Waiting for God

  ‘a God … who works for those who wait for him.’

+ In nomine …

There is a faintly irreverent satirical image you may have seen in bumper stickers and t-shirts which says ‘Jesus is coming: look busy!’ This seems to capture a particular view of Christ’s second coming and this season of Advent which begins today. The suggestion seems to be that the boss has been away from the office for a bit, but now he’s coming back so we’d better pretend we’ve been doing something useful, rather than just chatting to our friends, drinking tea, or whatever...    I’m sure we’ve all been in situations like that. And indeed, that can seem to fit with our more practical situation in Advent: Christmas is certainly coming, and so we need to run around being as busy as we can, sorting it all out. Being busy has a certain attractiveness to it. It’s a bit like a drug, it can take away the pain of things, distract you from things for a while, but the problem is that you keep wanting more and more of it. And so we see people who are constantly complaining about being too busy, but are actually terrified that they might have nothing to do for a moment. Their busyness is a way of trying to save themselves. And they may manage a semblance of it for a while, but before long they will probably go to pieces. Churches are as guilty of this as other places.

          Jesus however does not ask us to look busy, thankfully. In our gospel today and elsewhere in parables such as those of the foolish virgins or the thief in the night, he asks us instead to ‘watch’, to ‘wait’, to ‘stay awake’. Watchfulness, waiting, being fully awake and alert – these are aspects of living as a Christian to which we’re recalled at Advent. They’re different from being busy. They’re not about running around doing lots of things. But on the other hand they’re not quite the opposite of busyness. Watching and waiting are not exactly doing nothing, they’re quite different from just being lazy or falling asleep at the post. Staying awake, watchful and waiting, can be quite difficult. We all know how easy it is to be impatient or bored, to grow weary of waiting, to give up and go home, or to leap in and try and fix it all ourselves.

The disciples try both these routes in Gethsemane rather than waiting. Perhaps our culture is even worse at this than many previous ones. We’re so used to having everything on demand, food, entertainment, communication and information, that the idea of waiting for anything, for other people, let alone for God, seems like torture to us. Watch how quickly people lose their temper when they have to wait for something! I’m sure we’ve all felt the frustration and powerlessness of being on the end of an automated phone call waiting for something to happen. More seriously, I’d be surprised if most of us hadn’t had some experience of the agony of waiting in our relationships with those around us. There’s nothing we can do but wait. Waiting forces us to face up to a reality that is beyond our control. And if we are to be watchful and awake, we must face that limitation not with despair but with something else, with hope, even when it seems nothing is happening, no one is coming. The attitude of watching and waiting is fundamental to prayer. 

          Advent then is a season which reminds us of our radical hope as Christians, hope for a new and better world of justice and peace and love, a world in the process of being born, where tears are wiped away from every eye. This sense that history has a goal, this hope for the future is something which seems to be distinctive to the faith of Israel and her Muslim and Christian descendents. And for Christians alone, this Goal is not an unknown quantity, completely in the future, because ‘the End is near, is at the very gates’, it has all already begun, in the lifetime of Mark’s readers. The Kingdom is at hand, the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and end of all history has arrived in the middle, in Jesus Christ and his Cross and Resurrection. The future is not completely unknown: Christ is our future! 

This hope is not about thinking that we can easily fix everything, as if we could build the kingdom with our own hands, let alone that it’s already been fixed. We continue to pray ‘thy kingdom come’ and we believe that the new Jerusalem ‘comes down from heaven’, it is wonderfully more than our own capacities or imagination. Its coming is always surprising and even stealthy, like a thief, (‘you do not know the hour’) which is why attempts to pin this coming down, whether liberal or conservative, religious or secular, are always so ridiculous. But on the other hand, this waiting does not mean we’re completely passive in it all. The future may not be a project but it is a gift to be received.  Watching and waiting are about us being able to receive this gift of the coming kingdom. 

Two figures stand on either side of Christ on the iconostasis in an Orthodox Church and they are particularly linked with Advent. John the Baptist, or John the forerunner as they call him in the East, and Mary the Mother of God show us what this hopeful watching and waiting involves, how we can prepare the way for the Lord.    

John prepares for the Lord’s coming by telling others, by pointing to this Lamb of God, and by calling people to repent, which simply means to change, to turn away from evil. Mary prepares for the Lord’s coming by her great ‘yes’ to the angel, her ‘Be it unto me according to thy word’, which enables Christ to be conceived within her and for her to bring him forth into the world. Pointing to Christ, turning from evil towards this wonderful new life, receiving him in our hearts and giving birth to him in the world. Just as they did that then, so we can prepare for his coming now, in our neighbours, in those in need, in the transformation of our world, in the tiny moments of love and sacrifice, in the bread and wine, and at our final End. These are the ways that we can join John and Mary in preparing for the Lord’s coming, not by running around trying to be busy, not by elaborate projects to solve the world’s problems or complex predictions of the end, but simply by being awake, watchful and waiting, bridally excited even, about Christ our future, this advent and always.          

Zion hears the watchmen shouting,
her heart leaps with joy undoubting,
she stands and waits with eager eyes;
adorned with truth and grace unending!
Her light burns clear, her star doth rise.
Now come, thou precious Crown,
Lord Jesus, God's own Son!
Hosanna! Let us prepare
to follow there,
where in thy supper we may share.

           In nomine …     

AMEN.