Advent I

December 3, 2006

St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church

The Rev. Hannah P. Anderson

 

How We Wait

 

However the Gospel might strike us at first hearing, there is no escaping the fact that one of the most basic formulations of the Christian faith all include the expectation of Christ’s return.  You hear it when we say the Nicene Creed:  “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.”  You hear it again when we celebrate Holy Communion:  “We remember his death, we proclaim his resurrection, we await his coming in glory.” 

 

At the same time, we are given no time frame, no idea of when this might occur.  As Barbara Brown Taylor writes:  ‘Christ has been coming back for so long that plenty of people have given up on him.  Before he died, he told his followers he would be right back.  Believing him, they did not make long range plans.  They put all their energy into preparing for the end.  Paul’s letters were written with the second coming in plain view.  Then a decade passed, then another.  The people who had actually known Jesus began to die off.  Pretty soon the stories about him were being told by people who had known people who had known Jesus.  The only reason we have gospels at all is that someone finally worked up the nerve to say, “You know, there aren’t all that many eyewitnesses left.  We really ought to get this stuff down on paper (Home by Another Way, p.4).”’

 

By the time the Gospel according to Luke was written, during the last third of the first century, it was about forty years after Jesus’ death.  His mother, Mary, most likely had died by that point in time as had Peter and Paul who were both martyred in Rome.  Jerusalem had been destroyed by Titus and the promised land was a province of the Empire.  The temple lay in ruins, and the chosen people seemed to have been chosen chiefly to suffer (Home by Another Way, p.4).

 

The people for whom this Gospel story was gathered were frightened and certainly tired of waiting.  These were ‘people who desperately wanted to know whether Jesus’ delay was part of the master plan or whether he was missing in action (Home by Another Way, p.4).’

 

So Luke included words attributed to Jesus that would help them cope during this time of waiting:  ‘Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly like a trap.  Be alert at all times (Luke 21: 34, 36a).’  By offering these words to the early followers of Jesus, Luke held the tension between the now and the not yet.  He let people know that instead of worrying about the coming of Christ in the future at an undetermined point in time, they would do best to stay focused in prayer and healthy choices that would keep them alert, open, receptive, attentive to God’s messages and signs. 

 

We each know that waiting is certainly a part of human life.  We wait for short times like when we buy groceries and stand in line for a few minutes.  We wait for longer stretches when babies are to be born or loved ones are to arrive for a visit.  Still some wait through years for depression to lift or bodies to be made well, for relationships to either reconcile or fall apart, for jobs to appear. 

 

In the waiting, we are reminded by Luke that this is not just an idle task.  Active waiting cultivates patience, deeper faith and alertness like busyness cannot accomplish.  Our entry into the new Christian year through the season of Advent places us directly in the tension of living in the now but not yet; how to be a believer in the present moment and anticipating the return of Christ at an unknown point in the future.  This involves waiting and inwardly enlarging the space into which we will invite Christ to be born.  There is no quick fix, no magic formula. We know that the steadiness of daily prayer, regular worship with a community of believers and an ongoing desire to deepen one’s relationship with Christ through a variety of disciplines are all ways to enrich the waiting.  Each of us is invited on the journey…and it begins with four weeks of waiting.  AMEN.