Until Shift Change--March 30, 2023

Until Shift Change--March 30, 2023

"I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope; my soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning, more than those who watch for the morning.  O Israel, hope in the LORD! For with the LORD there is steadfast love, and with him is great power to redeem. It is he who will redeem Israel from all its iniquities." [Psalm 130:5-8]

I've been mulling over that phrase here, about "those who watch for the morning."  And I'm not sure how we're supposed to picture that.  

You can be leisurely watching out on some peaceful vista awaiting the sunrise, or you can be the night-watch looking out through the city gates to keep an eye out for invading enemies or besieging armies.  You can be busy through the night-watch, like third-shift emergency room staff who are trying their best to patch up every bleeding wound and broken bone until the day-shift comes in with the morning to take over for you so you can get some rest.  Or you can be waiting around with nothing to do, either calmly or fidgeting, knowing that something is looming on the horizon.  Sometimes you're both at the same time, I suppose, like people prepping for landfall of a hurricane or who can't sleep on the night before some major event.  You search for peace in fits and starts, carving out little moments of rest between bouts of anxiety, and grabbing a moment here at there to catch your breath while other things are moving all around you.

I was just listening yesterday to the poet Clint Smith sharing a poem on the radio, entitled, "For the Doctor's Record: Follow-Up," where he reports that "last night" a boy had been shot to death "who could have once been me or might one day be my son," and then follows up that detail with these words:  "I haven't cried in a long time. There have been 11,315 sunsets since I was born. And I haven't stopped to watch any of them."  And I can't help but hear in those words this deep unease at the pain of the world alongside the awareness that he has never felt able to rest or let his guard down for a moment long enough to watch a sunset.  I hear in those words an ache to be able to watch for the morning with hope, rather than with heartache.  I hear in those words the weariness of living in a world where we almost fear hearing the news in the morning for dread of what tragedy will have happened before the sun came up--where the latest school shooting was, which tyrant invaded which neighboring country, or which friend or neighbor got a terrible diagnosis.  We are all, in our own ways, watching for the morning with a strange mix of anticipation and despair.

And what I hear back from the psalmist, who is another poet weary of keeping his eyes open through the night, is an honest hope--one that is more than wishful thinking, but also one that hasn't given way to petrified cyncism that nothing can ever get better.  The poet is waiting for God to act, "more than those who watch for the morning," and I suspect there is both the urgency of wanting help for the hurts of the night and the expectation of something good and brilliant like the sunrise in that waiting.  I get the sense, like Clint Smith's poetic narrator, that the psalmist knows all too well the terrible things that happen in this world, and he is aching for things to be put right... and also is too weary to try and shoulder it all himself to fix things.  Like the graveyard shift nursing staff in the ER, he is looking for someone to relieve him of duties and to let him rest assured that everything has not fallen to him alone to take care of.  I'm reminded of the old line attributed to the late Pope John XXIII, who supposedly would pray at times of great distress, "I'm going to bed, Lord--the church is in your hands."  Maybe the psalmist has that tiredness in his bones, where he needs to know it's not just up to him to put everything right... which means waiting for a changing of the guard and being relieved of duties for the night.

It is hard, I will be honest, to be at peace with waiting when terrible things are happening all around in the world.  Or maybe, it's easy to do the sort of waiting that lets ourselves off the hook and says, "Nothing can be done to make things better, so I give up trying.  I'll just keep passively wishing over here by my comfortable view."  And maybe it's also easy to get stuck in the frantic "I-have-to-do-it-all-to-save-the-world" mentality that burns us out.  And instead, I think the psalmist here invites us to see that we are not alone in working to mend the hurts around us.  We wait for God, but not like we are sitting on our hands or twiddling our thumbs.  We believe that God's heart aches for every young man shot in the night, every student or teacher killed in a mass shooting during the day, every house blown up by invaders' missiles, and every despairing heart that shrugs in nihilism believing nothing will ever get better.  And if that is the God we believe in, then our waiting for God is neither wishful thinking nor pious escapism.  It means that where we have the ability to heal and mend and care for others, we do that--until our shift of duty ends, so to speak.  And at the same time, it means we can take the moments and times we need to rest, to catch our breath, and maybe to watch a sunrise, knowing that our work is a part of God's bigger work to mend the entire universe. Perhaps then we can see that our labor, suffering, and sorrow over the pain of the world is caught up with God's own labor, suffering, and sorrow over that same pain--and that God has gone to a cross over it, too.

It can feel pointless, hopeless, or impotent to believe that God's way of dealing with the terror of the world by suffering love and a cross rather than conquering armies is worth trusting in.  I think the psalmist knows the difficulty there of trusting in God without letting that become permission to do nothing. And yet surely he also knows it is impossible to keep going when you think you have the responsibility to do everything.  Maybe living in the in-between place, where we do what healing work we can while calling on God to move and act where we cannot, is what it means to "wait for the Lord."

Lord God, teach us how to wait for your action in the world, and teach us what you would have us do in the mean time while we wait.  Give us peace where we are weary, and renew us for when your work will come through our hands.