Katie Derksen
Waiting with Purpose
Micah 5:2-5a, Psalm 80:1-7, Luke 1:39-55
Waiting is quite often a very hard thing to do. I think it's safe to say that most people don't wait very well. In a society that's always rushing on to the next thing, expecting productivity, for people to be on the way to the next step, waiting isn't something that's even necessarily understood anymore. Rush rush rush, get that thing done, move on to the next place, the next position, the next project. It's like we're to always be not where we are, but already half-way on to the next thing.
And yet, we wait all the time. For the shower to be free. For the coffee to be done. For traffic lights or other vehicles. For internet connections, or email. For the time that we get to go home from work. For dinner to be ready. For sleep to come. There are so many things that we wait for, every day! And still, we're often not present to whatever it is that we're waiting for. We're thinking about what we could be doing if we were already past the next step. We're working on the thing that comes after what we're waiting for. We're thinking nasty thoughts about the one making us wait… So rarely are we actually waiting in a state of pleased anticipation, instead of a state of rushed or aggravated anticipation. And even when we get to what we've been waiting for, we're busy thinking about what we need to do next.
Sometimes, though, we can wait quite well. I think it's due to the element of choice: if we're waiting for something we want to wait for, or that we choose to wait for, we have more patience, more tolerance. However, if we're waiting for something that we don't want to be waiting for, our patience levels plummet. Just think of a kid at Christmas time – they're very excited that Christmas is coming, and can ask almost daily whether or not it's Christmas yet, but they're so excited about what's coming that they're not aggravated or frustrated. They wait with joy and anticipation.
Advent, as we all know, is the season of waiting. In fact, it's been said so many times, in so many different places, in so many different ways, that the phrase has become cliché. We understand that Advent is all about waiting – waiting for the Christmas eve service, waiting for relatives to arrive (or to leave), waiting for exams to be done, waiting to go home, or to relatives' houses, waiting for presents, waiting for snow, waiting for the canal to be open… There are so many things during this time of year to wait for!! And yet, I think that we're all aware of the danger of getting caught up in waiting for the wrong thing. What we're really waiting for is the celebration of the birth of our Lord, Jesus. But it can be so easy to loose sight of that in all the rush and the bother of "the Christmas season."
I've outed my self as a semi-Scrooge before, and I think I'm about to do it again. I think, though, that what turns me slightly sour at this time of year is at least partly my own capacity to get caught up by the secular stuff that's tied into the lead-time to Christmas. Sure, I get a hit of the coming birth of Christ every Sunday in Advent, but sometimes it sure can be hard to remember it during the rest of the week, when I'm bombarded by cheesy songs in malls and on the radio, advertisements encouraging me to buybuybuy/I>, and just the general focus on the materialism that has been inflicted upon the Christmas season. It's hard to escape that, and so at least part of what turns me into a Scrooge is in fact my own attitude, my own inability to hold the true reason for the anticipation of the season in my heart and in my head.
And yet, some part of me knows what I'm waiting for. I'm both patient and impatient for it to come. I enjoy the rituals associated with the true Advent season: the lighting of a candle every Sunday to remind us how much closer we are to Christ's birthday. The plays created and performed for us, to help remind us of why we celebrate. The focus on Joy, Love, Hope and Peace. Sharing the bread and the wine together at the onset of Advent, to remind us that we are one body. The gathering together each week as a community to wait as one body. These are all joyful things, and I think that it helps for us to do them together – it makes the wait more bearable, and helps us to focus on the right thing.
Although the season of Advent is generally tied to the month of December and occasionally late November, and is therefore something that has a definite beginning and a definite end, it can be said that we are a people of Advent. We're not only waiting for the birth of Christ - he has been born, and the effects of his time on earth are still being felt. No, we're not waiting for only that. What we're waiting for now is the full realization of the Kingdom of God on the earth. That is what we're living in anticipation of.
We've been hearing some apocalyptic literature this Advent season, and I think that it's at least partly to remind us that the birth of Christ is only a starting place – it's not the end of the story, not even close. We wait for it, and we celebrate it, to remind ourselves that we have a Saviour who came and who lived on this earth as well, and who died for us. We wait for it, but we know that we are also called to remember it, and the life that followed the birth, for the rest of the year. That's why we gather together during the entire year, not just Christmas.
We wait for Christ, knowing that He has already come to this earth once, and that he will come again. We wait knowing that while we wait, we are still to live here. A well-known writer, Henri Nouwen, talks of how waiting is an active thing, that "…the secret of waiting is the faith that the seed has been planted, that something has begun. Active waiting means to be present fully to the moment, in the conviction that something is happening where you are and that you want to be present to it. A waiting person is someone who is present to the moment, who believes that this moment is the moment (Seeds of Hope, page 158).
