What are we waiting for? Part I

What Are We Waiting For?  Part I    Rev. Laura Bogle

Sermon delivered on December 4, 2016

Monthly worship theme: Waiting

Readings

Luke 6:1-3 (The Message translation)

 3 ^1-6 In the fifteenth year of the rule of Caesar Tiberius—it was while Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea; Herod, ruler of Galilee; his brother Philip, ruler of Iturea and Trachonitis; Lysanias, ruler of Abilene; during the Chief-Priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas—John, Zachariah’s son, out in the desert at the time, received a message from God. He went all through the country around the Jordan River preaching a baptism of life-change leading to forgiveness of sins, as described in the words of Isaiah the prophet:
Thunder in the desert!
“Prepare God’s arrival!
Make the road smooth and straight!
Every ditch will be filled in,
Every bump smoothed out,
The detours straightened out,
All the ruts paved over.
Everyone will be there to see
The parade of God’s salvation.”

"A Vision" by Wendell Berry

If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it...
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
here, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides...
The river will run
clear, as we will never know it...
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields...
Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its reality.

The week after the election I took a trip to The Mountain  – UU retreat center near Highlands, NC.  I decided to drive through the national park to get there, and I drove in the early morning through the usual Smoky Mountains mist, but also through the heavier acrid smoke of forest fires.  By the time I got up to the top of Little Scaly Mountain, where the retreat center sits, the wind had shifted and cleared the air right there. But there’s a tower you can climb, and in the 360 degree view from up there, most every direction I looked I saw plumes of smoke.

It kind of mirrored how I have been experiencing the aftermath of the election. Since November 9^th,  every direction I look I see potential hardship, potential devastation – health care, education, civil rights, foreign policy, environmental protections, law enforcement, economic strategy…  the list goes on.  I feel like we are surrounded by fires being set on purpose and it’s hard to know which one to start with.

But I want you to know that while I was up there on that mountaintop for a couple of days with colleagues, I learned about an amazing life form that I would have easily overlooked if all I paid attention to was the smoke.

See the picture up here?  Anyone know what it is?

This is a kind of lichen called the Rock Tripe Lichen.  Doesn’t look like much.  Kind of dry, 

scaly patches clinging to a rock.  Not colorful – greenish brown on top and dark brown or black underneath.

Well, you are looking at an organism that is about 1,000 years old.  Scientists know this because they know how slowly these lichen grow, just a couple of millimeters a year.  Near this rock at The Mountain there is a sign to keep people from touching the lichen, or climbing the rock.  You see the lichen is really quite fragile;  I could reach out and just scrape it off I wanted to.

I did a quick search and I did discover two other things that might disturb this kind of lichen and kill it:  fire.  And disturbance of the water table.

And yet, this lichen has survived for 1,000 years.  Our lives are so short in comparison.  What would it take for us to have a 1,000 year worldview?  Like Native American and environmental activist Winona LaDuke has said,

http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/together-with-earth/bigger-than-science-bigger-than-religion

“The world is alive, everything has spirit, has standing, has the right to be recognized.

One of our fundamental teachings is that in all our actions we consider the impact it will have on seven generations.  Think about what it would mean to have a worldview that could last a thousand years, instead of the current corporate mindset that can’t see beyond the next quarterly earnings statement.”

As I pondered the 1,000 year old lichen and the surrounding fires, I was pulled in two different directions.  In the context of 1,000 years, how can anything feel so urgent?  Four years of a presidency, even eight years of a presidency seems insignificant when looked at in that time frame.

And yet, at the same time, the mountains are burning.  This week people and animals, and probably some 1,000year old lichen have succumbed to the fires ravaging our mountains.

How can we not feel urgency?

How can we even consider talk of “Waiting” this month? 

Next week I’m gonna talk more about action, about why being loyal to our Unitarian Universalist values means we can’t just “wait and see” under a Trump administration.

Today, I want to propose two important ways “Waiting” can be meaningful and important for these times.

I am not talking about a drumming-your-fingers impatient kind of waiting, like you might do in the middle of a traffic jam.

I am not talking about a falling-asleep kind of waiting like you might do at the DMV.

