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RCL Year C, Advent One, December 3rd, 2006
Jeremiah 33:14-16; Psalm 25:1-9; 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13; St. Luke 21:25-36
St. Edmund’s Episcopal Church
The Reverend George F. Woodward IIICarol Irwin, Heidi Leopold, Claire McKenzie and Pamela Payne represented all of you as your Lay Delegates to the 111st Convention of the Church in the Diocese of Los Angeles this weekend. Pam Payne addressed the Convention on behalf of the AIDS Commission, and is addressing St. Mary’s, Palms this morning. We heard a most insightful speaker in Phyllis Tickle, passed our annual budget, and accomplished much Diocesan business. Ask them about their experience. Also, of course, we waited around between business sessions, which was especially hard late Saturday as we all knew the Trojans and the Bruins were somewhere outside that Convention Hall playing football!
What is it about waiting that we dislike so much? I chafe at lines. I have things to do, places to be. In Argentina on sabbatical, when I didn’t have so very much urgency going, I loathed going to the supermarket. The cashiers are sitting down in Buenos Aires. They do not stand to attend to shoppers. They do not bag groceries. They take their own sweet time. You’d wait half an hour to pay for a steak and a bottle of Malbec. Those waits came to symbolize for me everything wrong with the Argentine economy, all the inefficiency and waste permitted.
Americans are not very good at waiting. We are trained against it, I think. Dinners are long in Argentina. Waiters don’t swoop in on plates as the last bite is consumed, nor are checks brought swiftly. One is given more leisure than one is sometimes ready to deal with, but, with a little practice, one can be humanized by the pace of meals in Buenos Aires.
Long sermons, I can assure you, are not well received in the U.S.A., whereas elsewhere, brevity is considered a lack of wit!
Advent, we are told, is a Season of Waiting, and waiting isn’t something we’re good at. We may need a little practice, a reminder that there are different kinds of waiting, and different postures of expectation.
Do you remember how difficult it was to wait for Christmas when you were a child? The countdown began right after Thanksgiving, along about now, and every subsequent day was both a joy and an agony. Those of you with children are reliving that experience this month, with so much enthusiasm, curiosity and excitement afoot in your homes that you may soon long for a return to normalcy!
I remember the Advent Calendar that hung seasonally in our kitchen. Each pane revealed some mystery…a lit candle, an angel singing, a shining star. I would wait anxiously for the dinner hour and my Dad’s return from the office so my sister and I could open the next window pane on the calendar.
The objects of childhood yearning are appropriate enough. Bright packages appear under the tree, inspiring questions and a search for hints. The children will have packages not only to receive, but to give, an important lesson, and they will be eager to see the response of those they love.
There are other kinds of waiting. I have a friend with Alzheimer’s, and the disease has nearly done its work. For the ten years since his diagnosis, we’ve lost a little bit of Bill every month, it seems. Many of you are walking, or have walked, that path with a loved one. In the face of that kind of waiting we can foresee a measure of relief and even a kind of gratitude at the end of the wait. But as consciousness wanes, revives, wavers and wanes again, the feelings couldn’t be more different than those of a child at Christmas.
I’ve been waiting for a response to a book submission I made to Morehouse Publishers in August. I’d like it very much if they bought the book, but if they don’t want it, I’d like to shop it around elsewhere. I didn’t really notice I was waiting to hear from them until November rolled around, and now it is with a mixture of hope and irritation that I check the daily mail. That is anxious waiting.
Much different is the feeling I have knowing my parents are coming for Christmas. They’ve not been to Pasadena since the summer of 2004. I’m mightily anticipating conversation and dinners and shared time together.
So many different kinds of waiting and such various emotions in the trying. To live is to wait, and to wait is to suffer and to rejoice, to dance with delight and to nearly break down from grief, not because of the realities we experience but in anticipation of realities that still lie ahead. Advent is the Season of Waiting.
The Church knows this, and always assigns readings for the First Sunday in Advent which have to do with Christ’s return. In so doing, the Church has linked the wait for the return of the Savior to the waiting for the celebration of the Incarnation. As we wait to journey once again to Bethlehem we are reminded that time is hastening on, and that all time is held in God’s Time.