So often when we're waiting for something, we're already half-way towards it in our minds. We forget to be fully present to the moment that we're already in, and that can lead to a sense of emptiness, the sense that wherever we are isn't "where it's at," and so we're never happy where we are, but wishing we were somewhere else. However, it's helpful if what we're waiting for is concrete, something with an end-point that can be seen.
At least in Advent, we have something concrete to wait for – we're waiting for the 25th of December, to celebrate the birthday of Jesus the Christ. That's something that we can wait for because we know that there is a date attached to it, that there's an end point to the waiting. However, being an Advent people, waiting for the fullness of the Kingdom of God, is much more of an open-ended thing, and that can make waiting harder. For one thing, it can be easy to lose sight of what's being waited for. It can also seem like what's being waited for will never come.
However, we can hold to the truth that Jesus came once, and helped to bring the Kingdom of God to this earth. It can and will happen again. We know it happened once, and we can have faith that it will happen again. We heard from the books of Daniel and Revelation a few weeks ago, of the coming of the end of days, when God's Kingdom will fully and truly be upon this earth, in a way we can try to imagine, but will never fully be able to grasp. We have these texts to help us keep our focus as we wait, to help us wait purposefully. Added to these texts are faith and hope and the ways in which we've already seen God at work in this world.
We're called to live as people expecting not only the coming birth of Christ, but also the coming of the Kingdom of God. Not only are we to live with hope, we are called to live the hope. To live as though the Kingdom of God is already fully upon the earth. To live with purpose. To wait with purpose.
As an Advent people, we can't wait idly, with the hope that the Kingdom of God will come about all on its own. No, we need to live as though it is here already. We need to listen to Mary's song with new ears, to hear it as a guide to how we should be living now. Hear it again:
[God's] mercy is for those who fear him
From generation to generation
He has shown strength with his arm;
He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
And lifted up the lowly;
e has filled the hungry with good things
And sent the rich away empty
He has helped his servant Israel,
In remembrance of his mercy
According to the promise he made to our ancestors,
To Abraham and to his descendants forever." (Luke 1:50-55)
The main thought of Mary's song, which is also called the Magnificat, is "of the in breaking of the Kingdom to which the whole Old Testament had been pointing" (Layman's Bible Commentary, page 29). We pick up from there, and go on to what we are now hoping for. We go from hope to hope, from waiting for one thing to waiting for the next. But it's waiting with a purpose – we're not merely idling our time, waiting for the in breaking of the Kingdom of God. No, God's Kingdom has already broken upon the world. In light of that, and in light of the call that we have received as believers, we're doing things while we wait. We're actively doing things to help bring about the Kingdom of God. Our hope in what we're waiting for infuses our daily living – it's in the way that we interact with those around us, how we choose to spend our time and our money, in what we place our trust in.
Mary reminds us that God has promised, and that God will be faithful. God has already fulfilled the promise given to Abraham, and sent Jesus to the world, and God will fulfill the promise that Jesus will come again, and that what God intended for the world when it was created will come about.
We wait for God, to do as God will in God's own time. Often, tied into waiting for something particular is the desire to control what is waited for. We aren't allowed to control how God will bring this about, but we can control at least some of the ways that God's Kingdom is felt already upon the earth as we live in it now. We're called to wait with purpose.
I've spoken before about how so much of life, and especially so much of faith, is all about the balance of tension. For us, as Advent people, we are called to live between the tension of Christ's coming two thousand years ago, and his future coming. We need to be here, now, on this earth, yet remember that our citizenship is in another place, in the Kingdom of God. And we're called to live in that tension, the tension of living as citizens of a place that doesn't fully exist, at least not yet. To live as citizens of God's Kingdom means to be guided by the rules and the spirit of that Kingdom, to hope for the high to be brought low, and the low to be brought high. To trust in God, that God will look after us, as promised in our reading from Micah. To be shepherded by God, and to open ourselves up to hearing what God has to say to us here and now, and to be open to how God moves in the world. To allow God to move through us, as we wait.
And so we wait, and we hope. But we don't wait and hope alone, or in vain. We gather together to wait together, and to help each other along the way. We know that God is faithful, and that God will do as God has promised. In the meantime, we wait with purpose, doing our best to bring about the Kingdom of God.
May God bless us all as we strive to do this. Amen.