I wonder how good you are at
waiting. It’s part of life – standing in a queue, waiting at the traffic
lights, waiting for a repair man to turn up, waiting for your shift to end,
waiting for a hospital appointment, waiting to arrive at your destination. Most
of us don’t much enjoy it. Despite the fact that many things are now available
almost instantly – instant communication by email and text, travel that is
faster than our ancestors could have dreamed of – it can seem that we have even
less patience than we’ve ever had. In places where we have to queue – at the
post office or the bank for example - there are often tv screens displaying
adverts or information to while away the moments. And we whip out mobiles or
other devices to fill in the empty time whenever there is a delay on a journey.
You might even have a car with multi-media screens in the rear seats so that
children never have to be bored enough to ask “are we nearly there yet?”,
though I expect they still do anyway.
There’s a lot of waiting in our
readings today. The Old Testament prophet, Isaiah, writes for the Jewish people
in exile in Babylon. A whole generation has passed away since Jerusalem was
destroyed and they were taken away from their homeland, a generation that has
gone like the grass that withers and dies. Is anything ever going to change, or
are they stuck there forever? Some had given up hope of a return. They had
stopped waiting, and had decided simply to abandon any thought of returning. Some
believed that what had happened was their fault anyway; they must have done
something wrong for this calamity to fall on them, so why would God even bother
to rescue them? But Isaiah tells them that help is on the way, and it is worth
waiting for. God is coming to lead them home, and nothing is going to stop him
– the mountains will be levelled, the valleys filled in. If they don’t wait, if
they don’t hang on in there, they’ll miss the moment.
For those who did wait, history
tells us that help came. The Persian king Cyrus overthrew Babylon and allowed
the exiles to return to their own lands. The Jewish people went back and
rebuilt their Temple and their city. The waiting may have seemed endless, and
some of them didn’t live to see that return, but it came eventually. The exile
wasn’t going to be the end for the Jewish people after all.
In the Gospel reading John the
Baptist is waiting too, waiting for the time when God would send his Messiah,
his chosen one, who’d bring in a new kingdom, a new way of life. “The one
who is more powerful than I is coming after me; …I have baptised you with
water; but he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit.” Like Isaiah, his
faith wasn’t misplaced, and when Jesus began his ministry, it was John who
pointed him out, sending his own disciples to follow him.
Both these readings tell us about
people who were waiting for things that did in the end happen. In the light of
history we know that they didn’t wait in vain. Their waiting had a happy end.
The people in today’s other reading, from the second letter of Peter, had a
rather different experience, though.
The early Christians believed
that Jesus would return to earth very
soon; maybe this month, maybe next, perhaps next year, but surely no longer
than that, they thought. They believed he would come in clouds of glory,
breaking open the sky. It’s all there in the letter; the heavens passing away,
the elements dissolved, the earth and everything that is done on it disclosed.
It would be something no one could miss, and when it happened it would signal
the beginning of a new age, dramatically different from all that had gone
before. They shaped their lives accordingly. St Paul told people who were
single not to get married – why bother if the world as you know it is about to pass
away? Everything was going to be different. All bets were off. If parts of the
New Testament sound rather odd to our ears it is because it was written during
a time when most Christians thought like this. The Gospels assume this is going
to be the case. We can’t know whether Jesus believed it himself, but the Gospel
writers certainly seem to think he did.
But the months passed and the
years passed, and where was this second coming they were expecting? The decades
passed and there was still no sign of it, at least not in the way they were envisaging.
It was a real crisis for them. Right up
to the end of the first century, this belief was central to their faith. The
fact that they were prepared to keep waiting shows how strongly they believed
it, and of course it has resurfaced from
time to time ever since. There are always Christians proclaiming that this or
that event is proof that “the end of the world is nigh”.
When Jesus hadn’t reappeared by
the end of the first century as those early Christians expected, some of them
probably abandoned their faith, but most began – quite sensibly – to ask
themselves whether they had been correct in their expectation in the first
place. In their eagerness for the mess of the world to be cleared up and for
the kingdom of God to be fully established, they had fallen into looking for
the quick fix, the apocalyptic magic wand, God’s dramatic intervention. They’d
missed the subtler, quieter message of Jesus that the kingdom would come like
yeast raising bread dough, or a seed sprouting unseen in the ground, fragile at
first, but growing into a tree that gave shelter to all. They’d also missed his
message that it would come through them, through their love and care for
others, their work in the world.
“We wait for new heavens and a
new earth, where righteousness is at home” said the writer of this letter –
and so do we all. One glance at the news tells us how much we need the world to
change, for it to be a place where “righteousness is at home”. But the
question is whether we see that just as a divine gift, landing from the
heavens, entirely separate from anything we are doing, or whether we see
ourselves as having a part in making that new world.
The thing is that waiting can
take many forms. Sometimes it is passive. There’s nothing you can do to hasten
it, nothing you can do while you are waiting that will prepare you for what is
to come. Shuffling along in an endless post office queue is a bit like that.
Assuming you’ve got your parcel wrapped up and addressed, or your forms filled
in, all you can do is stand there until your turn comes round. What you are
doing while you are waiting makes no difference. The length of time you have to
wait makes no difference – it is just that bit at the end when you finally
reach the counter that matters.
But there are other sorts of
waiting that are active, where what you are doing as you wait affects what will
happen at the end of the wait. If you are pregnant ,the time you have to wait
until the baby is born isn’t just wasted time. During those months, the child
is growing inside you, being built out of the very stuff of your body. As any
pregnant woman knows, what you do during that time, what you eat and drink, how
you take care of yourself profoundly matters. It is a source of huge anxiety,
in fact. The list of dos and don’ts gets ever longer. You can’t make the baby’s
birth come any sooner by anything you do, but what you do is crucial to how that
baby grows. There is a natural process going on which you can’t control, but which
you are vital to. It’s like the yeast growing in the bread dough, or the seed
sprouting, to use the metaphors that Jesus used of his kingdom. They take as
long as they take to do their work. You can’t hurry them, because you need a
good process to get a good result.
“Regard the patience of our
Lord as salvation”, says Peter. No matter what strange beliefs he may have
had about the future, he’s onto something very true and sensible here. It is in
the waiting – God’s waiting and our waiting – that we have the chance to grow
to be the people we are meant to be. How does the world become a place where
“righteousness is at home”? a place where goodness is natural and normal, as it
should be? Through our lives becoming places
where “righteousness is at home”, where we have learned to live with kindness, respect
and love towards others; that’s how.
In a sense all of life is
waiting; we are all time travellers, heading for a future we can’t predict or
control or hurry along. We wait to be born. We wait to grow older. We wait, in
the end, to die. It all takes the time it takes. But if all life is waiting,
then waiting is also life. Each day is a gift, each day a day in which what we
do makes a difference to the future.
I wonder what you will have to
wait for this week; for the kettle to boil, for the lights to turn green, for
the queue to move on? How would it be if, instead of reaching for something to
distract us from the wait, or tutting and fuming, we tried to wait actively?
How would it be if we used those moments to pray for someone, to notice the
world around us and the people we are waiting with? How would it be if we took that time to ask,
“what needs to change in my life? What can I do so that righteousness is at
home in me?” Maybe if we do, we will find that that God has showed up in
our midst, after all, with the love and the peace we were waiting for all
along.
Amen
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