Eagerly Waiting (Hebrews 9:24-28)

Eagerly Waiting

First UMC of Pocatello

November 10, 2024

Hebrews 9:24-28

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I’m sure for many of you this is a difficult Sunday, following on a difficult week. The antagonistic and supercharged nature of this national election meant that no matter what came out of it, about half the country would be reeling at the result. For many, a whole imagined future, with all its possibilities for progress, has been cut off. For others, the results suggest a secure possession of the future, a future to bend and craft according to the winner’s will.

Whether you or I feel that we have lost a possible future or are in secure possession of the future, neither is a faithful Christian position. The future is not ours to lose, and it is not ours possess. The future belongs to Christ and his promised future of shalom, of peace and justice and wholeness established through all creation. Neither Republicans nor Democrats can usher in this promised future. Only in communities where the Spirit of the Risen Christ is invited to have its way can we begin to glimpse it. The proper attitude of the Christian toward the future is not despair and disavowal. The proper posture of the Christian toward the future is not a selfish grasping. No, we are called to be people whose attitude is hope. We are called to be people whose posture is one of eager and resilient waiting.

“[S]o Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him” (Heb 9:28.)

This final verse of Hebrews chapter 9 tells us that salvation is coming to those who wait eagerly for the appearance of Jesus. The future that matters is his future, the future of his coming. Both the Hebrew prophets and the New Testament writers tell us what the future of God looks like: every tear wiped away, every life honored and provided for, the death of death. Being a Christian in the present moment means being a person who endures with patience and waits for Jesus to come and manifest his future. Our call has not changed between this Sunday and last Sunday, though perhaps some of us have a clearer grasp of the truth and urgency of this call.

So let’s flesh out this call to wait eagerly for God’s salvation. What does our waiting look like? It’s certainly not passive. We don’t just sit around doing nothing, staring at the sky. The disciples tried that on the morning of Jesus’ ascension into heaven and were promptly told by angels to lower their gaze back down to the earth (Acts 1:9-11).

Sus and I just celebrated our five-year anniversary on November 2, so memories from the time of our wedding have been fresh in my mind. The stretch of time between getting engaged and getting married is a kind of waiting. You’ve made a promise to each other; you’ve set an intention. But the fulfilment of the promise has not yet come; you’re waiting for it. But the waiting is full of intentional activity. For us, it meant booking a venue, a caterer, photographer, a band. It meant crafting the guest list, sending out invitations, holding a wine tasting. To be ready for the moment of fulfillment, we had work to do.

In our hopeful waiting for the future of God, how are we called to live?

The Greek word used here in Hebrews 9:28 for “wait eagerly” is ἀπεκδέχομαι (apekdechomai). I tracked it down in the rest of the New Testament and found some powerful resonances. I want to share some of those with you as a way of naming three aspects of the waiting we are called to practice.

The first thing might surprise you. While we wait for salvation, we have to get in touch with our pain. We have to express our grief, acknowledge our groans, and voice our complaints about the ways that things are just not okay.

Here’s a passage from Romans chapter 8 where Paul uses that word for eager waiting – ἀπεκδέχομαι – three times:

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God… We know that the whole creation has been groaning together as it suffers together the pains of labor, and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope, for who hopes for what one already sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with groanings too deep for words. (vv. 18-26)

Our waiting is not easy. Our is not always happy. Waiting for God to come and set things right means honing our vision to discern what’s broken and disordered. When we give ourselves permission to groan along with the whole creation, we come into contact with God’s own groaning Spirit. And it’s from that place of authentic feeling that our groans can be transformed into creative labor pains.

The Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann, who teaches at Columbia Theological Seminary in Georgia, wrote this in a book called The Prophetic Imagination:

Only in empire are we pressed and urged and invited to pretend that things are all right—either in the dean’s office or in our marriage or in the hospital room. And as long as the empire can keep the pretense alive that things are all right, there will be no real grieving and no serious criticism. …Bringing hurt to public expression is an important first step in the dismantling criticism that permits a new reality, theological and social, to emerge.

In other words, when we present that everything, including what’s going on with us, sound okay, we end up hurting ourselves and holding back the transformation of our world. We do what the powers that be want us to do, because by maintaining the okay-ness of things, we don’t rock the boat, we don’t demand change. Brueggemann says that it was only after the Israelites cried out for God to come and rescue them from slavery in Egypt that God called and commissioned Moses. The demand for divine justice opened the door for an answer.

