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! 

Christmas Imposition

On the 16^th of November, waiting in my favorite coffee shop for the arrival of my venti bold with a little room, I found myself humming along with the music wafting from the speakers in the ceiling. Before I even realized what I was doing my mind caught up with the words of the song:

Angels we have heard on high, sweetly singing o’er the plains…

Yikes! Mid-November and the Christmas season was imposing itself on me, sneaking up so stealthily and unexpectedly that I didn’t realize it until the angels reached the refrain to sing their glo-o-o-orias o’er the espresso.

I know that this early advent of Christmas carols in a coffee store is, in some ways, not much more than crass commercialism working to get me in the mood to rescue the economy by spending more than I should this Christmas. It’s as if the mermaid on my coffee cup was singing a siren song sweetly and subliminally underneath the angelic refrain: “Gloria! Buy early and often!” (Believe it or not, that actually works with the rhythm of the refrain; try it.)

Yet, I wondered as I wandered across the city sipping the hot java: Might this also be a sign of the impatience and persistence of Christmas?

The world and I yearn, we ache, for signs of God’s nearness, of God’s steadfast love and transforming presence. We cry out for rescue, relief and redemption, sometimes with sighs too deep for words. And this healing, this relief, this new life is precisely what God promises to bring through the babe born in Bethlehem. So urgent is our need and so sure is this, God’s promise, that the promise imposes itself impatiently and persistently on our days. It sneaks in where it can, rises up from unexpected places, swoops down from unimagined heights to draw near and sweetly sing God’s steadfast love to our aching hearts: Come to Bethlehem and see!

This is the gladsome tiding that inspires the heavenly song that imposes itself on our days. God is near in the One wrapped in swaddling clothes in a manger, stripped and strung on a cross, and who left the swaddling clothes behind on the floor of the empty tomb for us, for the world, right now, today.

Look for this Emmanuel, listen for the angel song announcing his nearness, this holy season and always.

Gloria in excelsis Deo!