The first kind of waiting I want to propose, is the kind of waiting that a fire-fighter does, with everything prepared for the call.

Or the kind of “waiting” that a server in a restaurant engages in—waiting to respond to what you need.

Think of the phrase “ladies in waiting” – the servants to a Queen who are ready to spring into action at any moment. 

There’s a meaning of the term “Wait” that means  being and remaining ready and available for use. 

In these times, we Unitarian Universalists need to also be waiting in that way.  To wait on one another and on the most vulnerable in our community.  Meaning to serve one another and the most vulnerable in our community.  To stay awake.  To pay attention for the calls we can answer.  In this way we are ultimately serving the flourishing of life.

The poet David Whyte puts it this way:

…It must be

under all the struggle

we want to go on.

It must be,

that deep down,

we are creatures

getting ready

for when we are needed.

….

we are getting ready

just to be ready

and nothing else.

(Excerpt from “Waiting to Go On”)

So that’s the first way I propose we wait:  to be at the ready to respond when and where we are needed.

The second way of waiting I want to talk about has to do with an active expectation that Love and Goodness will arise, is actually already arising at this moment.

I am talking about the kind of waiting you do when you sit by the door waiting for a loved one to come home, knowing they are on the way.

John the Baptist, and the Prophet Isaiah before him said,

Prepare the way, clear a path,

make the ways straight for the arrival of God, the arrival of the Good, the arrival of Life.

Christian theologian Henri Nouwen talks about “the attitude of waiting that allows us to be people who can live in a very chaotic world and survive spiritually.”  (“Waiting for God” in Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas) 

A very active kind of waiting.

A way to wait that has a sense of promise and hope. 

He says that people who wait in this way “know that what they are waiting for is growing from the ground on which they are standing.  That’s the secret.  The secret of waiting is the faith that the seed has been planted, that something has begun.  Active waiting means to be present fully to the moment, in the conviction that something is happening where you are and that you want to be present to it.  A waiting person is someone who is present to the moment, who believes that this moment is the moment.”

This kind of waiting remembers that there is something powerful in life that wants to live – a seed of life in everything.

This kind of waiting, in being present to the moment, understands that hope can break forth in infinite places, in infinite ways. 

This is not a naïve kind of pie-in-the-sky hope.

We have seen the 1,000 year old lichen clinging to a rock.

We are seeing the Native People of this land, after 500 years of oppression, continue to lead even those of us whose people have done the oppressing, towards a hopeful vision of sustainable co-existence.

We have seen generations of African Americans resist slavery and Jim Crow segregation and lynchings and mass incarceration and daily indignities.

We have seen the LGBTQ community live through the devastation and loss of the AIDS crisis, when our federal government would not act, creating their own systems of care and compassion.

We are seeing, right now, here in Blount County, people engaging in vulnerable conversations about race and racism, about how to seek the humanity in one another across difference.

Are we paying attention?  Are we, especially those of us in privileged positions, preparing, clearing the way for Love and Justice to arrive, expecting that it can and will? 

Remembering, in the Christmas story, that Love arrived in the body of a tiny baby that some these days would call an illegal immigrant born to an unwed mother. 

What we are waiting on is already in motion in the ground on which we stand, even though there is ruin in the land.  

What we are waiting on is already in motion within us,

Hope can even break forth in us if we are paying attention, waiting with expectation to greet it.

Now is the time to dig deep in our spiritual practices.  Whatever helps you wait with expectation, stay awake and pay attention. 

A colleague said that we all need to be finding that “grounded place that is neither numb nor hysterical.”

Gathering here for worship is our corporate spiritual practice, to be physically together, building relationship with one another, meditating, and singing and praying together.  Weaving connections of love that matter when we leave this place.  So I want to challenge you to be here even more often, to simply show up and wait on one another.

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be considering some other ways we might gather in the New Year, to keep ourselves prepared, paying attention, to clear a way for Love to arrive, to stay grounded in the wisdom of the survival of ancestors.  I’d love to hear your ideas about what you need, what our community needs during this new era.

Wendell Berry tells us:

If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it...
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
here, their houses strongly placed

May it be so.  Amen.