Waiting

What is it about the night that evokes fear in children and adults alike?  Is it that our eyes are so heavy, that we cannot fight the weight of sleep dragging us down into the caverns of our subconscious?  Or are we anxious about what might be hiding in the silhouette, where light no longer stands guard?  Throughout history, the realm of night has belonged to delinquency, wantonness and evil. 

In the deep dark of the night, children huddle under covers for fear of something sinister, waiting in the shadows to pounce upon them.  In some cases, this fear is unfounded, and a mere switch of the light reveals a pile of clothes, or a misplaced chair.  But in Uganda, the boogeyman is real.  Every night, Ugandan children try to sleep, haunted by stories of their friends and family who have been snatched from their homes, taken into the bush and forced to fight for the Lord’s Rebellion Army.  Most are forced at gunpoint to kill, so that they will become accustomed to inhumane behavior.  Others are made into sex-slaves, and mangled or murdered if they are no longer needed to serve.  This is the nighttime routine…death scratching at the door every moment that your eyes get heavy…passing through Uganda like a plague.

            How can one sleep with death making such a racket at the door?  The sons of ancient Israel knew no sleep in their desert homes, as Egyptian guards came to steal them away…to offer them up as sacrifice so that the God of Egypt…Pharaoh…could get a good night’s rest.  How someone can sleep through thundering blows against so many children is beyond my comprehension.  As Pharoah slept through the commotion, God heard the cries of His people, and raised up a prophet to fire off a warning signal to Egypt.  And Pharaoh slept.  So God sent a few more raucous messages, accompanied by flies, frogs and fleas.  And Pharaoh slept.  Finally, as God exhausted every option, He settled that the only way to get Pharaoh’s attention would be to return Pharaoh’s own message to Israel…and so, God’s messenger went door to door, hunting the sons of Egypt in the night.  The only way to repel this boogeyman was to paint the blood of an innocent on your doorposts in the night.

            And as Pharaoh began to awake, the Israelites packed their bags and laced up their Nikes.  As soon as the Master signaled, the Israelites were ready to flee.  Like an Olympian sprinter on the starting blocks, the Israelites were poised, waiting for the gun to fire.  This is the mood of the Passover meal…not one of mourning, but of expectation.  When Jewish families participate in their meal of deliverance, they hear the blood of their ancestors shrieking from the earth.  They remember the angel of Death wandering from house to house, whispering into doorways, only to relent at the aroma of blood.  This is a meal of deliverance...a meal in which Jewish people are able to participate in that state of preparedness, where at any second, God would arrive to lead them out of slavery…to lead them home.

            Jesus and His followers ate this meal every year.  They knew the stories, and they knew the process.  They felt within their chests the exhilaration of sharing the meal of deliverance…eating together, and praying that God would once again return to deliver His people in a world long since dormant to God’s voice.  The disciples had been looking for such a deliverer…the Messiah, who would return to rescue God’s people from the clutches of an evil empire.  Although they were surrounded by other figures that claimed to be the deliverer, both charlatans and the Caesar himself, the disciples had staked their claim in this Rabbi named Jesus.

            Jesus performed many miracles, and taught them many lessons, and the disciples began waking up to the fact that Jesus was the answer to the cries of so many generations of the sons of Abraham.  The disciples believed this so much so that all other options began to disappear.  Nobody else that they had ever encountered seemed to have the answer to the death that constantly loomed on their porch.  Even when Jesus began talking about weird stuff like eating His body and drinking His blood, the disciples knew that He was the one that they had been waiting for.  Jesus once mused to them, “Are you going to leave me, like everyone else,” to which the disciples responded, “To whom else would we go?”  Jesus wasn’t simply a choice amongst many others…He wasn’t a candidate with a good sales pitch.  He wasn’t the best looking option, or some sort of last resort.  He was the only option.  He was the Messiah…the deliverer.  The one they had been waiting for had arrived.

            And then Jesus started talking about leaving.  He told the disciples that they needed to start preparing to stay awake.  Put on a pot of coffee, because it might be a while.  In that age, Roman soldiers would stand watch at night, to protect against any nightly intruders.  Their shifts changed at sundown, midnight, when the rooster crowed and at dawn, and at each shift change, the Roman soldiers were expected to be awake when their peers came to provide them relief.  The night guard had one responsibility:  do not fall asleep.  A drowsy night guard would be like a lifeguard who cannot swim, or a chef who cannot taste.  Jesus made it clear that night was coming, and that His followers could not be sure exactly when the sun would rise again, but that they could know one thing for certain:  keep awake!

            And this lesson would not be lost on the disciples.  They might have failed Jesus in Gethsemane, and in letting Jesus get captured.  But the disciples were Jewish…they knew how to keep awake.  They carried the expectation of thousands of their Jewish ancestors deep in their bones, and as soon as Jesus ascended into the heavens, the disciples began the wait.  They knew the death that surrounded them…the despair into which the world had been plunged.  They lived in the midst of an empire that excelled at swift and exact execution of anyone who dared challenge the traditions of Rome.  But they also knew that their doorposts had been painted red with the blood of the Savior.  Jesus had torn His body apart to feed His people the meal of deliverance, and had bled on His people to shield them from that shadowy death that flew back and forth from one household to another.  The disciples were covered…now, they simply had to wait.

