Liturgical Waiting

Matthew 11:2-11

²When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples ³and said to him, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” ⁴Jesus answered them, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: ⁵the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. ⁶And blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me.”

 

 

As a child I helped my father on the farm. One of my favourite activities was moving sheep from paddock to paddock. Just the old dog, me and 500 hundred sheep. A great time of reflection, day dreaming and slowness that counteracted the busyness of the school week. It was life in the slow lane.

 

My father had set a standard of slowness. If the dust was raised behind the mob you were moving to fast. Slowness necessitated stillness and the inevitable waiting for the mob to graze and move at their own pace. It wasn’t a life of linear progress or rushing to get this done so you could go and do something else. This was all you had to do and it would come to an end when the end came. Any sign of dust indicated anxiety to be somewhere else with something else and not right where you were. This is a waiting to move on.

 

John the Baptist exhibits this last type of waiting in our Gospel reading today. Are you the one we were waiting for or do we have to wait some more? His question is full of anxiety, frustration and impatience. If this is not it, then we have to hurry up and wait for some more. And what are we waiting for?

 

Jesus replies, wait and see. Stop being anxious and looking for something else; stop being anxious and wanting to be somewhere else; stop being anxious and looking in a linear fashion. Look around you and see what is already here, what is already happening and what you are already in touch with. Yes, you have to wait, but the waiting is to see what is already here, mot waiting for another person, idea, experience or event. The kingdom of God has come near and is here. Wait and see.

 

One of the gifts of being an artist is this waiting to see. Walking home from taking may car to the garage for repairs I wandered slowly back along streets near here and was gobsmacked by what I saw. Melbourne in the morning is a place of great light and I discovered beautiful trees, amazing garden scapes and intriguing little finches buzzing around and was made aware, once again, that the Spirit of God is alive in Glen Iris. We simply have to wait and see.

 

We are often to anxious to move on, shift our seeing, all our senses without allowing ourselves to settle into what we see, feel, hear and sense. We pass a cursory glance across our world and those we share it with and move on, looking for something we already have.

 

We are like John, neurotically looking for that definitive moment to complete our hopes and our dreams.

 

It is a challenge to the church to stop our rushing to succeed and to simply wait as the Bride of Christ and be aware the marriage is alive and active now.  In our Sunday liturgy we are called to let go of our anxious searching and engage in a waiting, a stillness, a welcoming presence open to the Spirit’s embrace. Yet it seems we want to rush through the formalities of worship to get on with our busy lives. We give an hour or so and that is all. We have family commitments, morning tea to run, lunch to serve and a busy week ahead and our minds flit back and forward between these competing anxieties and we struggle to be present here, now in a waiting stillness feeding our soul.

 

The liturgy has been skilfully constructed to give us time out from the busyness of life, although we often do our best to make it as busy as possible. Liturgy is a work in waiting and stillness. It is the process of stopping, of letting go and of being available to wait with what is happening for us in that moment. As Jesus says to John, wait with what is happening and allow your self to hear what the spirit is saying to the church.  We can’t do that if we are anxious to move quickly and efficiently through the various sections of the service.

 

The creed isn’t a linear race we have to finish in so many seconds, neither are the Psalms. They have been devised in stanzas allowing us space to sit with what has come before and wait for what is coming next. The are many places of waiting in our service and it is through these spaces that we begin to unload the baggage we bring with us and unhook ourselves from the need to get a to a defined outcome – usually morning tea!

 

John wanted a definitive answer. Jesus said sit with what is already here and make sense of that. Take time to process and unpack your life and your experience and recognise the depth of that experience. Do not be in a hurry to chase after some golden thread of idealised promise. What is, is. Wait with it and allow it to speak.

 

Our liturgy is a rich treasure of stillness and waiting. Our 21^st century sensibilities finds it difficult to sit with empty space – be it on a wall, in our garden or in our worship, yet it is in this waiting space we discover truth. As you have noticed already this morning we have instituted longer spaces, slower movement and a little less urgency in our service. This will become a pattern which I hope will be helpful.

 

I encourage you to enter the church with quiet waiting as your intention. Using this space before the service as a time for sitting in the place of no-thing doing, allowing your presence to deepen and lengthen ready for the liturgy to come. There is time after church to meet and greet, to chat and swap stories and to share aches and pains. Prior to and during the greeting of peace let us find our centre and be still and know that God is God; that we are more than our anxieties and this is a safe sanctuary for being at rest.

 

Finally I would say, as we begin to explore our liturgy and the treasure it holds, to be still, very, very still, and above all else do not wobble! Waiting without anxiety will open up the vista of the treasures we already have and allow us to avoid repeating Johns frustrations.

 

Let us be still. 

Seeing Differently

Mathew 3

Grand Canyon by David Hockney

Today we meet the hermit from the bush. The bloke who ignores the social requirements for appropriate dress and, by the smell of him, for the use of water for something other than drinking, a man who is on the outside looking in, John The Baptist, so named after the rite he made his own.  It is interesting he wasn’t called John Camel Hair or John Who Needs A Bath or John the Vegan, but he wasn’t. He is John the Baptist.

