Curtis Almquist, SSJE
Monastery

Advent I – December 2, 2007

Matthew 24:36-44

            Today we begin a new season of the church year, Advent.   The word “advent” derives from the Latin, adventus, which means arrival: the arrival of the long awaited Messiah, the Christ, whom we as Christians know as Jesus.  Meanwhile, as we anticipate this arrival, we wait.  If we were to open the Gospels according to Matthew and Luke, we discover a great many people waiting for the Messiah, the Christ.  Mary is waiting.  Jo­seph is waiting.  Zechariah is waiting.  Elizabeth is waiting.  Symeon is waiting.  Anna is wait­ing.  Most everyone, it seems, is waiting.  They’re waiting on a baby.   There are also shepherds who are waiting. There are some sages from the east – wisemen – who are waiting.  The threatened govern­ment of Herod the Tetrarch is waiting, rather anxiously.  The only persons, it seems, who are not waiting are in Bethlehem, the keepers of an inn.  And there’s no room in the inn.  They’re all full up.  It is nigh unto impossible to wait if you are full up. Because waiting takes space; to be able to wait requires an emptiness.  And that’s a problem.  I think it’s problematic for many of us who live in North America.

            In our culture, there is a certain ingrained presumption that we should not have to wait.  We should be able to have it all and have it now.  There are two colluding, corrupting influences in our cultural zeitgeist when it comes to waiting.  For one, living life on credit.  The MasterCard people tell us, “You can have it all, and you can have it now.” You don’t have to wait.  You shouldn’t have to wait.  (Waiting is a problem.  Waiting is un-American.)  I would call that one of the colluding, corrupting influences in our culture: living on credit, borrowing life.  The second confusing influence these days is more subtle, and that’s the influence of the internet, virtual living.  The technicians who create internet search engines and  people who are webmasters know that the response to someone’s click must be within a couple of mini-seconds or else the person moves on, surfing somewhere else.  You probably know if you use Google to search the web, Google will tell you how many tenths of a second you had to wait for your search.  (I did a Google search on the word “waiting” and waited .04 seconds to get more than 26,500,000 web addresses on the topic of “waiting.”  But the rest of life is not like that.  Life is full of waiting.

            For many people, there are few things more difficult than waiting.  Even to say, or to hear someone say, “I’m waiting on ________,” this seldom comes with much sense of consolation.  Waiting often implies a certain agony or anguish.  Waiting may seem vacuous or unproductive.  Waiting may seem useless.  And yet, we have to wait all the time. We wait for medical test results.  We wait for the mail.  We wait for a spouse or lover or friend to arrive or to depart or to change.  We wait for someone to return our phone call.  We wait for the traffic light to turn.  We wait for someone to be healed.  We wait for someone to die.  We wait for our siblings or our children to grow up, to shape up.  We wait to discover what in the world we are to do with our life, now.  We wait for what will happen between Israel and Palestine, with Iraq, with Iran, with Bangladesh, with Pakistan, with Haiti, with our own country.  We wait to finally get our exam results, our credentials or degree, or our new job, or our vacation time.  Sometimes we may wonder, “Will it ever happen?” as we nervously dance from one foot to the other, not being able to hold still.  We watch and we wait… and we worry.

            So what are you waiting for?  And how is the wait?  It seems to me that woven into the fabric of life is the principle of waiting.  Somewhere between conception – be it the conception of the world, or of an idea, or of some molecular structure, or of a baby – there is a necessary time of gestation, of formation, during which time the neophyte is not fully developed or in control.  And there is a time of waiting.  I would even say that life never stops being gestation in God’s eyes.  Things come to be in the fullness of time.  On God’s time.  And that God is not in a rush.  God has all the time in the world.

            We believe, rightly, that God is our beginning and our end; the ultimate beginning and end of our life, our desires, our purpose, our eternal dwelling.  The beginning and the end.  But if we are to say that all the waiting that fills our life is not an accident, is not just neutral gear, then God will be equally concerned with the means to our end.  The beginning and the end and the way in between are inextricably connected.  There is a reason why today is not tomorrow.  We need today to be ready to receive tomorrow.  Jesus, who is the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega, is also the Jesus who is the way.

            The author Robert Finch writes in The Country Journal about “Traveling the Unpaved Way.”  He is convinced, so he says, that people really “live when they are aware of living, more for means than for ends, for the journey rather than the destination.”  “Perhaps,” he writes, “this is why we find the lives of those who settled this country more compelling than our own.  In the past, travelers arriving spoke of what they saw and did, experienced and endured on their journeys, as each trip was likely to be different.  Now we generally talk only about how much time it took us to drive or fly from one point to another, as though the virtue of a journey lay in how few new experiences it offered us.  We commonly ask of a traveler not, ‘What did you see?’ but ‘Did you have any trouble?’”i   I would say that we all are on the way.  And the way matters.  And along the way we must wait in life.  And I would say, the waiting is no accident.

            So what are you waiting for?  And how is the wait?

            To wait, as we see waiting in God’s time, is to be present to the moment.  To wait, in God’s time, is to believe that this moment is the most important moment.  To wait, in God’s time, is to believe that this present moment is sacramental.  That the outward signs of our life –  where we are, and how we are, and what we are at the moment, today – that these outward signs are the conduit of God’s interweaving grace in our lives, where God breaks through to us  The present moment is sacramental, not to be missed.

