First Presbyterian Church

First Presbyterian Church

Rev. Sam Pendergrast

December 2, 2007

Matthew 24:36-44

 

 

“In Praise of Waiting”

 

Well, here we are at the beginning of another Advent season. Advent, as you know, is the time of spiritual preparation for Christmas. It is an ancient observance of Christians, beginning in the 4^th Century as a period of fasting similar to the 40 days of Lent. Advent focuses on waiting – waiting for the celebration of the birth of Jesus at Christmas, waiting for the rebirth of the light of Christ in our hearts, and waiting for the Second Coming of our Lord when he will make all things new. In days gone by, Advent was a time of emptying, slowing down, prayer and waiting. It was a time of patient attentiveness to the stirrings of the Spirit, a time of listening for the voice of God in the silence.

 

In 21^st Century America, in some places Christmas decorations have been up since shortly after Halloween. Carols sound from loudspeakers in public places. We don’t like to waste time between holidays. We don’t like to waste time, period, especially with something as tedious as waiting. It’s annoying enough to wait for the email you were supposed to get fifteen minutes ago, or for the web page that’s taking more than a few seconds to load, or for someone to return a phone call from yesterday. Who has time to wait for forty days? I feel more and more counter-cultural each year at Advent, calling people to a time of waiting in a world that is more and more obsessed with efficiency.

 

The words I read from Matthew are from a long section that records Jesus’ teaching about the end of the old world and the coming of God’s kingdom. Jesus talks about the coming destruction of the Temple, signs of the end of the age, and coming persecution of believers. We read Luke’s account of that section two weeks ago. Jesus mentions other signs and warnings, and uses the fig tree as a symbol. The fig tree was the last tree to leaf out in the spring. When it turned green, one knew that summer was near. Just so, says Jesus, when you see all these things happen, you know that the end is near. After these words Jesus tells several parables about being prepared, faithful stewardship and the coming judgment.

 

Who would not be tempted to take all of the predictions and signs and announcements of the coming end and try to figure out when it was going to happen? I mean, if it’s coming, and if I need to be alert to what is going on, wouldn’t it help to know when it’s going to happen? Apparently not. Our text for today begins with an astounding claim: “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” Just like the time of the great flood, people will be going about their daily lives, working, playing, going to church, raising families – normal, everyday life – and suddenly they were swept away. Those who are ready will be gathered in to the kingdom; those who are not will stand there scratching their heads wondering what happened. He compares this event to the surprise of a house being robbed in the night. And so he says, “Stay awake; keep alert.”

 

Jesus is not at all interested in our trying to figure out when this might happen. In fact, attempts to pin down the time make it less necessary for us to stay awake and pay attention. Human attempts to predict that the world will end on any particular date are just one more way for us to avoid taking responsibility for what Jesus expects us to do in the meantime. If you know the end will come in March of the year 2015, you might wait until 2014 to get ready. Then you can slack off for the next seven years. “Wrong!” says Jesus, “I want you to live for me every day, from now until the end, whether it comes tomorrow, in the time of your great-great-great-grandchildren, or in another two thousand years. Stay alert.” I don’t think Jesus is interested in making insomniacs out of us, having us stay up all night watching for the burglar. He does want us to pay attention to what is crucial for our spiritual well-being.

 

In my New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, the section heading over these verses reads: “The Necessity for Watchfulness.” In the dictionary, synonyms listed for “necessity” are words like “indispensability” and “requirement.” Something that is necessary is something you can’t do without. Jesus is telling us that watchfulness is essential for our spiritual well-being. Remember the invitation, repeated several times in Scripture: “Be still, and know that I am God.” The unstated corollary is that we are not God, and that God invites us to spend time in the silence of prayer, cultivating the right relationship with our Maker and recognizing that God and not we are in control of our lives. If we are to stay spiritually healthy and to bear fruit for the kingdom we need lack of distraction, time to pay attention to the Spirit – in other words we need to observe some Sabbath time in our lives. We need space, time, silence – all of which are increasingly missing from our multi-tasking world.

 

Walter Kirn, writing in the November, 2007, issue of The Atlantic magazine, recounts an experience he had that brought him face to face with the perils of multi-tasking.

 

One night on a snowy two-lane highway, on my way to visit my girlfriend, my phone made its chirpy you-have-a-picture noise, and I glanced down in its direction while also, apparently, swerving off the pavement and sailing over an embankment toward a barbed-wire fence.

