My father has never been one to want to wait. When I think of my days in school, I think of all the times I rushed and rushed myself out the door because my dad was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs. Or I think about when he would pick me up from school or sports practice, and I’d have to be sure to give a good 15 minute cushion for his arrival time to ensure that I would be standing on the corner waiting when he came to pick me up.
He didn’t like waiting. And so when he and my mother would return home from a trip and need a ride home from the airport, he’d call me as soon as they land to come pick them up. I’d hurry over to the airport to find that they had not made it off the plane yet, not made it to baggage claim, and not made it to the curb where I pulled up my car. And so, if you know airports, I couldn’t stay there; I’d have to keep my car moving, which means taking a big circle around the airport and hoping that it would take enough time to get my parents through the airport.
I’d take the big loop around the airport waiting for them to arrive, only to find they hadn’t made it yet. And so I’d circle around again. And again, and again, and again, usually. It became almost a game for me. Circle around, idle through the carport, peruse the curb, and then circle back, hoping that this trip the timing would be right and they would be there at the arrival gate.
Pull up, wait, idle through, circle back, wait again.
I think the life of a Christian is like that often. We’ve been thoroughly trained to think in progressions, that as we move forward in time we move forward as people. We become better, we work harder, we don’t make the same mistakes. And we who follow Jesus hope for the same – that each day we become more and more like Jesus, we seek peace in our lives more often, we become more giving and generous, we constantly seek ways to tilt the scales of the world towards the poor and those in need. But the reality is, we are more human than that. We often find ourselves circling back, facing old challenges we thought were dead and gone, falling back into patterns of behavior we thought we had left behind long ago, and still striving to be more like Jesus.
Time and experience are not so linear, if we’re honest. Instead, it’s more like pull up, wait, idle through, circle back, and wait again. It’s cyclical.
I think that’s what I love about our liturgical calendar and the Revised Common Lectionary that we use to tell the stories of Jesus throughout the year. It follows a three year pattern of texts that we will hear many times throughout our lives. But beyond that, each year follows a pattern of seasons – Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Ordinary Time, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, More Ordinary Time, and then Christ the King Sunday – and then we start all over again.
Yet even beyond that, those who follow the lectionary closely find that the texts themselves cycle again and again WITHIN the year. The genius of the lectionary, for me at least, is that it pairs text and event, and sometimes a text repeats with an entirely new event – showing us that the text can be heard in new ways:
We hear the Parable of the Prodigal Son in Lent and we learn the value of the journey and the deep longing for home we all experience. We hear it again in Ordinary Time and we learn that this is a common experience, that we all have family struggles and people who leave us, even if we’d rather them stay.
We hear the passion of Christ during Holy Week and we learn that you can’t get to the glory of Resurrection without going through the pain of Golgotha. And then again, we hear the passion at Christ the King Sunday, and we find that this reign of God, this Kingdom is not like any Kingdom of this world – it is not run through power and coercion, but through suffering and witness and forgiveness.
Time collides with event and experience to give us new meaning. It gives us a new rhythm and pattern for life, even as we are increasingly uprooted and unsettled by the corporate and political world. It attaches us to a new timing for things and allows us space to work through life, not as a linear progression, but as a cycle, giving us space to breathe and meditate and give deeper meaning to things as they keep surfacing again and again.
It shows us that this is not chronos, the linear understanding of time, but the kairos, God’s time – the time outside of time when God is working and moving deeper in our lives.
And that brings us to this first week in Advent.
Advent is a peculiar season, and is becoming even stranger as the Consumer Christmas strangles out any deeper meaning of the season. As the corporations and talking heads teach us to race quicker and quicker to the shops, Advent teaches us to wait. Advent is a Latin word, Adventus, meaning “Coming” or “Arrival.” We wait for the arrival of the Christ child.
The texts help shape our waiting. This first week, we read from the prophet Isaiah the longings of a people in exile for the coming reign of God, when God, not humankind, will judge between nations, and when people will seek peace and learn to study war no more. This was the first longing of a people for a Messiah, a Redeemer, that we as Christians say has come in Jesus Christ of Nazareth.
But Advent doesn’t leave us there. We are pitted between those ancient longings and the words of Jesus, that the reign of Christ will come again, at the end of time. We are torn by the text between the Kingdom of God that we see in the live of Jesus and the Kingdom of God still to come, between the now and the not yet.
This is a peculiar kind of waiting – we are excited, we celebrate, yet we also groan and long for peace, for God’s reign to come swiftly. And we keep circling back, waiting to see if the time is right for Christ’s reign. This is our waiting.
When the world tells us to rush to the malls, to buy and buy, to spend ourselves for material wants, Advent tells us to wait.
When everyone is shouting “It’s Christmas time!” urging us to live in the revelry and extravagance of this time of year, we Christians know it is not time yet. It is Advent and Advent tells us to wait.
When technology implores us to be faster and begs us to be more distracted and disconnected, Advent tells us to wait and to watch; watch for this curious Messiah that came to us an one unknown, in a manger in the hill country of Palestine, and who will probably return just as quietly and inconspicuously to those with eyes to see.
And waiting can be hard – especially when we are waiting for things like war to cease, for the hungry to be fed, and for there to be justice and equality for all people in the world. All I can say is that difficult things like the transformation of the world into a place that is more just and equitable, where people live together in love and peace and where God’s reign is realized in the world, well, those kinds of things can take time.
And so we circle back again and wait to see if the time is right.
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