Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Good morning, friends.
Let's take a moment and pray, shall we?
Holy and gracious God, give us a spirit of wisdom and revelation so that with our hearts enlightened, we may know the hope to which Christ has called us, the riches of his glorious inheritance among us, and the greatness of his power for those who believe.
Amen.
Our first scripture reading this morning is from the Old Testament, the Book of Lamentations, Chapter 3, Verses 21 to 26. You'll find it on page 669 of your Pew Bible.
But this I call to mind, and therefore have hope.
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning.
Great is your faithfulness.
The Lord is my portion, says my soul. Therefore I will hope in him.
The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul that seeks him.
It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.
And from the New Testament, the Book of Romans, chapter 8, verses 18 to 25, you'll find that on page 919, I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.
For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God.
For the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its enslavement to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.
We know that the whole creation has been groaning together as it suffers together the pains of labor. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for the adoption, the redemption of our bodies.
For in hope, we were saved.
Now, hope that is seen is not hope.
For who hopes for what one already sees.
But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait with patience.
This has been the word of the Lord.
[00:02:26] Speaker B: Good morning, church.
It is an honor and a joy for me to be here this morning.
As Pastor Matt said, he and I met our very first year at Fuller Seminary 35 years ago. We were besties in Greek. We got through Greek, Hebrew, and I am just honored to be here today.
We got together soon after the fires and found a little bit of strange irony.
While Pastor Matt and his family lost his home, his church stands.
My home is okay, but our church was lost.
So we appreciate your continued prayers as we are forging new roads together in the Palisades. As you are here in Pasadena. Will you join me in a word of prayer?
Loving God, we come before you this morning and we give you thanks because you meet us here and we are your people.
And so, God, I ask that I would decrease that you might increase so that your word and your will would be made known to your people.
And all your people say Amen.
We are no strangers to waiting.
We wait in traffic. We wait in hospital rooms. We wait to hear from our children. We wait by the phone for good news. We wait for help, test results.
We also wait for healing and peace in our world, for reconciliation, for justice, for the night to end, in the morning to come.
And now, six months after the Eton and the Palisades fires, we have ushered in for many of us, a different kind of waiting in our lives.
We all have something in our lives for which we wait.
And in that waiting, which is sometimes filled with a deafening silence, sometimes full of excruciating pain and a horrible unknowing, we may be very tempted to give up.
And it is quite a human feeling, a human reaction, to want to give up.
But God's message comes to us again and again. Not to deny the reality of our suffering, but to anchor our souls in hope, even while we wait.
And there are few who do not know waiting.
Every child, every parent, whether we are young, in between, in the spring, summ, summer or autumn of our lives, because we have lived life, everyone knows the ache of waiting.
Some of us had mothers and fathers and friends who waited for us.
Maybe you know the feeling of waiting for your loved one to return from a bad decision in their lives.
Perhaps you're waiting for a teenager to open up after weeks of silence and the cold shoulder. Or you are waiting for a relationship that has grown cold.
We know what it is like to wait, to have our prayers to be answered. For your loved one to come back around, for true love to appear, for your daughter to believe in herself again.
Most connections of the human heart, of leading, of living all places of love, living life deeply, living life with compassion. We know about waiting.
Living in love is the ultimate long game.
And hope is the currency of that game.
So in this light of this concept of waiting, I want to speak to all of us who are in that in between place, that waiting, the not yet place.
And I submit to all of us this morning this truth.
That hope is born in the waiting, that God is not absent in the silence, and that God is working while we wait for whatever unanswered prayers we wait.
So Lamentations 3 describes Awaiting and hoping in very dark times.
And they are familiar words of promise to us.
But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope. The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. God's mercies never, never come to an end. They are new every morning. Great is your faith, faithfulness, oh God. It is good.
It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.
The book of Lamentations was written in the aftermath of Jerusalem's destruction, something that I think all of us in LA certainly understand too well.
Jerusalem was a city burning, people scattered, and the temple reduced to rubble.
The prophet Jeremiah, in his writing, does not pretend that everything is fine. He names the grief, he mourns the ashes.
And even here, even in this deep place of mourning, we see that hope rises up in the midst of his great grief.
And Jeremiah says, this I call to my mind. What does he call to his mind? The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, even in exile, even in pain, even when the temple and the city lie in ruins.
We read of another prophet, Isaiah, who writes another promise that is given to us. But they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings like eagles. They shall run and not be weary. They shall walk and not be faint. And we can notice something very interesting here.
Waiting is not passive.
Waiting is not passive.
It is actually a kind of spiritual posture, a spiritual discipline.
