, we do not just eat the bread and wine routinely. We pray for a presence of the Spirit of God to capture our minds, our souls, our bodies. This may not be the precise moment, but watch out, God will surround us, Jesus will eat with us, Christ will be born in us, and it could be the middle of the night.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan