STARTLED AGAIN

December 1, 1985, 11:00 a.m. Worship Service
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Text: “Take heed, watch; for you do not know when the time will come."
--Mark 13:33 (RSV)

Scripture

Jeremiah 33:14-16
Mark 13:32-37

In what does our- humanity reside? What makes us human?
Is it our wonderful prehensile thumb...?
Our ability to use tools...?

Is it our conscience or our logic? There are, of course, libraries on the
topic. There are terribly sophisticated and complicated answers and there
are very simple ones.

May I propose that at least part of the answer to the question, "What makes
us human?" is that we are watchers and waiters? We know there is more to this
business of life than meets the eye.-..and we are not very good, therefore, at
accepting the status quo. We don't live very easily with limits. We can't
accept injustice, unfairness, suffering as necessary. We live with the
expectation that life can be and will be better tomorrow than it is today.

Personally, where we live and have our private being, we come with a built-in
jonging for that which our lives do not seem capable of producing with much
consistency -- peace, wholeness, a sense of at-homeness, -~ salvation -- if
you will,

Augustine was right. We have been created restless until we find our rest
in God, or in something. In the meantime the waiting and watching have been
going on for more than 2,500 years. Alone in creation we human beings are
born, it seems, with a feeling of incompleteness and a sense of hopeful
anticipation. And so, from the beginning we have been watching and waiting
for God to make it right, for hope to be fulfilled, for all the promises to
be kept. For centuries our forebearers in faith have been watching and wait-
ing for the day of the Lord. It is one of the great ideas in the Bible and
it is there from the beginning. When God's people are in exile in Babylon,
separated from home, family, culture and most of all from the certainty that
God is in heaven and all is right with the world, they are spending their
time watching and waiting for God to put things right.

The prophet Jeremiah «rote to them, “Behold, the days are coming, says the
Lord, when I will fulfill the promose." -- Jeremiah 33:14

The watching has been going on for more than 2,500 years. The idea occurs
consistently in the secular literature of our civilization. Two of the most
famous watchers and waiters are Vladimir and Estragon, the tragic-comic

figures in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. An article in the Sunday Times
two weeks ago on Beckett reminded me again of what an experience in exaspera-—
tion it can be to read that play. The two characters talk relentless nonsense:

a flow of thought begins to develop and is suddenly terminated by an irrelevant
interruption and is never picked up again. Godot never comes, Of course. Play-
goers become uneasy, restless, sometimes angry -- which is the point. At the
play's American opening in Miami -- several decades ago -- a third of the audience
left at intermission. Those who stay put, or read on, however, gradually realize
an accumulation of religious ideas, that Jesus is mentioned a lot: s0 is
crucifixion and salvation: that the name Godot isn't far from God, after all,
and that perhaps the absurdity of the conversations is a paradigm for modern
human life. in the Times article I mentioned, the author, who directed the

play, had asked Beckett who or what Godot is supposed to be. “Beckett stared
off in space for a while and then answered, "If I knew, I would have said so

in the play.'" (NYT Magazine, 11/17/85)

Waiting fer Godot is cenerally recognized to be one of the important plays of
our time, Beckett's irritating brilliance is in helping us to see that to be
human is to watch and wait for something -- someone -- to bring salvation,

If only Godot would come everything would be all right, everything would make
sense. Beckett tantalizes his audience with the suggestion that Godot has
already come and that Vladimir and Estragon have missed him, or that Godot
will never come and that the waiting and watching are all there is to life.

Is it merely a literary exercise? The importance of Waiting for Godot is
precisely in the universality of the experience it portrays. To wait and

to watch is to be human. The form in which it is expressed is often a
rebellion at the incompleteness of life as it is...in this decade, we are
calling the experience a "mid-life crisis." We are waiting for life --

full, satisfying, happy, joyful human life. We're waiting for it to happen.
We're putting in time, days and weeks and months and years on the assumption
that some day it may happen to us. And then, for a Significant number at
least, somewhere around the middle of the journey we conclude that “it" isn't
going to happen, whatever "it" is. Godot is not going to show up.

Near the end of the powerful movie, Testament, the mother (played by Jane
Alexander), who along with her sons and all her neighbors is dying of
radiation sickness after a nuclear explosion in California, walks to the
football field and stands watching as the bodies of the dead are lifted into
the burning pyre. She breaks down finally, falls to her knees, picks up

two hands full of dirt, and like countless people before her -- from Job to
Isiah -- cries out: "Who did this to us? Damn you! Who did this?"

It is the oldest lament in history. It is the negative expression of the
watching and waiting we have been doing for thousands of years. The prophet
pled --

¥

"O that thou wouldst rend the heavens and come down...
To make thy name known to thy adversaries."
Do something God! Come and make it right."

