Waiting

Sermon preached Sunday, December 2, 2018, the First Sunday of Advent, at St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Littlestown, PA.

For Christians, this is a special time. As a church, today, we celebrate the new year—the new liturgical year, that is. Today is the first Sunday of Advent, the first Sunday in a yearly cycle of readings and festivals that begin with preparation and hope and end, as they did last year, with proclaiming Christ’s reign on earth on Christ the King Sunday, which we celebrated last week.

We can fall into a bit of a trap when Advent begins. After all, decorations are already up and lining the streets and filling our homes. Radio stations have long since switched to all Christmas music, all the time. Holiday items have been filling store shelves for weeks already. This is when I like to try and separate my “secular” Christmas celebration for my religious one. After all, Christmas doesn’t actually begin in the church until Christmas Eve! However, I enjoy the music and lights and cookies and decorations just as much as anyone and I partake in these yearly rituals with great joy…while still recognizing and holding dear the quieter observance of Advent in worship that my faith calls me to.

Keeping Advent in a meaningful way isn’t easy. With the world around us shouting that Christmas is practically here already, the temptation to skip ahead to Christmas and the birth of Christ is great. The even greater temptation is to view the season of Advent as a sort of chronological marking of time before Christ’s birth: weeks where we acknowledge the pregnancy and call stories of Mary and Joseph, but don’t see them as valuable in and of themselves. The reality is quite different.

These weeks are not used to tell the pregnancy and conception stories of Jesus. They’re also not used to put a damper on our holiday cheer by delaying our celebration of Jesus’ birth or by taking away chances to sing beloved carols. Instead, the Sundays of Advent call us into a time of anxious hope, expectation, and anticipation. These weeks, when the days are shorter, and shadows are longer, these weeks “awake[n] our longing for the surprising ways God comes to us.” (S&S Preaching: Year C 2016, p.19) We aren’t pretending we don’t know Christ was born. Christ was. We aren’t pretending we don’t know God’s promises. We do. No, in these four weeks, “we mean to be a people who know what time it is and are willing to wait for what will come.” (ibid.)

Think about the readings today. What did you hear? There is no story of John the Baptist preparing the way…that will come later. There is no angel greeting Mary or Joseph…that will have to wait. Instead, we have Jesus describing signs and times to come. We have the prophet Jeremiah describing God’s future action. Paul writes to the church in Thessalonica that believers should be strengthened in faith. And all of this is because of the both/and nature of Advent, of God’s work in the world, of our entire lives as Christians.

The readings today offer two seemingly conflicting parts. In the words from the prophet and from Paul and from Jesus himself, there are statements of caution, like “be on guard,” and statements of comfort, like, “Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety.” Both are true. Both are God’s word for us. And both are the essence of Advent. “Be alert” and “The days are surely coming…when [God] will fulfill the promise [God] made.” Both.

Waiting. Hoping. Expecting. Anticipating. These are the words of Advent—the emotions of Advent. And there is no time that these feelings are harder to live with than the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas Day. We have to-do lists for decorations to put up, food to make, parties to plan and attend, presents to buy and wrap, every last drop of holiday merriment to wring out of these busy days. The idea of waiting is hard to consider. The notion of being okay with that waiting is even harder to wrap our minds around.

But that’s what Advent is: waiting, wrapped in hope and expectation. Waiting.

What are you waiting for? What is humanity and all of creation waiting for?

We are waiting for the full reign of Christ to come. We are waiting for our Wonderful Counselor who will right every wrong and bring about justice and equity. We are waiting for our Mighty God who shows strength by being vulnerable and coming to live among us. We are waiting for the Everlasting Father who created us and names us as beloved children. We are waiting for the Prince of Peace who will end all war, violence and strife.

We are waiting for wrongs to be righted and oppression to cease. We are waiting for our relationships, our lives and the whole earth to be made whole once more. We are waiting for hunger and thirst and pain and death to no longer have power over us.

Of course, we are always waiting for these things. We are always longing for them. But Advent puts that longing into stark relief. As the celebration of the incarnation creeps nearer and nearer, we are made more and more aware of all the ways our world falls short and how desperately we need the presence of God with us. God with us…literally, Emmanuel.

And so…we wait. And we watch. And we hope. And we prepare. We prepare to invite Jesus into our world once more.

To close, I’d like to share with you a poem by Mary Oliver, a Pulitzer Prize winning poet. Here is what she has to say in her poem, “Making the House Ready for the Lord”:

Dear Lord, I have swept and I have washed but
still nothing is as shining as it should be
for you. Under the sink, for example, is an
uproar of mice it is the season of their
many children. What shall I do? And under the eaves
and through the walls the squirrels
have gnawed their ragged entrances but it is the season
when they need shelter, so what shall I do? And
the raccoon limps into the kitchen and opens the cupboard
while the dog snores, the cat hugs the pillow;
what shall I do? Beautiful is the new snow falling
in the yard and the fox who is staring boldly
up the path, to the door. And still I believe you will
come, Lord: you will, when I speak to the fox,
the sparrow, the lost dog, the shivering sea-goose, know
that really I am speaking to you whenever I say,
as I do all morning and afternoon: Come in, Come in.

We wait. We prepare. We ready our hearts and our homes and say to God, “Come in.”

Amen.