Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany
Text: Isaiah 40:31 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 faint. |
The other day I needed some postage stamps.
As I walked past the Post Office, I noticed the line of people went out
the door. I said to myself with an
impatient grunt, “I’m not going to wait in a queue like that” and walked on.
I dislike supermarkets and what I dislike
even more is waiting in the line at the checkouts.
What makes my waiting even more frustrating is this – there always seems
to be someone ahead of me who has a credit card that won’t work or knows the
checkout person and so wants to talk forever.
It’s times like this that I start to think, “Life is too short to be
waiting in a checkout line that isn’t moving” or I say to the person behind me,
“This line is moving so slowly that a person could die of old age waiting to pay
for a couple of batteries”.
As far back as I can remember I’ve been a
person who can’t wait patiently.
Now today we hear from the Bible about waiting for the Lord.
Those who wait for the Lord
shall renew their strength.
I hate waiting so
why should I have to wait for the Lord?
Is there some suggestion that God’s watch is slow so we must wait for him like
someone who is late to keep an appointment?
Is
waiting for God like waiting for a train. There’s nothing we can do to hurry up
its arrival; we just have to sit and wait.
And so to put that in religious terms – does waiting for the Lord
mean sitting on pious posteriors and twiddling our
religious thumbs, expecting God to get us out of a mess?
We wait for God to put things right.
I don’t believe that’s what is
meant by waiting for God. Some of the translations of the Old Testament Hebrew
text here use hope or
trust but to use hope or trust is
already an interpretation because the Hebrew text really says
wait.
There are two aspects to this
waiting that is talked about here.
First there is the aspect of “Be
patient – God hasn’t forgotten you and he will come to your aid”.
The prophet Isaiah was talking
to the people of God during a time, when they felt like their strength was
sapped and they had no hope. The
neighbouring countries were really dreadful and threatened the safety of their
families.
They were afraid.
They were fully aware of the ruthlessness and notorious reputation of their
neighbours. As they thought about all the stuff that was happening around
them, they were weighed down and overwhelmed by the seriousness of their
situation.
They started to say things like,
“God doesn’t really care about us!
How can he? Look at all this bad and difficult stuff that is happening all
around us. He’s not really in
charge of things at all!” (Isaiah 40:27).
You see what’s happening here?
They began to see their problems as being bigger than God himself.
They forgot that the creator of everything, the everlasting Lord will
never grows tired of helping those whom he loves.
They were so afraid that they forgot that God was able to help them with
their fears.
You see while they were
stressing and worrying a subtle exchange was taking place.
They exchanged their faith in God for a kind of do-it-yourself kind of
attitude.
We do the exact same thing!
This DIY kind of Christianity excludes God from certain areas of our
lives. We may not say it but we act this way.
“I know God is there but I can handle this myself”.
“Let’s see, my work, hmm, no that’s not God’s problem.
Finances, no. I can fix that.
Relationship problem, no. The other
person messed it up so he/she can fix it.”
Without even giving it too much
thought, we exclude God from different aspects of our lives.
We can fix it we say, and yes, maybe it works okay for a while. But then
we begin to feel the weight. Our
blood pressure rises. We toss and
turn. We get sick. We become
depressed. The joy goes out of our
lives. We despair.
We slowly realise that the DIY approach isn’t all that successful after
all.
God didn’t make us to stand
alone against everything that threatens our safety and happiness.
God made us to be in a relationship with him.
God made us to rely on him.
He is our God and he wants to help us but we can be so focussed on ourselves
that we forget that we have the power of the Almighty at our disposal.
This is where Isaiah comes in
and we have this wonderful passage that was read earlier.
He asks (I’ll paraphrase a bit),
“How can you be so dumb?
Don’t you know who stretched out the heavens, made the earth and filled it with
people?
Don’t you know that it is God who created the stars?
Every night God marches out like a general ahead of his starry army.
There are millions of them, and yet he knows the name of every one of
them and knows when one of them is missing.
If God knows each individual star, it follows that he knows each one of you
personally and calls you by name.
He knows when you are in trouble.
No one can ever accuse God of turning a deaf ear to your needs.
The Creator, Stabiliser, and Maker of the Universe is also your Saviour and
Redeemer. He might rule the
universe but he also loves each person he has created on this tiny planet”.
“Those who wait for the Lord
shall renew their strength”
are those who trust his love
and it is the almighty love of God that enables them to endure all things.
Paul in the New Testament
says something to this affect, “For
I can do everything with the help of Christ who gives me the strength I need”
(Phil 4:13). He is saying that
whatever comes his way, he knows that he is always in the arms of Christ and
that his love will always surround him and care for him.
So whether good or bad comes his way, he is content because Christ will
give him the power to endure whatever comes.
Even if death should come, he is okay with that.
Christ’s love will take care of him.
In time of trouble Paul took these words seriously,
“Those
who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength”.
So that’s the first aspect
of this waiting or the Lord – “Be patient because it’s clear God loves will
never give up on you”.
There is a second aspect to
this waiting for the Lord. It’s one
that doesn’t sit comfortably with me and maybe with a few others as well.
Waiting means stopping – like being in a queue and even though I’m all
knotted up about being in the line, I’ve stopped.
I had to
check out if that’s what is meant here in this Isaiah passage so I got out my
Hebrew Dictionary and much to my amazement the word used here for “wait” has a
Semitic connection with twisting or plaiting
strands together, as in making a cord or a rope.
Here we get a sense of the strength
that comes from binding things together. So instead of getting all knotted up
even further, waiting then becomes a time of being strengthened by God.
“Waiting for the Lord” then, implies
stop pretending we are in charge and rushing around.
Let God gather up our frayed ends, bind together our strengths, collect
our God-given resources, calm our fears, or as we might say these days, let God
enable us “to get our act together.”
It means let go and letting God
take a hold of us, reshape us and empower us to confront what is ahead.
Through the promises of his Word,
through the power of the Holy Spirit remoulding our lives,
through the people who calm us as they remind us of God’s love for us,
through the Sacraments,
God gathers the frayed strands of our being, gets us refocused us again on the
strength that we have in Christ, and enables us to be and do according to his
plan for us. He inspires us to get ready for whatever challenges are thrown at
us.
In this sense, waiting is the
confident hope that God will restore our lives to the fullest and most complete
degree possible. He has already
given us the gifts and tools and powers that we need to face the task but
somehow we have lost touch with what God has done for us.
Stop, wait, be still, let God
re-establish in you what he has begun.
If anyone can do it, he can enable us to “get our act together”.
By the way, this may not always
be a comfortable process. Our lives may need quite a bit of reshaping and
radical changing to get our priorities and our discordant lives right.
But it’s worth it.
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 faint.
Those who wait for the Lord will
be inspired to rise to new heights as eagles are lifted by the wind under their
massive wings.
Those who wait for the Lord will be inspired to seek out new and challenging
ways that will stretch them to try something they have never done before; they
will run and not be exhausted.
Those who wait for the Lord will be inspired to walk every day through the
familiar, the mundane, the trying and troublesome, the boring and the difficult,
through sickness and grief and not grow weary because with
God on their side, they are always winners.
Those
who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength.
© Pastor Vince Gerhardy
8th February 2015
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