Waiting - Sermon Preached at Evergreen CC

*this is the sermon I preached at Evergreen Christian Church on May 16, 2010

Waiting
Acts 1:1-14
Evergreen Christian Church – May 16, 2010

It is so good to be here with you all this morning. Ron and I have met a couple of times and he asked me questions about Young Adult Ministry and about this new movement called Emergent Church and I think that is why I am here this morning to bring the word of God and talk a little about this population or generation that is missing – from this church and from many churches.
Being that next week is Pentecost, the day we celebrate the church’s birthday, it is important to recognize who will not be coming to that party. Our scripture for this morning is full of glory and confusion and movements and we’ll get to that but I want to start by looking at who is not there. In the passage directly after verse 14 Peter stands and recognizes the fact that there are no longer 12 disciples. Judas is gone – they are not a complete community. It was a bold move for Peter, bringing up the absence, the loss of his Christian community – this is not the first day or the first event Judas has been absent from and no one has mentioned it until now, it makes sense, Judas’ absence was the elephant in the room and yet no one wanted to name it, to bring attention to it because if they could just forget that there was always 12, that there was supposed to be 12 then it wouldn’t hurt to bad. This is the feeling of so many churches – someone is missing – and they have been missing for quite a while now. Churches have seen a generation of people leave after high school and fail to return to the church or never enter the church in the first place. We as church look around on a Sunday morning and feel the pain of the absence of young adults but we are afraid to say anything about it, to bring it up because maybe if we forget that our church has failed to meet the needs of those in their 20’s and 30’s we won’t be sad or feel guilty or be forced to realize that we are not whole. The disciples had been silent and the churches have been silent, but when Peter stands up and names the absence -- it is then that a new disciple – Mattias and soon countless new disciples enter into the fold. And so I celebrate with you that someone has stood up and named the absence of young adults and that you heard that person, whoever it was, and that you are intentionally preparing yourself to fill that void, to welcome new disciples into the fold of Evergreen Christian Church.

So that is the first step, right, recognizing that Young Adults are not here. It may sound obvious but I can’t tell you how many churches refuse to step into the reality that they are not complete, that someone is missing. They keep names on the membership roles of folks they haven’t seen in 10 years, they expect that once people have children they will come back…so they wait…and wait…and wait…and they don’t come back and no one visits and the church continues to shrink and to age.

I am talking in generalities and of course there are differences for every church and every context. And I am a visitor among you, I know a little about this church – I have worshipped here before, led a children’s program for you many years ago at your church retreat at La Foret but I do not know your whole story. What I do know, however, is that you are in a time of transition. Your Pastor retired, you are in the process of looking for a new pastor and with that comes uncertainty, evaluation, a lot of hope and equal amounts of fear as you look to the future. Basically, you are in the waiting place. You are waiting to see who the search committee will find, you are waiting for your new Pastor to arrive and then you are waiting to watch that new Pastor do new things, transform the church…just like you have been waiting for young adults to come or to come back or you have been waiting to watch the new things you have been doing (and I hear from Ron you are doing great new things like table meetings instead of committees and house church gatherings) you are waiting for these to take off, catch on or maybe you are waiting for them to fail. Either way you are in the waiting place.

The phrase, The Waiting Place, is not my own. It actually comes from a brilliant scholar, author and theologian…who many of you might know as Dr. Seuss. Oh the Places You Will Go is a very popular book especially this time of year – I imagine it is one of the top 10 gifts given to high school graduates, when I graduated from high school I ended up with two copies, my husband – three! But in the middle of this book, Dr. Seuss talks about the waiting place…let me share a little of this story with you but as I do, I want you to think about your church – and what you are waiting for and how you are waiting (and what is a Dr. Seuss book without pictures):

You will come to a place where the streets are not marked. Some windows are lighted. But mostly they’re darked. A place you could sprain both your elbow and chin! Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in? How much can you lose? How much can you win?
And if you go in, should you turn left or right…or right-and-three-quarters? Or, maybe, not quite? Or go around back and sneak in from behind? Simple its not, I’m afraid you will find, for a mind-maker-upper to make up his mind.
You can get so confused that you’ll start in to race down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace and grind on for miles across weirdish wild space, headed, I fear, toward a most useless place. The Waiting Place…for people just waiting.
Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come or a plane to go or the mail to come or the rain to go or the phone to ring or the snow to snow or wating around for a Yes or No or waiting for their hair to grow. Everyone is just waiting.
Waiting for the fish to bite or waiting for wind to fly a kite or waiting around for Friday night or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake or a pot to boil, or a Better Break or a string of pearls or a pair of pants, or a wig with curls or Another Chance…

According to Dr. Seuss the waiting place is useless. We hate waiting, and yet the average person spends somewhere between 3-5 years of his or her life -- waiting. That is a big chunk of our lives so we try to do anything and everything to avoid it. We have speedy check out lanes at the grocery store, when you are put on hold with a company they now will call you back so you don’t have to wait, even Disneyland now has fastpass so you don’t have to wait in line to go on the most popular rides. We hate waiting, and yet all the ways we try to get out of waiting are just the easy way out…but what if we thought about waiting less as useless and more as process.
This past week my niece was born. She was 11 days late. So we spent a lot of time waiting. Everyday I would call my sister-in-law and she would tell me – no change. The doctor had offered to end the waiting – to induce as soon as her due date came but they decided to the best of their ability to wait for McKenna to come on her own. And in those days of waiting, they tried to rest, they played a lot, they dreamed and worried of course, they prayed for the little one, they received words of encouragement everyday (sometimes more than once a day from some annoying family members – well me!) and they took a deep breath before their worlds were changed forever. What they found was meaning and value in the waiting place. But the baby still didn’t come. And the waiting began to pose a threat to not only my sister but the baby as well. So they intervened and she was induced and delivered...

