I
don't know about you, but sometimes I get this panicky feeling when I realize
that Advent is just around the corner. There is so much to do: shopping for
gifts, innumerable Christmas parties to attend at school, sport clubs, church.
Getting organized for out-of-town guests, etc. What comes to your mind when you
think of Advent? Christmas markets and Glühwein? (A German hot mulled wine) Advent calendars and wreaths? Candles,
cookies, shopping, gifts? Food, music, church, gatherings? Waiting is the topic I want to speak on this evening. Advent is
the time during which we eagerly (or maybe not so eagerly) wait for Christmas!
If you google the word, you might find this definition on Wikipedia: Advent, anglicized
from the Latin word adventus meaning "coming",
is a season observed in many Western Christian
churches, a time of expectant waiting and preparation for the
celebration of the Nativity of Jesus at Christmas.
Waiting is a universal phenomenon
Another
difficulty we have with waiting, is that it never really comes to an end until
we die. No sooner than we have received that for which we were waiting, we start
waiting for the next thing. We always tend to believe that what comes next will
be bigger and better than our current situation. As a child, I felt like I
could hardly wait to be grown up because then, life would really start. When I
was a student, I could hardly wait to graduate so I could be a part of the
adult world, the real world. Once I graduated, I could hardly wait to find a
husband because then I would be truly happy. Once I got married, I started
thinking that having children would make me even happier. Once I had children
and was in the baby stage, I started waiting with great expectation for the
time when my child would finally sleep though the night. Once my children were
toddlers, I could hardly wait for them to be old enough to speak, to be
toilet-trained, to go to preschool in the morning so I could finally have a
little time to myself. And so, it keeps going on and on....
Waiting involves longing
The
truth is that waiting is such an existential part of our life, because waiting,
at its core is about longing. There is an emptiness in us that makes us long
for more, for something bigger and better that what we are or have now. We long
for meaning and security. We long to be known and loved and appreciated. We
long for beauty and justice. We long for things to be just right, or even perfect.
That sense of longing can appear in all areas of our lives, be it relational,
professional, emotional, physical, spiritual, intellectual, you name it. Have
you ever thought about why this is? Why do we long for things to be better? Is
our human experience just about the survival of the fittest, as Darwinian,
evolutionistic thought would tell us? One might agree that the desire to
survive, to reproduce and protect oneself is part of the survival of the
fittest...but what about the longing for love, and beauty and justice, dignity
and self-sacrifice? These concepts cannot be explained from an atheistic,
evolutionary vantage point because these things are completely irrelevant to
the concept of survival of the fittest, in fact they even hinder it. My father
recently wrote a birthday email to my son on his 14th birthday. I want to share
a portion of it with you:
"I preached this morning from Psalm 8 (he is a
minister) which teaches about the person of God and human dignity. I mentioned
Eric Liddell, a Scotsman, winner of the men's 400 metres at the 1924 Summer
Olympics in Paris. He had the world record for the 100 metres but would not run
in the finals because they were staged on a Sunday (you may recall this was the
theme of the movie Chariots of Fire.) The Japanese polytheists and the Chinese Marxist, 63 years later, recognized true human dignity
in this man. After his Olympic success he went as a missionary to China, and
was imprisoned in a concentration camp in 1943 where he served the sick and the
dying, until, on February 21, 1945, five months before liberation, he died of
overwork and malnourishment. In 2008 near the time of the Beijing Olympics, the
Chinese authorities revealed information from 1945 that had somehow been
preserved by the Japanese that Liddell had refused an opportunity to leave the
camp and instead gave his place to a pregnant woman. He gave his life to save
this woman, and it only became known 63 years later. The Japanese were amazed
and shared their amazement with the Chinese who made it known in 2008. That is
the way Jesus lived. That is true maturity, and eventually people recognize it.
You are in my prayers that you will have this goal, Christ-like maturity,
always before you."
Darwinian
survivalism leaves no room for this sort of behavior, nor can it explain it.
Liddel surely had waited and longed for his own release, he probably fantasized
about it in his daydreams. But when the time came, he was able to relinquish it
and give his place to a pregnant woman. What enabled him to do that?
