The First Sunday of Advent - November 30, 2009

"Advent Waiting"

The Rev. Stephen Elkins-Williams

All of us know what it is to wait.  We wait in line at the grocery store or in a traffic jam or at airport security.  We wait for an important letter or email message to come.  We wait for our busy lives to get less hectic.  We wait for the school bully to pick on someone else.  We wait for employment or to recover from an injury or surgery or for what we have planted to grow.

We wait for our child or grandchild to be born or to smile or to walk or to go to school.  We wait to get out of debt.  We wait for our spouse or friend to become what we would like.  We wait for someone in great suffering to die.  We wait for peace to come to a war-torn country.

All of life is in some way a waiting game.  It reminds us that while we live in the present, we are made for the future.  Not matter how full or difficult life gets, it will not last that way forever.  We are made for something more, something that lies beyond the present, something that manifests itself to us through all our longings, something that is yet to come.

That is the reality addressed by Advent.  The readings, the prayers, the hymns speak of expectation, of hope, of waiting for the time and for the One who is to come.  At first that focus is on the second coming of Jesus at the end of time, when all our waiting shall be over.  “In the last day,” we prayed in today’s collect, “when [Jesus] shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead,” may we “rise to the life immortal.”  Jesus encourages us in the Gospel, not just to wait for that time, but to “watch at all times”, i.e., to wait attentively and with understanding.  We are to have the perspective that our faith gives us: that the meaning of our present is shaped by the future, that what we see is not all there is, that what is here now will not last forever.

Indeed, in the form of this present life, we will not last forever.  Whether or not Jesus’ return at the end of time is still far off, individually each of us has an end time, a time when we will come into the presence of the One for whom we have waited, a time when our hope will rest solely on this One for whom we were created.

Advent, especially on this first Sunday, awakens us to that future time and to its present implications.  It reminds us to be vigilant, to be alert, to be wise.  Rather than “fainting with fear and with foreboding of what is coming,” we are, in the words of the Gospel, to “look up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”  Not weighed down with the cares of this life, but alert to the grace and the faithful presence of God, we are to await Jesus’ coming in glory.

As Advent moves forward to the second and third and fourth Sundays, the focus shifts more to Jesus’ first coming, when the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.  Liturgically, we join ourselves to the pre-Messianic Israelites, who longed for the fullness of time and the coming of God’s promised Messiah.  “O come, o come Emmanuel,” we invite plaintively, “and ransom” us who are captive.  Although we know that Jesus has in fact already come, each year in the liturgical cycle we again remember what the world was like without his saving presence, and we invite Jesus to come more fully into our hearts and to be born anew into our broken world.

By ourselves we are powerless to make that happen.  Like captive Israel, we “mourn in lonely exile here, until the Son of God appear.” But we do not do so without hope and expectation.  With Israel we rejoice, rejoice because we know that God is with us.  Emmanuel has come, continues with us and will come again.

As we begin once more the liturgical cycle, in which we celebrate God’s working in human history, we do so with patience and expectation.  We do so with quiet confidence and joy.  We do so in Jesus’ words, watching at all times, alert for the many ways that he comes to us.   As people who cannot save themselves, we wait for the One who is to come.

Luke 21:25-36