Readings: Mark 13:24-37, John 1: 35-42
Let us pray: May your word for us, O God, speak into our
hearts and minds, challenge us, encourage us and assure us in our faith and our
living, in Jesus name. Amen
I wonder, if we
were to strip away our pre knowledge of the advent story goes, would that
change the way we approach this season of waiting. After all what is expectant waiting if you
know exactly what you are waiting for. What
is hope-filled anticipation if you can say act by act what happened? What is spectacularly transforming about this
moment if you can rely on it coming round each year like clockwork.
I ask this
question of myself pretty much every year trying to find a new way into the
Christmas story, trying to imagine what it must have been like for Mary, trying
to strip away not just my familiarity with the story but also the layers of
accumulated cultural and historical response and get back to the beginning. I’ve previously talked of the Christmas card
Mary – mainly a legacy of the Victorian era, or the white faced European Mary
of religious art or the perfect Mary of the traditions that have deified
her. And yet we do her a disservice - is
not her powerful message of trust and obedience to be found in her very
humanity, her ordinariness, her faltering innocence and extremely vulnerable
social position – the stuff we seem intent on doing away with?
So in many ways
our contemporary knowledgeable anticipation of the coming of God’s promised one
at Christmas is very different from the experience of those who, back then,
awaited the Messiah not knowing the time or the place or the manner of this
fearfully anticipated birth. A very different waiting from ours.
Maybe this is why
we have such a challenging Gospel reading at the beginning of Advent – a
reading that seems both out of context and out of time: the second coming
before the first, the end time when we are supposed to be thinking about the
hope of new beginning.
Maybe the
lectionary writers wanted to remind us of what it means to wait, knowing
neither the time nor the place nor the manner of Christ’s coming, just as did
Mary and Joseph all those years ago.
Here is something
that might be helpful. One commentator
talks about the difference between passive waiting and active waiting and uses
the analogy of someone waiting for the bus (passive – unless its late of
course)– as opposed to hearing the sound of the parade and waiting for it to
come round the corner – on tip toes, eagerly anticipating, full of expectation.
So does this mean
that we are to spend our lives bouncing up and down in excitement, keeping our
eyes peeled and our lives on hold?
Absolutely not. Alternatively,
are we to spend our time and energy trying to figure out when this second
coming will be so we can be first at the welcoming gate? Again absolutely not.
‘Beware, keep
alert, for you do not know when the time will come.’ This is not a call for us to figure out God’s
timetable nor is it a time for us to wait alert, eyes peeled doing nothing
else. It is a call to active expectant
waiting, anticipating yet engaged with the now.
The two stories
together, the nativity and the second coming,
very clearly remind us of the most important of paradoxes in the Gospel
– that of living with the truth of Christ among us already and also in
anticipation of a full and complete relationship with God in a time yet to
come. The ‘already but not yet’ as we
call it.
So our
waiting is an active waiting, an alert and awake time of living our lives in
the way of the one who has already come and in the hope of the one still to
come. In that way we bind the waiting of Advent to that which is yet to come –
because by living actively in the now as Jesus taught us, we continually
encounter, glimpse, participate in what is yet to come. In every act of compassion, of service, of
justice and grace we are preparing the way for what is to come – is in fact a
stepping into what will be. If you plan
to wait passively, alert only to the end, then you not only miss the journey –
you also fall asleep. If you join in the
journey then the many wonderful God moments along the way will not only enliven
your waiting but will kindle a light for others too.
For that is what
the apostle Andrew did, did he not. It
is astonishing to look at the miles he travelled in his waiting, taking the
gospel message to places like modern day Poland, Russia and the Ukraine (all of
which he is patron saint to) and Greece and Constantinople and Rome.
He is known to have set out at least four missionary trips through these
countries and it was in Patras in Greece that he was crucified!
He wasn’t sitting
back waiting – he was living out the call that was placed on his life – getting
on with it. So I can see an immediate
exodus from Opoho as you all head of into the hinterlands – ok maybe not.
That was St
Andrew’s story of waiting. What is
ours? How do we live into the God with
us and yet remain alert to the God yet to come?
What does our waiting, if that’s what it is, look like?
I thank you all
for your very positive response to the future of full time ministry here in
Opoho – and for your trust in our journey together continuing. Because by doing so you have made a conscious
decision to not just sit tight and see out our time but instead to actively
seek out ways of being Christ in this community.
As we raise the
level of awareness of our need to be financially sustainable – do you know what
I see – increasing stories of acts of generosity inside and outside the church,
gifts of money, time, energy to the needy, for the vulnerable in our city. Did you all see that both the cities’ food
banks and the Night Shelter will be scraping the bottom of the barrel this next
couple of months? Can we respond ? Can we be generous in our giving of food and
can we get some money to the Night Shelter – I suspect we can.
As we continue to
engage in hospitality for students, for neighbours, for those on the edges – we
become more aware of the need to support each other too – how important is it
to be made welcome, to share food around the table, to rest and have a safe place
to ask questions. That is a integral
part of our mission in Opoho and we constantly think about how we can encourage
and engage as a welcoming community of faith.
And there is the
everyday – remember that tree that we so beautifully decorated a couple of
weeks ago – all the things that we do for each other and for the continuing of
this, Christ’s presence, here in this place.
And do you know what was an unexpectedly important one for me – those
who hold the memory of what has been – for it enabled me to imagine and see
more clearly and have an expectant hope in that which was to come? Does that make sense?
So none of this
sounds to me like we are a people who are sleeping while they wait for the
second coming. This sounds to me like a
people alert and engaged in the journey that Christ has invited us on, bringing
the kingdom of God that is to come very intentionally into the here and now –
and for this we say thanks to God - in
Jesus name. Amen.
Margaret Garland
No comments:
Post a Comment