Waiting shows us we are made for
something more
I
would love to propose to you that the waiting we experience and the longing we
feel when we have to wait is a sign to us that we were made for something more
than just this world. Have you ever thought of that? If this world is all there
is, why is it that we long for things this world can never really offer? C.S
Lewis, a writer and Oxford professor wrote "If I find in myself a desire
which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is
that I was made for another world" (Mere
Christianity). Another author, Saint Augustine, an early church father
wrote in a well-known prayer to God: "You made us for yourself, and our
hearts are restless until they rest in you." This is an amazing
proposition! God made us for himself! For relationship with him. The
restlessness we experience comes from expecting other things to truly satisfy
us and fill that God-shaped void.
The
incident at the computer with my son got me thinking about God as our
heavenly Father. He sometimes says "wait a minute" to us too. He is
not a heavenly vending machine built to give us what we want, when we want at the push of a button. Sometimes those
minutes turn into weeks, months, or years. But the delay in his answer is not
because he is too busy to deal with us, too wrapped up in himself to notice us
or that our requests are unimportant to him. God certainly doesn't mean
"never" when He says "wait." In fact, 99% of the Bible
could be wrapped up in one word: "wait." Humans alienate themselves
from God when they decide they know best...In fact, the very first woman
described in the Bible, Eve, made God her enemy when she failed to wait on God.
She, being proud and impatient, took her life into her own hands. Yet, even
after her great failure, God promised Eve that a descendant of hers would reconcile
humanity with God. Thousands of years later (now that's a long wait!), God sent
his son Jesus to this earth to do this very thing: to open up the way for us
to have a relationship with God again. Through Jesus, who made a way for us by
dying on the cross, the God-sized void in our hearts can be filled again.
Is
there a longing in your heart that you recognize tonight as a deep longing for
God? If you do, the good news is that Jesus can satisfy that longing. All it
takes is to recognize your emptiness, your need of him, believe that he paid
for your sins on the cross and receive his forgiveness. When we do this, we
receive a new identity as children of God. And when we have God's approval, we
don't need to strive for the approval of men. When we have God's love, we can
live without the love of a man. When we have God's forgiveness, we can afford
to not take revenge on those who have harmed us. It is this new sense of fulfilled
identity that gave Eric Liddell the ability to forfeit his freedom and give it
to another. Jesus gives us everything we need for life and happiness. All of
our longings can be satisfied in him because He promises us life in full. He
also said that he would come again and set all things aright and that we would
live with him forever. So even our desire for a perfect, peaceful and unending
world filled with joy will be satisfied through Him someday. But for that, we
have to wait. I can hear your skeptical question, because I have it too: So why
do we still struggle with waiting even though Jesus has already come? This
answer may not satisfy you completely, but it does helps me in my doubts. The
answer is really more of a question. Could it be that the waiting contains a
message and a meaning almost just as significant as the answer itself? Waiting
entails longing. Maybe not getting what we want right away forces us to long
for God's presence instead of his presents. The Advent season and waiting
for Christmas is not really a good analogy for me. Not that it is bad to
"wait for Christmas" but, really, that's looking back to an event
that already took place. Waiting for Jesus' return is a much more fitting,
up-to-date biblical paradigm that challenges me to truly wait, walking by
faith, not by sight. Jesus told us in the Bible that he would return "in a
minute."
C.S Lewis describes that moment when our earthly waiting will come to an end in his children's book, The Last Battle which is a part of the Narnia Series. In this series, 4 children travel to a magical land called Narnia and encounter a Lion named Aslan, who is a picture of Jesus. In the last book, at the very end Aslan ushers the children into his country. This is what Lewis writes:
“And
as He spoke, He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began
to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And
for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they
all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this
world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title
page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no
one on earth has read, which goes on forever, in which every chapter is better
than the one before.”
Waiting
on chapter one of the great story challenges us to trust him. To believe Him.
To wait on Him. Can you and I live in the gap, between what we know to be true
and what we believe will be true? Can we wait in this season of Second Advent,
not with passivity but with action, like Eric Liddell, that shows we believe
God doesn't mean "never" when he says "wait"?
