The Granary Graveyard, Boston, April 2022, "hic jacet" Sam Adams, Paul Revere, the Massacre Five and just a few Others.

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

Wednesday, April 27, 2022

What are We Waiting For?

On God, Climate Change, Waiting Around, and Just What is the Business of Church

“I wait for the Lord; my soul waits for him; in his word is my hope” (Psalm 130)

What are we waiting for? I had not heard this Psalm’s words before today as a wait for the declaration of forgiveness. But look at the context – the whole prayer is about sinning and being forgiven. I guess, actually, what I mean is that normally when I hear “wait for the Lord” I’m thinking of how we long for a change in circumstance or condition and that we need and we strive to have patience for those things to change. But no, this Psalm is not about waiting for things to change but rather about waiting for a word that frees – a word of forgiveness that looses and liberates. 

Our hope is not in a changed condition but in a declared relationship (“in his word is my hope”). Martin Luther’s “gouty foot laughs at our doctoring” speaks of our theological machinations to fix our problem with evil and suffering by exonerating God and blaming ourselves so we are empowered to patch up the wrong and the relationship (if we are to blame then we can also turn that around and make things right). In that way, our hope is in our word, not God’s. That is sadly laughable and laughably sad. 

But to rely and wait without agency, for God to right the wrong of how we break the relationship with who we are (identity) and what will become of us (destiny), without any help from anywhere within us, including our wokeness, that is what the “waiting for God” is all about. Note, there is the stuff done wrong that is culpable – saying we can’t fix the relationship and we can’t dismiss the wrong stuff does not mean the wrong stuff does not matter. We dare not wait around to fix things, to right the wrongs. Not if we expect sustainability and comfort rather than decline and chaos. But we do, we must, for we have no choice in the matter (bound will over free will), wait for God to give those three words that right the relationship and so right the world no matter what conditions prevail: I forgive you. The gouty foot then laughs no more. It is healed. 

And so the business of the church is revealed here. Somebody must declare in real time those three words, the “word” that is our hope, in order for the healing to happen. The church is not in the business of talking about God, but rather talking as God, to say to us daily what God says: I forgive you. 

What are we waiting for? There is embedded in that question the urgency of the moment. When it comes to many things, not the least of which and in my mind the most critical, righting global warming, we must act.

But when it comes not to things but to our relationship with our destiny, we don’t get going. Rather, we shut up, we stop, we open our hands and receive.