Patiently We Wait

March 7, 2004 (Second Sunday in Lent)

By The Rev. Benjamin J. Newland

- Genesis 15:1-12,17-18
- Psalm 27:10-18
- Philippians 3:17-4:1
- Luke 13:22-35

O Tarry and await the Lord’s pleasure; be strong, and he shall comfort your heart; wait patiently for the Lord.

This last verse of the 27th Psalm offers us the ideal place to be on this second Sunday of Lent. If you’re not careful, Lent can begin with an unhelpful amount of tension. Ash Wednesday is a powerful service, focused very tightly on our nature as sinful people and our ever present need for forgiveness and redemption. The first Sunday in Lent brings that lesson home again by detailing Jesus’ experience of temptation, which he resists as we cannot. So the season of Lent can really get started off with pretty intense feelings of personal guilt and an anxious need to repent and make yourself worthy again.

I think we need this yearly reminder of our fundamental nature before God, but if the only thing we get out of Lent is a self-inflicted sense of humility, then we have missed an important part of the meaning of the season. As the 27th Psalm reminds us this morning, Lent is also about waiting patiently for God. The psalmist entreats God to notice him: hear my voice and answer me, he calls; show me your face and do not turn away. He asks for guidance and deliverance. In the two final verses the psalmist expresses his amazement that even in a time when God seems far away anyone should fail to believe in the goodness of the Lord. Our part is to await the Lord’s pleasure; being strong we shall be comforted; simply wait patiently.

And so, having been given the theme for the day by Psalm 27, let us look at the other lessons appointed. The Gospel is divided into two parts, as you can tell by the bracketed section in you scripture insert. In the first part, Jesus is asked if only a few will be saved. His response is fairly enigmatic, something you’d expect to find in the Gospel of John, not Luke. First Jesus tells his followers that that they are to strive to enter through the narrow door. So maybe the answer is yes, only a few will be saved since the door is so narrow. Then Jesus goes on to tell of the owner of a house who shuts the door and will not Jesus’ followers inside. They beg for admittance, but the owner claims not to know them. Then, contrary to the few being saved concept, people start to arrive from the East, West, North, and South to eat in the kingdom of God. Jesus winds up with a old favorite: “some who are last will be first, and some are first who will be last.” Overall, Jesus’ answer is fairly cryptic, and doesn’t provide his followers with much in the way of practical advice for salvation. It basically boils down to this: The door to the kingdom of God is narrow, and the line to get in is not in the order you think it is.

In the second part of the Gospel reading Jesus calls Herod a fox, and compares himself to a mother hen, whose chicks refuse to be gathered under her protective wing. Coming on the heels of his ambiguous narrow door speech, this comparison serves as further warning that getting into the Kingdom of God is not going to work in the way we thought it would.

Perhaps the lesson from Genesis can shed light on Jesus’ teaching this morning. We have in these verses from the 15th chapter an early part of the Abraham story. So early, in fact, that Abraham is still named Abram. At this point in the story, Abram has been following God for awhile, but not much has happened except a lot of wandering from the territory of his people into a new land. Abram is beginning to get a bit antsy about God’s so far unkept promise to him that he will have children, so he expresses his doubt to God.

And that’s the first lesson to be had from this story. Abram is faithful. In fact, it is just about the only thing he’s really got going for him. God chooses Abram because of his faith, and faith will continue to be the defining feature of Abram’s relating to God. Yet despite the fundamental faith of Abram, still he has doubt, and that doubt is significant enough that Abram brings it to God. The lesson is this: it is not unnatural to faith that questions persist. Though Abram’s defining characteristic is faith, even he questions that faith, and does so directly to God.

God responds to Abram’s questioning by entering into covenant with him, and through him with all of humanity that would descend from him. God promises that Abram will have children, despite all the insurmountable obstacles that prevent that, and that those children will multiply and inhabit a land God prepared for them. There’s a jump in the verses read this morning, and in the gap God mentions that there will be a 400 year delay between the promise and the fulfillment, during which Abram’s descendents will be enslaved, yet by whatever dark and complex route God’s covenant promise will be fulfilled.

It is verse 6 of this excerpt that echoes most strongly down through the centuries. Once God has made covenant with Abram, we are told simply that Abram believed the Lord, and that the Lord reckoned such belief to Abram as righteousness. The fact that Abram believes, and on the strength of that belief alone is declared to be righteous, will later become very important to the Apostle Paul, and then to Martin Luther, as they seek to define the nature of God’s redemption of human kind. Yet here in this original context, Abram’s faith and God’s approval of it is not the basis for a doctrine of salvation by faith and not by works. Rather, it is another reinforcement of the idea that from God’s perspective, faith is not utter certainty or the lack of any question or doubt. Instead, faith is belief in spite of those things. And that faith, as shown by Abram, is righteousness.

The connection between today’s Gospel reading and the lesson from Genesis is tenuous at best, but I draw it anyways. Abram’s lesson is the more clear: that God desires us chiefly to have faith and not to be without doubt. Jesus conveys a similar desire, although by much a more inscrutable method. When his followers ask for specifics about entry into the Kingdom of God, Jesus responds by confusing them further, thus making it clear that he is not there to remove all doubt or to answer all questions, but rather to inspire their faith.

And now we have come full circle. The lessons this morning call for our faith during this season of Lent, which symbolizes all season of human separation from God. And what is the nature of this faith we are called to have? It is described in Psalm 27. Wait patiently for the Lord. You may have doubts, you may have questions; these things do not prohibit your faith. Just be strong and wait for God, and you shall be comforted. In the words of the psalmist, even though your mother and father forsake you, the Lord will sustain you; even in the midst of the most profound human betrayal and hurt, God’s way leads to goodness and comfort.

All of which leads me down to the final two verses of this psalm, when the psalmist contemplates the alternative to waiting on God, then quickly abandons it. I leave you with a paraphrase of these last two verses, as a theme for this new week of Lent:

If I did not have faith in your rightness
That it would bloom in this living land-
It is unthinkable.
I wait only for you
With strength and good courage-
I wait only for you