Jesus, the Messiah, did not bring the expected age of peace and goodness. The Messianic age is not yet. Or perhaps it is truer to say that God in Christ placed the work of peace and justice squarely into human hands. Those who proclaim an Advent past— that Christ has come—and an Advent future—that Christ will come again—are charged with rising to the truth we proclaim, and witnessing to the value of patience. The Messiah wasn’t the anticipated exterminating angel, but a suffering Servant summoning others to a servant way, to a ministry of reconciliation exercised now, in the in-between time. Patience and waiting are Christian virtues, and virtues the world much needs at this juncture.
I tried to follow as closely as I could Pope Benedict’s trip to Turkey this past week. During the two years I lived in Turkey I developed a great respect for Turkish culture and for Muslim Faith. Turkish culture is rich and hospitable. I liked reading about the marauding Turks spilling off the Asian steppes in wave after wave to conquer Christian Asia Minor a little at a time. I liked going into a shop and being forced to converse over two or three tulip glasses of sweetened tea before any business could be discussed. They embraced the foreigner, and wanted to share with the foreigner the riches of their culture, unapologetically, proudly.
I remain fond of the Turks, though not uncritically. They refuse to acknowledge the Armenian genocide and other inconvenient facts of history, treat their Christian minorities abysmally, and aren’t much kinder to the Kurds. Yet the kind of Islam practiced in Turkey when I was there was on the whole broader and more pragmatic and of a much different stripe than the Islam practiced in places like Iran and Saudi Arabia. There is such opportunity for conversation, if patience prevails, if we are willing to wait for result, and take on the disciplines of patience.
Americans need to learn patience and the value of waiting, not only in our personal lives, but in our larger dealings. Our denial of patience, our preference for haste and swift resolution, certainly hasn’t been productive in Iraq. The Christian practice of waiting, if we would embrace it, might just leaven our larger culture in useful ways.
Harry Emerson Fosdick, a famous mid-century clergyman at Riverside Church in New York City, writes of riding the train from Bronxville into the City. He noticed that a fellow commuter who always caught the same train and sat in the same seat would pull down the window shade as the train passed 128th Street. Having observed the ritual for a while, and knowing the man at least casually, Fosdick asked him why he pulled the shade down at that particular spot every morning. The fellow explained: “I was born in that slum, and I find it painful to be reminded of those early days of my life. There is nothing I can do about that pain.” Fosdick says he responded by saying: “I don’t want to poke around in your private life, but if you want to deal with your pain, you might want to begin by leaving the shade up.”
Our Advent lessons are, in part, counsel to leave the shade up on life’s difficulties, to indwell the pain as well as the joy, and to seek for how we might honor God in our response. Christian Americans need to leave the shade up on the world’s difficulties. We pull the shade of our affluence down so readily. We don’t really want to see the privation most of the world lives in. We don’t really want to understand the reasons why much of the world finds our stride across the globe wanting. We are in a hurry. We have places to go and things to do.
Advent waiting is a challenge for us as Christians, as Americans.
In all our waiting, both of the anxious sort, and of the joyful, there is at work a deeper yearning for God. Every earthly joy and happiness is transitory and has something of the feeling of a visitation. The very fleetingness of true joy distresses us. We know, at heart, that full completion and fulfillment reside only in the Eternal One. “Our heart is restless until it rests in You, O Lord,” St. Augustine penned sixteen hundred years ago. After leading a resolutely secular life to the age of 33, Augustine wrote in his “Confessions” that he had found fulfillment only in the experience of the grace of God. All our yearning points finally to God, Augustine believed; and so do I.
The coming of Jesus is always disruptive, as we are reminded this First Sunday in Advent in our apocalyptic Gospel. If we are to prepare for Christmas, we should prepare to have our lives disrupted, invaded, inconvenienced by Christ who is never content to let us rest on our laurels or pre-conceived notions. Because our identity is inseparably Christian and American, because we can no more make a distinction between the two than a Turk and his Muslim Faith, or an Israeli and his Judaism, we ought to prepare to allow Jesus to disrupt some of our political complacencies, for the spiritual and the political are joined at the hip. God will trouble all of our orthodoxies; our Democratic orthodoxies, and our Republican orthodoxies, our religious orthodoxies, and our secular convictions. God is in the business of troubling human beings, and we chafe, wanting swift resolutions, and hasty answers. God says: “Just leave the shade up awhile.” Advent is the Season of Waiting, and good luck to you with that. Amen. GFW+
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