What Are You Waiting For?

We Hate to Wait!

Waiting is hard. In our instant-satisfaction, short-attention-span culture, we’re all a little like the grumpy guy in the classic 1980’s Avis commercial who hated to wait.

It’s hard — sometimes impossible! — for a child to wait until Christmas morning to open the gifts. It’s hard to wait for your loved one to wake up after major surgery. It’s hard for parents to wait in hope for the day their son will break free from addiction. It’s incomprehensibly hard to wait for hostages to be released, for wars to end, and for peace to come.

Advent is the season of waiting that leads to Christmas. But it’s more than nostalgic waiting to remember the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem (a very dangerous place to be born these days!).

The scripture readings for the 1st Sunday in Advent declare that we are waiting for the fulfillment of the vision of the Kingdom of God which Jesus announced, demonstrated, and for which he died. We are waiting for the fulfillment of our prayer that God’s kingdom will come and God’s will be done on earth as in heaven. We’re waiting for the peace and good will the angels announced to the shepherds to become a reality in this sin-saturated, conflict-conditioned, politically-polarized world. We wait in hope-energizing confidence that one day this whole creation will be healed, reconciled and made new. We declare that hope in the creed when we say:

He will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead
and his kingdom will have no end.

Charles Wesley celebrated that hope in an Advent hymn United Methodists don’t often sing, though Episcopalians and British Methodists love it. You can hear (or sing along!) here.

Lo, he comes with clouds descending, 
once for favored sinners slain;
thousand, thousand saints attending 
swell the triumph of his train. 
Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! 
God appears on earth to reign. 

Every eye shall now behold him, 
robed in dreadful majesty; 
those who set at naught and sold him,
pierced and nailed him to the tree, 
deeply wailing, deeply wailing, deeply wailing, 
shall the true Messiah see. 

Yea, Amen! Let all adore thee, 
high on thy eternal throne; 
Savior, take the power and glory, 
claim the kingdom for thine own.
Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! 
Everlasting God, come down!

Waiting for the Party

Jesus described the coming of the Kingdom as a dinner party to which all are invited. Episcopal priest and author, Robert Farrar Capon, expanded on Wesley’s words when he wrote:

Lo, he comes with clouds descending. Alleluia, and three cheers … What we are watching for is a party. And that party is not just down the street making up its mind when to come to us. It is already hiding in our basement, banging on our steam pipes, and laughing its way up our cellar stairs. The unknown day and hour of its finally bursting into the kitchen and roistering its way through the whole house is not dreadful; it is all part of the divine lark of grace. God is not our mother-in-law, coming to see whether her wedding present-china has been chipped. God is, instead, the funny Old Uncle with a salami under one arm and a bottle of wine under the other. We do indeed need to watch for him; but only because it would be such a pity to miss all the fun!” (Capon, The Parables of Judgment)

What Are YOU Waiting For?

The question not only points to the hope that lies before us. It is also a call to action. Why are you sitting around doing nothing? Why are you waiting to get in on the action?

Waiting for the grand finale doesn’t mean we watch silently in the audience and miss our cue to be on stage before the final curtain. It doesn’t mean sitting around weeping over the past or bemoaning the way things are in the present. It is active waiting that participates in the coming of the Kingdom right here, right now.

Jesus said the Kingdom is already here. Our part is to stay awake and to keep our eyes open for every seemingly small sign of life the way Jesus described it. We are, in a word, called to be “woke” disciples who are awake to every way the Kingdom Jesus described is already here among us. And when we see it, to get in on the action now!

I visited this week with a United Methodist leader from a part of the country where the church is in serious decline. There are good reasons to be discouraged. But his eyes sparkled when he said his job is to look for places where there is new life and to pour his energy and resources into it.

We get to choose. We can either sit around wishing things were different or we can find those places where we can make a difference. If you want to know what active waiting for the coming of the Kingdom looks like, look no farther than Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. He said:

“I have one life and one chance to make it count for something… My faith demands that I do whatever I can, wherever I am, whenever I can, for as long as I can with whatever I have to try to make a difference.”

One of the many ways the Carters made a Kingdom-shaped difference was through Habitat for Humanity. I hope you’ll take three minutes to watch here. It will lift your spirit and inspire you to find the way you can participate in the coming of the Kingdom as we actively wait for the grand finale of the drama.

May you experience a hope-filled Advent in order to be prepared for a joy-soaked Christmas!

Waiting in hope,

Jim