Waiting - July 1, 2024
AM Psalm 106:1-18; Num. 22:1-21; Rom. 6:12-23; Matt. 21:12-22
“Prayer was never meant to be magic,” the Mother says.“Then why bother with it?” the daughter asks. Because it’s an act of love,” her mother replies. (Madeline L’Engle, A Ring of Endless Light)
How many times have we impatiently demanded that God answer our prayers, almost as if God is at our beck and call, responding whenever we need something, as if by magic. Then if we see no evidence that God is listening, we turn our face away as if to say, “Go ahead, two can play this game.” As if God’s seeming lack of response is proof of God’s lack of concern for us. We’ve become so spoiled with instant almost everything, we’ve come to expect instant success rather than anticipating what the act of waiting can produce.
Sue Monk Kidd in When the Heart Waits, describes the process of transformation that can occur while we wait, when we allow “the time and space necessary for grace to happen.” Kidd describes it as a process during which grace transforms our lives so that we become a container in which the Holy Spirit can dwell. Prayer can feel like a time of waiting, an act of love that often feels unrequited, while all along the love our prayers contain is not only going out to God but at the same time is transforming us as well.
Once in a conversation with a monk, Kidd asked how he learned to be so still. He laughed at her and said that she had bought into the myth that in being still we are doing nothing. He went on to say that “when you’re waiting, you’re not doing nothing. You’re doing the most important something there is. You’re allowing your soul to grow up. If you can’t be still and wait you can’t become who God created you to be.”
Jesus teaches us that whatever we ask for in prayer with faith, we will receive. He doesn’t say, how or when but there is the implication that through faith we will receive God’s grace.
Today is the church honors the life and legacy of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Stowe married Calvin Stowe, a professor at Lane Theological Seminary. She along with her husband were outspoken critics of slavery and supported the Underground Railroad. She’s probably best known for her book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), a fiction voicing her antislavery beliefs. Abraham Lincoln is said to have asked her if she was “the little lady who started this great war,” referring to the firestorm of angry debates her book had sparked. It was not until 1865 that the Emancipation proclamation was passed, declaring all slaves should be freed. And even then, it would be an endless effort for those who had been enslaved, along with their descendants to possess the same rights as all other Americans. Stowe was from a faith-filled family. No doubt her faith must have given her the courage to speak out for those things she knew to be wrong. She must have also understood the power of prayer and how our time is not God’s time; that along with prayer comes waiting, waiting for God to transform us and those for whom we pray.
In today’s gospel, Jesus tells his disciples whatever you ask for in prayer with faith, you will receive. Waiting is hard work. It requires patience and the certainty that in waiting God’s present, a certainty that only faith can bring. Faith that God knows our deepest prayers before we can even put words to our inner most needs. Faith that God will answer not with what we ask but with what we need.
Faithfully,
Sally+