Waiting

Waiting
First Sunday in Advent, 11/29/2020
Ryan Collins
Isaiah 64:1-9

Welcome to Advent!

This is the first Sunday of the new year in our church time. We have officially left what we call Ordinary Time in the church calendar, and I don’t know about you, but it hasn’t felt very ordinary to me this year! If you didn’t laugh, that’s ok. I’m pretty sure every preacher who uses the church calendar has made that same joke for the past couple hundred years.

Advent is an interesting time.

It is the end of the old church year and beginning of the new. It is a time we celebrate the coming of Jesus that happened thousands of years ago and the time we wait expectantly for Christ to return.

It is a celebration and a longing, an end and a beginning, and as our Advent series’ title exclaims, a before and an after.

Fancy people call this a liminal space where we are occupying two spaces at the same time, that are normally separated, where thresholds and barriers break down.

We are celebrating the past coming of Christ, and standing in solidarity with the people who longed for a savior before Jesus came, as we wait for the fullness of salvation to come. We are in this weird, spiritual place where we are both in the before, and the after.

Even though we celebrate the Jesus who has already come in this season with our celebrations culminating on Christmas, Advent’s main feature is the waiting, which we have just recognized through the lighting of the candle of waiting.

We mark the passing of time with these weekly Advent candles, and many of us have all sorts of various Advent calendars at home that mark the passing of each day. We remember the time before Jesus and the waiting and longing for a savior who is not yet born.

Waiting…

Waiting can be exciting!

The family and I went out driving Thanksgiving night looking for Christmas lights and found many beautiful displays. They are building excitement for Christmas and the anticipation of getting our own decorations out and exchanging gifts and celebrating with our family and our church family, probably virtually, and that’s ok. Waiting can be fun and build excitement for a future good that is headed our way.

Buuuuut…. Speaking of distanced worship, waiting isn’t always fun, is it?

Monica Coleman, a brilliant theologian and writer who has written about everything from theology to being a follower of Jesus while living with mental illness, has likened Advent to pregnancy and has written a devotional that focuses on Mary the mother of Jesus.

Mary knew the dual nature of expectant waiting. She received the call to mother the Messiah and alllllll the waiting that comes with motherhood. There is the expectation of a new baby, the excitement of his role in the world, and the waiting for all of those things to manifest. Dr. Coleman writes, “I hope Mary kept it real and told those non-pregnant advice-givers that waiting sucks.”

Now, you all probably have accurately guessed that I myself have never been pregnant, but my wife has, and it was a rough time for her. She had pretty intense morning sickness, which reeaaaally should be called morning to night sickness, that landed her in the ER with dehydration and a prescription to help curb further symptoms. On top of this she labored with Brendan from Friday night to Monday afternoon when the doctor finally decided to remove Brendan by force.

Pregnancy, like Advent, is a time where we can anticipate the coming of a baby that is both here, but not yet fully here, like Jesus is here, but not yet fully come. And like pregnancy, it can be both a joyous and excited waiting, and a waiting that causes a mom to furiously scratch off each day of the calendar while feverishly doing jumping jacks to encourage the baby to get a move on.

Waiting…

We’ve ALL… done… a lot… of waiting… recently, haven’t we?

Waiting that I think most of us would describe as the kind we want to end as soon as possible. Waiting where the light at the end of the tunnel never seems to come. C.S. Lewis described this waiting in the Chronicles of Narnia when Narnia was in a never-ending winter. It was always winter, but never Christmas.

The good news with Covid-19 is that vaccines are coming, and an expert I have been listening to said summer of 2021 should look a lot more like the summer of 2019 and a lot less like the summer of 2020. I have expectant hope that this is correct, but wow does the waiting suck.

Pastor Luke asked me to talk about my calling today, which I think fits in well with the Advent season. I did not grow up in a family that attended church, but I did attend multiple Vacation Bible schools each summer. I like to warn the youth ministry teams I encounter to never write-off the kids who only show up to VBS and you never see again, because they might just show up one day in a pulpit near you!

I first experienced a call into ministry after I had been attending a youth group in high school with my group of friends. I was baptized when I was 16 and decided to enter college and pursue a degree in Bible and Theology. When I graduated in 2004 I thought I had arrived! I thought I would find a ministry position right out of school and be on my way and be done with institutional higher learning forever. As someone who is now halfway through seminary, a 76 hour Master’s Degree, I can say, Boy, was I wrong!

And beyond that, my journey has brought me through a number of wildly different expressions of the Christian faith, from Pentecostal Assemblies of God, to Methodism, to a couple non-denominational churches, the Disciples of Christ, and now, happily, the United Church of Christ. I served as a youth minister, took a youth group to camp and local missions trips, served as an intern minister in two churches, and yet I am still not where I thought I would be by now.

Before my call I was a teen that didn’t have much of an idea what I would do when I grew up. After my call I am an adult who still doesn’t know exactly what I am going to end up doing… but I know I am headed in the right direction, a person who is following Jesus and helping others to do the same. But in this current time, it also feels like an in-between, a waiting. And that is ok.

When we wait, we stand in solidarity with the Hebrews who waited for liberation from Egypt and then waited for their arrival to the promised land. When we wait we remember the time before Jesus when the world was longing for a savior. When we wait, we stand with the disciples when they were waiting to see exactly what Jesus was going to do on this earth. When we wait we remember what it was like for the disciples and Jesus’s friends and family when he was in the grave for three days. And when we wait we recognize that God is not finished with this world and that we wait for the day that God’s full work and redemption comes.

Waiting is part of the journey, but it IS a part of the journey. Advent waiting is not sitting around. When the Hebrews were in the desert they were actively journeying, no matter how meandering their path was. God was constantly leading them. While we are in this period of waiting, we are also called to continuously pursue God as God has not stopped leading or speaking to us.

Before my call I didn’t know what my purpose was. After my call I know what my purpose is, even though I have learned that a permanent kind of destination isn’t likely. All of our callings are a kind of advent where we live in the space in-between the before– and the after.

And sometimes are waiting is joyous and expectant

And sometimes our waiting leaves us feeling like the crushed grapes in our scripture today.

In this season of Advent, recognize and name the waiting that you are doing, and stay with that waiting as we wait and expect Christmas night.

For the good news of Advent is that salvation has come, and salvation is coming, that we may now be in winter, but Christmas is coming, and no matter how much like crushed grapes we feel, God can bring a blessing from the juice, a blessing for the waiting.

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