2009.11.29 - "Waiting: Beginning at the End" by Ken MacQuarrie (St. Andrew's PC, Thorold)
13.6 MB
14:52 min
Advent is a funny time – we find ourselves, in a number of ways, beginning at the end.
Even as the year 2009 prepares to draw to a close, we begin a new year here, now, today. The first Sunday of Advent is the first Sunday of our new Church year, our lectionary calendar. This makes sense – our church year begins at the beginning – the hopeful expectation of the birth of Christ.
But in another sense, we begin at the end. Take our scripture reading for example. This year, we journey through Advent with the gospel of Luke. We would expect to begin at the beginning of Luke’s gospel – the naming of John the Baptist, the angelic proclamation of the pregnancy of the virgin Mary, the census and the difficult journey to Bethlehem that the young Mary and Joseph had to take – you would expect to begin with the great hope which rested in this small, unborn child.
But today, we don’t begin at the beginning, we begin at the end – at the end of Luke’s gospel – just as the anger of the religious leaders and the betrayal of Jesus’ closest followers threatens to come to a head – Just as Jesus’ short life begins to be thrown into chaos, he speaks of another chaos.
As his beginning draws to an end, he speaks of a new beginning, which will come at the final end. Just as his life was one of goodness and justice brought down to the depths by hatred and disorder, he speaks of a new beginning, a new time, in which hatred and disorder will be wiped away by goodness and justice.
This talk of beginnings and endings is concerned with time, or more accurately timing, waiting.
Have any of you ever had to wait for someone who was ridiculously slow getting ready for something or was unbelievably late, even when you made it very clear that they had to be on time?
I recall one winter Saturday morning when I was a High School student. The night before we had received the most beautiful powder snowfall, and the morning was perfect – bright, crisp, clear.
I managed to convince my parents to let me borrow their van to take a few friends to the local ski hill for the day. I phoned up my friends to invite them I told them “Get ready, I’ll be there in about an hour.” I wanted to get to the hill as soon as possible so that we could experience a full day of skiing – I didn’t want to miss a minute of it.
I got on my warmest winter cloths, gathered up my skis and equipment, put them in the van and drove off to pick up my friends. The first friends were waiting by the front doors of their homes, skis in hand, every bit as excited about the day as I was.
However, after arriving at the home of a third friend, we knocked on the door and waited – and waited – and waited. Then he finally came and welcomed us in. Was he ready? No. In fact, he had just gotten out of the shower – he was still wearing his towel!
He invited us to come in and sit and relax while he got ready and gathered his things.
By the time we were ready to go, we had lost an hour of our ski-day and the rest of us were so irritated that we were wondering why we had invited him in the first place.
Waiting can be frustrating, waiting can be stressful, waiting can cause anxiety. And we do an awful lot of it. We wait for tests, for traffic, for planes, we wait on the phone, we wait in checkout lines. We wait and wait and wait and it can be frustrating.
The Christians of Luke’s day had their own concern about waiting – it’s a waiting that we have unfortunately grown quite accustomed to, but it was new and difficult for them. Jesus had died, Jesus rose from the grave, and Jesus ascended to heaven with the promise of his inevitable return. The question that arose, the concern that people had, was “When?”
In the opening chapter of Acts, Jesus ascends to heaven and the disciples stand there staring up at the sky, wondering, waiting. It’s not until someone asks, “Why do you keep looking up there?” that they angle their necks back down and begin to carry out the ministry that he called them to.
This is what the early Christians were doing – they had their necks kinked up to heaven saying, “When?” They didn’t know when Jesus would return. They thought that it would be sooner than later – days, months, maybe years. As time passed they became more and more anxious. When will he come? When would their hope be achieved? When would the fulfillment be?
Our passage this morning offers an answer to that question – at least in part. Regarding “when,” Luke is downright vague, refusing to offer any hint of a timetable for Jesus’ return.
