Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary time
October 3, 2004

    How much of our lives do you suppose we spend waiting? It is said that death and taxes are the two inescapable realities. Waiting must be a close third. Our lives are one long wait. We wait in line at the grocery store checkout, the welfare office, the doctor’s office and the airline security, and we wait endlessly at red lights and in traffic tie-ups. Parents wait nine long months for the arrival of a child, and children wait what seems like ages for a birthday or Christmas or Halloween to come. And I suppose we all wait, now and again, for a homily to end!

    Today’s first reading from the Prophet Habakkuk is all about waiting. Habakkuk lived in the waning years of the sixth century before Christ at a time maybe not all that different from our own: a time when things were sliding in society, sliding downhill: morals were loose, the poor were oppressed, and God’s law was largely ignored. Habakkuk had had it! He was sick and tired of living in this mire where the wicked always seemed to have the upper hand, and so he prayed, “How long, O Lord? I cry for help and you do not listen. I stand at my watch post crying out to you, ‘Violence!’ but you do not intervene.” And Habakkuk waited a long time for an answer to his prayer but God finally spoke some very reassuring words to him: “The vision still has its time. “If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay.”

    Now, I’m sure it will come as no surprise to you that God’s idea of “no delay” didn’t match Habakkuk’s! The justice that God promised would come without delay was long years off – more than 80, to be exact, because between Habakkuk’s prayer and the fulfillment of God’s promise came the Babylonian Captivity: 80 long years of exile for the Chosen People in a hated foreign land, 80 long years of humiliation and just plain waiting.

    It is no different for us, my friends. We, too, wait endlessly - or so it seems – for an answer to our prayers. And the question arises: what are we to do while we wait? What are we to do when, like Habakkuk, we feel very small and powerless to change things – the things in our world, for instance, that need changing: rich nations steadily growing richer at the expense of poor nations; the alarming growth of terrorism and religious extremism; the general erosion of morals in society; the appalling disregard for the value of each and every human life; the callous neglect of the environment? What are we to do while we wait?

    Simple answers are dangerous, I know, but the only answer we get is the one in today’s readings. While we wait we are to live by faith. That was God’s message to Habakkuk when He told him that “my just one lives by faith.” It is also the message of Jesus who reminds us that God can work wonders even with faith no larger than a tiny mustard seed. And it is the message of St. Paul to Timothy when he encouraged him to “stir up” the faith that was passed on to him on the day of his baptism.

    Does this sound a little passive? It could, I know, but it really isn’t. Living by faith doesn’t mean sitting idly by. In our Catholic tradition, faith involves waiting, yes, but it also involves working: working to right wrongs, working for justice, working to build God’s kingdom. Working as if all depended on us; waiting with the knowledge that all really depends on God. It does, of course.

    Waiting and working – they are the point-counterpoint of the Christian life. And - did you ever notice? - they are woven into the very fabric of each Mass we celebrate. It is as if the Church is saying, “here is the pattern for your lives. This is where you learn to wait and work!” At each Mass we wait as we listen to God’s Word, allowing it to anoint our spirits, to challenge our complacency, to shape our attitudes, and to deepen our understanding. At each Mass we wait during those fleeting yet precious moments of quiet after the call to prayer and between the readings, and following Communion, – knowing that the voice of God is often a “still, small voice” that can only be heard in the quiet. At each Mass we wait for Christ who has died and is risen to come again. But at each Mass we also work. Did you know that the very word “liturgy” means work? – ‘the work of the people.’ And so we bring to Mass our hopes and our discouragements, our struggles and our joys, and we bring the awful agonies of our fragile and too violent world and, as we pray together, making the responses and singing the acclamations and hymns, we are working: we are doing the awesome work of offering to God the sacrifice of Jesus Christ which alone can transform our lives and redeem our world.

    My friends, this past week you received a letter from me about “keeping holy the Lord’s Day.” I hope you read it as a gentle but insistent invitation – not from me but from God – an invitation to wait and to work: to be here week after week in this community, for this is where we wait together in joyful anticipation of God’s tender mercies, and this is where we work together to heal a broken world.

Father Michael G. Ryan
Cathedral Pastor

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