Isaiah 2:1-5
Matthew 24:36-44Dangerous Community
by Patricia E. de Jong
December 2, 2001
One thing I do not do well is wait. I get very impatient in lines at grocery stores and the post office. If I have to go shopping for something, even to buy a quart of milk, I cannot bear having to wait for a parking place, especially if I am trying to park at the Quik Stop. I'd rather leave than have to wait for a space. I don't do well at the tollbooth of the Bay Bridge and I consider that Fastrak was divine intervention for my life! I have a hard time being patient if someone is trying to give me directions or asks me to wait a second while they finish talking to someone on the other line. Most modern people like life to be as efficient with time as possible; that way we believe we can get it all done, right on time.
I suppose the trivial annoyance of waiting is reflective of a deeper impatience in my soul. It seems that I have been waiting all my life for some things to happen and some things that haven't. The perfect job. The perfect love. The perfect house. The perfect pair of shoes! I sometimes think no matter how old or fulfilled I become, I will always have a holy restlessness! I even wonder if I will ever stop worrying about all the things that need to be done at work or whether or not I am helping guide this church in the way it needs to be led. I keep waiting for peace among all the members of my family and wonder if I will ever actually be content and at peace with the events that have taken place in my life. I understand perfectly the words of T. George Harris: "I sometimes feel as if I've been sent for, but I just can't get there."
Americans are waiting today. Waiting for victory or another attack. We are waiting to see whether and when and how we will capture Bin Laden. Thousands of refuges are waiting at the borders of Pakistan to see what is going to happen to them now that they have been bombed out of their homeland. With yesterday's suicide bombings in Jerusalem and Haifa, we are waiting for peace to come to the Middle East. Will it ever come?
It's a dangerous time, this season of waiting. Will swords be turned into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks this year? In this time of immense darkness and storm clouds, will we find a way to walk in the light of God? Is there any hope for the sanity of God to break into the world?
Patience may be a virtue, but if it is, not many of us have it. So it may be with some trepidation and anxiety, that we enter this season of waiting and watching, wondering and hoping. Waiting no longer seems a natural part of our human rhythms and expectations; we would rather have it all today.
At Advent we should remember that we straddle a paradox. As Christians we live between the already and the not-yet, between the inbreaking and the absence of God, between hope and the temptation to despair, between moments of brilliant illumination and the encroaching darkness. Matthew's Gospel describes such a time. There is a sense of urgency and expectancy in this Gospel that is at once off-putting and compelling. We tend to reject apocalyptic texts, because they express a longing for the end of time with a very specific timetable. However, we are also intrigued, because there is something in us that is longing for a second coming, a final triumph, an "end to history," the advent of love and justice. Instead of living as spectators guessing about the future and making predictions about future events, we should live as mystics, learning to embrace waiting, the already and the not-yet, along the road. George Harrison, the Beatle who recently died knew this. He remarked that his life was about waiting for God.
Part of the discipline of our faith is to learn how to wait without falling asleep and to learn to live as if the fullness of time has already arrived, even though it will not come in our lifetime.
Advent celebrates a time of waiting. It calls us out of the patterns of the rest of the world and places us in a dangerous community. A community that dares to hope in spite of…. It's dangerous because we are learning how to be faithful in waiting. Our whole life together is a time of waiting: waiting in the present absence of God, waiting for the ultimate coming of love and justice, waiting for the time when there will be a new heaven and a new earth, when all people will know the fulfillment of love and reconciliation and hope. "Earth may be fair and all her pulses move."
At Advent, we are called to participate in a different kind of time and a different way of life. In a society racked with worry and anxiety, about war and rumors of anthrax, we are called to stand in readiness for what God may do. We are asked to trust in a caring promise and a wondrous assertion that we are intensely cared for, in the now and the not yet. Isaiah proclaims the promise: "Fear not, says the Lord, for I have redeemed you, I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you, and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you."
The world spins on in exhaustion and pain. We are asked to believe in hope and take a dangerous leap of faith. God will enter the world in a fresh way again and again and again.
Henri Nouwen writes that the spiritual life is a life in which we wait, actively present to the moment, trusting that the new will happen to us, things that are far beyond our imagining, fantasy or prediction.
We are called to live in a dangerous community because, as God's people, we are asked to live the future now. We are asked to celebrate the sacred joy of the unknown, trusting in the power of God to break forth at any moment into our lives, our community and the life of the world. To live with such hope is a powerful and dangerous way to live.
Paul Tillich writes of the time of waiting, "Waiting is its own special destiny. Every time is a time of waiting, waiting for the breaking in of eternity. All time, both history and personal life is expectation. Time itself is waiting, waiting not for another time, but for that which is eternal."
Amen.
Copyright © 2001, First Congregational Church of Berkeley