Watching and Waiting
First Sunday in Advent (2002)

Week of Monday, December 2, 2002

Lectionary Readings
Isaiah 64:1–9
Psalm 80:1–7, 17–19
1 Corinthians 1:3–9
Mark 13:24–37

This week Christians around the world enter the season of advent, and in so doing we are reminded of one of the most difficult but important aspects of following Jesus, that we must learn to wait. At the simplest level we wait the next four weeks in anticipation of celebrating the birth of Jesus. We also wait for Him to return in power and glory. In the interim, the time between these two times, we also wait for Him to come to us and meet us at our point of need. Charles Wesley's advent hymn puts it nicely:

Come, thou long-expected Jesus,
Born to set thy people free.
From our fears and sins release us;
Let us find our rest in Thee.

No one in our society likes to wait for anything for any reason. Most people think of instant gratification as their entitlement. I was surprised this summer standing in the passport control line at the Munich airport when a fellow traveler rudely pushed ahead of me, and a German person next to me remarked, “You Americans are much better at waiting in lines than we are.” Not true. Waiting is hard, and thank God for advent that reminds us how good and necessary it is.

I resonate much more with Isaiah in the lectionary text for this week, who decidedly did not want to wait. He rather shamelessly begs God, “Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains would tremble before you!” Three times he uses this spatial metaphor of a God high and remote who “comes down” from the heavens to scatter the enemies and make the nations quake. He compares these divine acts of power to fire blazing through dry tinder, or water roiling to a boil.

Similarly, the psalmist in the lectionary text implores God with all the passion and emotion he can muster: “Hear us, O Shepherd of Israel. Awaken your might; come and save us! Return to us, O God Almighty! Look down from heaven and see!” Then three times the Psalmist repeats the same refrain, “Restore us, O God! Make your face shine upon us that we may be saved.” There is nothing subtle about these prayers, and perhaps that is why it is easy to connect with them.

Who has not experienced this intense longing for an unequivocal demonstration of God's mighty power? Who has not felt like God was “up there” while we languish “down here,” and longed for him to close that gap? Who has not felt like Isaiah and the Psalmist, that despite these prayers that are raw with emotion that God still felt silent, even hidden? Who has not begged God for a new job, healing for cancer, reconciliation with a parent or child, financial provision, guidance in the midst of confusion, peace when attacked by anxiety, solace when your heart is broken, and on the list goes. “Lord, split the heavens and come down! Now!”

Such longings are a natural human experience, and for the most part they are good and proper. We should never imagine that God is some remote and uncaring deity. He is not a God who deals with us, in the words of Bette Midler's song, “from a distance.” He is not the absentee landlord of eighteenth century deism, that is, a god who created the world but then abandoned it to itself. No, Christians rightly believe, says Isaiah, that the God we worship is different. He is a God “who acts on behalf of those who wait for him” and “does awesome things that we did not expect.” When you get to the New Testament Paul reminds us that God does “immeasurably more than all we ask or even imagine” (Ephesians 3:20). So, let us increase our expectations and not diminish them.

But both Isaiah and the Psalmist temper their zeal with empirical knowledge. Many of our passionate prayers seem to go unanswered. New Testament scholars tell us that this is just the sort of prayer and expectation that Israel had for a Messiah—a mighty Lord who would vanquish the hated Romans. But what they got was a vulnerable baby in a manger. We could point to many other examples in Scripture, such as Acts 12, where Peter got a miraculous escape but James was beheaded by Herod. So one thing to keep in mind is that God just might define a “mighty act of power” differently than we do, and that He is there for us if we only had the right eyes to see.

Sometimes we just don't know, and never will know, when, why and how God chooses to act.The experiences of the saints down through the ages show that life is not so neat and clean. One of the most sobering, and liberating, verses in Scripture reminds us that there are many saints who did not receive all the good promises of God in this life, despite their true and tested faith (Hebrews 11:13, 39). We don't pray to God as if to insert a coin in a vending machine and receive a product instantly or on demand. Life is not that cut and dry, and I am sure that we should be grateful that it is not. I might not be able to explain when and why God acts in might and power, but I know with absolute confidence that I am deeply grateful He has not answered my every prayer by giving me what I asked; what a disaster that would have been.

At other times we can and do know why God is not acting. Both the Psalmist and Isaiah are sure that the reason they fail to experience God's mighty acts of power is because of Israel's sin. Since Israel was continuing in sin, God was angry with them, says Isaiah, so “how then could we be saved?” He compares their moral life to filthy rags and shriveled leaves. No one called upon God, no one cared to pray. Consequently, “you have hidden your grace from us and made us waste away because of our sin.” But even here we need to be careful, and never make a direct cause-effect link between our sin and God's blessing. This is the lesson of Job. The presence of good fortune need not signify His blessing, and misfortune need not indicate his disfavor. Thank God that He does not treat us as our sins deserve, but continues to love and bless us (Psalm 103:8–14); and God save us from insinuating that the lack of His mighty acts is proof positive that we or some loved one lacks faith or harbors some sin. That might be true, but it is definitely not always true.

Having the right eyes to see God act truly if not overtly, acknowledging the ultimate mystery of our lives, and confessing our sins along life's way—these are components of waiting. The writer of Hebrews puts it succinctly, “patient endurance is what you need now” (10:36). In the Gospel text Mark gives to us a similar Advent prescription: Be on your guard, be alert, keep watch (Mark 13:24–37). Why? Because as Isaiah writes, “O Lord, you are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand. Oh, look upon us, we pray, for we are all your people.” So, we wait, and we do so with eager expectation.

The Journey with Jesus: Notes to Myself Copyright ©2002 by Dan Clendenin. All Rights Reserved.