 

It was interesting to me – in retrospect, after having done some reading about the frenzied activity of the multitasking brain – how late in the process my pre-frontal cortex, where our cognitive switchboards hide, changed its focus from the silly phone to the important matter of a steel fence post sliding spear-like across the hood of my car….

 

Clearly, Walter Kirn’s brain was more tuned in to his phone buried in a pile of stuff on the passenger seat, the arrival of a picture from his girlfriend on the phone, and possibly what he might anticipate when he arrived at his girlfriend’s place, than it was tuned in to the next bend in the road. Somewhere in his article he cites the statistic from the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis that some 2,600 deaths and 330,000 injuries may be caused by drivers on cell phones each year. But more scary to me than the possibility of running off the road while looking for my phone is what Kirn reports from his reading in the literature of brain research and the modern practice of multitasking.

 

In his article, “The Autumn of the Multitaskers,” he reports recent research in brain science that shows the changes in brain function and chemistry that are the result of constant multitasking. Neuroscientists have discovered that, in laypersons’ terms, multitasking messes with the brain. Doing several things at once switches functions to areas of the brain that specialize in visual sorting and processing, and shortchanges some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. “We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we’re supposed to be concentrating on,” he reports. In experiments, subjects managed to complete more than one task at a time, but they had a much harder time remembering what, exactly, they’d been doing once the experiment was over. If you’re a bottom line person, maybe the next statistic will get your attention. Kirn also cites an estimate by the business research firm, Basex, that wasted time dealing with multitasking related transitions and interruptions cost the nation $650 billion a year in lost productivity.

 

I am neither an economist nor an expert in analyzing research, so I can’t evaluate the validity of these claims for business. But I am disturbed by what I take to be the spiritual implications of Kirn’s report. If it is true that keeping ourselves constantly busy, juggling several things at once and failing to take time and space for resting our minds, orients our brains to getting tasks done but loses the purpose and content of those same tasks, what is the parallel in the life of the spirit? If we become so task-oriented that we lose a sense of meaning and purpose in whatever activity we are doing, who are we? If we fail to stop long enough to orient ourselves to a larger purpose than our own activity, what does it mean? Is our work for nothing other than justifying our own existence? Is that why the Bible says, “Those who wait for the Lord will renew their strength.” and “Be still and know that I am God.”? – because unless our work is directed toward the goal of loving God and neighbor and done in the service of the kingdom, it may be no more than spinning our wheels. And how will we know unless we take the time to wait before the Lord and listen, seek God’s guidance and share our questions with others, and be renewed by time spent in silence? I know, in these days of instant everything, waiting seems old-fashioned, even lazy. But if we pay attention to Jesus, we understand that it is necessary, crucial, a discipline that keeps us alive.

 

Through the centuries, people have wasted untold energy on supposedly decoding all the clues in passages like this to predict when and where Jesus would return and in what historical context it would happen. One wonders if they simply don’t read the whole Bible. In the first chapter of the Book of Acts, in response to the disciples’ question about when he would restore the kingdom, Jesus said “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses… to the ends of the earth.” If all previous attempts to interpret these sayings to predict a time for Jesus’ return have failed, why do people keep trying? How foolish that we think we can know what even Jesus did not. Listen to how these words from Acts help us interpret the words from Matthew. That’s the purpose, isn’t it? To be witnesses to what we have seen and heard, to pay attention to where God is moving, to follow where Jesus leads us. We don’t have to worry about dates and times. God will take care of it, just as God will take care of us. God invites us to a radical trust that lets us wait and rest, and lets God be God.

 

There’s a story about St. Francis, probably apocryphal, that helps me think about what it means to be faithful. Someone skeptical of Francis’ flight from the wealth of his family and the city found him hoeing in his garden with the other monks. “What would you do if you knew that Jesus would return tomorrow?” the visitor asked. “I would keep hoeing my garden,” was the reply. Don’t rush out and buy a hoe. What I take from the story is that Francis trusted that his life of faithful, focused simplicity, with its rhythm of work and rest and prayer, though it might be imperfect, was enough. With all the busyness and distraction of a world of violence and greed around him, Francis focused on compassion, community, honest work and time for rest and worship. This Advent, I don’t need to challenge you to take on anything new, just to something old, the ancient discipline of faithful waiting for the presence of God. I believe that if you do take the time to rest, and to wait upon the Lord, you will find rest for your souls and new strength for the journey.