Sermons from the Pulpit

     This is excellent advice if you have been put on hold. You have dialed the 800 number for technical support or the airline or (most appallingly of all) the phone company, and you have found your way through a maze of recorded voice-prompts, or at least you hope you have, and for the last 20 minutes some dreadful music has been liquefying your brain cells, and your ear hurts, and you want to go to the bathroom and your spouse needs to use the phone and every 20 seconds or so a recorded voice thanks you for your patience and tells you to hang in there, your call is important to us. They include this feature just in case you might actually start liking the music.

     Be aware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come.

     Consider how much of our lives is devoted to waiting, and how variable a thing waiting is. Waiting on a subway platform in Boston is a very different experience from waiting on a subway platform in New York. In Boston you're likely to wait longer, but the longer wait seems appropriate somehow, and when the train does appear, it does so with less noise, less speed, and infinitely more dignity than in New York. And when it stops the doors stay open longer, or seem to. A lot of this is very subjective.

     I hear metropolitan commuter traffic reports on the radio, and I picture all those cars sitting there or crawling and stalling and creeping and beeping, and I am amazed to contemplate how many people apparently look upon this as inevitable and just live with it. I read a column the other day which claimed that most automobile commuters treasure their commutes for contemplation, meditation, and solitude, and I do not believe one word of that.

     Waiting while the web page downloads. Waiting in the doctor's office. Waiting at the airport. Waiting for the sermon to end. Waiting in the checkout line or the ticket line. Waiting for the lab results. Waiting for the mail to arrive. We don't like it, but we do it. We see it as a necessary evil. Time spent waiting is wasted time, helpless time, useless time, pointless time, and worst of all lost time.

     There was a commercial on the radio this week. Talked about waiting until Christmas for that special gift on your list. Then a voice says, "Why should I wait? I'm not a kid anymore. I don't have to wait. I can get what I want when I want it."

     That is the world in which we live, and we are not just surrounded by it, we are part of it. Yet here comes our faith again, here comes the Biblical tradition, here comes the preacher, bristling with the usual perverse countercultural energy and proclaiming that the whole mood of Advent is about waiting, thanks be to God! I am never more aware of the disconnect between faith and culture than I am at this time of year.

     Let's be clear about this. It's not that waiting is, like any other form of adversity, potentially character-building. That may be true, but it's not the Advent message. The Advent message is that waiting is a gift from God, an opportunity to seize, an aptitude to nurture, a blessing to enjoy. The Advent message is that we cheat ourselves if we do not appreciate waiting.

     Advent means "coming." So who or what is supposed to be coming? God is coming, God in Christ, to set things right, to mend creation. Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done. The Day of the Lord.

     So that's what we wait for, but it's a peculiar sort of waiting. Nothing like reading vintage National Geographics at the dentist's. Totally unlike what we refer to, with deadly, desperate accuracy, as "killing time." Killing time! Have you ever really absorbed the meaning of that phrase, have you ever thought about what an abomination it is?

     We wait for God. We wait because God is coming, coming to us, coming to be with us. How does God do that? In the birth of a baby in the little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie, above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by. God came in Christ. But also in another way, another time, another day, in power and glory, to reign o'er all the earth. We call them the first and the second coming, as if we had any clear idea what God is up to.

     The scenario changes with human experience and imagination, but two things remain the same through all the variations. One thing that does not change has to do with us human beings. The other thing that does not change has to do with God.

     What does not change about us is that we always ache for the presence of God. Not single-mindedly, God knows. We fear, dread and avoid the very thing we ache for. But the ache is real and constant, and no words have ever been found to express them better than the old texts of Advent : O that you would rend the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence! Your watchers lift up their voices, together they sing for joy, for in plain sight they see the return of the Lord. There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

     So our longing for God is one constant. And what does not change about God is that God is faithful. Faithful to the promises made to our fathers and mothers in the faith. Faithfully bringing in the Kingdom. Faithfully coming to us. We do not know the details of that. We can only imagine and wait, knowing full well that the reality can only beggar our imaginings.

     Note that Advent does not say, "God will come," but rather, "God is coming." God's activity is not future, it is present. Or to put it another way, God's future is breaking into the present. Not on December 25, not at Y2K, not on any date down the road on our calendars, but now. Today. This minute.

     So it's not that God is absent. We're the absent ones. We are absent-minded; not forgetful, just inattentive. We do not see, we do not hear, we do not know what is happening in our midst. We all wear watches and watch clocks, but we have no idea what time it is, no clue that God's time is right now, the fabled Day of the Lord is today.

     We need to stop looking at our watches and start watching for God. But looking at a watch takes only a glance, and watching for God requires a bit more attention-span than that. It needs a complete interior re-orientation. It requires that we acquire a taste and develop a gift for waiting, which in turn demands some interior uncluttering, some quieting of the noise.

     We think of waiting as a non-activity, the very height of passivity, but that only shows how thoroughly brainwashed we are. Be aware; keep alert. Nothing passive about that. There's this edge-of-one's-seat quality to it, this conviction that Christ is at large in the world and active right now for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. And from that comes a readiness, a willingness, to be and to behave as a citizen of that godly commonwealth now, and let the presence of Christ be revealed in us even as we expect and wait for it to be revealed in others.

     We calculate, we control, we plan. We map out all the contingencies. And if we are brave enough and wise enough and maybe even desperate enough, eventually we see the limits of that whole approach to things, and learn the arts of faithful waiting and watching. And things are different. And so are we.

     Advent isn't a season, and Advent Christians aren't an obscure branch of the family. All Christians are Advent Christians all the time. Dry branches burst forth green, God's advent signs are seen, Hallelujah!

Amen.