November 23, 2008

       Here we go again, with the long wait. Advent seems to have come upon us with a rush – maybe because November has been so warm, it hardly seems like winter has really started yet. But it’s the end of November already, and a new year has begun in the telling of the church’s story. I bet the next four weeks won’t pass nearly as quickly though. Especially if you’re five – my daughter Elizabeth has already been asking, “When’s Christmas?” and when we tell her just how long away it is, she says, “But that will take all day!!”

Waiting is definitely part of what Advent is all about. We would like to think that the story begins with Jesus being born in Bethlehem, but of course it doesn’t. Before that happened, there was a long wait. For a millennium and a half of ups and downs, God’s people waited for God to come in the fullness of all his promises. They learned a lot during that period, and that’s why we read so much from the prophets in the next few weeks. But for the last few hundred years “BC” it seems they just settled down and waited. No Scripture comes from that time, no new piece of the story. Just waiting.

Today’s readings capture that spirit of waiting from a couple of different angles. The last reading, from Mark, probably comes closest to how we normally think of Advent. It’s about waiting in the sense of watching, “keeping awake” – knowing that the coming of God could surprise us at any time, and the watchword is “be prepared”. This is the kind of waiting that people with on-call jobs experience. The fire crew or the emergency response team, waiting for the alarm to sound so they can jump into action, keeping up their state of readiness so no time will be wasted, no lives lost.

And of course it doesn’t matter if any given crisis isn’t “the big one” – you’re still there, still ready to respond, to help, to save. That may be a part of what that sense of urgency is about, that Jesus, and Mark, tried to instill in the first Christians. Christian faith is about standing watch, no matter how long it takes for God to come and wrap it all up in the grand finale. Because God is always coming to us in small ways, and we’ll miss those if we’re not watching. We’ll miss the opportunity to throw a lifeline to one person, the chance to stand up to one injustice, the chance to encounter a hidden God at work in our world. And if we miss enough of those, then whatever God has in mind for a final act may just pass us by as well.

But our alertness, our watchful waiting, isn’t just for our sake. It may be more for the sake of the people who are watching us, watching to find out what this idea of following Jesus is all about. Attention and watchfulness are hallmarks in all walks of life, signs of how seriously people take what they’re about. Given a choice, you wouldn’t do business with someone whose attentiveness to detail was erratic. You wouldn’t hire a security firm that was only watching part of the time. And in matters of faith, it’s when people see that our attention is riveted on God, not distracted by the overwhelming trivia of daily life – that’s when they know we mean business. That’s when people know that there may be something to this Christian thing after all.

But that attentive on-call watching is not the only type of waiting that’s embodied in Christian experience. Both the Old Testament readings and the epistle today speak of a different kind of waiting that God’s people know a lot about. It’s a waiting that you could describe more as a yearning or longing. The kind of waiting that people feel when there homeland is occupied and they’re waiting for liberation; the kind that the slaves of the 19th and earlier centuries sang about as they longed for freedom, even knowing it might never come in their lifetime.

That’s the kind of waiting St Paul says the whole creation experiences right now – a longing for liberation and for God’s purpose to be revealed in a new heaven and earth. As human beings we share in that, but more than just sharing, we are the focus of it. Our longing for a better and truer world is what it’s all about. And I don’t just mean that in abstract political terms. Yes, we’d all like to see world peace and a clean environment. But what do you really yearn for? Where do you see something broken that you know, in the deepest place in your heart, needs to be fixed?

For some of us that will be an intensely personal question. There may be something in our own behaviour, in our own physical existence, in our own close relationships, that we are longing to see changed. For some it’s more objective – a desire to learn, to discover truth that has not been seen before, to build something, literally or metaphorically. And sometimes the yearning comes to us: we see something in other people’s lives that we know is not right, and we get caught up in a longing to see their world transformed, in a way that transforms us as well.

For everyone though, there’s the reality that our deepest longings demand a sacrifice, one way or the other. We can act as though they’re not there, we can let other things take priority, but only at great cost to who we are, to our integrity and the truth of our being. That doesn’t sound good, does it?! In one way it’s good news to know that God invites us to bring our passions with us on the journey – to use our own energy and investment to be part of God’s plan for the world. But when we do that, there’s a different kind of cost.

Not just the cost of time, money and effort – that hardly even comes into it. It’s not a cost when you pour yourself into the thing that means the most to you in all the world. But there is a cost when we discover that the coming of God is a two-edged sword. We long for it – we long for the world to be changed. But the prophets have been warning us since the Old Testament to be careful what you wish for! When we long for the wrongs in the world to be righted, we convict ourselves of collusion. We are a part of the problem, and that’s the only reason we can be part of the solution. God’s coming to change the world is also a coming in judgment, and we can’t escape that.

Now is the time to figure that out. Now is the time to understand what we need to let go of, in order for our lives and our worlds to become what we most want them to be. The time is short, the need is urgent. God wants more than anything else to work with us in re-making our lives and re-making our world. That’s what we want too. So we have this gift of a short time, right now, to discover what’s stopping us from working together with God. Let’s make use of it.

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