November 18, 2007
(Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost; Proper 28)
Building God’s Future: No Waiting
By The Very Rev. Terry White, Dean
Isaiah 65:17-25 • Canticle 9
• 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13 •
Luke 21:5-19
(From
The Lectionary Page)
The Texas Transportation Institute annually issues an Urban Mobility Report for over 400 urban areas including Kansas City. The report deals with a host of travel statistics including commuter data. The latest report is for 2005, stating that throughout the nation the average commuter spent 38 hours waiting in traffic. (not moving) Our area stats are below the average.
Last summer you may have visited an amusement park where signs let you know how long your wait was from a certain point.
Walk into a restaurant without a reservation, and you know to take the length of the wait for a table you are told, and multiple it by at least two.
And if you have ever engaged in remodeling your home, you must watch the movie “The Money Pit.” First time owners Shelley Long and Tom Hanks, when they ask how much longer they will have to wait for the remodeling work to be finished, are told repeatedly: “two weeks.”
The one constant you can rely is that my homilies are always 10-12 minutes long.
Waiting often feels like a waste of time. We are certain that if we weren’t waiting, we would be engaged in any one of a number of meaningful tasks.
Waiting can also produce anxiety as well as excitement. Few things are worse that waiting for the lab results of a biopsy. And we consider waiting well worth it when a partner, parent, or child, too long parted from us, walks through the front door for the holidays.
The lessons for today create a theme that we can easily relate to: do not waste time waiting. Claim God’s vision. Don’t panic – God is in charge. Be about God’s work. And especially, don’t wait for someone else to do what God has called you to do.
The Book of Isaiah contains writings from at least four different historical settings. Today our first lesson comes from Isaiah 65, known as Third Isaiah, and the Canticle sung in place of the psalm today is from Chapter 12, First Isaiah. Though these chapters were written in different times, their messages for us today blend well together.
In the first lesson Isaiah is a master with language, and electrifies his contemporaries with his vision of what their city can become. A new place where former things and ways are not set in stone, where a new vision emerges. Canon Herbert O’Driscoll writes that for us today, Isaiah calls us not to regret all that has changed in our own lives, in society, and the Church, but to see everything, especially the Church, an incarnating hope and new life. (The Word Today, pp164ff) We are to be agents of God’s future.
As the Body of Christ, we are to build the holy City of God, a new Jerusalem where no more shall be an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime. You and I are called to build such a city here, where no more lives are cut short due to a lack of food or education, or a lack of economic opportunity, or because of an abundance of violence.
Isaiah sings a song of a society engaged in building the future: they shall build houses and inhabit him, and they will not only plant vineyards but enjoy the fruit of the vines. There is no hint of waiting here – simply and clearly a call to action without delay.
Reinforcing this message is Isaiah’s canticle which proclaims our trust in God alone. No matter what circumstances we find ourselves in, Isaiah says we must realize that we are free, liberated to change the future with God’s help.
There is that word: change.
It is the time of year when a great holiday meal approaches. Families will come together, bow heads to give thanks, then look up and survey the table, and immediately engage in arguments over such important things as whether the cranberry sauce should be made with whole cranberries and cooked on the stove top, or be of the jellied variety, emerging from a can with a sucking sound leaving intact impressions of can’s rings imbedded in the jelly that quivers ever-so-slightly.
Holiday meal menus are not the only things we are reticent to change.
Yet these lessons speak to us of the truth that God is always creating something new. Change is at the heart of our faith, and especially, is a vocation of the Anglican Tradition. To quote a venerable member of this parish, a past senior warden: The only thing certain in life is change. And to be alive means to be willing to change.
You and I are called to change the world in order that God’s future becomes our present. That future is summed up by Isaiah’s final verses which describe a vision of peace and reconciliation between warring factions, represented by wolf and lamb, lion and ox. In God’s future destruction is replaced by creativity, the potential for death with the promise of new life.
Striving for justice and peace among all people demands much from us. And sometimes, the future looks bleak. Do not be weary in doing what is right, Paul writes. Jesus tells his disciples that when wars, violence, natural disasters, slander, persecution, beatings and the threat of death come upon you – keep proclaiming the Gospel of sacrificial love, forgiveness of sins, healing of the deepest wounds, and peace, wholeness, salaam, shalom. There is no future without peace. God’s future, God’s vision for the city, for his Church, for creation, depends upon each one of us.
As the Baptized people of God, we must be fixated on God’s future. At this Holy Table, where all are welcome, we receive the Food we need to create a future of hope, built confidently on God’s peace and justice, according to God’s economy where no one must live in want of food, shelter, hope, and dignity. We must place our trust in God, and wait not one more moment for our new city to simply appear.
Time will tell if these 12 minutes were worth it to you. (Well, twelve minutes or so.) If you feel like you are stuck in traffic so-to-speak, waiting for a call from God to stop your waiting, consider the call made. God needs you. The cathedral needs you. This city needs you. Are you ready to build the future?
Let this Cathedral’s commitment always be:
Building God’s Future in this City – no waiting.
