The 1935 comedy “A Night at the Opera,” starring Groucho Marx, Chico Marx, and Harpo Marx, has been given the honour of being selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. A smash hit at the box office, “A Night at the Opera” was the first film the Marx Brothers made after Zeppo left the act, and the first film they made for MGM after leaving Paramount Pictures.
There is a moment in the film when Groucho Marx, in the character Driftwood, says, “It’s all right. That’s -- that’s in every contract. That’s — that’s what they call a sanity clause.” Whereupon Chico Marx, in the character of Fiorello, snaps back: “You can’t fool me. There ain’t no Sanity Claus.”
May be Chico was right . . . there ain’t no “sanity clause” to this time of year. Even Advent is crazed with contradictions
As a child I remember that the most difficult part of Christmas was simply waiting for it to come. From my birthday (July 4) to December 25 seemed more like an eternity. Days seemed like weeks. Weeks felt like seasons. Time seemed to stand still.
Waiting is foreign to our society. It seems unnatural. We hunger for immediate gratification. The idea of delayed satisfaction is a stranger to our thinking.
The symbols of our unwillingness to wait are all around us. Fast food chains boom because we don’t have time to eat. We stand in crooked lines, then yell out an order, get it down in five minutes and then get back to the rat race. We haven’t got time to sit down and read a book anymore. Perhaps it is a sign of the times that we have condensed versions of the Bible.
In kitchens all over Australia there are gadgets to get the meal prepared quickly. Don’t you all have a Thermo mix yet?? I would guess Maxwell House started it all. Simply spoon in the coffee and pour water. The coffee is made before you can even find a cup. When we become sick we want to be made well now, not later. Medicine, doctors, pastoral care and love are often rejected if they are not swift.
I, like you, accept most of our no — wait approach to life, with the exception of instant potatoes, which are disgusting. But the truth is that, though we do not like waiting, waiting is a part of living. We must wait for payday, a break, quitting time, and for the postman. When you do your Christmas shopping, you had certainly better be prepared to wait in a line to get through the checkout, wait to get a parking place, and wait through at least four red lights before getting across any intersection.
But there are also very serious matters for which we wait. Some wait for health to return, some for the coming of food hampers some for marriage or remarriage. We must wait for peace. A scared child waits for the coming of morning, and a scared adult awaits death. And an expectant mother waits for delivery. Waiting can be pure agony. It’s like the jury is out.
The problem is that scripture time and time again tells us that God’s clock is wound in a different way and no matter what we don’t or cannot determine time the way that we want and that suits us. Then again it is just as well. Imagine if we could control the weather – some like it hot, some cold, some wet and some dry and some snow and so it goes on – we would be in endless battle, just as well God does control the Kairos (Gods time) and gives us the Chronus (time) to work within.
Which perhaps leads us to consider the letter of Paul to the Thessalonians – Pray always or without ceasing - We all pray whether we think of it as praying or not. The odd silence we fall into when something very beautiful is happening or something very good or very bad. The "Ah-h-h-h!" that sometimes floats up out of us. Whatever words or sounds we use for sighing with over our own lives. These are all prayers in their way. These are all spoken not just to ourselves, but to something even more familiar than ourselves and even stranger than the world.
According to Jesus, by far the most important thing about praying is to keep at it. The images he uses to explain this are all rather comic, as though he thought it was rather comic to have to explain it at all. He says God is like a friend you go to borrow bread from at midnight. The friend tells you in effect to drop dead, but you go on knocking anyway until finally he gives you what you want so he can go back to bed again (Luke 11:5-8). Or God is like a crooked judge who refuses to hear the case of a certain poor widow, presumably because he knows there's nothing much in it for him. But she keeps on hounding him until finally he hears her case just to get her out of his hair (Luke 18:1-8). Even a stinker, Jesus says, won't give his own child a black eye when the child asks for a sandwich so how all the more will God when his children... (Matthew 7:9-11)?
Whatever else it may or may not be, prayer is at least talking to yourself, and that's in itself not always a bad idea.
Talk to yourself about your own life, about what you've done and what you've failed to do, and about who you are and who you wish you were and who the people you love are and the people you don't love too. Talk to yourself about what matters most to you, because if you don't, you may forget what matters most to you. Even if you don't believe anybody's listening, at least you'll be listening. But someone is listening! Believe in miracles. That's what Jesus told the father who asked him to heal his son. Jesus said, "All things are possible to him who believes." And the father spoke for all of us when he answered, "Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!" (Mark 9:14-29).
We may hate the waiting that we have in life, hating the wait for our Lord to return for the final time but remember He comes to us all the time, when we pray He is with us, when we gather He is there, when we feel alone He is there. So in the madness and when you stand waiting in line or at traffic lights or at the layby window or the bank or at the checkout – don’t waste the opportunity to talk to HIM – and do it always.