Instead, he asserts that, just as budding leaves unmistakably proclaim the advent of summer, so also will the signs of the coming kingdom be transparent to the Christian community. And so the emphasis shifts from when these things will happen, to how Christians should live in light of the fact that these things will happen. Christians should be alert, ready and aware for the coming of the end. And so we try not be caught up in either the excessive pleasures or worries of the day, but rather to remain watchful. Through our joys and struggles, through our pleasures and trials, through successes and failures, we don’t let ourselves get bogged down. Rather, we live in hope –
hope that a greater future joy will overwhelm not only our current struggles, but even our current joys;
hope that a greater future pleasure will overwhelm not only our current trials, but even our current pleasures;
hope that a greater future success will overwhelm not only our current failures, but even our current successes.
It’s hard for us to feel comfortable with this passage. It’s very easy for us to read the passage in a negative light or in a negative tone. Hear Jesus’ words again:
“There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken."
It sounds negative; it sounds pretty scary. “Why would God want to cause confusion and distress and upset among the world?” we ask.
However, I would like to suggest that we, as Christians in the 21st Century Western World, are pretty poorly placed for a proper understanding of this passage. Jesus continues:
"Then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”
That last line is the key to our misunderstanding, “Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near."
We are one of the few Christian generations in the history of the church whose faith hasn’t cost us much. We are one of the few Christian generations who have been able to live virtually free of threat to our homes or families or livelihoods or lives due to our faith. One of the results of this safety, of this prosperity, is that we don’t seem to have much to hope for – we’re generally fairly content with what we have, apathetic even. Other generations, Christians in other times and in other places, hoped for their redemption from hopelessness, hoped for their redemption from the persecutions and sufferings that they experienced. And so for them, this passage, and passages like it were very very positive. For in them their rescue was promised.
We don’t generally experience the same trials that many of our spiritual ancestors have experienced, and so texts like our gospel reading for today often come across as alien, strange, even off-putting. Whatever worries we may occasionally have, most of us express little day-to-day concern about things like the end of the world and even less about Jesus' second coming. In this respect, perhaps we are very different from Luke’s original audience. But as different as we may be from them, we are every bit as intimately acquainted as they were with the challenges presented by waiting for an event that seems late in coming. We as individuals and as a community know what it is to wait.
Perhaps today you are waiting for an event on a national or global scale like economic recovery, an end to war in Afghanistan. Or we may be waiting an event on a personal level like the results from a biopsy, a letter from an estranged child, or the recovery of some great loss. Whatever the case, we know the challenge of waiting, the stress of waiting, the anxiety of waiting. As we enter into Advent, Luke offers us a perspective that, while it will not remove our waiting, it may affect the character of our waiting. We live, according to Luke, between the two great poles of God's intervention in the world: the coming of Christ in the flesh and his triumph over death, and the coming of Christ in glory at the end of time and his triumph over all the powers of earth and heaven. We do not live in the beginning, nor are we yet at the end. Rather, we live in this in-between time:
a time in which Christ has been revealed, but not fully revealed;
a time in which redemption has been promised, but not fully unveiled;
a time in which we may live in hope, assured of its final fulfilment.
This "in-between time," though burdened with tension, is nevertheless also characterized by hope. In the upcoming weeks of Advent we will again hear of the beginning – the promise and birth of the child in whom the hope of the world rests. This child is both the beginning and the ending of the story of the Church – and he is therefore the beginning and ending of our story. And so we are free to struggle, to wait, to work, to witness – indeed to live and die – with hope because we know the end of the story.
“History is full of examples of those who, because they had been to the mountaintop, [becaue they] had peered into the Promised Land, and had heard and believed the promise of a better future, found the challenges of the present not only endurable, but hopeful.
We, too, amid the very real setbacks, disappointments, or worries of this life, can ‘stand up and raise [our] heads’ because we have heard Jesus’ promise that our ‘redemption draws near’” (David Lose).
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