What are you waiting for?
Perhaps it’s been a long time since you had a visit from your family, but one is finally happening next month. The waiting is only building your excitement. Perhaps you ordered something you really wanted recently only to find out it’s on backorder, so you wait for the email saying it’s on the way. Perhaps you heard your favorite band has been in the studio recording their next album, and so you’re waiting for it to drop.
Or maybe you’ve been waiting for something that seems to have no timeline. You have a friendship that has broken down. You’ve been hoping and praying for reconnection, but it doesn’t feel possible. You’ve seen that friend across the room but couldn’t make your paths cross to take the first step towards healing. It feels hopeless because even the first step doesn’t appear to be close at hand.
On some level we also wait with this expectation that God’s promises will finally be fulfilled in our midst, that all the brokenness and injustice will find wholeness and reconciliation. While this is not an Advent sermon, it may as well be. The theme today is waiting expectantly. My mind even went to the hymn “Canticle of the Turning,” which draws off of Mary’s prayer as she waits to bring Jesus into the world. It opens like this:
My soul cries out with a joyful shout
that the God of my heart is great,
and my spirit sings of the wondrous things
that you bring to the ones who wait.
You fixed your sight on your servant’s plight,
and my weakness you did not spurn,
so from east to west shall my name be blest.
Could the world be about to turn?
There’s always expectation involved in waiting. There’s the huge kind of waiting like Mary is singing about. There’s the ever-so-important waiting that has no timetable attached of healing in a relationship. There’s even the small kind of waiting, like the package promised to arrive by 5:00 on Tuesday but still not there at 4:55.
Expectation is so essential to our lives, but when things aren’t going right, our souls grow downcast. We are tempted to despair. We lose hope that things could ever change. We lose faith.
This month we’ve been preaching on the Way of Love, providing you tools that can equip you to handle tricky relationships. How do we love those that are so hard to love? We’ve talked about moving from contempt to love by learning how to behold others. We’ve talked about moving from rigidity to humility by getting curious about others. Today we’re focused on moving from despair to hope by learning how to wait expectantly.
As I’ve dwelled on these themes this month, I’m struck by how the tools of our faith are so useful in our relationships with one another. The very things that give us solid ground in trusting God are also fertile for bringing healing to our hardest relationships. These things are good for us. They’re good for how we relate to the God who loves us. They’re good for others.
Here’s the issue, though: We live in a world of instant gratification. We can get what we want with just a few clicks. Seared into my memory from almost 25 years ago is one scene from the reality TV show The Restaurant. One of the wait staff was a young man named Topher. Under the stress of trying to open a new restaurant in New York City, Topher had enough. The cameras followed him down the street as he stormed away and caught him saying, “I promised myself long ago I would never waste one day doing something that made me unhappy. I quit.”
While it might be amazing to live every day in sheer happiness, I think we all know that this life is muddier than that and that there are things worth working through and waiting for. Needing nonstop instant gratification is a terrible way to live.
Our text from Hebrews defines faith like this, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” That entire chapter traces the stories of the Old Testament — from Abel to Abraham, from Moses to David — and concludes, “Yet all these, though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect.” In other words their expectant waiting never was fulfilled in their lifetimes because God’s plan was bigger and better than their expectations.
Hebrews points to Jesus as the one they were all waiting for but also holds before us that this race is far from over. The work is not complete. It urges us, “Let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross….so that you may not grow weary or lose heart.” In other words, God is not done with us. So with countless others down through the centuries, we join in the waiting with hope.
This already/not yet nature of God’s reign is so present in the parable we heard from Matthew. Did you notice how it began? “Then the kingdom of heaven will be like this.” Not is. Will be. It’s coming but not yet here. So, Jesus gives us this picture of a Middle Eastern wedding, and to get what he’s after, we need to know a bit about those.
In American Christian weddings, there’s a typical pattern. A couple dates for a while. They get engaged. They spend months planning a wedding ceremony and reception, often at a church and a banquet hall. They do premarital counseling. They book a DJ and a photographer. They head off on a honeymoon.
Middle Eastern weddings were not like that at all. It was often a bargain struck between two families. The bride would enter the groom’s larger household. This parable is a picture of the movement of the bride from her home to the place the groom has prepared for her. (And in saying those words, echoing through your ears should also be how Jesus tells his disciples that he’s going away to prepare a place for them.)
