This is a message I gave at FOCUS – Luther College’s Sunday night student led service. I gave this as a senior in college, on March 11, 2012.
Waiting on the Lord, Now
Continuing our Focus series of speakers named Daniel, I’m Daniel Flucke, and I’m going to talk about what I’m calling “the dichotomy of waiting now.” It seems pretty clear that we are called as Christians to be active servants of God, so what is this call to wait upon the Lord? What does that mean?
“Waiting Now.” We just did a song about waiting on the Lord. I’d sing it for you, but trust me, you really don’t want me to. “Strength will rise as we wait upon the Lord.” It’s a theme common throughout the Bible. God’s time is not our time. Psalm 27:14 says “Wait for the Lord; Be strong, and take heart and wait for the Lord.” Galatians 5:6 “For through the Spirit, by faith, we wait expectantly for the hope of righteousness.” And of course Isaiah 40:31, in particular the King James Version, which is where that song comes from. “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.” Wait upon the Lord.
Right now, we’re in the church season called Lent. Lent is all about waiting, about preparing for Holy Week, when Jesus is crucified and rises again on Easter. Similarly, before Christmas, we have an entire church season called Advent, which literally means waiting for the coming of Christ, waiting for Christmas.
Being in college is kind of like Lent. There’s a lot of waiting and preparing. After all, we’re in school right now. What are we supposed to be doing here? Isn’t our purpose in life right now to be learning, to be getting an education, preparing to take this great liberal arts education and go forth from Luther College to change the world(!)? Well, kind of. But what exactly are we preparing for? As Christians, we’re called to a life of service and discipleship, called to be ministering to a hurting world, called to be representing Christ, showing God’s love to the broken people in this world, broken like we all are.
Wait on the Lord. But God doesn’t call us to a passive waiting. It’s so easy to imagine all the stuff coming up in the future. Right now we have midterms, spring break coming up next week, graduation for some of us far sooner than we want it to be. There are summer jobs, career fairs, grad school applications, room draw, and all the rest of life. How do we get past everything going in life to even think about doing ministry, about serving God? Personally, I’m busy planning for my wedding in July, and then I’m going to seminary two weeks after I get married. With all of that coming up in the future, I’ve been wrestling a lot this year with the challenge of going to seminary to become a pastor, to prepare to go into ministry. What does that even mean, “Go into ministry?” So I’m going to go to seminary, get another three years of “theological education,” do an internship, and Ta-Da! I’ll be ready to do ministry!
Hold on. “I’ll be ready to do ministry?” Wait, what? How arrogant do I need to be to think that at some point I’ll be ready to do ministry? I’m a person, not God. Surely we’re not good enough, wise enough, or knowledgeable enough to do God’s work. But that’s not what we’re called to do, or who we’re called to be. Being called to do ministry doesn’t mean I’m called to save the world. God’s already done that. God doesn’t need our help; we do it because of what God has already done for us. “We love because God first loved us.” 1st John 4:19 That’s a relief! God doesn’t wait for us to be qualified before He calls us to serve Him. We’re answering God’s call to ministry out of gratitude. It’s not that God will stop loving us if we don’t serve well enough, if we don’t do a good enough job. It’s not a question of salvation; it’s a question of what do we do now that we’ve been redeemed. What are we set free for? None of us is perfect, or prepared to do God’s work. But God doesn’t call the qualified; God qualifies the called!
Like Lent, college is a time of waiting. But it’s not waiting in a void. I literally overheard someone in the caf this year saying that she couldn’t wait for life to begin after college. But life doesn’t begin after college. If you’re waiting for your life to begin, congratulations! It has! You’re living it, right now. Yes, the goals in college might be different, and we might be in a temporary, transient “Luther bubble,” but this is still reality. Having late-night conversations with friends who don’t see why their life matters, who think the world would be better off without them, that’s dealing with real life. That’s real life ministry. College is a temporary place, but don’t just wait for it to end. Waiting and preparing are part of Lent, but it’s waiting and preparing while still being present in the world.
I said before that I was going to talk about the “dichotomy of waiting now.” This whole year I’ve been struggling with that idea that I just said. How do we get past everything going on in life to even think about doing ministry? But that’s completely the wrong question. We are doing ministry here. Now. Yes, it’s great to look forward to what we’ll do in the future. If you’re looking for something in ministry to do this summer, (shameless plug) my camp director will be here tomorrow tabling in the union. But don’t wait until summer, or graduation, or grad school, or a full-time job, or…or…or. Like it or not, God doesn’t wait for us to be ready. God calls us to service and discipleship here and now. God calls us as we are, not as we shall be.
God doesn’t wait for us to figure it out, to graduate, to have all the right answers, maybe not even to be asking the exact right questions. Listen to that passage from 1 Corinthians 1 again. Paul writes, “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.” Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”
Good news, friends! It’s not about us! We don’t need to have all the answers. To me, that’s part of what waiting on the Lord means. Even if I’m not bold, or faithful, God is. It’s not that we’re waiting for God to give us all the answers. We’re never going to get there in this life. In College Ministries, we seem to use a famous quote by Rainer Maria Rilke a lot. He wrote, “Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” Live the questions. That sounds great, but if there’s one thing being a religion major has taught me, it’s that sometimes we don’t even know what questions to be asking. But we don’t need to. We don’t need to have the right questions, or the right answers, because we know Who has the answers. Waiting on the Lord means following and trusting in the One who has the answers, the one who made us to ask the questions. Having the faith to serve God does not mean not having doubts or questions. Jesus had questions for God, and Jesus WAS God! As Paul talks about in that 1 Corinthians passage, we can’t find all of the answers through this world. Going to Luther College, as wonderful as it is, is not going to answer all the questions. Far from it. Maybe going to college isn’t even giving us the right questions. But that’s ok! I hope that going to seminary next fall will give me time to look for more answers, and more questions, but I hope I don’t fall into that trap of thinking that it has to be done before I can do ministry.
Our call as Christians is not a call to knowing all the answers. Maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe being a Christian is admitting we don’t know, giving up the arrogant idea that we know what’s best. Maybe part of being Christian is believing in a God we can’t explain, that sometimes we don’t even like, sometimes we disagree with. There are so many things I don’t understand about God. But I also know that I don’t have all the answers. Maybe I’m going to be so trusting to say that I will not and cannot ever have all the answers. But God does.
Back one more time to that 1st Corinthians passage. “Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption.” I love that phrase. Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God. That’s so freeing. I don’t need to have all the answers. Waiting until I have all the answers is paralyzing. Yes, I’ll make mistakes. So what if I stumble, what if I fall? God’s love continues. God’s still faithful.
Wait on the Lord. Wait and go be the hands and feet of Christ. Right here. Right now. Amen.