One time, near the end of his life, Jesus talked to his followers about God
coming into the life of the world and into their lives. ‘The discourse
occupies the entire 13th chapter of Mark's Gospel and it is regularly subjected
to gross oversimplification and shoddy misuse. There has always been a
fascination with the end of the age. There was in Jesus’ day when some knew
the end was near. Two thousand years later the fascination continues, almost
obsessively for some. It has always been a product of our innate hope for

the future -- and, I think, our innate morbidity: more the latter than the
former frequently. It was then Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, who
allowed as how efforts to conserve the environment for future generations

were a waste of time because the end of the world was upon us. It is sobering
to be reminded that the all-time religious best seller is not John Calvin's
The Institute of the Christian Religion, or Reinhold Niebuhr's The Nature

and Destiny of Man, or Paul Tillich's Systematic Theology, but Hal Lindsey's
The Late Great Planet Earth which discusses the imminent end of the world.

It is sobering to learn how lucrative it is to preach about the cataclysmic °
and imminent end of history and then to invest one's royalties in long-term
growth investments.

It is hard to pin Jesus down in Mark 13. He will not be confined to our
favorite religious obsession. Rather his clearest word to his followers

was to be alert -- watchful. The future, he told them, is in God's hands:
all things ultimately will be put right, reconciled and made whole. There
is a destiny -- a direction -- to this business. One day ail crying will

cease, the tears will be wiped away, death will be no more and the whole
Creation will sing for joy. And when that happens or begins to happen --
when a bit of it breaks into the life of the world -- the disciples of Jesus
ought to know enough to recognize it.

We need an Advent season to get us ready because people do’ have a way of

missing God's activity. Jesus told them to watch because they, like us,

have a way of looking right at it and not seeing it. Advent is a time to

recall the part of the story which is about human dullness and shortsightedness:
to recall that in the case of the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, the overwhelming
Majority of people in the immediate vicinity didn't notice it. Advent is a
time for an annual admonition we all need, namely to watch, be alert, anticipate
God's coming.

Faith, in the Bible, can often be described as waiting in anticipation, waiting
in full confidence that God will come. Faith is willing to wait in the dark-
ness. Faith is willing to stand by the side of one who is dying, without
giving up hope, and without despairing when death comes anyway. Faith is

waiting in hopeful anticipation through the dark night of personal disappointment
and depression, knowing that God will be there somewhere. Faith is never giving
up on one's dreams. That is a powerful dynamic. That hopeful waiting, rather
than putting in time before the end, is a creative and Christ-filled force in
human history. Halford Luckock once called people of faith “Sentinel souls

who make possible the liberation of humankind from ancient wrong. Nothing
really great ever happened without a great many lives lived in expectation."

{A Sprig of Holly, p. 46)

$

The world will become a better place because the scientist stays at it day after
day, believing in and anticipating a resolution to the problem of safe nuclear
energy. The world will be better because there are medical researchers ready

to spend their lives in the pursuit for a cure to malignancy. Future human life
will be more full because brave doctors and brave patients anticipate the ultimate
success of heart transplants and artificial organs. The future will be better
because there are people of hope among us who do not and will not accept injustice,
inequality or the oppression of any group of people by any other group of people.
Our Future as individuals is possible because someone once was confident that we
might turn out all right. Sustained human relationships are only possible because
someone believes in the redemptive potential of the future, Human life now is
more full because people don't despair but go at their lives and responsibilities,
whatever they are, day in and day out, in full expectation that things will come
together, that everything will be all right.

The posture of faith is not mindless, naive optimism, but hard-working, steady
anticipation. The spirit of Advent is anticipation, watchfulness for the Lord's
coming, and joy when it happens: when after several years of thunderous Silence,
a summit happens and Russian and American heads of state are talking once again,
and words like arms control, freeze, disarmament and peace are spokén again --
out loud, in public -- by politicians: or when suddenly old wounds heal and
newness is born in our intimate relationships: or when tired old personal goals
are put aside and suddenly there are new and better ones.

The spirit of Advent is a willingness to be startled by newness. And a resultant
determination not to give up on humanity's fondest hopes for peace, for an end

to war, for food for all, for a rebirth of humanness that transcends every selfish
inclination. The spirit of Advent is a willingness to be startled again by the
creative, life-giving presence of God in the world and in our lives.

We have been here before, on this First Sunday in our most lovely, most hopeful
season. We know by heart the story we are about to hear. But the reality to
which it points is always startling when it happens. God came in a humble birth.
God comes in joy and hope celebrated. God comes in human love expressed. And --
God comes in bread proken and a cup shared.

Watch -- for you do not know when the time will come. Amen.