Sermon: Living in time of transition - in between time.
The theme I wanted to try and focus on is patience and or is it impatience? It’s a real challenge because as you all know I am not the most patient person on the planet. When I get an idea I want to run with it immediately. I get excited and want to share my enthusiasm with others. Yet this is a real season of patience for me. I am being made to wait on important decisions because of the lockdown, and to be honest I am intrigued as to where these weeks and months will lead me as individual and as a church. If this time was a book, I’d be the one reading the last chapter of the book before the middle of the book to find out what happens. I read the Scottish Government document regarding Covid-19 and coming out of the lockdown. What I would have given for a detailed timeline, and for the Church and others like Mosques to get a mention.
I sense a growing impatience, particularly in the business world to return to some semblance of normal. More and more companies are finding ways to open up, and I see the excitement that our favourite takeaways and coffee shops are generating, finding ways to keep us satisfied. At the same time, I am wondering what it means for keeping the NHS and support systems safe, because until the NHS can go back to some kind of normal, those with health conditions that are not Covid-19 won’t receive the level of care they need. And that isn’t a criticism of the NHS but a vague understanding of the fact that Covid-19 isn’t the only health situation out there, but it is dominating.
So how do we live in this in between time? And it is a time of waiting. We know that this version of the lockdown won’t be forever, even if occasionally it is reintroduced, but some version of social distancing will remain in place for a significant period of time. And that goes against everything we have become used to. We get deliveries in a day or a few days of just about anything. We click and collect. We watch 24/7 news, we online bank, we watch box sets rather than wait a week for the next episode. We are no longer designed to be patient, to wait, to exist in liminal time - that in between time.
We know our world. The world is as it is - at least what we knew just over 100 days ago. For the Jewish people their world was shaped, as ours is, by ritual and practice, by festivals and milestones. The Old Covenant was full of rules, and requirements for sacrifice and sin offerings. When you read through Leviticus as I just have it is a whole other world of ritual and sacrifice, that would make sense in that culture. Repeatedly, you find God denouncing the sacrifice of children made to the god Molech so other tribes certainly had sacrifices as part of their culture. Ritual helped people to distinguish between the ordinary and the holy, like we offer a guest the best of what we have. God is holy, to be respected and honoured. But a covenant wasn’t a dictatorship. A covenant is like marriage vows - promises, vows made between a couple to love and honour one another, to be faithful to one another, to share life together. The Old Covenant was a living, loving relationship between God and his chosen people, which had to include the forgiveness of sins. It is important to know that God and Abraham entered the Covenant as equals despite God’s holiness. God chose that.
But God is holy, and we are so not! So, on the Day of Atonement, the High Priest went into the Holy of Holies and sought forgiveness for the people on their behalf. It was an incredibly special day full of ritual practice, outfits, clothes, fasting and sacrifice.
The author of Hebrews in this passage shows how Jesus is the sacrificial lamb and fulfils the requirements of the Day of Atonement, but that because he does it in the heavens, rather than in an earthly copy of the heavenly temple, he has fulfilled the Old Covenant between God and his chosen people, and allowed the start of the New Covenant, that is a relationship between God and all his people. The High Priest could only use the blood of animals, which had its own set of rules, and blood was known as the source of life. In scripture we are told that and it is why Jews don’t eat meat with blood in it because blood equals life.
Therefore to completely fulfill the Old Covenant, to honour that promise, that relationship between God and his people, Jesus had to use his own perfect, sin free, blemish free life - life blood - to cleanse, forgive and begin the New Covenant. Jesus died to take away the sins of the world, and allow something wonderful to begin. Yet too often we miss this out of our faith story, and think somehow we are the ones who have to appease God. We spend time trying to make ourselves worthy. We think God wouldn’t have time for us, in our mundane lives. We don’t want to bother him with our guilt, our anxiety, our worries, our boringness...but I want to tell you that God cares and loves you enough to have come amongst us in Jesus Christ, and be the ultimate sacrifice and gift to humanity. And we know that God can never leave us or abandon us, so therefore he is with us in this time of waiting, of liminal space, of uncertainty...because as Christians we are living in the in-between time. We live between Christ has come and Christ will come, what some call simultaneously living in the “now and not yet”
Part of the problem of the human race is that we think we have to solve everything, do everything, be responsible for everything. We need to be doing. We need to have purpose. We need to be in control. And when that control, that purpose, that activity is taken away, we are bereft, lost, tossed about. We don’t like waiting. We don’t like not knowing what should be done or can be done. We see it all the time in the random pronouncements of politicians and pundits on what we should have done or be doing.
Within the Christian faith - we regularly build this waiting time into our faith journey. We maybe just haven’t truly appreciated it because culture pushes in and fills up our spaces. Think about it for a moment, run through the Christian year. Remember we start the Christian year with Advent - a season of preparation, waiting for the coming Messiah - not just the babe in the manger but a recognition that Jesus promised he would return. A sense of expectation and anticipation, of waiting. The New Testament writers expected Jesus to return quickly, yet over 2000 years later we are still waiting. But why are we so surprised at that? The promise of a Messiah was made hundreds of years before He came. There are 400 years of silence between the Old Testament and the New Testament. It took Moses 120 years to fulfil his mission...Move on from Advent, through Epiphany where many believe it took the Wise Men about 2 years to meet Jesus! Then we hit Lent - 40 days in the wilderness with Jesus, again a season of preparation, of penance. We arrive at the Cross, wait ever so briefly through Holy Saturday that feels like eternity and into Easter Sunday morning. From there we have 40 days til Ascension and 50 days til Pentecost - a season of waiting for the Spirit.
Kind of goes against same day delivery and live-streaming culture.
Add to the mix the place of the Sabbath, a consistent doctrine within Scripture which we have so lost in this world. We butchered it with constraints and lost the beauty of it in ridicule and misunderstanding, of selfish ambition and greed. But consistently God reminds us of the value of Sabbath. We need to rest, and most importantly rest in him and with him.
Waiting is a discipline of faith. Not popular - I get that. Waiting is not wasted time. Waiting is a time of growth, preparation, penance leading to new life, indeed eternal life. A grace, a fruit of waiting is patience. Over the next few weeks I hope to explore the discipline of waiting under the doctrine of Sabbath. Trust me Sabbath can be rebellion not just resting, it can be play and celebration, not just meditation and chilling.
Let us learn how to wait, and to watch for his return.
God bless you! Amen.
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