For young adults waiting is a part of life. Some are waiting for babies, some are waiting for their parents to stop asking them when they will have babies. Young adults wait to start a family and then they wait to get pregnant, wait for the baby to come or wait for the adoption process to proceed. Young Adults are waiting to finish school, waiting to stop waiting tables, waiting to get a job and once they have a good job they wait to get a better one. They are waiting to feel like an adult, waiting to be treated like an adult, waiting to be taken seriously in their families, in their work, in the church. Waiting to have the money to buy a house, or waiting for the next pay check to pay the rent. They are waiting to meet the right person, waiting to move -- again, waiting to make friends in new communities, waiting to have a sense of home away from home, waiting to travel, waiting to stay put and waiting to go.

They wait and wait and wait some more – and no matter what they do they cannot stop waiting, it is a natural part of all of life and particularly for the stage of life they find themselves…but it is not a lazy or inactive waiting…they are working and moving and changing and transforming and dreaming and hoping and listening and loving while they wait – and what many young adults yearn for in this time is a place, a community, rituals that help that bring out the meaning, the spirit that is very present within the waiting places.

Let me remind you of a familiar story of a group of young adults, young adults who were waiting. They had seen things and done things they didn’t know possible, they were excited and hopeful about what the world could be and how they could be a part of it and yet they were scared out of their minds. Afraid they were being as young and niave as theire parents told them they were. Petrified that they weren’t equipped – smart enough, gifted enough, kind enough, dedicated enough to do the work left for them to do. Their experience and their hearts and their guts told them they were on the right path but it wasn’t a fast pass…they had to wait…but they didn’t sit still – they recognized what they were missing, they made changes, they prayed – while they waited.

The disciples waited: These men and women who were young adults – whose leader had been only 33 years old. Like many groupings of young adults today this group had come from different places, different walks of life, many were in the family business for awhile, some had less than respectable pasts but then each of them heard the call to do something different so they followed this man, named Jesus, they followed him all the way to the cross and then in their loss and confusion they stumbled upon the empty tomb and now Jesus has left again…this time not in the violence of the crucifixion but in the glory of the ascension. Jesus rose to heaven with the promise that the spirit would come among them, not today, not even tomorrow but soon. At first the disciples just stand there, after Jesus has disappeared into the clouds they stand there looking back on what was. Just like the church when we stand still, when we gaze on yearbooks past and remember who we used to be, how the pews were filled, and energy abounded…in the same way the disciples stopped and stared. But then a man in white stood beside them and said, what are you looking at? Jesus is gone – what you knew is gone – but there is a promise of more to come. So get on with it.

We see in that moment the danger of waiting. The disciples did not know how to move. Jesus was gone and the spirit had not yet come so they stopped – they maintained, they kept breathing and blinking and doing the necessary things for survival but in that moment their waiting had no purpose, it threatened to destroy everything they had done and everything they could do. The same thing happens in the church, we wait for people to return, we wait for young adults to come and visit and then to join – and like the disciples we just stand still – we maintain and forget what we have seen and what we are called to do.

The disciples waited for 10 days…and in that time they stayed together – the 11 disciples and some women. The disciples were able to rest with one another, to be supported by one another, to share their stories of Christ, to be comforted and to be challenged, to pray, to be still, to be honest about their fears and skeptical about their hopes. Because even in that time of waiting there is a purpose and there is a call. For Young Adults it is about self discovery and relationships and transformations that begin with transitions – for the church it is a time of reflection, figuring out who you are, asking hard questions, listening to those not only in your community but those who are outside of your community. Waiting on the spirit is not a time to rest – but a time of activity, of evaluation, of honesty, of hope and community.

And so those young adults so many years ago – those young adults who didn’t fit in with the religious structures of the day…according to acts – contantly devoted themselves to prayer…
The young adult disciples, the young adults of evergreen and all of us, need a space to find a place of community, a place that embraces active waiting, a place that not only finds but helps us create meaning in the waiting…a place of prayer. Not just sit down, bow your head kind of prayer, but prayer that you live and you breathe. Contemplative prayer in its many forms is a growing young adult led movement in places like Taize, France and in the forms of Emergent Churches here and in Europe…young adults are asking for communities to gather to simply and profoundly wait together constantly devote themselves to prayer: sometimes this is in silence, sometimes it is building a house, sometimes holding hands and sometimes singing, sometimes laughing. They are seeking the space to live into the mystery and unknown of this world and of their lives -- a place to worth waiting in.

But this isn’t new, contemplative prayer and prayer practices like walking a labyrinth or meditative and repetitive song and words are some of the oldest Christian traditions. Young adults want to enter into the story of their tradition – to share in the community’s stories of Christ, they want to know and to share in the ways Christ has been experienced and then to sit together to pray and to ponder, AND to do and to give – entering into the story of God not when they are 45, not when they have finished raising their family, not when they have enough money to tithe 10% but now. No more waiting in vain – instead, waiting in the spirit. Let us work while we wait. Let us pray while we wait. Let us find the meaning and the call of God together as we wait to not only see and experience what God will do, but to be a part of all that God is doing with us and through us.

So Evergreen Christian Church – You, like so many, are waiting. The question is not necessarily what are you waiting for, but how will you wait?
How will you wait not on the spirit but in the spirit?
Let us learn from the young adults that started this movement, without money or homes or children…they gathered in community and shared their experiences of Christ…and they constantly devoted themselves to prayer. Amen.