Hopeful Waiting: God’s Faithful Future Hurtles toward Us:

A Meditation on the Day of Annual Meeting, December 9, 2007

By the Reverend Shirley Smith Graham

St. Martin’s Episcopal Church

Matthew 3:1-12

               

            You may never have imagined that “waiting could be action-packed.”  But that’s the idea I’m asking you to try on today.  That our waiting, as children of God, is an action-packed thing, a thing that brings the future hurling toward us.

The theme for this Advent at St. Martin’s Church is “we wait for the Lord in hope.”  Waiting may seem like a passive thing: waiting in line, waiting for a guest to arrive, waiting, and being powerless to act until the waiting is over, until the long-awaited event arrives – being passive until the activity starts.

            Do you remember how you felt as a child, long before you had a driver’s license or a car?  Do you remember how you felt you were always waiting for an adult to get themselves together and be ready to take you to your destination?  Perhaps you were waiting to be taken to a friend’s house, go to the store, go to the library, go to a football game, to the movies … waiting for the adult to be ready to leave – what on earth were they doing all that time, all that time you were waiting.  Come on, already, mom, I’m ready.  Mom!  Just a minute … with every minute that passed, it seemed there was always, “Just another minute ….”

            But God has a radically different kind of waiting in mind for us.  God delights in Advent waiting.  Yes, it’s true: Advent is an invention of the Church.  This four-week season is set-aside for waiting for the anniversary of the Christ-child’s coming.  It’s a time symbolic of our waiting for Jesus’ to come again in great glory and remake the whole creation anew.  But as powerfully impactful as Advent is, it is true: there is no Biblical warrant for this season.  There is no ordinance in the Book of Deuteronomy prescribing that the children of God will assemble before the Lord and wait four weeks until the festival day of the Miseeiah.  There is no instruction from the Apostle Paul to spend these four weeks in joy-filled waiting, before we remember the coming of our Lord in flesh. 

But even though Advent is a creation of the Church, the season is so useful to God’s purpose of pulling us near – just as the mother hen gathers her chicks under her wing, just as the father scoops up his toddler child, just as God refuses to let us flail around alone, but pulls us close, even in the winter cold, nearer to the heart-beat of God.

Rather than waiting being a passive activity, waiting for the Lord is an action-packed thing.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and preacher describes this idea in his Advent sermon from November 29, 1931,  Bonhoeffer delivered this sermon in Berlin, 14 years before he would die in a German prison after having attempted to assassinate Adolph Hitler.  Bonhoeffer says, in our waiting, we do not stand at the edge of some vacuum of nothinglessness, helpless, or weightless in time.  Rather God comes rushing at us from the future.  We do not “find our own way to God into the future” but rather we “receive the future from God.  We know that we cannot go to God, but God comes to us, enfolding us in his unbelievable grace” (Robertson, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christmas Sermons, 53).  We watchfully, alertly awake for the coming of this future: “that means,” he says, “passionately waiting, totally deaf to those who would sow doubts in our mind, blind to every power that stands between us and that future which God wills for us.  One thing is needful: the conviction that we shall see God, we shall hear God, we shall receive God, we shall know God, we shall serve God.  In some incomprehensible way, God [rushes toward us with the future] otherwise nothing, absolutely nothing else, counts” (Robertson, 53). 

When Jesus looks upon us as we are now, he sees us not in the broken, agitated, doubting, anxious, fault-ful ways we are.  But rather Jesus sees us from the future; Jesus comes rushing at us from that future; Jesus sees us healed.  In Bonhoeffer’s own words: we know that “[Jesus] will eventually come at last, no longer clothed in our history, with its suffering and death, but seen by all the world as judge and redeemer at the end of time.  It is because God [before] has come that we wait [now].”  And we wait, knowing that God faithfully has a future for us, and is, in this season of waiting, hurtling toward us with that future, a good future of salvation and peace.

But if God has this good future for us, what are we, then to do with John the Baptizer yelling at us from the Judean desert: Repent!?  “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”  John, the Baptizer, that pesky prophet here each Advent, by invitation of the church lectionary, just won’t go away: “Repent!” he shouts.  So uncomfortable is his message, so confrontational is his manner, that it’s amazing we haven’t tossed him out of our readings!

Well, let’s put John’s prickly invitation to “Repent” into the context of Bonhoeffer’s image of Jesus seeing us from the perspective of our ultimate wholeness with God.  Bonhoeffer says, “[Jesus] sees humankind already taken up within God’s peace, already quite free from strife, sin and death … Jesus sees [us] as already under the rule of the kingdom, and [we] are blessed.  Because Jesus sees humankind like that, we stand there where Jesus blesses us … Therefore we know that he is not speaking of us as we now are.  But he sees us all in a quite different perspective, such as we never see ourselves.  Rather as though we were covered by the eternal peace and eternal holiness of God already, as men and women who approach the state in which the new heaven and the new earth is theirs.  That is seeing humanity in the perspective of God’s future” (Robertson 47).

So today, with Jesus seeing us with his future-come-up-close eyes, with Jesus seeing us as whole and blessed, John the Baptizer invites us to cross the great distrance from how we see ourselves now to how Jesus sees us with his future-come-up-close eyes.  What do you need to do to get there?  It is as if Jesus is that high school coach or English teacher who saw through all our adolescent awkwardness and lack of skill, who saw the potential in us and said, “What do you need to do to get there?”

What sin stops you, today, from seeing yourself the way Jesus sees you, as whole and blessed in God?

What brokenness stops you, today, from seeing yourself the way Jesus sees you, as whole and blessed in God?

What anxiety prevents you from claiming that peace and blessedness that God has for you?

Repent.  Turn away from the sin that binds you. 

Repent.  Turn away from the brokenness that keeps you short of seeing yourself the way God sees you.

Repent.  Turn away from the obsession of worrying about things out of your control and, then claim that peace in which God sees you today.

Through our repentance we can accept God’s future rushing toward us, bringing us the reign of God, a reign of wholeness, life and peace.

Repent, and in repenting, know that you are being as active in your waiting for the Lord, as the Lord is being active in his waiting for you.  “[N]o one can wait for God, who does not know that God has long been waiting for them” (Robertson 55).  Amen.