Waiting in Hope
1st Sunday of Advent
Isaiah 64:1-9, Mark 13:24-37, 1st Corinthians 1:3-9
It’s hard to wait. The challenge of Advent, of course, is the waiting.
Our contemporary society doesn’t help us with this at all. Advent is a church thing – society doesn’t recognize this time of anticipation. Society isn’t very good at anticipation, and we’re actually getting worse. Some of us remember 30 years ago – the “Christmas season” started sometime after Thanksgiving. Now, however, it begins sometime after Labor Day. Big business and gross annual sales drives the start of the “buying” season ever forward.
Waiting is hard. Sister Tracy is telling a wonderful story this week in her sermon. She says, “You’d think we would have learned by the time the second child rolled around, but no; we’re slow learners. So when we told Aaron a few weeks ago that we’d be going to his Cousin Garrett’s house for Thanksgiving, we doomed ourselves to weeks of 4-year-old time-confusion. “Is today the day? Will we go when we wake up tomorrow? When you pick me up from school, will we leave for Garrett’s?”
This is the time of the year that I spend a lot of time sitting in a hunting blind. Deer hunting is all about waiting in the forest. Waiting for the moment of harvest. Success comes to the patient hunter. I heard a story this last week that indicates that success may come to the sleepy hunter. Joe Black harvested a pretty nice animal last week. His dad tells me that he slept from the moment they arrived in the stand until just before the deer arrived.
Waiting is hard. Not just for children, mind you – it’s hard for adults. One of my choir members asked last week if we could start singing Christmas hymns earlier in the season. I understand the difficulty – I, too, want to sing those hymns. Christmas is coming, but first, we wait.
There is a tension to waiting. In our scriptures for this morning, you can sense the anticipation – Isaiah says, “O, that Thou wouldst rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains might quake at Thy presence.” We wait for the salvation of God, and the waiting is hard. “As fire kindles the brushwood, as fire causes water to boil – to make thy name known to Thine adversaries, that the nations may tremble at thy presence!” We long for the salvation of God, and the anticipation is virtually more than we can bear. “Come quickly, Lord Jesus. Come quickly,” we plead.
Advent is the season of waiting. We wait for the second coming of our Savior, even as we waited for the arrival of that baby 2000 years ago. We are shaped by our anticipation of this event. What will we do while we wait? How will we prepare for His return? Will He find us prepared, or will we be caught off guard? These are the questions of Advent. These are the questions of waiting.
I have been astonished over the years by listening to those who have claimed that they can predict the exact time of the return of Christ. I had a friend in Houston some 13 years ago who was obsessed with the task. He was convinced that the scriptures held the clues – and almost as if he was unraveling a mystery, he searched, and conceived, and postulated until he was sure that Christ would return in 1998. I think he missed it. Others have tried to accomplish something of the same over the centuries. They easily forget the words of our Lord who said that even He “did not know the time.”
While we wait, we make preparation. Our sanctuary is a good example. We have started decorating. Making ready. We know He is coming again, just as surely as He once came. We have hung the banners, the cloths have been changed, and we have lit the first of our candles of anticipation. In a few weeks, we will celebrate again the birth of our Savior, and should He tarry in His return, we will continue to wait in anticipation.
I’ve thought a lot about my Dad over the past several months, and especially over this past week. It was about this time last year that we realized that Dad would not be with us this year. We waited. He waited. During the succeeding months, we all waited for his passing. But there were things to do. He had things that he needed to do, and I am not privy to all of those things. He had some things that he wanted to say to each of us, and we had some things we wanted to say to him. Then the news of his death came, and I realized that as much as I had tried to prepare – as much as I knew that this moment would come – I was not fully prepared. I don’t suspect that any of us can be fully prepared for something this tumultuous.
Isaiah’s frustration is the reason we have this Scripture to read on the first Sunday of Advent.
He was ready for the Messiah to come – for salvation to come to his life and to the lives of his people. He was frustrated that God was taking so long to send the Messiah. We understand his frustration. We are not very good at waiting.
