Awaiting the King
And now, brothers and sisters, we wait.
In the frozen north of the old world, people would yank one
of the wheels off the family cart to show that the time for normal busyness,
the hustle and bustle that fill our lives, had come to a close. It was largely
symbolic, I imagine, for once the deep snows set in the roads would’ve become
largely impassible anyway. But still the custom has meaning. Just imagine if we
could get away with something similar—with yanking the wheels off of our cars
for the month of December just to affirm that now is a time for preparation,
for settling, for peace. Now is the time of Advent.
We can recognize a similar theme behind the two most common
traditions of this season, the Advent calendar and Advent wreath. The calendar
counts us down to Christmas, rewarding the young and young at heart each night
with a little picture or chocolate or—for those who may be so inclined—a dram
of good whiskey. The Advent wreath is a fairly modern custom and, I’m proud to
say, a solidly Lutheran one. Wreaths had been symbols of hope amidst the bleak
midwinter from the Middle Ages, but it was in the Year of our Lord 1839 that a
German pastor thought to use a candlelit wreath to count down the days until
Christmas.
Johann Wichern ran a mission school for the urban poor, and
every day the eager young children would ask if it were Christmas yet. So Pr.
Wichern took a great wooden cartwheel—there’s that wheel again—and he put four
large white candles on it for the four Sundays of Advent, with a series of
smaller red candles between them. Every school day he and the children would
light a little red candle, and every Sunday one of the large ones, so that it
became a growing ring of flickering flames wrapping around to the fullness of Christmas
Day.
Advent, you see, is a season of preparation. And I do not
mean a hectic sort of preparation, rushing around to decorate and shop and fit
in as many events as possible. It is the season when we, as individuals and as
the people of God, prepare ourselves—our souls and our homes—to receive the
King. It is not a time for business as usual. We still have our labors and our
chores, of course, and our youth still attend to their studies. But we must
foster an interior quietude, an interior peace. Christ is coming—into our
lives, into our world—and this is no time for needless distractions. This is
our season to wait in the Spirit.
It’s amazing to me just how much of the Bible is about
waiting: Abraham waiting for a son, slaves waiting to be freed, nomads waiting
for a home, Exiles waiting to return. And through it all, waiting for the
Messiah, the Savior, the Son of Man—waiting for tens and hundreds, even
thousands of years. Waiting for God, knowing He would come; having faith in
promises that span generations, never despairing, never losing hope. Trusting
that God is God, and that God always keeps His Word. That’s a long time to wait
for Christmas! Thousands of years we waited. But I think we can all agree that
Jesus Christ is worth it.
Mind you that the waiting
itself has value. The Church has ever held that those Israelites who had
faith in the Messiah—who trusted that Christ would come even though they never
saw Him in the flesh—had the same faith that we hold. Waiting for Jesus was
equated with knowing Jesus. David’s faith a thousand years before Christ, and
Abraham’s 2000 years before Christ, were held to be the same as ours some 2000
years after Christ. Waiting itself is an act of faith in Jesus, faith that He
will come. And so waiting has for us a deep and abiding spiritual value.
Of course, this raises the question as to what exactly it is
for which we are waiting—now some 20 centuries after the Incarnation of God as
the babe, the Son of Mary, lying in a manger. Are we waiting for something that
has already occurred? Are we waiting for a Christ Who has already come? Well,
yes and no. Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again. In
Advent we await this Christ Who was, and is, and is to come, all at once. Jesus
indeed was born, to a specific Mother in a specific time and place: born in a
cave used to house animals in the little town of Bethlehem; born, as near we
can tell, at midnight on December 25th, two thousand and thirteen years ago.
