THE FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT
Isaiah 64:1-9 + Mark 13:24-37
I generally find waiting to be an extraordinarily difficult thing to do. Which might be a surprise because I love the season of Advent and waiting is a pretty big part of it. If there is a pause in the action out in the world, I immediately go to my phone. Either that, or I look up at the tvs that are mounted to the wall in line, or I graze the supermarket tabloids next to me. [DMV, amusement park rides, grocery store.] I just wish that, instead of waiting, I could actually be doing something.
I always have to remind myself that waiting is doing something too. It’s easy to get mired by the fact that the line is never going to end, or to be uncomfortable with a silence when in conversation with another person. If you only think about waiting in terms of what’s happening right now, it becomes very easy to overlook the fact that waiting also has the quality of looking ahead. you’ll get to Christmas. Your number will eventually be called at the DMV, [amusement park, grocery store line.] When we’re stuck in a moment, focusing on what’s not happening, we might call our time there “waiting.” But if we’re in the moment and looking ahead to the future, it’s more like “expecting” or “anticipating” that takes up our time. Instead of waiting, we’re hoping and looking forward.
I think this difference between waiting and hoping points out something about our lives with God that will always need some work on our part. And I think at least part of the central problem is that we are always misunderstanding God. We don’t understand what God means when God does one thing, or another. And every time we try to predict what God will do—especially when God wasn’t the first person who said it!—we’re always going to find ourselves surprised. And perhaps disappointed. There’s the old saying—it might be a saying?—good things come to those who wait. And so we sit, and we wait, and think about all the good things that might happen after we wait, but then we get impatient and think “why in the world did I spend all this time waiting for nothing?” When we talk about waiting with God, we have to be careful not to cook up unrealistic expectations. God doesn’t promise to pass tests for us, and God doesn’t even promise to be with us in a visible, sensible way.
We misunderstand God when God isn’t around. When God isn’t immediately discernible to our senses. We assume that God has abandoned us, and as Isaiah says, that’s when we start sinning, that’s when we transgress. [A little bit about iniquities here.] WE assume that because we can’t see God, or can’t feel God in every moment, God has left. We start depending on ourselves, we start thinking that we can—or have to!—pick up the slack when God isn’t around. And then God becomes visible again, and we are embarrassed, and we remember that God is our father, and that of course God was around the entire time. We ask God not to be “exceedingly angry”—we allow for a little anger—but then, after th emoment’s passed, we never remember. We misunderstand what God is doing when God isn’t obviously visible. And then we get mired in waiting. And we can’t see past the end of that moment.
We misunderstand what Christ means when he says he’s coming. When sun goes ddown, when the moon goes dark, when the stars fall from the sky, we assume that it’ll be the end of the universe. Doom and gloom (cf. Left Behind books). We assume that when God commes to collect the elect, we aren’t among them. But if elect means favored, and favored means grace, then Christ comes for all of us because God supplies grace and favor to all God’s children. Christ collects us, his favored, his elect (because all God’s children are favored, graced, elect), and Christ sets us right in our relationship with him. I think the power fo Christ makes us recognize the nakedness of those of us who work only for ourselves, out of selfishness and greed, for those of us who would launch entire wars in the name of ourselves. I’m not sure what God does, but this moment blows all the posturing of our lives, all our iniquities, all the moments when we think we ARE alright on our own, and shows us that the entire question is wrong because we’re NEVER alone.
The point isn’t “now we understand,” or that “finally we’ve come up with the right thing”; the point is to always be thinking about whether we are trying to understand God at all, or whether we’re getting caught up in our iniquity. iniquity—the whole I dea that we don’t have it right. the fact that we hold each other not to be equal to one antoher. Forgetting who God is, forgetting who we are. Becoming conquered by our own pride. Thinking that we can go it alone. The second we think we’re right, we’re probably if not most definitely wrong. WE are constantly misunderstanding God, think we have it figured out, only to discover that we can’t. only god can tell us what’s really going on. Only god has the wisdom to make our iniquities known, to remind us that waiting for God ends in being with God. NOT in abandonment.It’s written in Isaiah “God works for those who wait for him.” It’s in our waiting and expectation that God is working—especially when we can’t see it.
The gospel of mark has some great reminders here. Read one way, they can mean that the end of the world is coming. That everything we know is going to fall away, will be cancelled. But there’s another way to understand what Mark means when he says the sun will go down, and the moon will disappear, and the stars will fall out of the sky. IF we look up—to the sky, especially during Advent—we can notice that these things happen all the time. The age is always changing, somewhat: [sunset, sunrise; new moon, full moon; annual meteor showers.]
I think these signs are meant to remind us of God’s abiding presence, even when nit’s not visible. And to remind us, just in the living-thorugh of these signs, that they aren’t permanent. That something happens after. That the waiting isn’t the only thing that happens. Because the sun comes up the next morning; the moon will go through a new cycle of fullness and newness; that the perseid meteor shower happens every year. They don’t tell us exactly when God will be present, but they remind us that, nevertheless, God is our father. And God is present.
On this first service of Advent, I invite us to look upward toward these signs. WE actually put a few in the gathering area outside the sanctuary this morning. These are signs to remind us that the world isn’t ending just because it looks like it is. In fact, when it looks like that, God is most near. Especially when we can’t even tell. It gets darker and darker, but in that darkness we see more stars. We see more light. We see past the waiting and graduate to hoping. Graduate to anticipating. We double check whether we’ve misunderstood God—did God really disappear, did God really hide Godself?—or is this just one of the ways God works, allowing us to be expectant and hopeful. Giving us an opportunity to trust that God is here, that God was here, that God will be here, especially in our waiting. May God’s signs always remind us of his presence here.
AMEN
The Rev. Daniel Kuckuck + November 26/27, 2011
St. Paul Lutheran Church in Davenport, Iowa
