O come, O come, Emmanuel. Amen.
What are you waiting for? A follow-up appointment with the doctor where you will, hopefully, get some good news? A college acceptance letter? An estranged family member to make an apology? Some sort of decision to be made? Christmas morning to arrive so you can open presents? A permanent peace treaty between Israel and Palestine? An end to this sermon? We’re all waiting for something.
What
does waiting feel like for you? It’s not uncommon to be at least a bit
impatient and anxious as we wait. Waiting can be a challenge because waiting
feels so unlike doing – which our culture has trained us is wasteful. This is
why multi-tasking has become so prevalent. If we’re waiting for something to
happen, we don’t often just sit and daydream, pray, or notice the world around
us. No, typically, we pull out our adult pacifiers, known as a phone, to occupy
us. So we’re not really waiting, we’re scrolling, emailing, or gaming.
Not
to mention how quickly everything happens in our modern world. A lot of people listen
to podcasts and watch videos at faster-than-live speeds. We order a random
household item and have gotten used to it being at our front door within 24
hours. We have a question about anything, so we ask our phone for an answer and
have a response within seconds. In other words, we’ve gotten out of practice when
it comes to waiting.
Which
makes Advent a difficult time in the Church year for us to live with. The word “Advent”
comes from Latin and means “coming.” So Advent is a season in which the Church
turns our attention to what is yet to come. There is an unfortunate
misunderstanding among many people, even among clergy, that Advent is about
preparing for Christmas. But it is not.
Yes,
Christmas is coming and we are thinking about how we are preparing our homes,
hearts, and lives to receive the gift of Emmanuel, God with us, just as the
world received him 2,000 years ago. But more than that, Advent is about waiting
for what is described in this morning’s Gospel text from Mark, as well as the
greatest of all the hymns – “Lo, he comes in clouds descending.”
Advent
is the time of year that the Church reminds us that we are waiting for, we are
hoping for, we are expecting the day when all swords are beaten into
plowshares, when lions lie down with lambs, when every tongue confesses that
Jesus Christ is Lord, when, as we say in the Creed each week that “He shall
come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,” when the Kingdom has
come just as fully on earth as it is in heaven, when all people can say that all
has been made well.
And
so, you can see why Advent is a tricky time of the year for the Church. It’s a
season all about waiting and we aren’t very good at waiting. Plus, I’ll let you
decide whether or not this is the most wonderful time of the year, but most people
would say that it’s the busiest time of the year. We don’t have time to wait –
there are presents to wrap, parties to attend, lights to be strung, cards to be
mailed, and cookies to be baked.
This
Advent, the sermons are all going to revolve around the Collects for the
season. The Collect is the prayer that we use at the opening of worship. And it
is pronounced call-ect, not cu-lect. The Collect is not just the prayer for
Sunday, but for the whole week. So if you’re looking for a way to be more prayerful,
take that page of the bulletin home with you or use the Book of Common Prayer,
where all of the Collects are found, and use the prayer each day.
The
practice of having a Collect goes back to at least the 600s. These prayers have
a regular formula – there is an address or invocation to God, a petition or
request, and a concluding mediation where the Trinity is named. This predictable
pattern makes it easy for a person or congregation to write their own Collects –
as we’ve done with our parish prayer. Today’s Collect first appeared in the
first Prayer Book of 1549 and draws heavily from Biblical imagery found in
Romans.
This
Advent Collect captures so well the tension of the season – both that we are
preparing for Christ’s coming by putting on the armor of light and, at the same
time, are waiting for his glory to be revealed. Waiting and hastening seem like
opposites, but the interplay between them is perhaps the best description of what
it means to be a Christian – followers of Jesus are those who are both passively
reliant on the grace of God and actively participating in the Kingdom; we are both
waiting and preparing.
This
tension is found in the Collect between the “now in the time of this mortal
life” and the “that in the last day when he shall come again.” Christianity is
about both the now and the then, both the today and the last day. The challenge
and struggle is that the “last day” sure does seem to taking its time in
getting here. Read the New Testament and you’ll quickly realize that no one quite
expected us to be here. Many followers of Jesus believed that the trumpet would
sound in their lifetime, or certainly within a generation or two, at the most.
It’s
one thing to wait a few minutes for your coffee order to be ready, a few hours
for an email to be responded to, a few days for an appointment to be available,
or a few months for a baby to be born. But when the waiting turns into years,
decades, centuries, and even millennia – well, it’s easier to just move on and
forget about what we’re waiting for. We put our hopes elsewhere at that point. We
find other things to focus on. We lose the sense of urgency.
