McQuiston Memorial Presbyterian Church (1978)

 

Rev R D Drysdale

McQuiston Memorial Presbyterian Church

BBC Radio 4, Morning Service (16th July 1978)

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Radio Introduction

Welcome

First Hymn “From All That Dwells Below The Skies”

Prayer of Affirmation & Confession

The Lord’s Prayer (Sung)

Old Testament Reading: Psalms 130 & 121

Children’s Hymn “For The Beauty of the Earth”

New Testament Lesson: Philippians Ch 3 v6

Choir Anthem “Lift Up Your Heads”

Prayers of Intercession (Rev David Knox)

Hymn of Preparation “Come Holy Ghost, Our Hearts Inspire”

Sermon “Waiting”

A few months ago, our eldest boy eventually persuaded me to join him and one of his chums on a night out at a downtown cinema in Belfast. It was all really a very clever conspiracy, as I soon found out, for the only real reason for my being there was to pay up when we got to the box office and dawdled around the sweet counter en route to the Circle. From that point on, my services could quite happily have been dispensed with, except that the boys, I suppose, needed the transport home again, after James Bond 007 had got safely through an incredible series of adventures with voluptuous female spies, innumerable would-be assassins, and an enormous man with steel teeth.

But I hadn't been to the pictures for a long time, and so it was with just a hint of nostalgia that I set out. It wasn't at all as I remembered it. For security reasons in our city, the stalls were closed off. The place was generally grubby, noisy, and cold. Instead of the heavy curtain played on by coloured lights, there was just the blank screen, and even it was anything but white. A week after we'd been there, the place was blown up.

So, I suppose why bother about appearances when it's always on the cards that the terrorists might strike at any time. 

How different it all was when I was a youngster and sat most Saturday nights with the rest of the gang enthralled by the exploits of Flash Gordon or Roy Rogers and Trigger. Front stalls for ninepence, and if you whistled during the romantic scenes, you were thrown out.

But what I remember especially was the time of anticipation before the film started. Soft music lulled you into a sense of magic and excitement, until suddenly the lights dimmed, the curtain parted, and the film began. It was all eagerness and expectation, those five or ten minutes of waiting.

Indeed, the waiting was part of the total experience. 

Waiting, for me, has an awful lot to do with the whole experience of living. We wait anxiously for exam results, or the outcome of medical tests. We wait impatiently for the return of someone long overdue. We wait excitedly for the night of the party or the wedding day. We wait somewhat apprehensively for the coming on of old age and death. We spend much of our time waiting, don't we?

Because waiting is the result of not having, of not being fully in control of our destinies, of being able to see some things only from afar. And so, we wait. In the Old Testament Book of Psalms, we read a lot about waiting.

It came out very clearly in that Psalm 130 we listened to earlier. In this Psalm, the writer has apparently fallen into the depths of despair, where everyone, it seems, has forsaken him. And out of his emptiness, he cries to God. If only God would come and transform his darkness into light. So, he waits for God.

“I wait for the Lord, my soul waits. And in His word, I hope. My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning.”

I think we can readily identify ourselves with those words, whether, like the psalmist, we're in the depths or not.

Because there's a sense in which our relationship with God is always one of waiting. Even if we have no conscious relationship with God at all, we're in a state of waiting for him, aren't we? Like the psalmist here, we too often have to wait for the Lord. Because we never possess God, can never say, “I believe…”  without having to add, “…help my unbelief.”

Like the Apostle Paul in that part of one of his letters that we also listened to earlier, the best that we can say of our spiritual maturity is that we press on but haven't yet arrived. Don't yet have all the truth, or at least fully understand it. We still see so many things, “as through a glass, darkly.”

So, we must wait for God. Sometimes, of course, we're lured into imagining that we do have all the answers, that we have arrived, God's in our pocket, as it were. Paul Tillich, a penetrating Christian writer, graphically describes those who don't wait for God. “There's the theologian,” he says, “who doesn't wait for God because he thinks he possesses him in doctrine. There's the biblical scholar who doesn't wait for God because he thinks he possesses him in a book. There's the churchman who doesn't wait for God because he thinks he possesses him in an institution. There's the religious man who doesn't wait for God because he thinks he possesses him in an experience." But for me, God can't be reduced down to any of these things, to a possession. And those who imagine that he can, end up only with an idol of their own invention, not the "God for whom we must wait.”

