Waiting

Scripture: First Sunday of Advent, A.D. 2015 C

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Waiting. Advent is the season of waiting.

I’m not very good at waiting, myself. If there’s something I want to read, or some map I’d like to buy, I whip out my phone and with the push of a virtual button or two I slap that puppy up on my Amazon wishlist—which is sort of the online ordering equivalent of chambering a round in your rifle. Won’t be long before I hit the trigger. Free two-day shipping, doncha know.

This is, after all, the age of instant gratification. Why else would we have 24 hour news services? Or downloadable movies straight to our iPads? Or candy racks in the checkout aisle? See it, want it, buy it. That fast. We’re addicted to the quick fix. Learn Spanish in five weeks. Get a beach bod in three. With a credit card you don’t even have to save; just pay with future money!

Kids are especially bad at waiting, but it’s not their fault. After all, they haven’t lived very long. 10 minutes seem like an appreciable chunk of their lives. And besides, at that age everything is hormones and blood sugar and poor impulse control. Alas, I don’t have such excuses. I’m just an American, and Americans don’t like to wait.

But why is that, do you suppose? Why can’t we wait? Why can’t we savor the anticipation? Sociological studies indicate that people in fact gain more happiness out of expectation—out of looking forward to something—than they get out of the thing itself. Disney World might be fun, but you’re really going to experience more happiness in the months leading up to Disney World than you will with the actual lines and fees and exhausted children. Waiting is good for you, good for all of us. So why do we keep trying to avoid it? It has to do with insecurity, I think.

Let’s imagine that someone has made us a wonderful promise, but we find ourselves waiting a long time for that promise to be fulfilled, perhaps a very long time. What shall our reaction be? If we trust in the person who made us that promise, we’ll respond with hope. Our time of waiting will be a happy one. Because no matter how long the interval between promise and fulfilment, we are assured of the good things that are coming.

But if we do not trust the person who has promised us such things, the longer we wait the more anxious we will grow. Doubt will creep in. Jealousy. Suspicion. We’ll start to demand updates, evidence, proof that the promiser will keep his word. In this scenario the future is not secure, so instead of looking forward to it with hope, we fear that our hopes will be dashed. A chronic inability to wait indicates a chronic anxiety about what is to come—or rather, what is to become of us.

Throughout the Bible, God makes a lot of promises. And some of those promises take an astonishingly long time to reach fruition. Thus, God’s people, Jewish and Christian alike, become a waiting people, a people who live between promise and fulfilment. This takes patience, and patience requires trust. Yet if we have trust in the One for whom we wait, then our waiting becomes not arduous, not some pleasure deferred, but instead a blessing, a gift, an opportunity for deeper and more spiritual bliss. We wait for God because God is coming. And we know that when He does, we will be here, waiting for Him.

“Do you believe because you have seen?” Jesus once said. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” He wasn’t talking about credulity. He was talking about faithful waiting, the blessing of being able to trust in the Lord. It’s funny, really. He comes to us, draws near to us, in the midst of our waiting for Him to come to us. This is but one of the many paradoxes of our faith.

“The days are surely coming,” says the Lord through the prophet Jeremiah, “when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and He shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.” That was written somewhere around 600 years before Christ, and it makes reference to King David, who lived 1000 years before Christ. God promised David that a descendant of his would sit upon the throne of Israel forever. Over time it became clear, through the prophets, that this Son of David would not be like other kings, but would be some sort of cosmic ruler, a heavenly King, come to set all things right. In other words, Jeremiah is talking about Jesus.

But note the chronology. 400 years passed between David and Jeremiah. “I haven’t forgotten,” sayeth the Lord. “The days are surely coming when My promise shall be fulfilled!” And then it takes another 600 years after that. A thousand years of waiting. A thousand years of trusting in God’s promise. And yet, as the centuries rolled on, as the world turned and heaved and changed and turned again, God’s people Israel did not throw up their hands and say, “It ain’t ever gonna happen. He’s not coming.”

To the contrary, they got progressively more excited with each passing generation. They could see how God’s other promises were fulfilled in ways more wondrous than any they’d expected. Prophets and priests reaffirmed the promise of the Messiah. And so the waiting, even this astounding millennia of waiting, was not a time of despair and anxiety but a time of hope and anticipation. The Messiah was coming. The Messiah was coming! And Israel would be ready to greet Him. And in the centuries to come, sages and saints would affirm that the faith of those who anticipated the Messiah throughout all those generations was the same faith as those who had seen Him Resurrected from the dead! God was in the waiting.

In our Gospel this morning, Jesus speaks of signs and distress and confusion among the nations, a time of judgment upon the abuses of those who had usurped Jerusalem. And He warns His disciples to be alert, be ready, because “this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.” Keep in mind that a generation in the Bible is 40 years. And 40 years from the start of Jesus’ ministry, in A.D. 70, Jerusalem was destroyed, the Temple swept away, and the world as Israel had known it ended.

40 years the early Christians watched, and waited. 40 years they preached Jesus’ promise of deliverance. So that when the signs came, at the end of that generation, the Christians survived the destruction of Jerusalem by fleeing to the city of Pella. They trusted in the promise of Jesus Christ for 40 years, never despairing, never doubting His Word, and so that day did not catch them unexpectedly. And they found the strength to escape all these things and to stand before the Son of Man.

Today, some 2000 years after the Resurrection, we are still a people waiting, waiting for Jesus to come. He comes to us in many ways. We remember His birth in Bethlehem; His ministry and Passion and Cross and glory; His Ascension into Heaven and His promise to come again in the same manner in which He went. He comes to us in the Word of God as found in the Holy Scriptures, and in the Sacraments of the Church, which bind us as one in the Body of Christ and fortify us with His own Spirit and Flesh and Blood. He comes to us in the needs of our neighbor, in the fellowship shown to the stranger, in the risks we take ministering to the exile and the refugee—for he who would gain his life must lose it.

And someday He will come again, when all things shall be fulfilled. Then shall He wipe away every tear, heal every wound, and raise all the dead from their graves. Heaven and earth shall pass away, and a new Heaven shall descend to the new earth, where God again shall dwell with Man. Then will God be all in all. No one knows when the time shall be fulfilled, not even the angels in Heaven. It might be 10,000 years from now. It might be tomorrow; I haven’t a clue. But we trust in the One who has promised to us all this and infinitely more, and so we wait—not with anxiety or impatience—but with hope and faith and love.

We are a waiting people, people waiting for God. And God is with us in our waiting.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.