            There is no future of God in our lives unless there is a presence of God in our lives, now.   At the moment when we may be tempted to flee from the present, which is to flee from the presence – the presence of God – these are the moments where God is meeting us, now.  The present moment is sacramental.  This spiritual principle of waiting is nothing passive.  It is not about bearing one contusion, one shove in life after another, with our only response being a limp resignation.  This waiting is not passive submission.  It is rather an active acquiescence to God’s being at work in our life in ways beyond what we could ask or imagine, probably in the waiting.  We have just heard in our Gospel lesson for today, “You must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.”  I hear this as a word of promise.  It’s not a caution about how God might come to us in the end, but an assurance of how God does come to us all the time.  The waiting is promising.  “You must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.”  We can expect that God will come to us, again and again, even unexpectedly.  Look for it; wait for it.  The Psalmist say, “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits for him, in his word is my hope.”ii  Simone Weil, the great French spiritual writer, says “waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life.”iii

            So what are you waiting for?  And how is the wait?

            For some of us, to wait is to worry.  To worry that what has filled our vision or fed our desires may never come to be, and there’s the temptation to despair or maybe even to run away from life.  I would say that at these times, when to wait is most difficult and to worry is most natural, at the times when God’s provision may seem most distant from us, where there is more a sense of God’s absence than of God’s presence, this absence is the very sign of God’s presence.  God is behind the absence, meeting us finally in our lowliness our emptiness, our neediness, our poverty our hunger, our thirst, and drawing us Godward.

            I’ll return to the gospels, to these opening scenes in Matthew and Luke’s gospel where the common theme is waiting.  It seems to me there’s something to be learned from them.  All these folks – Joseph, Mary, Zechariah, Elizabeth, Symeon, Anna, the wisemen, the shepherds, even Herod, and eventually John the Baptist (Zechariah and Elizabeth’s son) – all these folks are waiting because they know that something is coming.  They’re waiting for that time, in the fullness of time, when a baby shall be born.  The reason that we call it “waiting” (what all these people are doing) instead of fretting, or stalling or biding time... is because these people have a kind of promise.  Each of them, in their own way, were able to wait because there was some promise which came to them, some assurance, some reminder, some sign, some inner knowing or longing which spanned the chasm – that empty space – between where they were and where they were being led in life.  God was leading them in their longing while they waited.

            Waiting presumes two things.  For one, having to wait presumes that something is not yet complete.  There is something more to be had or held or endured or enjoyed.  Behind the sense of waiting – no matter how empty or anxious you may feel in the wait – is the sense that something more is coming.  It may have to do with your personal life, it may have to do with those around you, with your community or country or with our world and some of this waiting may cause you tremble.  It seems to me that if you find yourself anxious just now, in what you sense awaits you, there may actually be some good news rather disguised.  In­side of the experience of anxiety is a seed of hope.  Anxiety is an anticipation of the future… and so is hope.   Saint Paul writes (in the Letter to the Romans): “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation but we ourselves… groan in­ward­ly while we wait….   For in hope we are saved.  Now hope that is seen is not hope.  For who hopes for what is seen?  But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with pa­tience.”iv   If you find yourself waiting anxiously just now, pray for the conver­sion of your anxiety.  Converted anxiety is hope.  Anxiety is dreadful expectation; hope is expec­tant desire.  And they are like cousins to each other.  Pray for the conversion of your anxiety, within which is the seed of hope.  That may well be a wonderful Christmas gift.  If you are anxious just now, you are almost already hopeful.  Something hopeful is happening in the wait.

            The other thing I would say about waiting is how waiting conforms us to the image of God, who waits. We have been created in the image of God who is a waiter.  God waits with us, until we are ready.  If we take our cues from the scriptures, we hear God’s calling us children, “children of God.”  And we know that children are not developmentally ready to know everything at once.  There is a reason why today is not tomorrow.  If God chooses to give us as much as one more day to be alive, we shall need the provision of today to equip us for the prospect of tomorrow.  God knows what we do not know.  In the language of the psalmist, we are “like watchmen waiting for the morning.”v  The beams of enlightenment that we can bear, God will dawn on us when we are ready.  And in the mean time we wait, we must wait, and until we are ready or readied.  And God waits with us.  But God also waits on us, like a waiter stooping low to serve us at whatever the depths we are. 

            This Advent consider incorporating this word “waiting” into your life.  Let this word “waiting” be a part of the vocabulary of your soul.  It’s a rather counter-cultural word these days, but it actually is an important foundation piece to our faith.  What are you doing?  You say, you say to yourself, “I’m waiting.”  Isn’t that fascinating?  To incorporate the promising word “waiting” into your experience of life, letting this graceful notion of “waiting” replace what otherwise might be worrying, or clamoring, or demanding, or resigning.  You’re waiting, and with great expectation, for what is coming to be in your life, in the fullness of time.  You are waiting on God, who is waiting on you, for what shall be birthed in your life in the fullness of time when you are ready or when you are readied.  Watch for it, wait for it, with thanksgiving and with great expectation how God is coming to you in your experience of both the fullness of time and the emptiness of time.

  © 2007

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