Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

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The promise comes at the end of this passage, and it is a wonderful promise, indeed. I remember my boyhood minister expounding on these words. I remember them in the film, Chariots of Fire, as one Olympic-hopeful begins to stumble in his race, and another young runner, his friend (who had refused to race that day because it was the Sabbath) is heard, in a voiceover, preaching these words in a little Scottish church. “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings as angels. They shall run and not be weary. They shall walk and not faint.”

“Don’t you know? Haven’t you heard,” Isaiah asks. That our great God who sits above the circle of the earth and stretches out the heavens like a curtain, who disposes of men, brings princes to naught (“he blows upon them and they wither, and the tempest carries them off like stubble”), who brings out the stars at night and numbers them and names them. Haven’t you heard that this amazing God, a god of nature and of nations, does not faint or grow weary, and (best of all) that he gives power to the faint and strengthens the powerless. Even strong youths, when they trust in their own strength, often faint and fall exhausted, but, “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings as eagles, run and not be weary, walk and not faint.”

People in hard times sometimes say, “I guess God doesn’t gives us more than we can bear.” A positive, and truer way of expressing that is to say that when we are at our wit’s end, when we think we have come to “the end of our rope” – and are unspeakably weary, and feel faint and sick, under life’s stresses and burdens, God renews our strength. Jesus promised even more than that; he said God would make us new. Not fix us up a little, not slap on a new coat of paint and send us forth, but create us all over again. Anyway you look at it, it says life is not a zero sum game. It is not that the cards in our hand are all we have, and when we have played them there are no more. There is a deck to draw from, and the deck has no bottom. “Renewal,” “regeneration,” “rebirth.” Whatever you call it, it is a spiritual miracle, and by it our spirits live.

Charlotte Bronte (after the death of her one sister, Emily, and with a second sister, Anne, dying of tuberculosis) wrote to a friend, “I avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward….the days pass in a slow, dark march; the nights are a test; the sudden wakeup from restless sleep; the revised knowledge that one lies in her grave and another, not at my side, but in a separate and sick bed. However, God is over all.” She didn’t look forward in fear nor backward in resentment. She looked upward. She would “wait upon the Lord.” And God would renew her strength.

“They that wait upon the Lord….” I had that wrong, when I was young. I thought it meant “serve the Lord (to “wait upon” as a waiter “waits upon” a table), but it means “wait for.” “They that wait for the Lord shall renew their strength….” But that’s a puzzle! Because we are a “can do” people. We admire doing, not waiting. “Can we fix it? Yes we can.” But, sometimes, we can’t fix it, and there is nothing we can do. Charlotte Bronte could do nothing about her sisters. The families of the shuttle astronauts can do nothing to change the reality of their losses. All around us there a those who suffer (physically, and mentally and spiritually) and can do nothing about their pain. All they can do is wait, and trust in the God, of whom Isaiah speaks (who “sits above the circle of the earth,” who created a dependable natural order, whose constancy is reflected in his work, whose everlastingness is a wonder, and who would surely not permit suffering were there not a purpose) wait for him to work out his plan in their lives. And in that trust, in that faithful waiting, strength is renewed.
We watch the news and wring our hands. We fret over every breaking story, and fume over all the wrongs we can’t control. As we age, if we’re not careful, we begin to believe (in a more thoroughgoing way) that the world is, indeed, going to hell in a hand basket – if it hasn’t already! Have we forgotten what it means to “wait for God,” to trust in his providence. To believe his promises. If we have, the Bible teaches, we have lost that ever-flowing spring of renewal and new life which is promised to those who wait for him.

You see, of course, that waiting is not just waiting…and doing nothing. We wait in faith and trust, and that (in a spiritual world) is doing something. “They also serve who only stand and wait,” said blind Milton. The church is a waiting community. We wait, in faith and trust, for the coming of our Lord. And as we “wait upon the Lord,” and await the renewing of our strength, we remember the foundations of our faith, “our youthful God,” as Matthew Arnold put it. The foreman of a road crew hired a strong-looking young man to paint a stripe down the middle of a new road. First day the boy painted 250 yards, and the foreman told him that was the best he’d ever seen, and he’d see to it that the boy would get a bonus if he kept up that pace. But the next day he only painted 85 yards, and the day after that only 20. The foreman said, “What happened to you. You were so fast at the beginning.” The boy said, “It’s not my fault. I keep getting farther from the can.”

As we grow older, and our strength is tested, it is a danger that we keep getting farther from the can, from the power of the gospel, which once enthralled us Hopefully we have picked up our faith and carried it with us all our lives, and (if that is the case) it will be as much of an inspiration to us in old age as it was in youth. John Wesley wrote this when he was eighty-two years old: “Mr. Henry said, ‘I bless God that I am never tired of my work, yet I am often tired in my work.’ By the blessing of God, I can say more: I am never tired in my work. From the beginning of the day, or the week, or the year to the end I do not know what weariness means. I am never weary of writing, or preaching, or travelling, but am just as fresh at the end as at the beginning. Thus it is with me today, and I take no thought for tomorrow.” Wesley wrote many volumes, preached thousands of times, and traveled on horseback 250,000 miles – the equivalent of ten times around the earth. And never got tired. Even at 82. Something kept him going. His whole life was a waiting for God – believing, trusting, knowing that God would be faithful to his promises – and in that faithful waiting he renewed his strength, he rose up with wings as an eagle, he ran and was not weary, he walked (and rode) and didn’t faint.