Jeremiah 33:14-16; Luke 21:25-36
Presented December 3rd, 2006, by J.D. Kline
The First Sunday of Advent
What are we waiting for? Sometimes it seems as if all of life involves waiting. In this season so rampant with commercialism, we find ourselves frequently waiting in lines to make our purchases. On Thanksgiving evening, some people began, hours ahead of early morning openings, lining up in front of stores, hoping to grab hold of the best bargains. But waiting is not limited to shopping. Younger persons sometimes find themselves yearning to be at a later stage in life, anxious to experience what their older peers experience. Many 14 and 15-year-olds, for example, can scarcely wait for their 16th birthday and a likely driver’s license. High school seniors experience “senioritis,” impatient for their coming graduation day and the opportunity to embrace new endeavors. Young adults may well assume that their lives are not complete until questions of career, faith issues and relationships are settled.
It’s tempting to assume that life will be better at another stage of life, and until that time arrives, waiting may feel painful. For those struggling with fresh experiences of grief, a time of waiting and yearning for that grief to become less raw involves a great deal of pain. Waiting, while a common part of life, seldom comes easily to us.
The season of Advent includes the experience of waiting as well. Advent waiting, too, can be difficult. Advent is a time when we are reminded that God has so much more in store for us than we have experienced thus far. God envisions a new way of living, a time when despair gives way to hope, when enmity and warfare and suspicion are replaced by peace, when grief and tears no longer carry the final word. But the unfolding of God’ realm, God’s kingdom in our midst, often seems so very distant.
The intriguing thing about all this is that Advent waiting is not an idle “sit on our hands” kind of waiting; Advent waiting is not the kind of waiting that assumes that we have nothing we need to be doing, that somehow this new life will magically unfold before us. No, Advent waiting is active waiting, partnering with God, choosing to live here and now in the light of what is coming. “Stand up and raise your heads,” the Gospel lesson puts it (21:28). Stand up and notice that the God who dares to come among us in the vulnerable life of a small infant is the same God who invites us to envision new ways of living and acting in the world around us.
Advent waiting requires alertness, being eager, open, hopeful. Advent waiting involves yearning, hoping beyond hope for that day when, in the words of the prophet Jeremiah, we shall see justice and righteousness in the land, that time when we learn to live together in safety and in peace.
Many assume that this morning’s lesson from the Gospel of Luke anticipates the second coming or advent of Jesus, but in reality this passage anticipates something far more imminent for the people of that day—the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, which we know occurred in 70 AD. The mood is one of uncertainty, and talk of “signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations” (v. 25)—this language suggest that a time of upheaval is imminent. Much like the people in those days when the church was beginning, we too live in times of uncertainty, times which demand, according to Jesus, a new perspective, a new way of listening, a new way of experiencing life’s traumas. And what is that new way, but a matter of trusting that, even in the midst of upheaval, God is present. Even when life appears chaotic, something new may well be in the works.
Advent carries a message of dissatisfaction, for we wait and yearn for something new to emerge out of our own chaos, our own times when life appears to be coming unglued. It is at such times that we most need to heed the reminder of biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann, “The real God is the one who can convert life from terror to boldness, from sorrow to joy.” Such conversion seldom comes easily, for it demands that we embrace a God who leaves the mighty humbled while lifting the poor, the broken, and the lowly. God is not the God of the status quo; God is in the business of recreating and re-forming life, and as God’s people we are privileged to see glimpses of hope shining through the struggles of life, glimpses of peace replacing violence and warfare and destruction, glimpses of compassion in the midst of a world far more likely to see cutthroat competition.
Baptism is one of those times when we glimpse God’s re-creation, God’s making life new. The act of baptism not only carries personal significance for those entering the waters this morning, but for each of us. Baptism serves as a reminder for us all that something markedly new is unfolding, something for which we wait and yearn.
What are we waiting for? In a world far more accustomed to darkness, are we not waiting, and yearning, and praying, and working for the coming of God’s light? In a world beset by terror and fear, warfare and destruction, are we not waiting, and yearning, and praying, and working for the coming of that day when swords are beaten into plowshares, when justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream? This Advent, we wait and we work for the unfolding of a life of justice, peace, compassion, and self-giving love.