Wait
An Excerpt of A Lenten Sermon Series
Rev. Dr. Waltrina Middleton
Sacred Texts:
Psalm 27:13-14
Talkin’ About a Revolution (Tracy Chapman, 1988)
The practice of Lectio Divina, “a contemplative practice of scriptural reading, meditation, and prayer”, invites us into transcendence through repetition. When we repeat the words and pause and reflect, we believe something will resonate and speak to our spirit and mental consciousness. We trust something transformative and miraculous can occur out of the quiet whispers of peace and devotion we create in this practice of waiting on divine revelations. Texts like Psalm 27, verses 13 and 14 remind me of this practice as it insists, “Wait on the Lord”. Wait.
Wait on God. Be strong. Let your heart take courage. Wait on God.
What transcendence awaits us? What wondrous revelations await us as we pursue justice and a revolution?
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. admonishes us not to wait in his critical 1964 writing, “Why We Can’t Wait.” King argues that the message on waiting “rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘wait’ has almost always meant “never”. And so, he tells us, “We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that justice too long delayed is justice denied.”
King goes on to say that this insistence on waiting perpetuates a sense of nobodiness. Waiting with nothing, in order to gain nothing. Waiting on justice only to be kicked a little lower. For Black people in America, waiting equated to “three hundred years of humiliation, abuse, and deprivation”. It included being attacked by dogs, beaten by police, pushed back by fire hoses, disenfranchised at the voter booth, lynched, dehumanized and, in the words of Tracy Chapman, “Wasting time”… “crying at the doorsteps of those armies of salvation.”
How long must we wait? How many more lives must be stolen? How many bodies must be lynched? How many crosses must burn grimly in our yards? How many synagogues, temples and houses of worship must be bombed or violated with bloodshed? What assurance is there for us midst our waiting on God?
How do we wait with so much at stake? How do we actively wait? How do we consciously wait? How do we wait with an urgency of right now? How do we wait purposefully? How do we wait with the audacity of hope? How do we wait on God?
How long must we wait before the tables finally start to turn? Before poor people rise up and reclaim what is theirs?
Be strong. Let your heart take courage. Centered between two repeated commands to wait is a call for strength and courage. We don’t want to miss those critical steps for this is what it means to wait on the Lord. It is not an idle posture. Waiting is an in the meantime posture. Waiting on God, in the spirit of the Black Church, is knowing that God may not come when we call on them, but God will always be on time. Waiting is a posture of hope and faith. Waiting is Easter hope in a resurrection after witnessing the torture and terror of a crucifixion.
Be strong. Let your heart take courage.
The entire Resurrection story is centered around waiting, waiting on judicial systems and public officials to be righteous and just; waiting on death; and waiting on God’s intervention of Christ’s death on the cross. “God why has thou forsaken me?”, Christ cried out from the cross. Christ was waiting on God to show up in a time of deep sorrow and suffering. All of Creation was waiting on Christ’s defeat of death and ultimately his resurrection. After so much waiting, finally, the story of Christ’s resurrection and the literal defeat of death becomes a symbolic defeat of racist patriarchy and imperialism!
We couldn’t get to Easter without the wonder and witness of the wait.
Wait on the Lord. Be strong. Let your heart take courage. Wait on the Lord.
Poor people will rise up to reclaim what is theirs. The whispers of revolutions will catch on and people are gonna rise up and reclaim what is theirs.
Wait on the Lord. Be strong. Let your heart take courage. Wait on the Lord.
Activist, author and humanitarian, Dr. Angela Davis says, “Our histories never unfold in isolation. We cannot truly tell what we consider to be our own histories without knowing the other stories. And often we discover that those other stories are actually our own stories.”
If this is true, then who will cry for 7-year-old Jakelin Caal Maquinn of Guatemala who died soon after being separated from her father while seeking asylum near New Mexico? She died in El Paso the next day. Who will cry for Darlyn Cristabel Cordova-Valle of El Salvador who died in federal custody while trying to reach Nebraska where her mother lives? Or for Felipe Gomez Alonzo, an 8-year-old from Guatemala. Felipe died in Border Patrol Custody on Christmas Eve. Who will cry for those with courage, strength of heart, hope and prayers – waiting to cross the line – waiting to be seen as human?
Wait on the Lord. Be strong. Let your heart take courage. Wait on the Lord.
Who will cry for those born within these borders of the United States and are faced daily with the moral injury of racial profiling, state-sanctioned violence, classism and other forms of normalized culture of violence and bigotry?
Who will decry the exhaustive list of hashtags that memorialize young Black and Brown lives in America that have died at the hands of the state and then are placed on trial for their own murders – like Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri. Michael was waiting, too. Waiting to get home, he was killed footsteps away from his family’s home. Waiting for his tomorrow as he just graduated from high school. Waiting with the hope and expectation that his life mattered and that the dreams and promises of this nation others seek, belonged to him too.
He was brave and strong enough to believe that he was worthy of freedom, too. When he was denied and left to die in the streets for 4 ½ hours in Missouri’s summer heat, his peers and his community said no more and began to rise up and reclaim what was Michael’s and what is theirs.
There in the unsuspecting streets of Ferguson, the whispers of a revolution took on a life of their own. We know George Floyd and Breonna Taylor because young folks in the streets of Ferguson made the world know Michael Brown. And because Mamie Till made the world know Emmett Till. We heard the whispers of a revolution because Eric Garner cried out, “I can’t breathe.” Within the borders of their native land, Black, Brown and indigenous people face persecution, execution and exclusion. The same can be said for Black and Brown transgendered women who are being murdered before us exponentially without outrage. The stories of the exiled and asylum seeker can be found in these shared narratives, too.
Psalm 27:13-14 implores us to wait on the Lord, be strong and courageous at heart. It also offers us the promise of a Beloved Community. It begins with these words: “I believe I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.”
I believe. Two powerful words signifying hope even perhaps in the unseen.
We are able to wait on the Lord because our waiting is rooted in faith and hope and belief in the power and promises of God.
Waiting is recognizing Kairos time – God’s time is not our time.
There is courage and strength and power in our periods of waiting. There is moral consciousness and moral authority and there is solidarity and unity that must be found. The interconnectedness of our shared humanity must drive us to recognize and condemn the inequities and injustices everywhere from the genocide in Ukraine to the genocide in the Gaza Strip.
We must be persistent in our faith and our hope. We must envision the prayers manifested right here and now with a core belief that we can and will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living!
Our activism, witness and ministry must not be restricted by borders where our cries for peace only apply to our borders or in safe and convenient places. We who call ourselves followers of Christ, must not ignore the wounds of God’s people (Jeremiah 6:14).
If we believe the scriptures: I believe I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Let us activate that faith indiscriminately. Let those words ring true through us. We are the mirrors of God’s goodness. We are the living, breathing manifestations of God’s goodness, right here, right now – as we live and breathe. The tables are starting to turn because we are the revolution. We are revolutionary love. We are the ones we have been waiting for.
I believe I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait on the Lord. Be strong. Let your heart take courage. Wait on the Lord. Amen.
*Rev. Middleton presented her series on “Wait” throughout Lent as a guest preacher for various CRS member congregations.*