I’m pretty sure we all
remember when we learned in school that, one day, the Sun is going to become a
red giant before burning out and that process will swallow and destroy the
earth. That should put a sense of dread into our hearts. But it’s not going to
happen for about 5 billion years. Given that scale of time, it’s unreasonable
to think about it for a single moment more, unless you’re an astrophysicist. It’s
the same reason why we’re all pretty much ignoring the fact that our current economic
and transportation practices are destroying the planet – the change is just too
gradual. There’s no sense of urgency. How much more so is this the case when
that “last day” seems to be even further out?
To close that gap between
“now” and “the last day,” the Church has, historically, done one of two things.
One is to try to inject a sense of immediacy into things. This is what is known
as “hellfire and brimstone” preaching. If that’s what you’re looking for, as
much as I love having you here, you’ll have to go somewhere else to hear that.
I’m not going to try to scare you into thinking of God as a boogeyman who is
lurking just around the corner, ready to pounce. Neither am I going to tell you
that God is like Santa Claus – God is not making a list, nor checking it twice.
Nor will I tell you about a dream or a shooting star that told me that the
world is going to end on such and such date, thereby making the “last day”
something to urgently put on your calendar. Sadly, some churches try to eliminate
the anxiety of waiting by creating a false sense of urgency.
Other churches have the
opposite reaction. Some say that this whole thing has just been a
misunderstanding – there is no “last day” that is coming. We’ve misread the
prophecies, they say. When Jesus referred to the sun being darkened, it was a
metaphor. Or it was about his Crucifixion, or Resurrection, or Ascension, or the
Day of Pentecost, or all of those put together. Essentially, this response is
summed up by John Lennon, “Imagine there’s no heaven, it’s easy if you try. No
hell below us, above us only sky. Imagine all the people living for today.” In
this worldview, there’s no “last day” but just an eternal now. It’s something like
Diest theology – God set everything up, maybe intervenes every once in a while,
but there is no direction or destination of Creation.
This second approach is
much more common among the mainline churches and just as problematic as the
first. This so-called solution to our discomfort with waiting has, at least
partially, led to the decline in faith. If we have no future hope, if we do not
anticipate God to show up, then, rather quickly, faith becomes an opinion, a
fairy tale, a legend of old. Instead of expecting and relying on God to be our savior,
we’ve taken that task into our own hands, often with disastrous consequences. Eliminating
the idea of the “last day” not only requires us to ignore most of Scripture,
but it also would have us to abandon all hope of things ever being set right.
But what other option do
we have? How can we wait with a sense of urgency for something that seems like
it will never happen? The Collect puts us on a path for the sort of expectant
and active waiting with its language about light and darkness, which comes from
Romans. The metaphor that we can use to imagine what the Christian life is like
is that of a sentinel, or to use the older and gendered language, a watchman.
As Psalm 130 puts it, “My soul waits for the Lord
more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning.”
Yes, that final and last “day
of the Lord” might be far off into the future, but there are beams of its light
that brighten our path. We do not wait passively, rather we are actively
watching and waiting for those glimpses of God’s mercy, love, peace, and
reconciliation. And then, like the sentinel, when we see them, we announce the
glad news.
A lot of churches have
mission statements – descriptions of what it is that we intend and attempt to
be and do. And those are fine, I suppose. You might have noticed that St. Luke’s
does not have a mission statement. Instead, we have something else. It’s what
one author calls a “watchword.” I didn’t know that’s what we were naming when
we started using “come and see,” but that’s exactly what it is – a watchword.
A mission statement is
about what a church does, a watchword is something that helps us pay attention to
what God is doing. A watchword reminds a community of the foundation that it
rests on and is a way of describing how we notice God’s activity in our midst.
A watchword focuses our attention on what God is up to and how we can be a part
of it. At St. Luke’s, our watchword is “Come and see the difference Christ
makes in abundant grace, intentional worship, and beloved community” with “come
and see” being the shorthand. It’s how we both live in the now and in eager
anticipation for the last day, as that watchword helps us to notice those
moments when God’s future is alive in our present.
I’ll confess that each
month, Tyler and I max out on the allowable contribution to our retirement
account. If I really and truly expected that the “last day” was going to come
in the next 30 years, I’d spend that money instead of investing it. But that
doesn’t mean I’m not eagerly waiting for God to make all things well. We live
with the tension of those two realities by being sentinels who through
community, song, Scripture, and Sacrament, attune our senses to what God is up
to in the world. We are trying to keep awake as we expect that God is up to something
for us to come and see. And when we catch those moments of grace, we tell others
to “come and see.”
Something you might
consider doing in Advent is to think about your own watchword for faith. What
grounds you in faith and helps you to keep alert to the movement and coming of
God in your life? It would be my delight to talk with each of you about that –
both to help you in naming your watchword, but also to hear about how the
Spirit is uniquely speaking to you. Having a watchword helps us to rest in that
tension between “now” and the last day when he shall come in clouds descending.
It really is the question for Advent and the question for faith – what are you
waiting for?