We wait – we wait in a kind of darkness, not knowing, finding ourselves less than fully aware. The psychologist, Carl Jung, said, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”1 I am intrigued by that last phrase. Last month, I went on a deer hunt over in McAlester. The organizers of the hunt would take us out into the field quite early in the morning – so early that we would be in our stands nearly an hour before first light. Those were interesting minutes. It was so dark that you couldn’t see anything – not even your hand in front of your face. On the second morning of the hunt, I was in my stand quite early, and sitting still. I could hear animals running around in the forest. I’d like to be able to tell you what they were, but I couldn’t see them. So, I tried to imagine what was running around down there. It could have been deer, and then again, it could have been coyotes. The imagining was fun - during those moments, the darkness was conscious. It was alive. But I was limited in my ability to experience what was going on. Animals of the night have different vision capacity from humans. They can see things we simply cannot see – because of our limitations. To them, the darkness is conscious.
Advent is the season of waiting. We are shaped by our anticipation of this event. What will we do while we wait? How will we prepare for His return? Will He find us prepared, or will we be caught off guard?
Mark works to illumine our task during this season. We are to wait in hope. I like the word hope, because in the biblical sense, hope and anticipation are virtually the same thing. In our society today, hope looks more like the lottery – we buy our ticket, but the odds of winning are so very slim. Biblical hope has security. Biblical hope has promise. When the scriptures speak of hope, it looks more like anticipation. The return of Christ is not a possibility – it is an assurance yet to happen. We cannot change the outcome of His return. We cannot hurry it up by creating more darkness, or by committing more sin, or by offering greater support to the nation of Israel. We cannot hurry the return of Christ by ushering in the next apocalypse, whatever that may be. What we can do is wait.
And we wait in hope. We are waiting, but there is still stuff to do. We continue to prepare. We continue to make ready – we make our own lives ready, and we tell the story of promise to those who will listen and prepare for themselves.
I read another intriguing quote this week – this one by the American poet Adrienne Rich. She said, “My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed. I have to cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.”2 I like what she said in this respect. Even while we prepare for the age to come, which we suppose will actually look like the world to come, we do what we can with what we actually have – which in our case is nothing less than our own world. Our families may be the best example of this kind of thinking. We do not merely acknowledge the history of our families, but while acknowledging and celebrating that which was, we prepare for the future of our own families. In my own family of origin, this was the year that the balance between the adults and the children actually, well, balanced. With Dad’s passing, there are actually as many grandchildren as there are parents and grandparents. There is a new generation coming of age – thinking of ways to think, to serve, to survive, to thrive, to prosper, to contribute, and to perpetuate. The future belongs more to them than it does to the family members of my generation, and so it should be. It gradually becomes more their family, and then it will pass from them to their progeny. “Age after age, perversely with no extraordinary power, reconstituting the world.”
Frederick Buechner says, “Advent means ‘coming,’ of course, and the promise of Advent is that what is coming is an unimaginable invasion. The mythology of our age has to do with flying saucers and invasions of outer space, and that is unimaginable enough. But what is upon us now is even more so – a close encounter not of the third kind but of a different kind altogether. An invasion of holiness. That is what Advent is about.”3
We wait in anticipation for the holiness of God to return. But how close is His return. Mark says, “recognize that He is near, right at the door.” And then later, he says, “Therefore, be on the alert – for you do not know when the master of the house is coming, whether in the evening, at midnight, at cockcrowing, or in the morning – lest he come suddenly and find you asleep.”
We do not know the day or the hour. We do not know. But we do know that He is coming. We have assurance. He came once – He is coming again. We wait in hope – confident assurance. We wait in hope.
And so we listen as Mark closes with these words. “What I say to you I say to all, ‘Be on the alert.’”
Richard W. Dunn, PhD.
