Advent 1- Faith as Waiting- Jeremiah 33.14-16- Luke 21.25-36
Well! Ho Ho Ho! What a merry set of words we have heard to mark the saint day of Santa. What am I going to do to make these fairly hefty words of bible that we have heard into a large exciting gift drawn out of the haul of goodies from the sleigh today?
I think I might be able to do this. Bear with me, let’s see where we go.
But the reality is we are celebrating a happy saint with a great Coca Cola following, at a time when the bible texts are deliberately pointing at the pains of the world. We are, if you like, to set aside some of the jolliness and fur-lined red costumes (they were once green but never mind), because we are being asked to inhabit, as it were, not the end result of the St Nicholas story and its following glitzy traditions, but the beginning.
St Nicholas rescued the fate of three sisters, says tradition, by providing the dowry to prevent an awful end in slavery or worse, and that is generosity of the heart that is something to celebrate: if only we could do as much as that, but here with today’s bible words we are parked, as it were, at the start of that folklore, where the father, and the sisters, have no clue of the provision that will come their way and are sat there each day, carrying out their daily tasks, wondering how to get out of the mess they didn’t ask to be in.
That is where we are today. So setting the time-stamp in the St Nicholas schema, let’s now delve into those texts to see what gift we might receive.
“The days are surely coming” says the prophet Jeremiah. ‘Get ready for God,’ he tells the Israelites, ‘the countdown has started!’
I’m sure all of us are terribly familiar with advent calendars, aren’t we. Have you started yours today? As a child I can remember getting terribly excited when the advent calendar came out because it meant that it would soon be Christmas and I could get my hands on some new toys!
But as the days of childhood often seemed to last so long, the slow crawl through the middle of December was for young me, absolutely agonising. I just had to wait.
Waiting is, of course, part of the heart of Advent. And whilst we wait the few weeks to the joyful celebration ahead, Advent itself speaks to a whole different scale in our waiting.
For the Israelites who heard Jeremiah’s words, who had been through some tough times back then, such hope-filled promises, all that warmth and hope that we heard, must have seemed to them like a long time coming; because, uncertainty, and the threat of war and famine were upon these people when he spoke, so how could this prophet, ever speak such hopeful words?
Similarly, in our lives today, we also wait for God’s justice in the world and in situations around us. We still have war, famine, and unrest, discrimination in so many forms and a disdain of humanity from our very leadership at times that appalls me.
We have all waited so long. When do these words of hope become fulfilled?
Advent takes us through a much bigger calendar. The 4 short weeks of reflection that we are offered from today, are just a scale-model of the real thing. We, in the midst of this real calendar, are shown how this ultimate promise of God’s rule of mercy will unfold into our world, with the pure innocence of an infant.
But until then— we wait.
Waiting doesn’t come that easily to us, does it.
It seems unnecessarily inconvenient, a passive thing to be doing, and so it isn’t a verb we usually have much time for. Especially when there is so much we see and want to do for God as her people. The sense of doing nothing in waiting, can often be too much for us.
And yet waiting is a big theme of the bible, and we would do well to embrace it in any positive way we can. Jesus often spoke of waiting in terms of watching, of keeping alert, and many of his stories, and the gospel reading today, pick up on that thought. To Jesus, waiting isn’t about a lull that gets in the way, its about being ready for action. Like an athlete waiting for the starter’s pistol— muscles held taught, the curve of the track alone seen by the eye, and the ear trained upon just one sound.
This kind of waiting is a real skill, one that takes lots of effort and energy to hold just right. This wait is action held to command, and we can see it’s intensity: a false start on the athletics track reveals it all.
Waiting is the process of faith itself. And it isn’t necessarily a waiting that knows what will happen next. In the St Nicholas tradition, the sisters and their father, didn’t know that the generosity of Nicholas was going to arrive. Their waiting was full of a trigger-ready edginess, that was ready to leap on any solution, or to spring to combat whatever would force the calamity they feared. But it was still waiting, and their focus was fully switched on, even if their waiting wasn’t as simple as the athlete’s, waiting in her blocks.
A favourite painting of mine is Holman Hunt’s ‘Light of the World,’ painted to the words of scripture: ‘Behold I stand at the door and knock.’ The image of Christ standing outside a door overgrown with weeds and missing its door-handle, is a reminder to me of that watchful waiting that every single one of us knows only to well. From the inside, when might a knock come. We don’t know. In the painting there are no windows in the wall for us to glance through. We are on tenterhooks, like the sisters and the father in the St Nicholas folklore. We don’t know when. But when the knock comes, and it will come, we open; and together the action of God’s Advent promise comes.
That is the reason we can get so playful and fun with St Nicholas today, and with all the generosity he had to give give give until it hurt. We can laugh, and have fun, because he emulates another, who gave gave gave, for our freedom, until it hurt. And his is the one whose knock we are waiting for.
Christ calls us to be an Advent people, a people who never forget the anxious wait for their rescue in receiving and being ready for Jesus’ continual arriving in their lives.
