Wait for the Lord.
“Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not be faint.”
Wait for the Lord.
Waiting is a tricky thing. A long period of waiting can create expectations of our own making. The Israelites in exile who heard these words from the prophet about waiting for the Lord were waiting to get back to Jerusalem. The longer they were gone, and the longer they waited, the more glorious their eventual return must have seemed to them.
Their waiting for the Lord became waiting for the Lord to fulfill their expectations—to get them home so that they could go on with life as it used to be.
As we know, looking back into history, the Israelites were finally allowed to go back home to Jerusalem from their exile in Babylon. And what they found was not what they had imagined, but instead a city in ruins and lives much harder than they had expected.
We have been waiting for a year now for the pandemic to be brought under control. We have been waiting to have the freedom to be out and about again without worrying about getting sick or inadvertently infecting someone else. Our prayers to God have included asking healing for those who are sick, for an end to the pandemic, and also thanksgivings for the recoveries that have taken place and for the vaccine that may help bring the virus under control at last. And I have certainly prayed that we may return to worship together in person, to sing, to be able to celebrate the Eucharist again, and to be fully with one another.
While I’ve been waiting and hoping for an end to the pandemic, I realize that I’ve been a lot like the Israelites, waiting for the Lord to fix everything according to my satisfaction and fulfillment, imagining a glorious return to what was—to what is now in the past.
So the prophet’s words bring me up short.
Isaiah says, “Those who wait for the Lord will renew their strength.”
Now I see that my waiting has been shortsighted– because I’ve tended to wait and hope for certain outcomes of my own design rather than simply waiting for the Lord.
So while I’ve longed for a return to what is now past, I’ve partially missed out on what God has been trying all along to give to me and to all of us who wait–
Power to the faint.
Strength to the powerless.
To the faint, the weary, and the exhausted, renewed strength.
The ability to keep on going without getting exhausted by the effort.
Jesus understood the importance of waiting for the Lord.
And Jesus did wait for the Lord.
In today’s gospel, Jesus had been proclaiming the Good News at the synagogue in Capernaum, where he also cast a demon out of a man. As if all of this weren’t enough, when he and the disciples got to Peter’s house, they found his mother sick in bed with a fever. So Jesus healed her. And then, that evening, a crowd showed up around the door, and he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and he cast out more demons.
The man must have been exhausted.
But Jesus knew what it was to wait for the Lord. Mark tells us that early the next morning, while it was still very dark, Jesus got up and went out to a deserted place and there he prayed.
He put himself in the presence of his Father. God renewed the power and strength of Jesus during the time that Jesus waited for the Lord in prayer.
When the disciples found him, Jesus said to them, “Let us go on to the neighboring towns so that I may proclaim the message there also, for that is what I came to do.” And they went, and he kept proclaiming the good news in the synagogues and casting out demons.
Jesus didn’t use his renewed power and strength to go back to Capernaum, to go back to the familiar, even though the people there would have been delighted for him to keep healing their sick. Instead, he went on to neighboring towns. He wanted to spread the Good News far and wide.
Next Sunday is the last Sunday after the Epiphany.
And then the season of Lent will begin on Ash Wednesday.
The Season of Lent, as Charles Sydnor, our Rector at St George’s used to say, is a time of “spiritual spring training.” And that is true.
But the Season of Lent, like Advent, is also a season of waiting, a season to wait for the Lord.
During Lent, as we journey with Jesus to Jerusalem, and go with him through the events of Holy Week, and then once more witness his death on the cross on Good Friday, we are waiting for the Lord.
We are waiting for the Lord to resurrect Jesus. And for the Lord to resurrect us, both in this life and in the next.
So that brings me to one of my favorite stories in the gospels, the resurrection story at the end of the Gospel according to John—because this story is about waiting for the Lord and finding out that you really can’t return to the past.
God wants to take us into a resurrection future.
After the resurrection of Jesus, and the puzzlement and joy and excitement of the disciples that Jesus was indeed risen, Peter must have wondered what was next.
Maybe Peter was hoping for a return to the past, for more days of traveling around with Jesus in Galilee, proclaiming the Good News, seeing Jesus heal people and cast out demons and feed the thousands, being part of all that Good News again in the ways he had already experienced. The past was his only reference, so recreating the past must have been what Peter hoped for.
But after a while, Peter must have realized that even though Jesus had been resurrected, Jesus and the disciples weren’t going to be returning to the past.
Peter was going to have to wait for the Lord, but Peter didn’t figure that out right away. He was in a sort of limbo, a liminal time of wondering, and when the answer about what they’d be doing didn’t come immediately, Peter and seven of the disciples went down to the Sea of Galilee, their old stomping grounds. And when Peter said that he was going fishing, back to his old pastime—back to the past, the others went along.
They stayed out all night but caught nothing.
And then the next morning, a man on the lakeshore called out to them to cast their nets on the other side, and their nets filled with fish. Peter knew then that the man who had called out to them had to be Jesus.
After Jesus and the disciples had breakfast, Jesus and Peter had a heart to heart conversation, and Jesus told Peter about what would be next—Peter wouldn’t be going to go back to the past, but he would be going forward, with a mission.
Peter’s mission is ours as well– to proclaim the Good News by feeding the sheep and tending the lambs—loving and serving the people as Jesus did during his ministry on this earth.
But Peter would have to continue to wait for the Lord to find the strength to do what the Lord would be asking of him.
This Season of Lent will be of the utmost importance to us as the people of God here at St Peter’s. Hopefully, this Lenten season will coincide with the beginning of the end of the pandemic that we have endured. This season may mark the approach of the end of our exile from our church building.
So this season of Lent will be the ideal season for us to wait for the Lord.
Let’s be intentional about waiting for the Lord, so that God can give us what we need for all that is ahead—the strength and power we will need to move fully into the future as God’s servants, caring for God’s flock in the ways that God will be calling us to do, ways that we cannot imagine or believe that we could manage.
During the Season of Lent, I hope that you will join me once a week in a thirty minute time of prayer each week. We’ll open with a brief time of sharing, and then we will wait on the Lord in silence for twenty minutes, and then end with a spoken prayer. This will be our time to go out to a “deserted place” and to pray along with Jesus.
We will put ourselves in the presence of the everlasting God, our Creator.
Remember, our God “does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and strength to the powerless. Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not be faint.”
Someday, we will return to our building, as the Israelites returned to Jerusalem. And if we have been waiting for the Lord, we will not be simply returning to the past, but we will be entering the resurrection future that God has already laid out for us.
As we wait, God will renew our strength, and we will mount up with wings like eagles, and we shall run and not be weary and we shall walk and not faint when we have the opportunity to move ahead on the paths of service that we cannot yet see, following our Lord and Savior, who will be with us through all that lies ahead.
So may we wait on the Lord, so that our God can renew our strength and give us the power to do infinitely more than we could ask or imagine as we serve the Lord and give God the glory.