In the Silence, We Wait

I don’t know about you, but I can take an educated guess and say that waiting is something you might not be excellent at. I say this because it is absolutely something I am terrible at and we live in a culture that appears to value instant gratification more than almost anything. I remember being about 9 years old and breaking down into tears because my parents wouldn’t let me open my birthday gifts two days early just because I wanted to. The idea of waiting 48 more hours to see what was inside those brightly wrapped packages seemed impossible to me, and felt more like a form of cruel punishment for some crime I didn’t know I had committed. The fact that it just literally wasn’t my birthday yet was lost on me, I did not care, the waiting felt impossible, it did not matter that my request was completely illogical.

I wish I could say that in the past 30-something years I have improved in my waiting skills. Yet, I’m not sure I can, with any honesty, make that declaration. I like the immediate, the quick gratitude; if Amazon tells me my package won’t be arriving for two whole days I want to know why it’s going to take “so long.” Just this week I’ve started working on healing a part of my body that hasn’t felt right in awhile and I’ve had to tell myself after about 4 days “good grief stop being so impatient! Healing takes time! This isn’t an instant remedy!” Yeah, that whole “patient” part of the fruit of the Spirit passage isn’t my favorite…

The thing I love about the church liturgical calendar is that those who formalized it appeared to know this about humanity—that humans are by nature, impatient and impulsive creatures. It’s as if they knew this and then accounted for it in how they created the rhythms of the church year. Built into our yearly calendar are two specific seasons dedicated exclusively to waiting and preparing. One is the season of Advent, the 4 Sundays before Christmas when we wait for Jesus to be born as a baby and look forward to the day when He will return again as a conquering King. The other season is the season we end tomorrow, the season of Lent. Lent begins on Ash Wednesday and lasts approximately 6 weeks leading up to Easter, where we wait and prepare to celebrate the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus.

When I used to teach Sunday school to preschool aged children in my church in Seattle, we used a program called Godly Play, which taught children how to enter into the liturgical aspects of the church year. We changed the colors of table cloths in the classroom to coordinate with the liturgical calendar, and taught them what the colors meant. They knew from age 4 that when they came into the room and saw purple cloths that meant we were in a season of waiting for something BIG to happen! So twice a year they would have a season where purple was what they encountered and we talked to them about how the birth and death of Jesus are such BIG events we have to spend weeks getting ready for them. Today, Holy Saturday, the day before Easter, is the last day of “purple” we have for awhile.

Yesterday we celebrated Good Friday and honored the death of Jesus by acknowledging our own sin, the sin that led him to the cross in the first place. I don’t attend a church that honors Good Friday, and honestly it’s the thing I hate the most about the leadership choices they’ve made. We try and cram Palm Sunday and the Passion story into one 20 minute sermon a week before Easter and call it good. I think that’s terrible discipleship of our people. We end up creating a congregation really good at singing praises about our risen king without teaching people how to sit in the silence, pain, and grief that will inevitably find each of us in the course of our lives. We don’t teach people how to pause and reflect on our sin, and because of that I’d argue we don’t fully embrace the joy of Easter either—how can you fully appreciate the resurrection if you don’t pause at the foot of the cross and encounter the horrors of what Jesus underwent for us? We are cheapening the Gospel message year after year as we refuse to give people a designated space and time to reflect on what is truly happening during Holy Week. Good Friday and Palm Sunday are not the same, not at all.

The reality is Jesus did die. He died a brutal, horrific death most of us cannot even imagine. And then he was laid in a tomb just like every other person who had died before him and that stone was rolled in front of the opening to the tomb, sealing his lifeless body, the same body that had healed countless others, into it’s cold and dark grave. Friends, can you even imagine the grief, confusion, trauma, and disillusionment that all of his followers experienced on that Saturday? They buried him before sundown on Friday so as to not break the sabbath laws that began when the sun sank out of sight, which meant they didn’t have time to perform all the proper washing and anointing rituals that went along with a Jewish burial. They simply took his body off the cross, wrapped it in cloths and laid him in this stone cold tomb. And then what?

We don’t know exactly. I’d imagine many simply went home, confused, heartbroken and alone. This was the one they had followed for three years, and he was gone. Who was there to follow now? Who was in charge and could tell them it would be okay? Apparently no one. Have you ever believed something was right, and invested yourself in making that happen only to come to the realization that maybe you weren’t on the right path after all? The disciples and followers of Jesus were sitting in that same space on that Saturday. Can you imagine waking up that Saturday morning wondering if the day before had been some horrific nightmare only to come to the realization that this thing really happened? This Jesus you believed was the Messiah, the promised one, now dead and gone. How could you have been so wrong? The grief would have set in. I imagine some of them couldn’t get out of bed that day. Some gathered together probably asking themselves “how did we get this so mixed up? Did he lie to us? Was he really not the messiah? But we saw him do all those miracles! How do you explain that if he wasn’t who he said he was? But if he was who he said he was how is he gone??” Have you ever found yourself in that place of all these swirling questions that seem to receive only silence when you fling them heavenward in desperate prayer? I don’t think we are alone when we find ourselves in that place of grief and confusion. The followers of Jesus were right there too.

In fact, that’s what today is. Holy Saturday. The day before the dawn breaks. A day given over to the silence, the waiting, the questions. I think the fact that this day exists in our church calendar shows us that when we find ourselves in places of grief, questions, confusion, second-guessing, and waiting we are not outside the Holy. Grief and doubt are a part of life; an uncomfortable part, to be sure, but when we find ourselves in that place we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses who have also sat there in the darkness of Saturday wondering “what’s next?” I find that so comforting, so encouraging. We know Easter is coming, but those first disciples did not. Just like many of us find ourselves waiting in situations where we don’t know what “Easter” might look like or when it might arrive may we remember today we are not alone. There is holiness in the silence too; in the waiting. It may feel like God is gone, like there’s no hope, like the Messiah that has been promised was a fraud, but this weekend shows us that God is always, always faithful. The sun will come up tomorrow, and when it does, nothing will be the same. Easter is coming, my friends. And until it does, let us sit in this silence with hope, because we serve a God who never fails to keep His promises.