Wait for it
Sermon for the Fifth Sunday in Lent
By Rabbi Neil Comess-Daniels -
When my son was still in preschool, we took a trip with a friend of his and his dad, who was a friend of mine, to the Mission at San Juan Capistrano. It was a glorious day. We took the train from downtown Los Angeles – the first real train ride for both of our sons. I truly recommend it as a day trip. The small town adjacent to the mission is a pleasure to walk around – great restaurants and ice cream, too! Even though we all wanted the ice cream first, the mission was our main agenda item and so we set out for our visit.
Like all the California missions, San Juan Capistrano is beautifully restored and maintained. Even though it is a tourist attraction, it’s a full-functioning mission. As we entered the church sanctuary itself, I suddenly realized that this was my Jewish boy’s first time in a church. Not only that, but it was also a traditional Catholic sanctuary, long and narrow to bring everyone’s focus to the altar and the cross. That is where my eyes went and I was taken off guard, although I should not have been, to see, of course, a Catholic cross, with an ornately carved and painted figure of Jesus on the cross, complete with the blood dripping from his wounds! I looked at my son, who was staring wide-eyed. Having not prepared ahead of time, I did a fairly decent job, I think, giving a quick Christianity 101 for a preschooler.
Like most missions, directly adjacent to the church itself is a cemetery. My son was silent for a few moments in the cemetery and then asked, “Does this really happen in our world?” Assuming he was referring to the graves, I said, “Yes,” and gave, again, what I thought was a rather good off-the-cuff explanation of illness, aging, and death. I gave a silent sigh of relief that my son quickly interrupted saying, “No, no! I mean the guy on the cross! Does that really happen in our world, that the Good Guys lose?!” Talk about the student teaching the teacher and out of the mouths of babes! I told my son yes, in our world sometimes the good guys lose. I honestly do not recall much more of the conversation, but clearly, it stayed with me these past 33 years.
With Russia’s vicious attack on the independent nation of Ukraine sparking a refugee crisis in Europe exacerbating a pre-existing refugee crisis, other wars, and persecutions of innocents going on in too many places on the planet, lopsided wealth distribution, educational opportunity, and access to healthcare, not just extant but long-standing worldwide - yes, sometimes the good the guys lose. Not just sometimes - all too often and too much!
So, what do we do about it all and how do we maintain our hope? Texts for this week promise a new day is coming from a divine source and the day will arrive at a divinely appointed hour. Isaiah assures us this is so by referencing past miracles that he says will reflect what will take place in the future:
Thus said the LORD,
Who made a road through the sea?
And a path through mighty waters?
Who destroyed chariots and horses,
And all the mighty host?
They lay down to rise no more,
They were extinguished, quenched like a wick:
Do not recall what happened of old,
Or ponder what happened of yore!
I am about to do something new;
Even now it shall come to pass,
Suddenly you shall perceive it:
I will make a road through the wilderness
And rivers in the desert.
The Psalmist writes a song of aliyah, of going up, about the spiritual uplift that will occur when the Jewish people return to Jerusalem out of the Babylonian Exile:
A song of ascents.
When the LORD restores the fortunes of Zion
— We see it as in a dream—
our mouths shall be filled with laughter,
our tongues, with songs of joy…
…The LORD will do great things for us
and we shall rejoice…
…They who sow in tears
shall reap with songs of joy.
Though he goes along weeping,
carrying the seed bag,
he shall come back with songs of joy,
carrying his sheaves.
In today’s reading from the books of Philippians, we hear an ominous presage of Jesus’s death when he says, “…you will not always have me.” We feel that death turned into salvation for Jesus’s followers when Paul encourages the Philippians to follow his example, saying, “Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things…in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own…but [rather] that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith— that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death…”
In this week’s Jewish haftarah portion, the selection from the prophetic books that were originally used as surrogates for the weekly Torah portion when Romans forbade the latter, we learn from the book of Malachi:
You have said, “It is useless to serve God. What have we gained by keeping His charge and walking in abject awe of the LORD of Hosts?
And so, we account the arrogant happy: they have indeed done evil and endured; they have indeed dared God and escaped.”
In this vein have those who revere the LORD been talking to one another. The LORD has heard and noted it, and a scroll of remembrance has been written at His behest concerning those who revere the LORD and esteem His name.
And on the day that I am preparing, said the LORD of Hosts, they shall be My treasured possession; I will be tender toward them as a man is tender toward a son who ministers to him.
And you shall come to see the difference between the righteous and the wicked, between him who has served God and him who has not served Him.
I hear the contemporary phrase, “Wait for it…”, in all these texts. “Wait for it; the day is coming. Everything will change for the believers and the good people. Everything they ever hoped for will come to fruition. It will be like a dream, but it won’t be a dream. The arrogant will be laid low and the humble will be resurrected from the dead. Wait for it! Salvation is in the air, just around the corner.”
You already know that my tradition has a different take on the reality of the Messiah. Yes, we don’t believe that Jesus is the Messiah, and there’s more. Because of the Jewish experience in history, there’s also a healthy amount of cynicism that accompanies a full horizon of beliefs about the Messiah as a personage or an era amongst Jewish people. You may be familiar with one such expression of our skepticism from the musical “Fiddler on the Roof.” At the end of the musical, the Jews of the mythical town of Anatevka are forced out of their homes by the Russian/Tzarist authorities. One of the townspeople says to the rabbi: “Rabbi, we’ve been waiting all our lives for the Messiah. Wouldn’t now be a good time for him to come?” To which the rabbi answers, “We’ll have to wait for him someplace else. Meanwhile, let’s start packing.” There’s also this notion, which I believe I’ve shared with you before, from an 8th or 9th-century rabbinic text, “If you have a sapling in your hand and people tell you that the Messiah has come, plant the sapling and then go and greet him.”
We are at an inflection point in time. That is, it will be an inflection point if we grab it as such. The time for grabbing the inflection point is now. We can’t wait for any prophecy to come true. Time itself doesn’t change things. Time goes along for the ride. The world is asking, as it has so many times before, how do we derail the runaway train of a tyrant without using the tyrannical tools of war to defeat him, and placing ourselves in the position of needing to be military prepared to perennially defend what we’ve “won.” War only perpetuates war. A tyrant doesn’t care about world opinion and a tyrant doesn’t care whether we become tyrannical to defuse him. That may be his most fervent wish. The question of the moment is: How messianic can we be so that we find a different path, a different way, a different commitment? Jesus warned, “You won’t always have me.” What he’s saying is, it’s not up to Jesus or a Messiah by any other name, it’s up to us.
Rabbi Neil Comess-Daniels
Rabbi-in-Residence - Mt. Olive Lutheran Church
Santa Monica, California
Sermon for:
March 3rd, 2022