 

John is also remembered for his aversion to sin. His baptism was predicated on repentance, the recognition of sin by an individual who then takes steps to repent of that sin through the cleansing and renewing act of baptism. Now sin got a bad name when I was growing up. It seemed to include everything that was enjoyable – eating too many lollies, drinking too much soft drink, getting your sibling into trouble, dipping the pigtails of the girl who sat in front of you in the inkwell and many more mortal acts. The last may very well have been mortal if she could run faster than you at recess!

 

Sin has been trivialised to many normal and ordinary acts of being human and it seems it is still in that place. Yet John the Baptist’s idea of sin was much expanded on that of our parents, nuns and the morality police of our youth. John refers to the systemic sins maintaining the status quo, the sins of entitlement due to right acting, of doing what was expected of you and reaping the rewards. It was the sin of identifying clearly the status of each individual, their rights and their responsibilities. It was ensuring those born into privilege maintained that privilege. It is about exclusion of others from the benefits you have based on class, skin colour, health or otherwise, gender and age.

 

²“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” In other words, the possibility of instituting the promised kingdom does not belong out there, to others or to the future. It belongs here, in you and now. It is calling you and I to make it real – to put love into action and respond to the covenant requirements of kindness – respect, justice and compassion. It is not a task of people like John or even those whom he spoke harshly about; the first is just one man and the latter group won’t change until they have no choice. It is up to you to ensure they have no choice by you own love in action for yourself, others and the world.

 

John wasn’t interested in who stole the cookie from the cookie jar, but who stole the cookie jar and who allowed the cookie jar to remain stolen. He was particularly tough on those in privileged positions and saved his strongest words for them, but he didn’t let the ordinary folk off the hook either. John’s expectation was that is if you recognised your complicity in this corporate sin, then you needed to show evidence of a change of heart, mind and action. He says: “⁸Bear fruit worthy of repentance.”

 

Bearing fruit can be as little as sharing the troubles of those who live next door, advocating for a fairer share of society’s wealth for all, ensuring those who on the outside get to come in side. There is no prescription for bearing fruit and there is no particular type of fruit – love, justice, compassion, kindness, advocacy, giving and more – all work if that is what the situation needs.

 

Ben Witherington suggests: "Repentance, or metanoia, to use the Greek word, refers to far more than a simply being or saying one is sorry for past sins, far more than mere regret or remorse for such sins. It refers to a turning away from the past way of life and the inauguration of a new one, in this case initialised by an act of baptism."

 

And this isn’t easy. Those who describe the Christian life as easy and a cop out haven’t tried to live it! It is incredibly difficult to live in such away that each day is a further step toward wholeness and another from stuff we have held onto and has held onto us. It is being prepared to shed our previous static identity and accept the uncertainty of unfinished business.

 

Crabs and other crustaceans do not grow in a linear fashion because of their hard outer shell. Up to 20 times in its lifetime a crab moults, in effect moves out of the old shell and grows a new one. This happens 6 times in the first year. It is a difficult and excruciating time, not to say a vulnerable onee. If your shell is your protection, wandering naked around the sea floor is not a comfortable place to be. Yet it must happen if it is to grow into maturity.

 

Repentance requires we shed our tough and hard formed identities both as a society and as individuals. What served us well in another time and place no longer does. What we have come to accept as the way things are, no longer is appropriate and we have to change structures, ideas, ideologies and religions.

 

John the Baptist calls that the coming near of the kingdom of God – the ever evolving recognition of a new way of seeing. David Hockney, the wonderful English artist, paints what he sees but what he sees in isn’t always what is physically there. He suggests we see two ways – physically and psychologically; physically by recognising objects, like a camera. Seeing psychologically is different. If we look at a scene we will focus on one particular element that takes our eye in that scene. Because we do, that tree, face, animal, colour becomes clearer and larger in our view and seems to be larger and more significant than the rest of the scene. There are a whole lot of reasons why this happens but we rarely if ever see what is there. We see what we see.

 

In art this works well, in community and individual life here is a glitch to be aware of. What we think is the case may not be so because we are seeing, hearing, engaging with it as we see the world – focusing on what is important to or has a specific meaning or interest to us. We may miss what is really happening. We are not called to see physically or one dimensionally as a camera but we are to be aware of the psychological pre-determinants affecting our response to the world.

 

John the Baptist calls us to confront society and ourselves to engage in the very difficult process of moulting, like the crab, and to recalibrate our seeing. In this way we begin to recalibrate the world by helping to break it out of its restrictive shell and welcome in relational wholeness empowered by love - the kingdom of God.

 

Oh and this won’t get easier when Jesus enters the picture. It gets harder, because he increases the requirements and calls more from us. “¹¹He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” Seeing through the eyes of Jesus changes everything.

 

John’s repentance is the ongoing reassessment of self and society required of all who profess faith. It requires action and outcomes and can’t be avoided. It is our vocation. How will you see differently when you leave here this morning?