Wait and See
Palm Sunday, Year A
In 1940, T.S. Eliot published a poem in the New English Weekly called “East Cocker.” This was a year of war, the same year that the German air force began their brutal raids on London, the nightly bombings that sent the citizens of the city into the underground. It was a season when the people of England, and much of the world beyond, were united only in their fear and loss, anxiety and outrage. Hope was hard to see, the future impossible to discern.
“East Cocker” is a poem seeking some light, some hope in the midst of the dark. But where? Eliot goes searching for certainty in the old rhythms of nature, but finds them:
Whirled in a vortex that shall bring
The world to that destructive fire
Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.
Prescient of the climatic upheaval to come, Eliot sees nature itself in chaos, no sure guide for the future.
Culture, the old wisdom of the ancestors, is no better help. The experience of the past is “At best, only limited value.”
“…Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,” he writes.
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.”
Culture and experience, the patterns that came before us, cannot bring healing, the reconciling love for which the poet longs.
In the end the only truth that gives him wisdom is that found by self-emptying, going down, embracing the ground of all life--the soil of humility.
“The only wisdom we can hope to acquire,” he writes. “Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.”
Ours is a time ready for the wisdom of humility for it has been a time of humiliation. Our knowledge, our power, our technologies—as grand as we’ve imagined them, as much trust as we’ve put in them, have proven inadequate to defend us against disease, death, the inevitable limits of creaturely life. Like World War II that put an end to the optimisms of modernity, COVID19 is another warning against our hubris, a reminder of our limits.
Most of us among the global few, who live with more than enough, are not well trained in the way of humility. We went to elementary schools with sayings like “knowledge is power” emblazoned across the halls. We entered careers and professions that offered opportunities for advancements and awards and titles. We are among the generation of more who live with more stuff, in more space, using more energy than any people the world has had to bear. How do we, so trained, now learn what Eliot called the “way of ignorance,” how do we accept the wisdom of humility?
These lines from the Gospel of Matthew begin to show the way:
A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of him and that followed were shouting,
"Hosanna to the Son of David!
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!
Hosanna in the highest heaven!”
No leader alive, no dictator, no president, no prime minister could hope for such a welcome as Jesus had when he entered Jerusalem. The people were ready to make him king, ready to die for him, ready for the revolt that would return their national pride. They saw hope in Jesus, hope in his power, hope in his miracles of healing, his feedings of the masses. Now was the time for these desperate and downtrodden people to reverse their fate and rise to power.
But in the few days that followed, Jesus did not capitalize on the chance to be on stage, to gain the power that could have been his. Jesus rejected rank and title in order to be counted as a slave, condemned as a heretic, killed like a common criminal.
It was of this path that the ancient Christians sang, in the hymn recorded in our reading from Philippians. Christ who was equal with God became instead a common human, a king who tossed aside his crown to become a servant--one more in the disinherited mass of the poor and powerless. Christ followed the path of humility, obedient to its call all the way to his death.
Humility can be our balm, our way into the ground where the seeds of our flourishing can be planted and spring forth with radiant beauty and life. But for that ground to be alive, to give us the renewal we need for resurrection, we must enter into death and surrender even of our hope to God.
“I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope,” writes Eliot.
“For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without
love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and love and the hope are all in the waiting.”
The path of humility is not easy. It would have been so much clearer, so simple and comforting and safe, if on that day when the palm branches were spread in the streets Jesus took the throne. But Jesus knew that such power would have only kept the kingdoms of coercion alive. He chose, instead, the way of the cross for the only path toward wholeness, the only way into the life of the divine is the way of waiting in defenseless vulnerability before God.
Ours is a time of waiting. We do not know what will come today or tomorrow or a year from now. We never did, but before we were at least comfortable in our illusions. To be awakened from them is unsettling and so we may be tempted in this waiting to put our hopes in politics or science or some other solution ready to offer us answers. We may hope that everything will just go back to normal without wondering if normal was ever just or good or loving.
Instead, this day, this Holy Week in which we trace the powerless path of Christ toward his glorious resurrection, we are offered another option. When the apostle Paul called the church in Philippi to love and compassion, he told them to cultivate within themselves “the same mind that was in Christ Jesus.” The way into this mind is the way of humble prayer, open and silent and vulnerable. This is the kind of prayer that the Anglican theologian Sarah Coakley calls “the defenseless prayer of silent waiting on God.” It is through this waiting that we can give up our own hopes and loves and agendas and join with Jesus in welcoming whatever God is bringing into the world, whatever God is birthing from death. It is in this silent waiting, this defenseless prayer, that we find the “self’s transformation and expansion into God.”
Over these past couple of weeks, I’ve heard from many of you that are experiencing isolation and loneliness. I’ve heard of jobs lost and futures uncertain. I’ve heard of people in hospitals who are denied the comfort of family beside their bed. There is much suffering and there are many deaths in this waiting.
But I have also heard from many of you about flowers blooming in your yard, afternoons spent digging in the dirt. I know families who have spent their time at home ripping out their lawns to make gardens. I’ve talked with friends who never cared before about how to begin a compost pile. Seeds are being planted in the soil now warm from sun and wet with rain, and they are sprouting, driving roots down into the dirt and sending shoots up toward the sun. The soil for these seeds is humus, the dead stuff of life once lived, now transformed into the ground for new beginnings. The way of humility is the way of this soil, of going down so that we can rise again, rooted in our truth, grounded in God’s love. The seeds are planted, now we wait.
This Holy Week let us embrace the pause, the waiting, the solitude it offers. Wait with Jesus, in the posture of a servant, bending toward the needs of neighbors near and far. Wait with Jesus in the garden in dread of what will come. Wait with Jesus through the agony of the cross where even God seemed distant and all felt lost. Wait with Jesus in the silence of the grave, his tortured body encased in stone. Wait with Jesus because God is doing something new, bringing resurrection and life and love and hope in ways we cannot begin to imagine. Just wait and see. Amen.