"The whole thing is rotten," said Morris Weiser, as he tapped his cane on the vaulted ceiling of the old and decaying synagogue in New York's lower east side. Morris Weiser was among the few Jews who survived the Janowska concentration camp in Poland, and now, a retired butcher in his seventies, his one remaining passion is to keep alive the Chasam Sopher synagogue. The synagogue has few Sabbath worshipers now, but Morris has put all of his savings into this place, sustains it by his constant effort, keeps it barely alive by the sheer force of his will. "When God saved me from Hitler," he said, "I promised that in any country I come I will do something for God."
The synagogue, like the tenements which fill the neighborhood in which it stands, is marked by peeling paint, deteriorating floors, and falling plaster. Morris, himself, is feeling the wearing effects of the passing days. "I'm broken down like this shul," he confesses.
In the days before the war, Morris had been a promising young medical student, but now his youth is gone, his money is gone, and all he has left are the synagogue and hope. And so, Morris Weiser does what he can, and he waits. Casting his eyes over the vacant pews, he vows that someday "there'll be a lot of Jews here."1
Simeon and Anna were also aging Jews who clung to their hope ... and waited. Luke tells us that Simeon and Anna lived in Jerusalem and were among those who looked expectantly for God to come in power to save his people. Like Morris, who believes that a God who can save will not leave the synagogue forever empty, Simeon and Anna believed that a God who can save would not leave the chosen people forever empty. And so, like Morris, they did what they could, and they waited. New Testament scholar Raymond Brown gives us the best translation of Luke's descriptions of them: Simeon "was upright and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel." Anna "never left the Temple courts; day and night she worshiped God, fasting and praying," for she was among "those waiting for the redemption of Israel."2
It is never easy to wait for anything of importance -- for Christmas, for the plane carrying the one we love, for the morning to relieve the sleepless night, for the healing word in a bitter argument, for the toilsome task to be done, for the labor to be over and the child to be born, for death. It is never easy to wait.
It is hardest of all to wait for God. Not many can bear its harsh discipline. Not many can attain its delicate balance of action and hope. Not many can achieve its deep wisdom. Not many can endure its long and dark hours. Therefore, since the demands of waiting for God are so great, there is always the temptation to transform waiting for God into something else, something less.
There are some who would change waiting for God into passivity. "It is God for whom we wait," they say, "so nothing can be done until God comes. Nation will rage against nation, and there is nothing we can do about it. We must wait for God to bring us peace. The poor we will always have with us, and it is God who will take care of them. We live in an evil and unjust world, sad, but true, and we must wait for God to set things right."
But waiting for God is not like sitting in a darkened theater, idly waiting for the movie to begin. Waiting for God is more like waiting for an honored guest to arrive at our home. There is much work to be done; everything must be made ready. Every sweep of the broom, every pressing of the dough, every setting of the table is done in anticipation of the needs and wishes of the one who is to come.
When James Watt was Secretary of the Interior, he often infuriated environmentalists by his careless treatment of the nation's natural resources. He advocated the granting of oil leases in wilderness areas, and he worked to permit strip-mining in areas adjacent to national parks. Particularly troubling was the fact that Watt based his decisions on religious as well as political grounds. A fundamentalist Christian, Watt saw no real reason to preserve the environment, since Jesus would be coming soon. While Watt can perhaps be admired for his undeserving faith in the coming Christ, his actions demonstrated a serious misunderstanding of the Christ who is coming. The Christ for whom we wait is the very one "in whom all things were created," and a selfish lack of care for the creation is no way to wait for his coming.
In the early '60s, at the height of the civil rights movement, a group of white ministers issued a public statement urging Dr. Martin Luther King, in the name of the Christian faith, to be more patient in his quest for justice and to relax the relentless struggle for civil rights. King's response came in the form of the famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail." In the letter, King indicated that he had received similar requests for delay, indeed, that he had just gotten a letter from a "white brother in Texas" who wrote, "... It is possible you are in too great a religious hurry ... The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth." Dr. King replied that such an attitude stemmed from a sad misunderstanding of time, the notion that time itself cures all ills. Time, King argued, could be used for good or for evil. Human progress, he said, is not inevitable, but rather ...
... it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.3
King knew that complete justice must await the coming of God. That was the theme of his final sermon in which he proclaimed, "I've been to the mountaintop. I've seen the promised land." But he was persuaded that while we wait, "the time is always ripe to do right." Simeon and Anna were waiting for God to come, but they also were not passive in their waiting. Simeon was full of devotion and did what was just. Anna kept the lights burning at the Temple with her ceaseless worship. They waited, but, while they waited, they did what they could.
On the other hand, there are others who are weary of waiting for God, who would turn instead to more immediate and tangible sources for action and hope. According to the account in the New York Times, it was just before Christmas several years ago that David Storch, a music teacher, borrowed a copy of the score of Handel's Messiah from the Brooklyn Public Library. Through a clerical error, however, the transaction was not recorded. There were several other requests for the score, and the library staff, unaware that it had been checked out, spent many hours searching in vain for it through the stacks. On the day that Storch returned it, placing it on the circulation desk, he was astonished to hear the librarian spontaneously, joyously, and loudly shout, "The Messiah is here! The Messiah is back!" Every head in the library turned toward the voice, but, alas, as the Times reported, "A few minutes later everyone went back to work."4
A wry story, but also a parable of the often dashed expectations of those who wait for God. Someone cries, "Peace, peace," but there is no peace. Another says, "Comfort, comfort," but there is little comfort. "Come, thou long-expected Jesus," goes the prayerful hymn, and heads turn in a moment of curious interest, then, seeing nothing, go back to work. And so, weary of waiting on a God who does not come, we lower our horizons, fold our hands in prayer to more tangible gods to give us purpose, and turn to more immediate and reliable resources for hope. We build shiny sanctuaries of glass and steel where we can celebrate "possibility thinking" and the other human potentials, which we hope will save us from our self-doubt, if not our sins. We fill the silos and the skies with ever more potent weapons of destruction, which we hope will save us from each other. And we summon the elixirs of modern medicine to save us from disease, aging, and finally from death. In short, tired of waiting for the true God, we create our own.
