"Hopeful Waiting"
Isaiah 2:1-5; Matthew 24:36-44
One of the
many places I'd like to visit someday is Ireland. In the early centuries of this millennium,
the southwestern coastline of Ireland was the end of the known world-- which
someone suggested may be why it's dotted with prehistoric stone circles and the
ruins of ancient monastaries.
One of
these monasteries was built on an impossibly steep rock island eight miles off
the coast. For 700 years, the monks
there practiced a strict, ascetic way of life.
They survived the weather and raids by the Vikings. They hauled stones to build 2700 steps up the
mountain's dizzying height-- to the prayer huts on top the mountain. They'd climb up to the mountaintop to pray... and to watch for Christ to return in power
and glory.
In the
eleventh century, a more relaxed form of monastic rule came into fashion on the
mainland. When the European orders of
Benedictines and Augustinians arrived in Ireland, the local tradition of small,
independent monasteries began to die out.
In the thirteenth century, the last of the monks got into their boats
and rowed away from their rocky outpost.
We don’t
know for sure why they left, but it's possible that they just got tired of waiting. As Barbara Brown Taylor suggests when she
tells about this monastery, seven hundred years is a long time to watch the
horizon for the second coming. It's a
long time to keep your fasts and say your prayers at prescribed times
throughout the day and night. It's a
long time to live in strictly disciplined community with one another--
especially when word reaches you that the monks on the mainland have made some changes. They're eating better and sleeping later than
you are. They've decided they can be in
the world a little more without being of it--
especially since it looks like they're in for a longer wait than anyone
had expected.[1]
More than
700 years later, we can empathize. Few of us spend our days watching the horizon
expectantly for Christ's second coming, although over the centuries there have
been folk who compute dates for the coming of the Lord, convincing their little
band of followers to stand on a hillside somewhere, ready to be Raptured up!
The
earliest Christians thought the Second Coming would be immediate... and they lived accordingly. For many centuries, Advent was observed as a
season of preparation and waiting. The
faithful waited for the feast of the Nativity, a time to celebrate the mystery
of the Incarnation. They waited for the
Second Coming of the Christ.
More than 2,000
years have passed since God came to dwell among us in Jesus of Nazareth, and Jesus hasn't come back. So it's easier for Christians to live as if
the present world is all that we can expect.
After all,
we hate to wait. Waiting is hard. We
live in an age of microwave dinners.,,salad in a bag… fast food restaurants.
Waiting is
hard. From the time the days start
getting shorter and shorter in the fall--
I can't wait until they start getting longer again. Waiting is hard for us.
But it’s an important part of our spiritual journey.
We only lit
one candle today in the Advent wreath.
That’s because we still have some waiting to do. There are two more blue candles and a rose
one yet to go-- and it still won't be Christmas until Christmas Eve and we
light the Christ candle. We have some
waiting to do...as we prepare our hearts for Christ’s coming.
Waiting has
always been hard. If you read the Bible,
you will discover that the Bible is full of stories about what faithful people
did while they waited. It’s full of promises
not yet fulfilled.
Centuries
before the birth of Jesus, the Old Testament prophets were writing and talking
about waiting for one who would be like a light for the darkness. Those who heard the prophets were weary with
impatience. They wanted the Messiah now. They yearned for God to be on their
timetable. For years... for centuries... through the events of history, God's answer was, "WAIT."
We’re still
waiting. On this First Sunday of Advent,
the first Sunday of our new year, the first words from Scripture the church
hears are from the prophet Isaiah: “In
days to come the mountain of the LORD’S house shall be established as the
highest of the mountains and shall be raised above the hills. All the nations—all the nations—shall stream
to it. Many peoples shall come and say,
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD…that God may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.”
Now, these
words may be familiar to some of us, and we may read through them too quickly
to hear something new. So I want us to
slow down, to wait for a few moments and ponder their meaning.
This week I
heard something new in this passage.
“The word that Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and
Jerusalem.” It doesn’t say Isaiah heard
a word from the Lord. Isaiah saw the
word.
This vision
Isaiah received and prophesied says, “In days to come…” It doesn’t give us a timetable for when this
word will be fulfilled.
It’s hard
to wait. It’s hard to stay hopeful when
there’s so much in the world that’s so wrong.
Even the second-generation Christians--
the ones to whom the New Testament was originally written-- weren't immune to this loss of faith in the
coming kingdom of God. The passionate
hope in the second coming of Christ dimmed as the days wore on. The early Christians were having trouble hoping. So it was important for the church to remind
them of Jesus' warning: "Be ready.”
Strange as
it may seem, that passage wasn't written about the future, as we understand
it. It had everything to do with the
early Christian's experience of the present and how they lived it. It was written to encourage them during hard
times... and to call their attention to
the signs of the forthcoming kingdom.
We have prayed for peace, and still we wait. We have prayed for healing in the quiet
corridors of the hospital. We have
prayed for the healing of the creation...
and the healing of the wounds of racism. We pray,
and we wait.