1,2,3 - all three quotes come from Behold: Arts for the Church Year, Advent 2005 - Epiphany 2006 (Year B)
Isaiah 64:1-9, Mark 13:24-37, 1st Corinthians 1:3-9
It’s hard to wait. The challenge of Advent, of course, is the waiting.
Our contemporary society doesn’t help us with this at all. Advent is a church thing – society doesn’t recognize this time of anticipation. Society isn’t very good at anticipation, and we’re actually getting worse. Some of us remember 30 years ago – the “Christmas season” started sometime after Thanksgiving. Now, however, it begins sometime after Labor Day. Big business and gross annual sales drives the start of the “buying” season ever forward.
Waiting is hard. Sister Tracy is telling a wonderful story this week in her sermon. She says, “You’d think we would have learned by the time the second child rolled around, but no; we’re slow learners. So when we told Aaron a few weeks ago that we’d be going to his Cousin Garrett’s house for Thanksgiving, we doomed ourselves to weeks of 4-year-old time-confusion. “Is today the day? Will we go when we wake up tomorrow? When you pick me up from school, will we leave for Garrett’s?”
This is the time of the year that I spend a lot of time sitting in a hunting blind. Deer hunting is all about waiting in the forest. Waiting for the moment of harvest. Success comes to the patient hunter. I heard a story this last week that indicates that success may come to the sleepy hunter. Joe Black harvested a pretty nice animal last week. His dad tells me that he slept from the moment they arrived in the stand until just before the deer arrived.
Waiting is hard. Not just for children, mind you – it’s hard for adults. One of my choir members asked last week if we could start singing Christmas hymns earlier in the season. I understand the difficulty – I, too, want to sing those hymns. Christmas is coming, but first, we wait.
There is a tension to waiting. In our scriptures for this morning, you can sense the anticipation – Isaiah says, “O, that Thou wouldst rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains might quake at Thy presence.” We wait for the salvation of God, and the waiting is hard. “As fire kindles the brushwood, as fire causes water to boil – to make thy name known to Thine adversaries, that the nations may tremble at thy presence!” We long for the salvation of God, and the anticipation is virtually more than we can bear. “Come quickly, Lord Jesus. Come quickly,” we plead.
Advent is the season of waiting. We wait for the second coming of our Savior, even as we waited for the arrival of that baby 2000 years ago. We are shaped by our anticipation of this event. What will we do while we wait? How will we prepare for His return? Will He find us prepared, or will we be caught off guard? These are the questions of Advent. These are the questions of waiting.
I have been astonished over the years by listening to those who have claimed that they can predict the exact time of the return of Christ. I had a friend in Houston some 13 years ago who was obsessed with the task. He was convinced that the scriptures held the clues – and almost as if he was unraveling a mystery, he searched, and conceived, and postulated until he was sure that Christ would return in 1998. I think he missed it. Others have tried to accomplish something of the same over the centuries. They easily forget the words of our Lord who said that even He “did not know the time.”
While we wait, we make preparation. Our sanctuary is a good example. We have started decorating. Making ready. We know He is coming again, just as surely as He once came. We have hung the banners, the cloths have been changed, and we have lit the first of our candles of anticipation. In a few weeks, we will celebrate again the birth of our Savior, and should He tarry in His return, we will continue to wait in anticipation.
I’ve thought a lot about my Dad over the past several months, and especially over this past week. It was about this time last year that we realized that Dad would not be with us this year. We waited. He waited. During the succeeding months, we all waited for his passing. But there were things to do. He had things that he needed to do, and I am not privy to all of those things. He had some things that he wanted to say to each of us, and we had some things we wanted to say to him. Then the news of his death came, and I realized that as much as I had tried to prepare – as much as I knew that this moment would come – I was not fully prepared. I don’t suspect that any of us can be fully prepared for something this tumultuous.
Isaiah’s frustration is the reason we have this Scripture to read on the first Sunday of Advent.
He was ready for the Messiah to come – for salvation to come to his life and to the lives of his people. He was frustrated that God was taking so long to send the Messiah. We understand his frustration. We are not very good at waiting.
