WAITING NOW
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One of the accusations made against the Christian faith is that it disengages believers from the present world, promoting an escapist response to suffering and injustice rather than confronting the needs and realities in our lives and in the world around us today. While the Bible promises rescue, redemption, and re-creation, it also sends us back to our lives, our communities, and our world inspired by vision and hope, but with lives to live and work to do in our time and place. Waiting for the Lord, as David described it, is never passive.
Psalm 27 is both an affirmation of God’s presence, protection, and care, and a prayer for that presence, protection, and care. David included his expectation of seeing God’s actions “in the land of the living”—in his present life—not waiting only for a glorious hereafter. Waiting is about being alert to God working in our lives and around us.
And it is about living with strength and courage today as an active and engaged way of waiting well. As such, waiting is about continuing to live and work in the light of our expectations of God’s actions and ultimate intervention. Even in the battle experiences and imagery that he used in this psalm, David was not advocating inaction.
“Hope, however, does not consist in crossing one’s arms and waiting. As long as I fight, I am moved by hope; and if I fight with hope, then I can wait.”* Although it is not the only reason, faith has been criticized for disengaging people from the world around us because this is how we have misunderstood it. It seems David would encourage us to have a more active, expectant, and courageous kind of waiting.
* Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (London: Penguin Classics, 2007), 65.
