© 2026 Evan D. Garner
Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video can be seen here.
Are we there yet? Summer is almost upon us, and, for many of us, that means lots of time in the car with young children. Are we there yet? Those words have unique power to annoy any parent who is just doing their best to get their family to the beach or to the lake or to grandma’s house. Are we there yet? That question reflects more than the impatience of the petitioner. It is born of immaturity—the conceptual inability or, perhaps, willful refusal to accept that the journey will take as long as it will take and that there is no amount of wanting to get there faster that will, in fact, make the journey go by any faster.
Are we there yet? Parents don’t hear that question as much as they used to. When I was a child, I didn’t have a smart phone or a game console or a portable DVD player to anesthetize my restlessness. My parents had to be creative, which, in turn, helped me learn how to be creative. I can’t tell you how many times we counted cars or played the alphabet game or I-spy or twenty questions. We sang songs until I was old enough to know that singing songs in the car wasn’t cool. With nothing else to do and bored out of our minds, we picked a fight with our parents and asked repeatedly—Are we there yet?—until we discerned that the likelihood of parental violence outweighed the tedium of the journey, so, for at least a few minutes, we rode in silence.
MIT sociologist Shelly Turkle says that children need to be bored or else they will grow up lacking the ability to form meaningful relationships with other people. Until we can sit and be comfortable with ourselves—and just ourselves—we won’t develop the skills necessary to engage another person in deep and mutual exchange. Are we there yet? We need to grow up asking that question and being disappointed with the answer in order to learn that all the stuff in this life that really matters—like friendship and romance and triumph and flourishing—are more than a click away. They require patience and perseverance and vulnerability and mutuality—attributes that only develop over time.
Are we there yet? Children aren’t the only ones who ask that question, though they may be the only ones who use those particular words. Adults ask their own version all the time because, in truth, when we’re stuck in the back seat and unaware of how long we’ll be there, we’re no better at waiting than our children or grandchildren. When will my boss take me seriously? How much longer can I hold this marriage together? When will God finally take me so that I can be reunited with my beloved? There’s no map or GPS for that kind of waiting. We wish we could snap our fingers or click a button or tap a screen and make the interminable waiting stop, but part of what it means to journey through this life is to wait and wait without the ability to do anything about it.
Are we there yet? That’s the question the disciples asked Jesus right before he was taken up into heaven, though it sounded more like, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel.” They wanted to know if the waiting is over—if the time when God’s people would be in control of their own security and prosperity had arrived. The disciples had experienced the agony of waiting—waiting in despair after Jesus had been crucified. They knew what it meant to suffer without hope. But now they had known the power of the resurrection. God had brought their rabbi back from the dead. Jesus had been given authority over heaven and earth, over life and death, and the disciples wanted to know if this was the time when he would use that authority to establish God’s kingdom here on the earth.
“Is this the time?” they asked, confident that their master would rule all the kingdoms of the earth with righteousness and justice—that he had the power to subdue the enemies of God’s people and give his followers the peace and security they had always dreamed of. Are we there yet? Are we finished? Can we celebrate? Is this what we’ve been waiting for?
“It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority,” Jesus said to his disciples. “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Jesus was raised from the dead in triumph, and he was exalted into the heavens to rule over the cosmos, but the power he promised to send his disciples was not the power of our journey’s completion but the power to wait for its completion in hope.
Jesus sends us the Holy Spirit to make us his witnesses—witnesses to his triumph and witnesses to his promise. And we bear witness to him whenever wait with hope. Because Jesus was raised from the dead, we know that God has won the victory over sin and death. Because he has been exalted to the heavenly places, we know that there is no longer any separation or barrier between God’s presence and our struggles. Because God abides with us in the Holy Spirit, even our most tortuous and aggrieved waiting is imbued with hope, and hope is what sustains us as we wait for his promised return, and waiting in hope is how we bear witness to him in the power of the Spirit.
That does not make the waiting easy, nor does it make the pain of waiting go away. As Saint Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “For in this [earthly] tent we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling” (2 Cor. 5:2). Sometimes we groan or whine or complain from the backseat because we cannot see how far we have to go, but just because this waiting is long and hard and painful doesn’t mean that we give up on waiting for God.
If we allow our struggle to be overcome by impatience or restlessness, we cannot bear witness to the one for whom we wait or the Spirit that abides within us while we wait. If we reject outright the holiness of waiting for that which is beyond our control—if we instead prioritize the manufacture of our own security and prosperity over the stark vulnerability of waiting for the one who was crucified for the sake of the world—we lose hope and the faith that is within us. As Michael Gorman wrote, “Hope can be understood as…the future tense of faith.” Believing in Jesus—putting our trust in God’s promises—means nothing if we are unwilling to endure the long and hope-filled wait for his return.
Are we there yet? No, we are not. And the hardest part is that we do not know how long it will be before Jesus comes and draws us and all things to their perfection. All we can do is wait and wait with the hope that the Holy Spirit nurtures inside us—the hope that fills this community whenever we gather together in prayer. We are the recipients of the Holy Spirit. Jesus has sent that Spirit to sustain us and comfort us and lead us to bear witness to Jesus Christ—to show others about his victory and his promise—his triumph over the forces of evil and his promise to come and set all things right. And you are a part of that witness every time you let hope shine through the hardship of waiting. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” Are we there yet? No, not yet, but, by God’s grace, we will be soon.
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