Have you ever noticed how uncomfortable people are when nothing is going on? The great pianist Rachmaninoff tells of giving a piano recital when he was very young. He began with a Beethoven sonata that had several long rests in it.
During one of those long rests, a motherly lady leaned forward, patted him on the shoulder, and said kindly: “Honey, play us something you know.”
There is an awkwardness in silence, in waiting.
Do you remember your first date? Do you remember those long, painful periods of silence while riding together in the car? We are not very good at handling silence. It’s awkward, confusing. We are not very good at waiting.
A man was in a restaurant. A waiter was passing by. “Excuse me,” said the man, “but how long have you been working here?”
“About a year,” replied the waiter.
The man said wearily, “In that case it couldn’t have been you that took my order.”
Waiting is no fun.
Over the next few weeks our boys and girls will become restless with expectation and excitement waiting on the coming of Christmas. So it is with the people of God. The Old Testament concludes with the people of Israel waiting on a coming Messiah. The New Testament concludes with the followers of Jesus awaiting his return. We have been waiting now for more than 2,000 years.
Waiting is hard to do. Sherwood Wirt deals with waiting in his book Freshness of the Spirit. He reminds us that much of life is spent waiting.
“Think of nations waiting for their rulers to die. Oppressed peoples waiting for a deliverer who will lift the yoke of the tyrant. Merchant traders waiting for their ship to come in.
“Lord Reith, the founder of the BBC, says that he spent virtually the entire period of World War II by the telephone, waiting for Winston Churchill to call him. He never [called]. And think of all the [ordinary] people waiting today at the airport, at the bus depot, at the doctor’s, at the amusement park, at the bowling alley, at the post office, the ticket office, the unemployment office, the Social Security office. Society has become a vast waiting room.” (1)
Waiting for the return of the Messiah. Much of the New Testament is devoted to the second coming of Christ. We dare not ignore those important Biblical teachings. Nevertheless, there are some clear Biblical principles for those who wait.
The first is to be patient. Jesus was as explicit as he could be no one knows the hour or even the day when the Son of Man shall return. He will come as a thief in the night. No one knows. Oh, I know that it is good box office among some Christians to always be looking for the right signs. Some preachers preach on nothing else. There are two dangers in trying to rush God, however.
The first is that in constantly looking toward the sky we will ignore the responsibilities we have here and now.
You may know the story about the little boy who had returned from his first two weeks at summer camp. He showed his mother two badges that he had won: one for making improvements in swimming, the other for naming the most birds on a nature hike.
There was a blue ribbon in his pocket signifying a third prize, and his mother asked him about that. “Aw,” he said, “I got that thing for having the neatest packed bag when we were ready to come home.”
“I’m proud of you,” his mother said.
“No big deal,” he said. “I never unpacked it in the first place.”
If we are constantly looking for God to right the world’s wrongs some day in a great cataclysmic conclusion to life on this earth, we may never “unpack our bag” and realize that it is here and now where God has placed us.
As Thomas Carlyle once put it: “Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.”
The second danger is that we shall be taken in by false messiahs and there are many.
In 1978 the whole world was shocked and dismayed by reports from Jonestown, Guyana where the Rev. Jim Jones led hundreds of people into one of history’s darkest hours mass suicides and mass murders. These were not ignorant, primitive savages in a far off land. They were American citizens who had fallen under the leadership of a mad man.
We don’t see many signs nowadays of the Moonies. Their founder Rev. Moon and his Unification Church have faded into the background. At one time he boasted considerable political support. He invested heavily in the elections of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Rev. Moon built an empire by putting young people out on the streets selling flowers. Moon preaches that a new messiah is soon to come. This new messiah is on earth already. He is a man born in Korea in the 20th century. Wonder who he could be? Surely not Moon himself! False messiahs are forever with us.
We need not even deal with such self-deluded creatures as mass murderer Charles Manson who gathered a group of seemingly intelligent young adults as his followers. Manson once said, “My philosophy is: Don’t think.” That is the philosophy subtly expressed by all false messiahs. Don’t think. Reason is the enemy of all fanatics. But false messiahs do come along every once in a while.
Be patient. No one knows the day or the hour of Christ’s coming. God has spent millions of years creating this world. It has been 2,000 years since Christ came into the world. God has his own timetable. It may be today or it may be another 2,000 years. Let no one mislead you. Be patient.
The second admonition is to be faithful. Some of you remember the ancient epic poem by Homer called the Odyssey. It is the story of Odysseus who traveled the world pursuing many adventures. Meanwhile back home his beautiful wife Penelope was being pursued by various suitors trying to take advantage of Odysseus’ twenty-year absence. In order to keep these suitors at bay, Penelope announced that when she finished weaving a particular garment, she would choose among these persistent suitors. There was something these suitors did not know, however. Each night Penelope undid the stitches that she put in during the daytime, and so she remained faithful to Odysseus until he returned.
That is our call to be faithful. While we wait for Christ’s return, we are his body in the world, called to do his work. The church has been serving the world in Christ’s name for two thousand years. Now is not the time to let up.