And this waiting, it is a leaning forward.
It is a leaning forward. It is not a collapsing backward.
And the promise is clear.
While you wait, your strength is being renewed, not in spite of waiting, but through it. And because of the waiting, our strength is being renewed.
In his letter to the believers in Rome, Paul writes, we know that the whole creation has been groaning in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.
And the apostle Paul also does not sugarcoat suffering in the waiting. He says we groan, and he doesn't stop there.
He dares to call this groaning a kind of labor pain, a struggle that leads to new birth.
So we're not just suffering and groaning in death.
We are groaning in the becoming.
We are becoming.
We are becoming something new.
We will be something new after our waiting.
So hope is not denial.
Hope is actually defiance.
Hope stands in the rubble of life and says, God is not done here yet.
Friends, we are assured that faith is not just wishful thinking. It is grounded in the character of a faithful God.
We look at the list of the faithful. In Hebrews 11, Adam waited for a son. Moses waited in the wilderness. Joseph waited in a prison cell. David waited in caves, hiding from Saul. And there were so many more who waited.
Ruth waited for Naomi. Sarah waited for a child. Anna waited for the Messiah. Each one of these people bore witness not only to God's eventual deliverance, but to God's present and enduring grace.
There's a wonderful passage in that tiny book of James that says, be patient.
Therefore, brothers and sisters, see how the farmer waits for the precious fruits of the earth.
So James gives us two metaphors here, and one of them is that of the farmer who sows and then waits.
She cannot rush the seasons.
There are no shortcuts in God's fields and gardens.
It is the long game.
And this kind of waiting again, it is not idle.
It is rooted in the trust that God keeps God's promises, even if it takes longer than we hoped.
And perhaps even as a people of faith, perhaps, maybe, just maybe, we don't give God enough credit for being a waiting God.
A God who waits for us.
Because our God is not distant. Our God is not disengaged. Our God is the one who. Who waits at the end of the road with open arms.
And God hopes even when we have forgotten God. And God believes even when we've stopped believing in ourselves and what we can do.
And God gives us this wonderful model of waiting in the gift of Jesus, the one who would be the fulfillment of a long awaited and long suffering hope.
So lamentations gives us this prophetic longing for a time when God would step into the world's suffering.
And this is what God did with Jesus.
Jesus is the embodied answer to lament.
And Jesus preached this upside down kingdom of God that was not a quick fix, not a speedy answer, but the long game of hoping and living in hope.
Nelson Mandela waited in a South African prison for 27 years. Years.
27 years in a cell, waiting for justice, for freedom, for a new nation.
And he said, it always seems impossible until it is done.
And his time of waiting was not wasted.
It forged the character in him that would help him lead with grace instead of bitterness and resentment.
Friends, I don't know what you're waiting for today, but we are all waiting for something.
For the healing to happen, for the injustice, to end.
Our insurance adjuster, the answer to our problem. We're waiting for a diagnosis, an end to the wrong. We're waiting for a child to come home, a door to open, for the pain to stop.
And God does his deepest Work in the waiting.
The psalmist writes, I wait for the Lord my. My soul waits. And in his word I hope so. When we carry the heart of someone who is in the long game, someone who cares and loves and waits.
This, then, is our calling.
To keep waiting, to keep hoping.
And we do not give up.
We need friends and mothers and fathers, all people who love like the Father in Jesus. Story of the parable, the prodigal Son.
Father's people who never stop looking down the road.
And we need to become people who hope like God hopes for us, with us, in us, and despite us.
I'm joyfully rereading the Count of Monte Cristo.
Not just a good sandwich, very good book. You might remember that it is the story of a young man who was unjustly cheated out of everything in his life. And he returns years later to exact revenge on all of his enemies. But in the end, after the Count has carried out all of this revenge that he has planned, he encounters a metanoia, a change of heart, a realization.
And he renounces the anger that he has held onto for so long and writes this in a letter.
All human wisdom is contained in these two weight and hope.
All human wisdom is contained in these two words, to wait and hope.
Hoping is the long game.
We are reminded that we cannot know or control our future.
Therefore, we must hold on to patience through all things.
And we have, all of us, a holy calling, a daily calling, a daily choosing to wait in love, to hope against hope, and to welcome hope into our lives with open arms.
So, friends, for whatever you are waiting, let us hold on. Because the God who came to us in the silence of Bethlehem, the God who ministers to us while we wait, the God who rose in the silence of. Of a sealed tomb, this God will not abandon us in our waiting.
Our God is in the long game.
And while we wait, God is with us.
May it be so.
Amen.