We've all known the sense of loss and disappointment
when something we hoped for doesn't come.
A husband and wife try and try to
conceive a child, in vain. Plans for a
long-awaited visit are changed. Even
Christmas day has its own measure of disappointment. The packages are opened... the gifts are admired. But later the tree comes down... the nativity scene is stored away for another
year. The long-awaited day passes with a
sense that nothing really has happened.
In a far
more profound way, the church has always struggled with its pain over a future
that fails to come.
"Come,
Lord Jesus," the early Christians
prayed... but it was Roman soldiers who
came. "This world is passing
away," they sang... but the world
remained.
People can
live on the edge just so long, before they get weary of watching and waiting
for the light of a day that doesn't dawn. If the church is standing at the threshold of
God's future kingdom of justice, then the church can dare to touch the wounds
of lepers and pour out its resources freely
for the poor. If the new age of healing
and mercy is just around the corner, then the church can cheerfully bear
suffering and persecution... and
faithfully sing its alleluias.
But if
there is no God-shaped future at hand...
if nothing is about to happen--
then there's just a series of days...
a bottomles pit of human need.
All there
is left for the church to be is another well-meaning institution. All that's left for the church to do is to
get together for routine Sunday services...
collect the pledge cards... and
keep the doors open...have pot-luck suppers
and the roof repaired. If nothing is about to happen.
And yet-- as Christians, we're
called into a life of hope and trust.
Each day brings an opportunity for us to experience the miracle of the
dying and rising of Christ... and a new
opportunity to live out Christ's love in our lives.
The
season of Advent is a time when we practice hopeful waiting. If we are not powerful or rich, we look around
us and see that things in the world are not as they should be. Without God’s promises as the basis and
ground of hope, the future could be just a repetition of the past.
But we have a choice.
In the midst of the waywardness and idolatry and brokenness around us, we
can choose to live as nothing will change.
Or we can choose to stake our lives on God’s promises.
We
are in the presence of a mystery. God’s
justice and peace will come to pass among the nations “in days to come.”
Wait.
Be ready. Trust that the future is
based on the promises of God. Hope in God’s
hope for us-- the hope that the people
will make peace, as swords become plowshares and spears become pruning hooks.
What Isaiah
proclaims is not only a vision of global transformation, but an invitation to live
toward that day: “Come, let us walk in
the light of the LORD!”
No matter
how hard it is sometimes to trust that a new reality will come some day, there
is hope and power in walking in God’s light now, one step at a time.
Prophets
like Isaiah and his contemporary, Micah, paint a picture of an alternative
reality and proclaim God’s truth that God requires justice and mercy… and
invites us to walk humbly with God.
During
Advent, we practice hopeful waiting, as
we prepare our hearts to welcome the Christ child more fully into our
lives. We look forward to the time when
“Christ will come again.” But this
waiting isn’t passive. We live in this
time between the two comings as followers of the One we know in part as the
“Prince of Peace.”
God doesn’t call us to an illusory peace of families or
congregations that are afraid to talk about difficult issues, but the peace
that decides to do the hard work of including everyone and knowing each person
as a beloved child of God.
God calls us to a peace that says we may disagree about
some things, but we’re not going to let our differences keep us from loving one
another and being the church together.”
God calls us to the ministry of reconciliation—with one another, with
God, and with all of creation.
I
believe Isaiah and the other prophets wanted to energize the people with hope.
They tell us that we don’t have to accept things as
they are. They showed us how to speak
truth to power. I believe they still
cast a vision of an alternative reality—of God’s kingdom—for us all these years
later. They challenge us to see what is
beyond our seeing.
The prophets saw something beyond our everyday
vision—they imagined a path of righteousness and justice, and abundant life.
This Advent, we are
waiting once again. We wait to hear the nativity story again, of a child born
under the shadow of a mighty empire… a story of a child who would deliver us
from death itself and show us the way to truth and life. We wait for Jesus to be born again in our
lives.
When we get tired, when we feel hopeless, when we are
weary of resisting, when we are afraid to make waves, when we are told over and
over again that this is just how things are going to be for a while and we
should just accept it-- the prophet’s
call is clear. God has something better
for us. We are called to walk in the
light of God, in the way of justice and mercy and freedom. We are called to walk with God and be
transformed, so that we can work with God to transform the world.
As we walk in God’s
light, every word we say, every thing we
do, every prayer we pray is important.
In Advent, we are looking for the inbreaking of peace. We look for the dawn of a new day.
So pray. Pray for the coming of the Christ. “Come, Lord Jesus!” Pray for Christ’s rule in our lives... and in the world. Pray "thy
Kingdom come, thy will be done"--
because that is the one prayer that we know will ultimately be answered.
Amen.
Rev. Fran Hayes, Pastor
Littlefield Presbyterian Church
Dearborn, Michigan
November 27, 2016
[1]I'm indebted to Barbara Brown Taylor for the monastery
story and this line of thinking, which appear in Journal for Preachers, Advent 1996
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