ACTIVE WAITING

(Preached on Sunday, November 30, 2008)

So, stay at your post, watching.  You have no idea when the homeowner is returning, whether evening, midnight, cockcrow, or morning.  You don=t want him showing up unannounced, with you asleep on the job. -Mark 13:35-36

 

Nine months seems like a long time off, yet parents will testify to how quickly the time passes, for the most part, because there is so much to do to get ready for the arrival of that baby.  There is a nursery to get ready, supplies to purchase, a name to pick.  There are arrangements to make around work, around family to come to help out, sometimes around other children already in the house.  A bag for the hospital must be packed, important telephone numbers gathered onto one list, the quickest route to the hospital discovered.  A season of pregnancy is a season of great excitement and expectation.  It is also a season of preparation.  It is not a season to just sit back and passively wait for this child to grow and be born.  It is a season of great activity.  It is also a season of surprise, for though the parents know the child is coming, the exact day of arrival is never a certainty.

 

Today is the first Sunday of the Advent season.  Today=s gospel reaches for strange, stirring imagery, signs from heaven, darkened sun and moon, the Son of Man coming down on clouds, all to say that the present world in which we live is not fixed, final.  There=s a new world a=coming.  Something is being born among us.  Wait.  Watch.  You will see a world breaking open into something new and wonderful.  God, having begun creation, shall finish creation.  There shall be a new heaven, and a new earth.  Advent is not about getting ready for Jesus= birthday but about bracing ourselves for the full revelation of the mystery of God coming to birth in our flesh.

 

Most of us think of waiting as something very passive, a hopeless state determined by events totally out of our hands.  The bus is late?  You cannot do anything about it, so you have to sit there and just wait.  It is not difficult to understand the irritation people feel when somebody says AJust wait.@  Words like that seem to push us into passivity.  But there are different kinds of waiting.  Some waiting is passive.  But there is also active waiting.  A girl who stands on a street corner waiting for the bus to arrive will experience one kind of waiting, a passive waiting.  That same girl on the same corner hearing the sound of a parade that is just out of sight will also wait, but it will be a different kind of waiting, full of expectation, a waiting on tiptoe, an active waiting.

 

Jesus= admonition to Awatch@ is a plea to us to be alive to each moment of our individual and communal journey.  We can choose to wait passively for God to appear.  We can live our lives as if the world were a waiting room, not merely flipping through magazines, to be sure, but generally filling the time with whatever is at hand, occupying ourselves with the tasks of the day.  We may assume that an all-knowing God knows where to find us if God ever wants us.  Such passive waiting does not require much in the way of our attention or energy.  Such passive waiting is dangerous, though, for it can lead to us falling asleep in our lives.  It can lead to mind-numbing routine, never changing what we do in life, never taking risks or trying something new.  It can lead us to fall asleep in our lives by shutting down creative thought, never challenging our perspectives on life and the world and God, accepting what some authority figure, some preacher, some politician, some teacher, tells us to think.

 

If we dull ourselves to the experience of life, we shall miss God=s coming.  Through active waiting, though, we pay attention to the ordinary in order to discover the extraordinary in-breaking of God=s grace.  Advent is a reminder to engage in active waiting, by watching, paying attention, and making space for the waiting.  In that space we free God to be God in our lives.

 

Dorothy Bass in her book Receiving the Day: Christian Practices for Opening the Gift of Time, tells of a mother who had a simple way to help develop this active waiting attitude in her children.  It was a new version of the common parental question, AHow was your day today?@  As she tucks her children into bed each night, this insightful mother asks instead, AWhere did you meet God today?@  Her children are used to this question, so the answers come tumbling out: AMy teacher helped me.@  AThere was a homeless person in the park.@  AI saw a tree with lots of flowers on it.@  The mother then shares with them some ways she has met God in the course of the day.  Comforted by the awareness of God=s presence in their lives, the children fall contentedly off to sleep.  As Bass puts it, AThe stuff of this day has become the substance of their prayer.@  And those children have been taught how to actively wait for the presence of God in their lives.