And let's face it, very often we don't wait for God, simply because we have no time for him. When in our churches, we really come to terms with this biblical concept of waiting, then denominationalism, in the sense of thinking our own particular Christian tradition has a monopoly of the truth, will be knocked for six for a start, won't it? Our service of worship this morning is Presbyterian, though I doubt if many of you listening could have put a tag on it if you hadn't known.

And we love it, because that's the tradition most of us here have grown up in and become accustomed to.

But much more important is that our worship today should be Christian, an experience of waiting for God, shared with all, for whom Jesus is Lord. Simply because God is the one for whom we wait, he can't be locked up within Presbyterianism or any other-ism. Because God isn't a possession, he can't be enshrined in any one Christian denomination, but remains free, infinite, and above all our religious structures and historic ecclesiastical forms, present within them, no doubt, but limited to none of them.

Our God is too small too often, isn't he? I remember hearing a story about something that happened during the days of the British Raj in India. A group of English people set out on a week's tiger hunt. They were led by Indian guides and porters. When quite out of the blue, the Indians' downed tools, piled up the baggage in the middle of the jungle clearing and sitting down refused to budge another inch. The English party were at a loss to know what was the matter. Had someone offended them or did they want more money? What was the problem? Eventually, through an interpreter, they discovered that the cause was religious. The Indians refused to move for at least a day. "We must wait here," they explained, "until our souls catch up with our bodies."

We who live in Northern Ireland understand that very well.

We're waiting for our souls to catch up with our bodies, waiting for the spiritual and moral values of our community life to catch up again with the political and violent ones, waiting for the time when the past nine years will be a bad dream and our divided society can live in some semblance of peace.

And in the bigger world beyond our doorstep, we'll see the same need, the need to take time to let our spiritual and moral understanding of life catch up with our material and scientific advances. For example, what's going to be the eventual outcome if our racing industrialization completely outstrips our moral sense of responsibility for our stewardship of the earth and its resources? Or if we who live in the so-called developed areas of the world refuse to wait till our poorer neighbours come alongside? Can we who call ourselves Christians refuse such waiting, with all the enormously complex issues involved? For what is it but the social, economic, and political expressions in the world of our waiting for God? And what about you and me as individuals?

What does it mean for us personally when we stand with the psalmist crying out at times in sheer agony and frustration and impatience for God, waiting with an intensity more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning? What does it mean for us? Well, it will mean the skittling of every posture of self-righteousness, every stance of unwarranted dogmatism, the opening of locked minds and closed hearts.

It will throw us as individuals back upon grace; the grace of the God who holds us because we can't hold Him, the God who first seeks us before we can find Him, the God who calls us to wait for Him, but who through that very call confronts us with Himself, creating in us the faith that waits. And for us who live in A.D. rather than B.C., there's something more, something the psalmist didn't know. We wait for God, but not ultimately in despair, not in vain, not with only illusions for company, for we see Jesus.

Of course, there's a great danger in all of this. It's been lurking underneath everything we've said so far. In Samuel Beckett's famous play, “Waiting for Godot,” the action, if we can call it action, revolves around two old men who are sitting and idly passing the time, waiting for the arrival of their friend Godot. As the play moves slowly along, it begins to become clear to the audience that the old men's expectation isn't going to be fulfilled. Indeed, grave doubts begin to arise as to whether or not Godot really exists at all or is just an invention of the old men in order to give them something to wait for. When the curtain finally falls, they're still waiting for Godot.

Now, this isn't the waiting of Christian discipleship, though it is the danger. Where we merely move about a little, we talk, we contrive abstractions about our situation, we sit, the earth turns, but meanwhile we do nothing, only wait. In sharp contrast to Beckett's characters waiting for Godot, we who wait for God don't wait in idleness, but in a world where there's much to be done in God's name.

And we wait as those who, in seeing Jesus, believe that we have caught sight of God. And that vision moves us into activity, so that our waiting becomes not only an expression of faith, but also of love and of social concern. Our biblical text, therefore, isn't a prescription for pietistical laziness, no, no.

The waiting of the Christian, like that of the Apostle Paul, is the strange waiting of the pilgrim who hasn't yet arrived, but who's on the way.

Hymn of Thanksgiving “Blessed Be The Everlasting God”

Benediction

Organ Postlude (Jim Beattie)