The Waiting Game
FROM THE RECTOR
In the song, “The Waiting,” Tom Petty asks his lover, “Don’t it feel like heaven right now? Don’t it feel like something from a dream? Yeah, I’ve never known nothing quite like this. Don’t it feel like tonight might never be again?” And yet, from that place of romantic fulfillment, which for Petty becomes the standard against which all other romantic pursuits will be measured, the singer acknowledges in the chorus, “The waiting is the hardest part. Every day you see one more card. You take it on faith, you take it to the heart. The waiting is the hardest part.”
Waiting is hard. As Sara Milford preached last Sunday, none of us wants to be a parent in Nashville, waiting to learn if our child will emerge physically alright. Having felt a babe nurse at our breast, having held that child safe in our arms, having danced and played and laughed with that beloved baby, we wait in agony to know whether we will see them smile again. Similarly, when tornadoes rip through central and eastern Arkansas and our loved ones are in the path of the storms, every second until we hear their voice on the phone is a terrible eternity. As Tom Petty expressed, once we have experienced in another human being the unfathomable depths of love, to be cut off from them creates an unbearable longing.
During Holy Week, we schedule special services on Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. We mark each step in Jesus’ journey—from the Last Supper into the garden of Gethsemane, from to the cross and into the tomb—with an act of worship. We know what lessons to read and prayers to say and gestures to complete at each stage of the Paschal Triduum. What does not appear on the liturgical schedule, however, is the long period of waiting that each of us must endure from the time we say goodbye to our savior until the time he greets us again at Easter.
Appropriately, therefore, the shortest, simplest, and quietest service on that journey is the one we offer on Saturday morning at 8:30 a.m.. It takes up less than a page in the Book of Common Prayer and is more fully characterized by what it is not than what it actually is. The prayer book tells us that “there is no celebration of the Eucharist on this day.” We begin not with the opening acclimation or a song of praise but with the Collect of the Day, spoken almost without any interruption in the waiting that began at the cross the previous day and that will continue until the tomb is found empty. After reading from scripture and offering a homily that is a reflection on the occasion, we finish with some prayers from the burial office, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Grace. Then we return seamlessly to that period of waiting that stretches on ahead of us.
We wait with the women outside the tomb. We wait with the disciples who scattered in fear. We wait with every parent, every spouse, every friend who has known the power of love and has come to a place where that love feels terrifyingly absent. This period of holy waiting has the power to hallow the agony of waiting that every human being experiences. In the case of Holy Week, we know that these few days of waiting will give way to the good news of Easter. More often in this life, however, we wait without the assurance that the agony of our uncertainty will end as quickly. Yet somehow this annual reenactment gives hope and meaning to those longer periods of waiting and watching which we endure.
Jesus Christ was not raised on the first day or the second day but only on the third. God did not leave him in the tomb in order to keep us in suspense but to sanctify our own experience of longing, waiting, struggling, and hoping. Because of Easter, we know that God has won the victory over death, but because of Holy Saturday we know that God is with us in our own waiting. Our pain in that waiting is not lost to God. On this journey, it becomes holy.
Yours Faithfully,
Evan D. Garner