So, this is a scene focused on the wedding banquet at the home of the groom. A large crowd of family and neighbors has filled the home and spilled out onto the streets. The groom and some close friends have gone to his bride’s home across town or in a nearby village to bring her back. When she’s ready to go, she would be placed on an animal she could ride, while the groom and friends would joyfully parade around her. They wouldn’t go straight to the groom’s home. No, they wanted all to see his great joy, so they’d wander down as many streets as they could, taking their sweet time.
This parable takes place 2000 years ago. Even with a full moon, it would be fairly dark at night, and young women would want to be prepared to be in the darkness with a lamp. This is not merely practical. No, they would have these lamps burning to protect their reputation. All can see what they’re doing at night. Ken Bailey points out, “For unmarried women to move around in the dark without carrying lamps is unthinkable! What might they be doing in the dark and with whom? Also, with a lamp, no one can harass them.”
So, these ten young women are waiting for the happy couple’s arrival, only the parade back is taking longer than expected. Five of the women were anticipating this. They were living with expectation. The knew the arrival would happen, but they did not know when. They lived with hope.
When Jesus delivered this parable, particularly as Matthew presents it, he was stressing the importance of preparedness in expecting the kingdom to come in all of its fullness. I think that still holds true today. We should be prepared and learn how to wait expectantly. The beautiful thing about parables is that they are elastic. The Spirit speaks through them to us in different ways for different times. So, I’m going to ask you to hear this plea for waiting expectantly through the lens of loving others who are hard to love.
Today I’m encouraging us not to despair about people or situations that feel impossible. Despair, ultimately, is a form of nihilism, a belief that there is no God who could actually do something to fix this situation or relationship. Despair, also, is a very real and human feeling. We all at some point in our lives have despaired over someone or something. But staying in despair is a place of despondency. As God’s children, believing that God is actually in the business of bringing healing to every square inch of the universe, we need to take what brings us despair and let the cracks of light brought by hope into our darkness. We learn hope by learning how to wait expectantly. For God to bring repair. For an unexpected positive step. For the first crack of the sunrise in what has been a long and lonely night.
Tanner Smith from The Colossian Forum reminds us, “Loving people in real life is hard. Sometimes it can even feel impossible….Hope…is about staying engaged even when things are hard.”
In Jesus’ parable, five of the young women came prepared with vials of olive oil, ready to keep their lamps burning well past what they expected. Five did not. But I have compassion for those who did not. We don’t know about their lives. Maybe they couldn’t afford the extra oil. Maybe one of their siblings hid the vial earlier in the day. Maybe they had attention issues and simply forgot. The beauty of parables is that we can offer all of these what ifs, right?
They may have missed the opportunity for this wedding, but maybe they learned from it. Maybe they were the ones who showed up at the next wedding party not just with one vial of oil but with two because they wanted to help someone else keep their lamp trimmed and burning long into the dark of night.
I think Ken Bailey’s observation is on point here. “In the Middle East the word no is never an answer, rather it is a pause in the negotiations. The reader has to finish the play.”
I’m finishing this play by saying there is no failure and no darkness and no situation into which God cannot bring redemption.
So, maybe you’re in that place of despair about someone or something. Maybe you’ve been in that place for years. Maybe it just happened. Don’t give up hope! Earth has no sorrow that heaven can’t heal. It’s okay to admit the truth of your pain, your hurt, even your despair. But then lift your eyes — even a little — and ask God’s Spirit to break into even that. Learn how to wait expectantly. Doing so is a step in moving us from despair to hope.
To put it another way, N. T. Wright says that being hopeful answers two questions.
- What are you waiting for?
- What are you going to do about it while you wait?
So, to wrap up today, I’d like to give us all a minute to think about a person or a situation that has us on the path towards despair. I think prayer is another form of learning how to wait with expectation. So, I’m going to close the sermon with asking each of us in the silence of our own hearts to offer this prayer to the God who kicks the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
It’s called “A guided prayer for when I can only see the hurt”:
You know me more deeply than anyone, Lord,
and you discern the disappointments I struggle to name.
You see the hurt beneath my frustration
and the tension I’ve been holding inside.
Give me courage to look with honesty —
not only at ___________________,
but at what this relationship draws out of me.
Where my view has grown narrow,
widen it.
Where my heart has tightened in self-protection,
soften it.
In scripture, you surprise people
who thought they already knew the whole story.
Do the same for me.
Where I feel lost in darkness, make the night shine like day.
Bring what is hidden into the light, help me release old defenses,
and open my heart to see this situation with renewed clarity and hope.
Amen.