The Arrival of Godot

June 30, 2002

Matthew 11:1-6

A couple of summers ago Ann and I decided to take advantage of the fact that we lived in New York. I booked us for four or five Broadway shows. It was great fun to look forward to a real evening out in New York City in the summer. I love the city on a warm summer night with the wind cooling just enough, and everyone is out. We even saw a number of good shows. One that I looked forward to that was playing at the time was Copenhagen. I had heard great things about it and it seemed to be about something I was really interested in. The plot revolves around the meeting of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg two physicists in Copenhagen in 1941. The reason this is important is because it has been surmised that it was this meeting that passed crucial information about the creation of an atomic bomb into the hands of the Germans.

That was not the part that interested me most though. The play was written in a way that explored the uncertainties of experience by way of the uncertainties of physics. It was a grand and ambitious idea. But the play was terrible. It was so talky and the same scene kept getting played over and over. It might be something good to read but it was almost impossible to watch. I tried hard to love it. I tried then to like it. By the end I wanted to run from the theatre screaming.

The play belabored the idea of uncertainty. The uncertainty principle is actually a principle in physics, a principle that Heisenberg first wrote about in 1927. If I understand it right the uncertainty principle in subatomic physics claims that the meaning of an occurrence is determined by how it is measured. If you measure an occurrence in two different ways you get two different results. How the measurer interacts with the occurrence has a lot to do with what it will mean in a particular instance. The play write made sure that no one could leave that theatre even somewhat certain and every one would have a different idea of what happened in Copenhagen between these two men in 1941 and so mirrored the theory.

It was an interesting idea that did not work as far as I was concerned.

I am not going to go to far into the philosophical implications of uncertainty because I do not understand the theory enough but I do understand that perspective, mood, culture, education, and beliefs have a great deal to do with how we perceive experience. In other words what we bring to an event has a lot to do with the meaning that we will derive from that event. That I believe is a universal truth reflected in yes physics and our every day life.

So as I am apt to say so much depends upon the choices we make. And the choices we make depend on what we believe about ourselves, what we believe about our world, what we believe about our God. That is why this church business is so important. We work on our beliefs here in countless ways and so we determine here the quality of our lives. This might seem like an addendum to living but what happens here in growing and changing beliefs is at the core of the quality of our lives. So good for you being here on a Sunday in late June.

Copenhagen actually reminded me of another maddening play that I have sat through more than once. Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece Waiting for Godot is at once brilliant and boring and extremely irritating. Of course that is the point. The two main characters are absurdly waiting for that which never happens. Beckett was a child of the twentieth century being born in 1906. The play first appeared in the fifties. This was the time when, after the two world wars, after the bomb, after the holocaust, every philosophy and religious understanding was put to the test and the arts, almost all of them, reflected that challenge. In the case of Waiting for Godot, Beckett creates in very bleak terms a world where salvation never comes. Godot of course never arrives and that is a thinly veiled reference to the God that too often seems absent. And the characters in his play find no meaning in what they are doing and the waiting simply goes on and on.

This same hopelessness was expressed in countless other ways and has been expressed by many artists and thinkers and philosophers since. In theology Gabriel Vahanian wrote a book titled God is Dead in 1957 and it lead to a number of works that talked about the demise of the deity.

Of course such questioning of our God is not just a mid twentieth century phenomenon. It continues right now because the world continues to create catastrophes that beg for divine presence.

We face now a world wide crisis that has been spawned by religious traditions. We read about the horror of people who have detonated themselves so that others will die. Hatred in the Middle East runs that deep. We had a taste of it last year in September and I dare say that we will not soon forget that terrible event. I have heard it asked a lot of different ways, “Where was God on September 11^{th?” “I wonder why God will not solve this terrible stand off in Israel.” I guess we are like all people who ever lived wondering where God is now.}

It is a question for the ages and a question worth addressing. A long time ago John the Baptist sent an emissary to Jesus pretty much asking him the same thing. I am glad he did because through the miracle of scripture we are privy to the answer.

John asked Jesus this: “Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?”

John wanted to know if God had arrived. Jesus words are shocking and most inspirational.

Jesus says consider the evidence. Jesus asks, “What do you see?” Jesus challenges John and the ages with the idea that the problem isn’t God’s absence but rather our lack of faith. He says, “Tell John what you see and hear.” On the surface it is so disappointing. It is so disappointing because we live in a much different world than Jesus did and the evidence that seems to surround us is quite to the contrary. Two world wars, the atomic bomb, daily suicide bombings, terrorists threatening to do worse than they have already done, ongoing wars and rumors of wars, genocide that seems to repeat itself. Is Jesus kidding? Look around?

Jesus is so bold here it almost gives me a chill. And this is nothing if it is not a challenge because in other words he is saying quite clearly that if you see no God there is no God. If you see no God there is nothing that God can do about making God more apparent or more believable. It was that way in the time of Jesus and it is that way today.

This is the way faith works. It isn’t about what God is or isn’t doing it is about seeing what God is doing. The key to meaning in this living is not about what God does it is about what you or I choose to do. Jesus stands on the fact that there is plenty of evidence of the presence of God but there is far too little faith to perceive it.

We have been given the opportunity, by God, to bring peace into our lives and into this world. Peace is possible but if we don’t believe it and we don’t act on it then we can’t just say it is because God failed us. God did not fail us we failed ourselves. Love is always a possibility, because God made the world that way, but if we live without love is it God that we should blame? Faith and hope are always choices, because God provides for their possibility, but if we deny that these are even possible whose decision is it?

Jesus is clear we don’t need any more evidence our challenge is to see God, our lives depend on it. Our challenge is to act on God’s behalf; the future of the world depends on it. Our challenge is to find faith right now right here, the meaning of our lives depends on it. We have every opportunity to make this a world where God’s peace and love and faith are undeniable, I think Jesus is asking, what more are we waiting for?

Faith is the embodiment of the uncertainty principle. It is the ingredient that changes reality when it is applied to an occurrence. God can seem utterly absent and outcomes can seem nothing but evil until one person acts in faith and then everything changes. Jesus asks us. “Don’t you see how this works? God is everywhere just waiting for you.” And if we have the faith of a mustard seed we will have to wait for God no more. This is the promise and the good news.

In Christ Jesus. Amen.