An Ideal Wait
DATE: November 29, 2009
SCRIPTURE: Luke 21:25-36
Whenever I tell someone here on the East Coast that I grew up in Hawaii, their first reaction usually is: "Wow, Hawaii? What are you doing here?" Over the next few weeks, as another New England winter approaches—as the tepid sun drifts across grey skies and barren trees shiver in the cold—I will no doubt be asking myself the same question. "What am I doing here?" Thankfully, four weeks from now, I will get on a plane to visit my family for Christmas. The flight from New York to Honolulu takes anywhere from ten hours to twenty hours, depending on how much you want to spend on your ticket. Usually, it takes about fourteen hours including layovers. I'm a reasonably patient person. But after about ten hours of air travel, I start to get restless. I just want to be there.
When I start to get frustrated, I think about my grandparents, my mother, and my aunt when they moved from Hawaii to Washington, D.C. in the late 1940s. Back then, the flight took ten hours from Honolulu to Los Angeles. Then in L.A., the four of them were joined by another family of four, and the eight of them squeezed themselves into a Packard and drove cross-country for ten days. Eleven days total. Suddenly, fourteen hours doesn't seem that bad. I never cease to be amazed by the endurance of my ancestors. Not just my mother and aunt, and my grandparents, but the generation before my grandparents. All eight of my great-grandparents immigrated to Hawaii about one hundred years ago. They boarded ships in Korea and Japan and traveled three thousand miles east across the Pacific Ocean. I can't imagine how long those journeys took.
My great-grandmother, Esther Chung, my mother's mother's mother, was only sixteen when she came to Hawaii. I imagine her, in one hand a suitcase, and in the other, her Bible, her passport, and a photograph of a man she'd never met, a man she was to marry when she arrived in the strange new country she would have called miguk, or America. When she finally stepped onto the shores of the island of Kauai, she met her future husband, who was much older than he had looked in the photo, who was actually thirty-eight—more than twice her age. I wonder how she eventually acclimated to her new husband and her new life. How did she manage to raise her six children and care for her aging husband during the Depression while working as a seamstress? Later in life, as she sat at her sewing table, designing evening dresses for the young daughters of wealthy plantation owners, did she remember her own dreams when she was sixteen?
My great-grandfather, Seijuro Tanaka, my father's father's father, dreamed of a higher education for himself in amerika. The caste system in Japan had prevented him from attending Kyoto University, where he had worked as a groundskeeper. In Hawaii, because of his math skills, he was one of eight men selected to survey the island of Maui for pineapple plantations. Later, he acquired and ran a small fishing operation. By Thanksgiving of 1941, he had paid off the last of his three fishing boats. As fate would have it, seventeen days later, Pearl Harbor was attacked. The U.S. government confiscated his boats, and falsely accused him of espionage. I wonder how he kept going during the war, as he sat for years in prison. How was he years later able to hand his grandson, my father, a quarter and eagerly point to the image of George Washington and say, "Ichiban," meaning "the best," expressing his unwavering belief in America?
I am utterly in awe of my ancestors for their vision, their courage, and their perseverance. Leaving their homelands, they each dreamed of a better life for themselves. But when they arrived in Hawaii, they encountered unexpected challenges, like the harsh working conditions on the plantations, and prejudices against their nationalities. They came to realize that some of their hopes would not be realized in their lifetime. Some their dreams would be achieved later by their children, and their children's children. My great-grandparents understood how to wait.
Today is the first day of Advent, a liturgical season dedicated to waiting. During Advent, the church sets aside four Sundays to prepare for Christmas. And as we wait for Christmas, we remember our spiritual ancestors, those generations after generations of Jewish people who waited for a Messiah. Advent includes all the preparations that lead up to our celebration of the birth of Jesus, like organizing the Christmas feast here at Saugatuck and rehearsing with the choir for the Christmas Eve service. The focus of this season is on our spiritual preparation for the coming of Christ.
In Advent, we don't only look backward, at the history of our spiritual ancestors. We also look forward, to our future as Christians. In our reading from the gospel this morning, Jesus offers a glimpse of that future. He explains to the disciples that he will come a second time. Using dramatic language, he paints an apocalyptic tableau in which "there will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves." To us today, this spectacular vision of the end times might seem more appropriate for Hollywood than for a twenty-first century life of faith. But to the early followers of Jesus, this apocalyptic vision of the Second Coming was real. Around the time Luke's gospel was being written, early Christians were facing persecution by the Roman government for their religious practices. These early Christians therefore had a very strong incentive to believe in the end times. They wanted to believe that were not being persecuted in vain, that they would in their lifetime witness the kingdom of God here on earth.
