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Sermon - December 9th, 2007
Waiting in the Dark
Rev. Gwen Drake
Scripture: Isaiah 11:1-10; Matthew 3:1-12
Second Sunday in Advent
We are greeted on this second Sunday in Advent by two prophets—Isaiah and John the Baptizer. They appear to be conspiring to give us a vision of the impossible in the form of animal dreams. Isaiah’s dream warms my heart. I would love to live in a world that we could only describe as the peaceable kingdom, where lambs hang around with wolves and adders (which are a kind of snake) behave as though Mr. Rogers taught them how to play with children. A totally unnatural world as we know it where a political leader shows up with the heart and spirit of God. Which would be more unbelievable today, finding lions feeding on grass or a politician who was looking out for something other than his or her own advancement? Advent is a time of dreaming the impossible and imagining the unimaginable.
Then John the Baptizer bursts into our dreams and induces nightmares rather than a peaceable kingdom. This fiery, prophetic preacher yells at us, “You are nothing but a bunch of snakes slithering as fast as you can from a grass fire!” He cuts straight to the chase and announces the coming of a leader who sounds more like the grim reaper than someone with plans for a kinder, gentler world. He reminds us that you won’t get very far on your inheritance or your blood lines. “It’s your LIFE you must change, not your skin.” You can’t just look good. What counts is the very essence of your life, down to the very core. And what is not green and blossoming goes in the fire! That’s the gospel according to John the Baptizer. We just can’t get to the angels and the birth without first encountering a wild and bold prophet from the wilderness.
He preaches about judgment in a frantic, desperate way. But isn’t this too, part of the rhythm of our life’s journey? In school, we receive report cards. In college, we go through finals week. At Church, we count the offering, or the money made from Cookies N’ More. Failures and successes are recorded and announced. Later in life our progress reports are a little more complicated than getting report cards and counting money. However, there are those times when our procrastination, cheating, lying, half-hearted efforts, broken promises, forgotten appointments, and debts catch up to us. Maybe it never shows on the outside—but it does wear us down on the inside.
Judgment is a reality in our lives. So, really, there is something intriguing about John the Baptist’s idea of wiping the slate clean—making a clean sweep of the house that is inside of us. John the Baptist said the one who is coming will do just that, “He’ll put everything true in its proper place before God; and everything false be will put out with the trash to be burned.” This is the good news on the Second Sunday in Advent according to John the Baptizer.
Maybe, it is a message we need to listen to in today’s dark world, a world that seems to be dominated by aggression and violence, in a world where a lost young man killed others, then himself, just so he could become famous. Sometimes I wonder if I can even dream of peace in a world such as ours.
It must have been hard to be John the Baptizer. There he was, set apart by God to do one single thing with his life—to proclaim the coming of the One—and yet he did not even have a name to shout out loud. He did not know who he was waiting for. He did not know when the One was coming. He did not know whether to watch the sky or the earth. Maybe the one he was waiting for would come in on a chariot of fire that no one could miss. But it was also possible that the One would come incognito, so that only those who were searching for the One would know the One had arrived.
John knew what his job was, to prepare the way for something and someone who would not fit into some religious category, who would escape any kind of label. Not that we wouldn’t try. The One who was coming would turn the world upside down. And John was a voice crying out in the wilderness, “Make straight the way of the Lord…the one you do not know… the one who is coming after me.”
Until that day came, John’s life was one long Advent, a waiting in the dark for the light, a waiting without knowing, waiting for the one thing that would change everything. John could not name it, but he knew it was coming. And that knowledge alone was enough to make the wait worthwhile.
Who in here likes to wait? I don’t. People are not very good at waiting. And we are getting worse! We prefer to reach out and grab what we want. We have the “I want it and I want it NOW” mentality. We live in a culture where getting what we want is everything. We live in a culture where looking good is everything. We live in a culture where speed is more important than quality.
But the truth of Advent is that sometimes what we want is not there to be grabbed—we have to wait for it, because, maybe it is not ripe yet. A fig that is still a hard green knot no bigger than a gum ball is not ready to be grabbed off the tree. Or maybe, we are waiting for something that is not even real yet, a dream of the future that is still a long way off. Or maybe we waiting something that is illusive—where the more you want it, the less likely you will find it. Like love… Love can’t be found. Love is discovered. Love finds you.
Another truth about Advent and waiting is that when we are waiting, we have to admit that we are not in total control, we are not in charge. There are things we think we cannot live without that we are denied, there are things we have given up waiting for, and then suddenly they are dropped in our laps. We can say “yes” or we can say “no” to these things, but we cannot control them. The truth is our lives are formed in the hands of a great mystery that does not ask for our advice.
So, if waiting is an aggravation or a frustration in your life, it is at least partly because you do not like being reminded of your limits. We like DOING—earning, buying, selling, building, buying, planting, driving, baking, did I say buying? We like making things happen, and waiting is essentially a matter of just BEING—stopping, sitting, listening, looking, standing, breathing, wondering, praying. It can feel pretty helpless to wait for someone or something that is not here yet and that will arrive in ITS own good time, which is not to be mistaken for OUR own good time. There’s nothing we can do to hurry it up—we just have to wait.
And yet waiting is an essential part of practicing the Christian life. One of the great mysteries of our faith is that we are always waiting for Christ to come to us even though we believe that Christ has already come and that Christ is coming to us right now, here in this place, through us, through the word, through the children, through the music, through our gathering together. Is Christ’s coming past, present, or future? Yes. The answer is all of the above which means that our waiting is not a matter of entering into suspended animation. Our waiting is not nothing—it is something—a very big something—because people tend to be shaped by whatever it is they are waiting for.
Have you noticed that? When you really, really want something, your whole life tends to rearrange itself around that goal. Some have called this the Law of Attraction.
When I was a teenager, I could hardly wait to get my driver’s license. After that I could hardly wait to get a job and have my own money. After that I could hardly wait to be out on my own, out of the small town of Heppner—my own life, my own rules. After that I could hardly wait to be married. Then just before I was to walk down the aisle, I realized I didn’t want to be married, I’d rather go to Australia. So I applied for a teaching job in Australia and then had to wait for the day I was to fly to Australia. When I decided to move back home after four years, I had to wait for the day I came home. Waiting…. It is part of our lives, and I dare to say, it shapes our lives.
I’m still waiting for wisdom, maturity, enlightenment, and for answers to all of my questions.
How about you? What are you waiting for? And how is your waiting shaping your life? Are you waiting for certainty, for healing, for love? Are you waiting for recognition, for retirement, for enough money to pay the bills? Are you waiting for your next drink, your next cigarette, your next high? Are you waiting for dry weather, your next vacation, a knight in shining armor? Are you waiting for this sermon to be over?
How about peace on earth and justice for all? How about an end to the destruction of our environment? What about the elimination of hunger? What about basic health care for everyone? What ever it is that our heart yearns for, chances are, it has something to do with our own vision of what it would mean for us to be whole, to be transformed, to be a person who is not afraid, who is more close to being who God created us to be. John the Baptizer had that kind of vision. He had a vision of a great light that was coming into the world to outshine the darkness once and for all.
What does it mean for us to be waiting for the One to come, to be waiting in the darkness? Just who or what are we waiting for? The truth is we do not really know, we cannot predict the future, it is out of our hands. However, we are still able to rejoice, because the one who is coming is the one who has come and is the one who is coming to us even now, right now. We may be short on details, but we are not short on hope and wonder at this mystery whose good hands we are in. Whatever happens to us while we are waiting, however dark it gets before it gets light, this is what we believe, the hands we are in are GOOD hands. We are in God’s hands. Amen.