When we commemorate and celebrate this entry of our God into
history, His Incarnation as one of us, we are engaged in something greater than
simple remembrance. The fancy word for it is anamnesis, but don’t let that offend you. Anamnesis simply means
that when we remember, in a religious and ritual manner, something that
happened a long time ago, we mystically
join in that original event. Anamnesis would tell us that we aren’t just
thinking about Jesus born in a manger on that first beautiful Christmas morn;
we are, in some mysterious way, participating in His arrival. We are there, at
the first Christmas, to welcome Him! His love for us, and ours for Him,
stretches out across the eons, and time proves no barrier to heralding the
arrival of God in the flesh. So yes, in a way we are waiting for something that
has already happened, waiting to return to that moment, to that holy hinge upon
which all of history revolves.
But we are also preparing ourselves to receive the Christ
Who is alive amongst us here and now. Jesus has promised to be present for us
in Word and in Sacrament here in the Church. He promises to meet us in the face
of the poor and needy for whom we must care in this cold, stark season. And He
promises that we will see Him in the love we show to our neighbor, in the least
act of kindness done in Christ’s Name. Advent prepares us to meet Christ in
this way as well, Christ in the here and now, Christ hidden in plain sight. We
all know this to be true: the closer we draw to Christmas, the closer we feel
to God. Not simply God in the distant past, but God here and now in the simple
things of hearth and home, of friends and family. God in the roaring fire as
the snow rages outside.
And then, of course, there is the fact that we await the
Second Coming of our Lord. Christians have ever held, as did our forebears in
Israel long before, that the day will come—though none may know the hour—when the
Messiah shall return to our world and set all things right. Heaven will descend
to earth, the dead will rise, and God again will dwell with Man. Then at last
shall all tears be wiped away, all tragedies set right, and all godly hopes
fulfilled. Sin and death shall be no more. And Christ will be all in all.
Ignore the popular images found in films and in novels.
There is no timeline for the end of the world, and no meticulously scheduled
sequence of events. All we know is that we can’t know, and that this is
mysteriously a blessing. Paul’s epistles flatly state that the Second Coming
has been delayed specifically so that “the fullness of the Gentiles”—which is
another way of saying all the peoples of the earth—may be brought to salvation
in Jesus Christ. When we proclaim, as we do every Sunday in the Creed, that
Christ shall come to judge the living and the dead, this should open our hearts
to a depthless well of joy. For indeed, what better news can there be than that
our judgment, our eternal destiny, lies in the crucified hands of the God Who
loved us even unto death? To know that Christ is our Judge is to know that our
fate will be determined by true love.
I know that our Gospel lesson sounded a bit scary today,
what with people going about their business and one suddenly being snatched
away by death. Keep in mind that what Jesus seems to be talking about here is
the judgment of Jerusalem—that is, the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans some
40 years after the Crucifixion. He is warning all who will listen not to raise
the sword, not to use force to deal with force, for those who live by the sword
also die by the sword. Thank God we listened, or else the Church might’ve
fallen along with the Temple. It is true that Jesus once said, “I come not to
bring peace but a sword.” Yet clearly He was speaking not about His actions,
His preference, but about how people would react to Him. Christ is the Prince
of Peace, Who turned the cheek and prayed for enemies and forgave those who
nailed Him to the Cross. Jesus is our peace.
That, dear Christians, is what we await at the Second
Coming: not Christ descending with a heavenly army to fill the world with blood,
but Christ come to burn the shield and break the bow and hammer our swords into
plowshares, our spears into pruning hooks. Christ will come again, and when He
does all war shall cease. Remember
that, as we enter this season of waiting. Remember that we hear the ringing,
the clanging, the clatter of bells to announce the coming of the King. But
these are not the jingle bells so prevalent in this season—rather, these are
the sounds of hammer and anvil, pounding, re-forging, reshaping our lives,
hammering swords into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks, weapons of war
into implements of abundant life and growth. That is the coming of Christ.
Ring the bells. Await the Lord. And prepare your hearts for
the King.
Thanks be to Christ, Who was and is and is to come. In Jesus’
Name. AMEN.
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