            And where are we now?  What does the Church do 2000 years later?  Many options have come and gone, and yet nobody has stepped up to the challenge.  We have seen great rulers and movements, thinkers and dreamers come and go, and yet death continues to roam across the earth, meandering from one country to another, starting wars and kidnapping children…starving families and inflicting disease.  2000 years later, the Church still only sees one option.  To whom else would we go?  We are waiting for Christ.  

            Or have we moved on?  It seems as though when we lift the veil of history, we see people making the same mistake.  We forget so quickly…we are a drowsy creation.  When our needs are fulfilled, then we tend to forget that something greater is on the way.  We eat our fill, and then claim a place on the couch to take a nap.  How embarrassing to be in this position when the homeowner returns!  It is a great danger to live in our country, because we, unlike most of the world, enjoy a great deal of comfortable living.  We have air conditioning, all-you-can-eat buffets, discount stores and welfare.  If you don’t have it, chances are you can get it through a bit of diligence.  Now, I’m not trying to claim that you sin when you enjoy a meal, or when you can get a good night’s rest.  Yet, I do think that we run the risk of falling asleep. 

I find myself in the same predicament on Friday nights.  After a long week at work, I have many plans of watching movies with Kelley, or finishing a book, or working on a project.  However, inevitably, when I get settled on the couch, regardless of what Kelley and I are doing, I black out, only to find Kelley prodding me and telling me to go to bed before I become a permanent addition to the couch.  I even fell asleep playing a video game once…a rare feat indeed!  Do not underestimate the combination of weariness and comfort.  Jesus did not instruct the disciples to crane their necks upward and gawk at the sky until He returned.  He was extremely vague about the details of His return, but He was equally clear that when He returned, He wanted to return to a lively house.  Surely, we won’t fix all of the world’s problems before Jesus returns…but we had better not be asleep when He gets back!

             Most Americans do not find this teaching daunting, because we are not heavy sleepers.  In a culture of crammed schedules and crowded life plans, we are not keen on wasting our time on sleep.  If anything, we are too impatient to stay in one household for too long.  We think that this new leader will be the answer to our problems, or that that movement is what the world needs, if only people would rally behind it.  We are appalled by a different political issue every week, and redraw our lines in the sand over and over again.  We are saturated with statistics, and stories, and solutions, and we constantly shift our paradigms to accommodate the ever flowing sea of change around us.  The question has become, to whom will we not go?

            But Jesus told us to wait.  He prepared a meal for us…He set the table, served us dinner, and after we finished eating, He told us to wait a while until He returned…that He would be back to rescue us.  Have we moved on?  Is it that we are scared of what looms in the darkness, so much so that we cannot stand the wait any longer?  Or are we drowsy?  Have we lost the expectation…the cries of a thousand generations before us, asking God when He will return to rescue His people?  The Lord’s meal is precious.  It has been shared by generations of Christ’ followers.  Some have sold everything to eat the meal.  Others have eaten at the expense of their friends, their family, and their home.  Some have even given their lives to eat at the Lord’s table.  Generation after generation have shared this meal, handing it on to the next generation to wait patiently for the Lord’s return.  And now, the baton has been passed to us.

            At the beginning of each year, we repeat the motto of our particular church body:  “Don’t just go to church…be the Church!”  What does it mean to be the Church?  In so many words, we talk about the importance of following Christ, not just on Sunday morning, but from Sunday to Sunday.  We also talk about investing in one church body…not hopping around, taking from this ministry and that gathering, but focusing your time on contributing to help one part of Christ’ body be excellent.  However, this year when I say “Be the Church”, I challenge you to now think about the Lord’s meal.  Think about how Jesus tore apart Himself to feed you…how He covered your house with His own blood so that death would stop harassing you.  Think about the generations of Christians who have given everything the possessed to carry this meal into the future…to share the table with a new generation of Christians.  Think about how long people have waited, patiently and responsibly, for the return of the Master.  To “Be the Church” is to take up this baton…to run the next leg of the race, praying that at any moment, you might be the generation that sees the Master return to the house.  You can help clean the house, or help someone else get their things prepared.  You can stand at the door, inviting in others who are fleeing the scourge of death that roams rampant in the night.  Invite them into the one place that death cannot invade. 

            When we gather together, we proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes again.  We do not gather here because we want to hang out, or because Kelley’s cooking is good, or because we like Graham’s guitar playing.  I know we don’t gather here for the preaching.  We don’t even like each other (I’m kidding!)  We gather here because we know that there is no other option…there is no other solution than Jesus.  We stay awake, because we want to be the first people to greet Him when He returns home.  We lovingly, and carefully, take His meal, because if we are not the lucky ones who see Him return in our age, then we can share the meal with those who will carry it into a new age.  In all, we gather because we need to poke and prod each other to stay awake.  It is easy to become weary, as time presses on.  It is easy to let our eyes wander…tempting to want to flee the house in search of something else.  But we are not called to flee…we are not called to rest.  We are called to keep awake.  Because when our time comes, we want to be the ones who waited for Christ…just as He waited, and still waits for us to come home.