In Arnold Schoenberg's opera, "Moses and Aaron," while Moses is on the mountaintop receiving the Law, Aaron is left in the valley to wait with the people. Exhausted, impatient, and deprived of the vision of God's presence, the people cry to Aaron, "Point God out! We want to kneel down ... But then, where is he? Point him out!" Finally Aaron yields to their plea, forging for them a god they can touch, a god for whom they never have to wait. "O Israel," he says, "... I return your gods to you,and also give you to them,just as you have demanded.You shall provide the stuff;I shall give it a form ....4
But our gods made of positive thoughts, nuclear megatons, management objectives, secular therapies, and cosmetic skill cannot save us. Indeed they become burdens to us, heavy to carry, costly to maintain. It is God alone who saves, and part of what it means to be fully human is to wait for his coming. Jesuit priest William F. Lynch has observed that there are two kinds of waiting. One kind waits because "there is nothing else to do." The other is born out of hope. The decision to engage in this hopeful kind of waiting ...
... is one of the great human acts. It includes, surely, the acceptance of darkness, sometimes its defiance. It includes the enlarging of one's perspective beyond a present moment ... It simply chooses to wait, and in so doing gives the future the only chance it has to emerge.5
Simeon and Anna did not wait because "there was nothing else to do," but because they had hope. Therefore their waiting was not a vacuum, devoid of activity. They worked and worshiped, performed acts of justice and prayer. While they waited, they defied the darkness by serving God, because it was for the light of God that they waited. They did what they could, and they waited.
And, Luke tells us, God did come to them. Who knows what they were expecting, but surely it was not this: a fragile baby bundled into the Temple by two young parents who were eager to obey the ritual law of purification, but who were too poor to afford the sacrifice of a lamb and brought with them instead the acceptable substitute, a pair of birds. A man, a woman, two birds, and a baby. Can this be the heralded and hoped-for coming of God?
It is hard to wait for God. There are some who wait for God passively, and there are some who impatiently refuse to wait, but the hardest part of waiting for God is to recognize and accept God when he comes and how he comes. We pray for God to come and give us young people to fill the pews, and God comes, not bringing more people but a new and demanding mission. We pray for God to give us inner peace, and God comes to us bringing another struggle. We pray for God to come and heal, and God comes to us at graveside saying, "I am the Resurrection and the Life." We pray for God to come and console his people, and in the front door of the Temple walk two new and uncertain parents carrying a pair of birds ... and a baby who will die on a cross.
But old Anna looked, and somehow she knew that she had seen the fulfillment of her hope and Israel's hope. Old Simeon looked, and he knew, too. He knew that God indeed had come, and he also knew that this coming of God, like all of God's comings, both met human need and defied human expectation, that it would bring both salvation and demand, great hope and great cost. As soon as he had said, "Mine eyes have seen thy salvation," he added the warning, "This child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel." Every coming of God meets our needs, but also violates our expectations and demands our lives.
When the master artist Giotto expressed this story in paint, he, too, saw the fulfillment and the demand, the joy and the hope, in the coming of God. His "Presentation in the Temple" is, according to art critic John W. Dixon, Jr., "one of the few genuinely witty paintings in great art."6 Simeon holds the baby Jesus, his lips moving now beneath his hoary beard, carefully reciting his oft-rehearsed lines, "Nunc dimittis ... Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace." Giotto knows his Simeon. He also knows his babies, for the infant Jesus, far from resting contentedly through this aria, is responding as all babies do when held by eccentric strangers. His dark eyes are narrowed and fixed in frozen alarm on Simeon. He reaches desperately for his mother, every muscle arched away from the strange old man. Giotto knows his babies. He also knows the deep truth of this moment, for as Jesus reaches away from Simeon toward Mary, we observe that the child is suspended above the temple altar.7 "This very human baby," observes Dixon, "is from the beginning, the eternal sacrifice for the redemption of mankind."8
Redemption and sacrifice. Hope and demand. So it is with the coming of God. But God will come. The God who came to Simeon and Anna will come to us, too, violating our expectations even as he comes to meet our deepest needs. Until He comes, like Anna and Simeon, we do what we can ... and wait.
1. Joseph Berger, "A Man Battles to Save Cherished Synagogue," The New York Times (July 21, 1986), section B, p. 3.
2. Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1977), pp. 435-6.
3. Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail," in Why We Can't Wait (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), p. 89.
4. Arnold Schoenberg, "Moses and Aaron," as translated in Karl H. Worner, Schoenberg's Moses and Aaron (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), pp. 137 & 163.
5. William F. Lynch, S.J., Images of Hope (Baltimore: Helicon, 1967), pp. 177-8.
6. John W. Dixon, Jr., Art and the Theological Imagination (New York: Seabury Press, 1978), p. 96.
7. Some of this material previously appeared in Thomas G. Long, "Bit Parts in the Christmas Pageant," Journal for Preachers, Vol. VI, No. 1 (Advent, 1982), p. 20. It is used by permission.
8. Dixon, p. 96.