Advent: The Waiting Is The Hardest Part...

In a world that is all too ready to begin celebrating Christmas, we in the church continue to prepare for the coming of Christ anew in our life and our world. We prepare through the season of Advent by waiting.

Waiting for what we cannot make happen by our own strength. Waiting for the light that we cannot see in all of our darkness. Waiting for the One who we cannot birth by our own will and enterprise.

Waiting does not come easy for most of us. Waiting is not something that we like to do. Research suggests that the average person will spend five years of his or her life waiting in line, two years playing telephone tag, and six months sitting at red lights. That’s over 7 and a half years of waiting—of killing time! Ironically, despite the supposed comfort and simplicity of our technology, often created to lessen the time in between—we still find ourselves waiting...

 Still waiting for that online order we placed over a week ago. Still waiting in line at the self-checkout station at the supermarket. Still waiting for the phone to ring on a Saturday night. Still waiting for the perfect job—any job—to come along. Still waiting for that elusive perfect relationship.

Advent teaches us how to wait. More than this, Advent reminds us that we are not alone in our waiting. I encourage you to light another candle in our vigil and read the words of the prophet Isaiah. In chapter 40, we hear words first spoken by Isaiah and later echoed by John the Baptist several hundred years later. We read these words and remember those who waited thousands of years for their longing to be fulfilled.

 Sometimes people say, maybe you feel this year like, “Christmas isn’t what it used to be.” How can anyone put up a tree, fix a celebration, or sing about “joy to the world” in the midst of death and loss? How do we keep waiting when our heart just isn’t in it anymore? How do we have hope when the world seems hopeless?

Sometimes the hardest part about waiting is losing interest, losing focus or losing touch with the object of our desire. A lot can happen in the time in between—death and loss never conform to anyone’s timetable. In the face of such questions, especially at Christmas, many of us do our best to put on a smile, eat, drink and make merry. We choke down all the holiday cheer not because we really believe there is anything to wait for but in an effort to be comfortably numb as the length of these winter days increases—as the darkness seems to overtake the light.

Through Isaiah, through John the Baptist, God offers words to a people who had lost hope, to a world that, even back then, felt hopeless. Through them, God also offers us a word of comfort. God’s comfort is not what we have made this word—an experience of disconnect, of disengagement, of resignation. God’s comfort is the reassurance of presence, the relief of solidarity—the revelation that God is with us. God has not forsaken us. God has not forgotten his promises. God is with us.

We must not be swallowed up by the darkness of our world. Our world is messed up. We are messed up. But we cannot give up the hope of divine intervention—of a God who keeps His promises, a God who delivers. Our lives are in chaos, the troubles of this world are not a hill, they are a mountain...but there is no mountain high enough which this God cannot level to build a bridge, to come to us in our wilderness.

If we take these words in and allow such desire to meld with our own longings, we join in the waiting of patriarchs, kings, prophets, and priests, for a Savior to come—for the world to be made right again. Through prayer and the signs and symbols of Advent, we anticipate with millions of others, named and unnamed, who yearned for something more complete and more "real" than what they knew.

With them, through them, we learn not only how to wait but how to be ready in the midst of our waiting. For the Advent season is about waiting but it is also about readiness—about keeping one’s eyes on the horizon for the breaking dawn, for the coming of the Light of the world. God’s presence, God's love for us, incarnate in Jesus, is a gift, not a reward. It is grace, not a salary. It is grace and not a question of who’s been naughty or nice. It was not our commitment to God that brings Christmas, it is God's commitment to us. And that commitment simply cannot be broken.

So let us not be so intoxicated by the trapping of the holiday that we forget the event that makes the day, the night, a holy one. May we forsake being comfortably numb in the midst of our Christmas cheer so that we might receive the true comfort of Christ’s presence, of God with us.

The joy the world knows because “Christ has come” is possible only when we know that he is also still coming. He’s coming that death may die.  He’s coming that our loneliness will end.

Wait, do not lose heart and be ready O people of God, for he is coming...