Complaint and lament and even protest have a prominent place in Christian spirituality. The world is not okay. Our planetary wellbeing and our national wellbeing, even before this election, were heading in dangerous directions. Groan! Experience unity with the discontentment of creation and of God’s Spirit. Let your own pain flow, and it will clear your system for solidarity, creativity, and hope. That’s the first aspect of Christian waiting: getting in touch with our groans.

The second aspect of our waiting is that we must take the long view, and to take the long view we have to make sure that we remain clear on our primary affiliation and place of belonging. Here is Philippians 3:20-21:

Our citizenship is in heaven, and we eagerly wait for a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will transform the body of our humble condition into the likeness of his glorious body, by the power that enables him to subject everything to himself.

Our citizenship is in heaven. Some other translations say that our commonwealth is in heaven. The point is that we belong to the realm, the kin-dom, of God. Our Savior comes from that place.

This is very important for us to get clear on, especially after an election week. I’m going to say it. America is not God’s chosen nation. The Republican Party is not God’s preferred party. God is not a Democrat, and neither Harris nor Trump is God’s chosen Savior. We eagerly await a Savior from the realm of God. We wait for Jesus.

Obviously, our political system matters. Protecting and providing sometimes, threatening and dehumanizing other times – the structures in which we live and move affect us. And though we should care about them and work for their transformation for the sake of the most vulnerable in our society, these systems are not where we ultimately belong.

We are citizens of heaven. We are citizens of a realm that critiques and holds every other realm accountable. And it’s very freeing to belong to God’s promised future. It frees us to tear down or build up what’s around us without tying our identity to what comes and goes. When we are not taken in by the idolatry of partisan politics, we are freed from having something fallible and finite and fickle as our source of hope.

While we wait, we groan. While we wait, we maintain our primary citizenship in God’s realm.

Finally, while we wait, we serve. We live into the unique gifts and graces that God has given us. Here is 1 Corinthians 1:4-8:

I always thank my God for you because of the grace of God given to you in Christ Jesus, that you were enriched in him in every way, in all speech and all knowledge. In this way, the testimony about Christ was confirmed among you, so that you do not lack any spiritual gift as you eagerly wait for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ. He will also strengthen you to the end, so that you will be blameless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.

We don’t lack any spiritual gift while we wait. And we will be strengthened for the long waiting. This is really where the rubber meets the road. For the waiting, which for every generation of Christians since the time of Christ has been their whole lives, we are given the gifts that we need to love.

The New Testament tells us what many of these gifts are: teaching, encouragement, generosity, leadership, mercy, wisdom, healing, discernment, evangelism, pastoring. We know what the fruit of the Spirit is: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. The spiritual gifts are gifts of grace. They come from God and God’s away of awakening us to our purpose, our truest selves. While we wait, we are called to be curious about our place in the human family, the place from which we are called to care for ourselves. Whether you are elated or devastated by the election’s outcome, you are first and foremost called to be a vessel of love.

Here’s what it means to put our hope in God’s future:

We groan, refusing the narrative that everything’s okay.

We keep our citizenship in heaven, refusing to give ourselves away to lesser things.

And we open ourselves to the Spirit, discovering our gifts and putting them to use.

I wonder which of these aspects of waiting speaks to you most, either as an affirmation or a challenge.

Do you need to name some pain? Do you need to groan and be met by God’s Spirit in that groaning? Can you make space for that? Can you invite others into a shared time and space for speaking pain and telling God it needs to be different than it is right now?

Or maybe, for you, it’s time to fix your perspective back on Jesus. Maybe you’ve put a little too much stock in something else – the election, sure, but also maybe your public image, your career, your family, the LA Dodgers, or even your conception of what Church is supposed to be. Perhaps it’s time to create a little distance and be set free for true service.

Finally, maybe for you it’s time to use the gift you’ve been sitting on, or to discover the gift that the Spirit’s waiting to reveal to you. Are you ready to take up your place as a strengthener of the waiting community? We need you, because if there’s one thing that we don’t do while we wait for Christ’s final deliverance, it’s nothing.

May we listen to the Spirit speaking to our hearts, and may we respond with courage and with confidence, knowing that the Christ who came and dealt with sin once for all will come again to save those who are eagerly, patiently waiting for him.

In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.