We hear criticism of the church. Some of it is justified, some is not. We are not perfect. Some of what we do is very mundane.
A pastor once said, “I sometimes fear going into heaven to stand before the Master with his nail-pierced hands. When he asks, ‘What have you suffered?’ all that I will be able to show him is a paper cut from folding the bulletin.”
Well, folding bulletins is important. Singing in the choir is important. Working with children and youth is doubly important. We are here doing our duty as we await the coming of our Lord.
Some of the criticism we hear of the church is justified, but much of it is ill informed. We need not overlook the church’s problems, but neither should we hide her accomplishments.
Some of you know the story of writer Anne Lamott. When she was twenty-five, her father died after a long struggle with brain cancer. Over the next few years Anne herself began to suffer from an overwhelming sense of desperation and fear which she tried to suppress with alcohol and pills. Although she was managing to write and publish successful novels at the time, it was clear that her life was spinning out of control. In her memoir, Traveling Mercies, she writes about this dark period of her life. And most importantly she tells how a community of Christian faith, a neighborhood church called St. Andrew, came to her rescue.
In her book she tells the time-honored story of a little girl who was lost. This girl ran up and down the streets of the big town where her family lived, but she couldn’t find a single landmark. She was frightened. Finally a policeman stopped to help her. He put her in the passenger seat of his car, and they drove around until she finally saw her church. She pointed it out to the policeman, and then she told him firmly, “You can let me out now. This is my church, and I can always find my way home from here.”
Anne Lamott writes, “And that is why I have stayed so close to mine because no matter how bad I am feeling, how lost or lonely or frightened, when I see the faces of the people at my church, when I hear their tawny voices, I can always find my way home.” (2)
Be faithful. Remember Albert Einstein’s words after the Second World War: “As a lover of freedom, when the revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but no, the universities were immediately silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers, whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities were silenced in a few short weeks. Only the church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing truth. I never had any special interest in the church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration for it, because the church alone has had the courage to stand for intellectual truth, and moral freedom. I am forced to confess that what I once despised, now I praise unreservedly.”
We are Christ’s body in the world today. Be patient. Be faithful.
But one thing more: be prepared. Be prepared for Christ’s coming. Be prepared if he should come today; be prepared if he should tarry another thousand years or more. Be prepared at any cost, for we simply do not know what tomorrow may bring. Nothing is more unpredictable than the future. If there is one lesson from history, it is that.
I read recently that when the city fathers of the grand metropolis New York City planned for the future growth of their city, they laid out the streets and numbered them from the center outward. When they began, there were only six or seven streets. In their planning maps, they projected how large they thought the city might grow.
Reaching beyond their wildest imagination, they drew streets on the map all the way out to 19th Street. They called it “Boundary Street” because they were sure that’s as large as New York City would become. At last count, the city had reached 284th Street far exceeding their expectations! (3)
Be careful when you try to predict the future. Today’s experts turn out sometimes to be tomorrow’s fools.
In 1881 the New York City YWCA announced typing lessons for women. Amazingly, angry protests greeted this announcement. Why? Many believed that the female constitution would break down under the strain.
Some of you women can remember when girls were only allowed to play half court in basketball for the same reason. Nobody envisioned what today’s women athletes would be capable of.
There is still so much we don’t know about all the things that matter most, and predictions can only be based on current knowledge. Who could have predicted the wars that ravaged our planet in the twentieth century? Who could have predicted the scourge of terrorism in our own time? What wise person predicted the collapse of both the real estate market and our major financial institutions last year?
With all of the latest super computers, economists cannot even predict with certainty what our dollar will be worth next year. As one man put it, if all the economists in the world were laid end to end, they still would not reach a conclusion.
We worry about global warming, but a recent report suggested that the explosion of one enormous volcano could theoretically blot out the sun and spell the end of human existence on this planet. We don’t know what the future may bring. We may be here another million years. On the other hand, today may be our last day on earth. Jesus tells us to trust God and to wait. Don’t worry about what tomorrow may bring. At the same time prepare yourself emotionally, mentally, spiritually for whatever may come.
In the Greek there are two words for time one is “kairos” and the other is “chronos.” “Chronos” as in “what time is it?” is a neutral kind of word. “Kairos,” on the other hand, is a word charged with power. As in the phrase “THIS is the time.” It is that word that Paul uses when he talks about the time of the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
This may be the time. Or it may not. It is certainly the time to take stock of our lives to see if we are prepared for an unknowable future. Live each moment as if it were your last moment. The good that you would do, do now. The love that you would give, give now. The commitment you would make, make now.
As John Ruskin once put it: “Let every dawn of morning be to you as the beginning of life, and every setting sun be to you as its close; then let every one of these short lives leave its sure record of some kindly thing done for others, some goodly strength or knowledge gained for yourself.”
This may be the hour. That is the lesson for this first Sunday of Advent. Be patient. Be faithful. Be prepared.
1. Sherwood Wirt, Freshness in the Spirit (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978).
2. (Anchor, 2000).
3. Rev. Adrian Dieleman, http://www.trinitycrc.org/sermons/eph3v20-21.html.