Even God Waits

[Click on this link to listen to this reflection as a podcast by the author: http://www.iksynod.org/Resources/Podcasts/2011adventweekone.html] 

Listen to this startling Advent assertion from Isaiah 30:18:

The Lord waits to be gracious to you. Therefore God will rise up to show mercy to you.

When we think of Advent waiting, we usually think of our waiting…or the waiting of our loved ones…or the waiting of the world. It’s the waiting expressed in so many psalms.

For example, Psalm 60: “I am weary with my crying; my throat is parched. My eyes grow dim with waiting for my God.”

This is the waiting at the hospital bedside of a parent or child.

It’s the waiting for a job, for resolution to a breaking relationship, for freedom from addiction.

This is the waiting for peace in war-torn lands, for the economy to turn around, for those without food to be fed.

Our waiting is deep. It’s often painful, confusing and lonely. We wait for God, often impatiently, even desperately.

That may be why it is startling to hear that even God waits. This ancient promise to people waiting in exile is a startling reminder that God gets there first. Before the exiles’ waiting for deliverance, before our waiting for joy, hope or peace, is God’s waiting to bring it.

As we journey with Joseph and Mary toward the birth Bethlehem, we are reminded that God’s waiting is gestational. While we don’t see much happening, God is working on fulfilling promises. In “due” time God will rise up to show mercy to us, as Isaiah promises. This is, after all, who God is:

…delivering from slavery in Egypt…restoring from exile in Babylon… birthing Jesus in the quiet of a Bethlehem night…raising this same Jesus from the dead in the early dawn of a Sunday morning…

At the right time, in God’s time, God’s waiting will come to an end and God will rise up to bring us home.

So, we wait, wrapping gifts, singing carols, drinking nog, sustained by bread and wine and Word and the company of others who wait.

And we wait under the canopy of God’s promises. There, right there in our uncertainty, alongside our pain, and in our impatient desperation, the very God who crafted the canopy of promise waits underneath it with us.

Hear it again:

The Lord waits to be gracious to you; therefore God will rise up to show mercy to you. For the Lord is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for him. [Isaiah 30:18]

You are blessed.

May your Advent journey be sustained and led toward Christmas by this promising light!