Today, with almost two thousand years of hindsight, we know that the Second Coming was not as imminent as the early Christians had hoped. We Christians today continue to live in between the first and second comings of Christ. While we might not understand all the apocalyptic details of the Second Coming, we Christians today do have hope for the fulfillment of humanity's experience with God, in which peoples and nations will enjoy peace, the oppressed will receive justice, and love will triumph. We have faith that the reign of God will be realized someday, and we know that we are called to live faithfully until then. We are called to wait.
Unfortunately, we live in a society that doesn't value waiting. Technology has changed our perception of time. Today, a five-thousand mile journey from Hawaii now takes ten hours instead of eleven days. Time has become a commodity with an estimable value: The quicker the flight, the less waiting, the more desirable the ticket, and therefore the more expensive the ticket. Because the dominant culture defines waiting as not doing anything, waiting has no value. Maybe it even has a negative value. And so, we have been socially conditioned to devalue waiting, to distrust waiting, to disbelieve in waiting.
Our culture of impatience is one reason why many religious organizations are declining in membership. Many people today want to be tangibly rewarded for their participation in a spiritual community. They only want to spend their time on projects that will be actualized in an expedient timeframe, with measurable results. But churches can't guarantee this. And so, Christians today who are active in churches like this one are faced with a double challenge. First, we must wait faithfully for the Second Coming of Christ. Second, we must do so against the dominant culture. Our waiting is therefore not passive. We wait actively, against what society expects and demands of us. We, like Luke and the early Christians, realize that Jesus' promise of the Second Coming might not be fulfilled in our lifetime. We understand that being a Christian requires faith that sometimes defies expedient timeframes and measurable results. We believe that our waiting offers a value of its own—a spiritual value grounded in our relationship with God.
One of my favorite church songs is an Advent hymn. "O come, O come Emmanuel/ And ransom captive Israel." The haunting melody captures the desperate plea of the singer, imploring God to send a Messiah to free Israel "that mourns in lonely exile here/ Until the Son of God appear." The name Emmanuel was invoked by the prophet Isaiah, eight centuries before the birth of Jesus. In Hebrew, "Emmanuel" simply means: "God with us." "Emmanuel" helps us understand why we wait: because God is with us while we wait. We wait as individuals, and we explore a closer relationship with God. We wait as a community, and we discover our connectedness with each other as the people of God.
Sometimes, while God waits with us, God reveals the divine within and around us. Every now and then, often unexpectedly, God offers us a glimpse of the Second Coming. God creates a moment in which we are allowed to catch sight of the reign of God here on earth. Last Sunday in worship, all four of Saugtauck's choirs offered a hymn together. Younger people sang with older people while others played hand bells. Where else but in God's community can we experience such pure, human joy? Where else but in God's community can we witness a group in which the voice of a third-grade girl is valued and appreciated as much as the voices of adults? And then, this past Thursday in Hoskins Hall, hundreds of people participated in a meal together at the Thanksgiving feast. Where else but in God's community can folks of very different social backgrounds gather to eat at the same table? Where else but in God's community can we simply experience each other as fellow human beings, unencumbered by social labels such as "rich" and "poor"?
Our reading today can remind us to be open to these everyday experiences of God. Jesus warns the disciples: "Be on guard." And: "Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength … to stand before the Son of Man." Although Jesus' words refer to the specific details of the apocalyptic Second Coming, they remind us today to be watchful while we wait. They remind us to be on the lookout for glimpses of God in our everyday lives.
My great-grandfather Tanaka never realized his dream to study at university. But he saw a glimpse of the future in his grandson, my father, who became the first in the family to attend college. Like my great-grandparents, like our Jewish spiritual ancestors who awaited a Messiah, like the early followers of Jesus, each of us here is on a journey. Our journeys almost always include times of waiting, times of uncertainty, times in which we ask ourselves, "What am I doing here?"
We here at Saugatuck Church are also on a journey as a community. And that journey too will offer times of waiting and times of uncertainty. The Good News is that we are not waiting alone. God waits with us. As we wait, we sometimes catch glimpses of our future with God. And in those moments, we begin to understand what it means to have faith, what it means to have hope, and what it means to be loved by God.
Chad Tanaka