Waiting on God

‘Waiting on God’
A Sermon preached by the Precentor, Canon Anna Macham

Sunday 30 March 2025, The Fourth Sunday of Lent

Isaiah 40:27-41:13 and 2 Timothy 4:1-18

In a lecture reflecting on the relationship between religion and art, the writer Will Self- a non-believer, known for his cynicism, ranting and general grumpiness about everything- confessed to a secret liking for churches.  This liking, he said, isn’t just about aesthetic appreciation, although that’s an important part of it.  It also comes from a feeling that churches are places where he can lose himself in spiritual contemplation.   “It may not be prayer as it is commonly understood by the great monotheisms”, he says, “but I find, that by setting my own fears, hopes, concerns against the great span of the universe, so their trivial scale is revealed”.

Church buildings, and not just the vast and beautiful ones, have a power over us.  We may not always know why, but we’re drawn to them as a place to pray, even if we don’t know whether we really believe in prayer.   Visitors to this Cathedral often say that their visit has been a spiritually uplifting experience; they feel comforted, in ways they can’t always articulate.  And our worship this afternoon speaks of prayerful contemplation, the beauty of holiness.

What happens, though, when the beauty of our surroundings, the worship, the music that lifts us to God, ceases to inspire our prayer, the times when, with the poet R S Thomas, throwing his lonely prayers against the cold walls in his poem “The Empty Church” we cry out to God: “Why, then, do I kneel still striking my prayers on a stone heart?”  There are times when we are so busy, so anxious or stressed, that it is hard to focus our thoughts on God in worship.  Where do we find God, not just at the moments when we feel inspired or uplifted, but also in the low times, in the empty places we carry within us?

Our Old Testament reading today is from the book of the prophet Isaiah.  In this reading, the people are desperate, poor and needy.  Exhausted and afraid, hungry and thirsty, they’ve reached the end of their resources.  Today’s reading is from the middle part of Isaiah that was written by a later prophet than the first part, writing during the Exilic period, when the people were away from their own land.  In the desert of exile, a place empty of civilisation, the people are unable to help themselves.  Only God can do anything.

In this situation of barrenness and vulnerability, both of their surroundings and in their own selves, Isaiah reassures the people that God will renew and revitalise them.  “Have you not known?  Have you not heard?” he writes.  “The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth”.  Unlike people, he does not grow faint or weary.  “Even youths will faint and be weary”, he says, “But those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength”.

In the part of the chapter that follows today’s reading, Isaiah refers to the barrenness and dryness of the desert, and the threat of the danger to life it poses.  “When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none”, he writes, “and their tongue is parched with thirst”, “I the Lord will answer them”, he promises.

In Isaiah, as in earlier prophets like Hosea, the desert, the empty place, is the place where the people meet with God.  A vast and harsh place, rocky, desolate and dry, the Middle Eastern wilderness could be a frightening place for a person alone, who would have to do battle physically and emotionally just to survive in that rough environment.  And the people stumble into this wilderness very much alone, with no human companionship and very little to nourish or sustain them.

We are in the church’s season of Lent at the moment, a period of 40 days when we are called to leave behind everyday human pleasures whose existence we take for granted, and be led into our own wilderness, to retreat from life’s busy surface into its solemn deeps, to be alone with ourselves and our human fears and hopes.  During this time, we remove ourselves from the things we ordinarily fill our lives with, the things we use to comfort ourselves, that divert or entertain, that distract us from confronting our deeper longing for real happiness, a happiness that would come from within, rather than being snatched from outside.

The desert is a curiously ambivalent symbol, both in the Old Testament, and in the later history of Christian spirituality.   It is a place of beginning, where the human is refined and God is revealed, as with Moses at the burning bush.  As its name suggests, it symbolises barren desolation, solitude or, as in the Greek eremia, stillness, a state of extreme simplicity, stripped of anything unnecessary, even the pleasures and cares of civilised or cultured life, and especially the comfort and distraction of society.  It’s a place of struggle, but also- potentially- of creativity, a noisy, clamorous place, but also of imagination.  Barren as far as all human purposes are concerned, it is a place where God’s presence and power are manifest.  The journey into the desert is a powerful symbol of the experience exacted by God of those who seek him.

Ultimately it’s in the wilderness that God’s people, the Israelites, discover God most powerfully.  And for us too, often where we hear God speak most powerfully is in silence, in emptiness.  What is being described in the desert tradition of Christianity is a gift: a place free of noise or words that is authentic, where, free from distractions or diversions, we can be genuine, and in the quiet hear God speaking to us.

Ultimately, in Isaiah, the wilderness is a place of transformation, not just of the people, whose strength is restored, but of the land itself.  “The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad”, this writer tells us elsewhere in Isaiah, “the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing” (Isaiah 35: 1-2).  The desert isn’t just a place where God reveals himself, but where His power is revealed in the transformation of the desert itself, where the barren land is transformed into Eden, the garden of paradise.  The land itself mirrors the human poor, those dependent on God and to whom, in the grim desolation of the wilderness experience, God gives strength.  “I will open rivers on the bare heights”, he writes, “and fountains in the midst of the valleys; I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water” (Isaiah 41:18).

Barren for human purposes, the desert is open to divine purposes.

Lent is a time to open ourselves to the possibility of this transformation, as we learn to be still, and to cultivate the places of solitude and silence, the desert places that run parallel to our lives.  Here, in the empty place, we begin to see ourselves as we really are, not through the distortions and cracks which are our habitual ways of seeing ourselves, but as God sees us, as his Beloved.  In this way, amidst all the stress and noise of living, the surface things that distract and divert us, we discover the stronger and quieter voice of God, speaking to us and calming us, renewing our strength and our thoughts, and taking away our fear.