We wait – we wait in a kind of darkness, not knowing, finding ourselves less than fully aware. The psychologist, Carl Jung, said, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”1 I am intrigued by that last phrase. Last month, I went on a deer hunt over in McAlester. The organizers of the hunt would take us out into the field quite early in the morning – so early that we would be in our stands nearly an hour before first light. Those were interesting minutes. It was so dark that you couldn’t see anything – not even your hand in front of your face. On the second morning of the hunt, I was in my stand quite early, and sitting still. I could hear animals running around in the forest. I’d like to be able to tell you what they were, but I couldn’t see them. So, I tried to imagine what was running around down there. It could have been deer, and then again, it could have been coyotes. The imagining was fun - during those moments, the darkness was conscious. It was alive. But I was limited in my ability to experience what was going on. Animals of the night have different vision capacity from humans. They can see things we simply cannot see – because of our limitations. To them, the darkness is conscious.
Advent is the season of waiting. We are shaped by our anticipation of this event. What will we do while we wait? How will we prepare for His return? Will He find us prepared, or will we be caught off guard?
Mark works to illumine our task during this season. We are to wait in hope. I like the word hope, because in the biblical sense, hope and anticipation are virtually the same thing. In our society today, hope looks more like the lottery – we buy our ticket, but the odds of winning are so very slim. Biblical hope has security. Biblical hope has promise. When the scriptures speak of hope, it looks more like anticipation. The return of Christ is not a possibility – it is an assurance yet to happen. We cannot change the outcome of His return. We cannot hurry it up by creating more darkness, or by committing more sin, or by offering greater support to the nation of Israel. We cannot hurry the return of Christ by ushering in the next apocalypse, whatever that may be. What we can do is wait.
And we wait in hope. We are waiting, but there is still stuff to do. We continue to prepare. We continue to make ready – we make our own lives ready, and we tell the story of promise to those who will listen and prepare for themselves.
I read another intriguing quote this week – this one by the American poet Adrienne Rich. She said, “My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed. I have to cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.”2 I like what she said in this respect. Even while we prepare for the age to come, which we suppose will actually look like the world to come, we do what we can with what we actually have – which in our case is nothing less than our own world. Our families may be the best example of this kind of thinking. We do not merely acknowledge the history of our families, but while acknowledging and celebrating that which was, we prepare for the future of our own families. In my own family of origin, this was the year that the balance between the adults and the children actually, well, balanced. With Dad’s passing, there are actually as many grandchildren as there are parents and grandparents. There is a new generation coming of age – thinking of ways to think, to serve, to survive, to thrive, to prosper, to contribute, and to perpetuate. The future belongs more to them than it does to the family members of my generation, and so it should be. It gradually becomes more their family, and then it will pass from them to their progeny. “Age after age, perversely with no extraordinary power, reconstituting the world.”
Frederick Buechner says, “Advent means ‘coming,’ of course, and the promise of Advent is that what is coming is an unimaginable invasion. The mythology of our age has to do with flying saucers and invasions of outer space, and that is unimaginable enough. But what is upon us now is even more so – a close encounter not of the third kind but of a different kind altogether. An invasion of holiness. That is what Advent is about.”3
We wait in anticipation for the holiness of God to return. But how close is His return. Mark says, “recognize that He is near, right at the door.” And then later, he says, “Therefore, be on the alert – for you do not know when the master of the house is coming, whether in the evening, at midnight, at cockcrowing, or in the morning – lest he come suddenly and find you asleep.”
We do not know the day or the hour. We do not know. But we do know that He is coming. We have assurance. He came once – He is coming again. We wait in hope – confident assurance. We wait in hope.
And so we listen as Mark closes with these words. “What I say to you I say to all, ‘Be on the alert.’”
Richard W. Dunn, PhD.
1,2,3 - all three quotes come from Behold: Arts for the Church Year, Advent 2005 - Epiphany 2006 (Year B)
posted by the sojourning pilgrim | 9:12 PM
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