What Are You Waiting For?

-

Advent is a season of waiting.  A pregnant pause before the passing of the old and the coming of the new.  

 It is in this season of waiting that we symbolically await the arrival of the Messiah as part of our ret-telling of the story of how God became one of us to rescue all of us.  

 But what is it that we are really waiting for during this blessed season of Advent?  What are we expecting to find when we come to the end of it, and usher in the new year?  

 We journey through this season filled with memories, marked by our traditions, and charged with the purpose of finding gifts, hosting gatherings, enduring family drama, and checking the boxes on our to-do lists and calendars.  

 But we long for something more--something deeper.  We long for things to be different.  We long for the kind of connection with the Divine that so often eludes us, keeps us living in the dark.  

 We long to know that God sees us... hears us... knows us.  

 And this is what Advent truly teaches us, if we are willing to lift our heads up long enough to learn... God is near.  God is with us.  God is for us.  The story we tell and re-tell is a story about that very idea.  

 Fr. Richard Rohr puts it like this:  
God is not as transcendent as we first imagined, which was definitively and forever revealed in Jesus.  It seems God is humble, identifies with us, is fully on our side, and is actually for us more than we are for ourselves. 
If we would be instructed by our Advent journey, we should be instructed on how the story of the coming of the Christ is not stuck in the past.  

 While the story of Advent is certainly the story of God acting in the "fullness of time" at a particular moment in our history, it is not just something that happened.  

 The story of Advent, the event we are waiting for, longing for and desperately expecting is the story of how God is arriving among us right here and right now.  

 Beloved, God is near.  God is for you.  God will never be far away from you.  

 God is making Godself known to you right now through the energy and Spirit of the eternal, universal Christ, who is always arriving in the most unexpected ways.  

 Your longing, and waiting during this blessed season is not in vain.  

 May you come to believe this with all of the unfettered joy of a child on Christmas morning.  May you come to know this in your heart of hearts.  May it be so today and always. 

 And may the grace and peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you now and always. Amen.   

Comments

Post a Comment

Thanks for leaving a comment! If you comment Anonymously, your comment will summarily be deleted.

Popular posts from this blog

Wuv... True Wuv...

-
Image
Go ahead. Ask me what my favorite "chick flick" is. The Princess Bride , that's what.  The pic at the top of this entry gave it away, I know. There are three reasons why it is my favorite "chick flick." 1. It's not a chick flick.  2. The only kissing is at the end of the movie... where it's supposed to be. 3. It has Andre the Giant in it. Any of these reasons could stand alone in their own right as pretty dang valid reasons why The Princess Bride is atop my list of romantic films.  But when the aforementioned reasons are lumped together, I don't see how anyone could argue against it. There is a scene in The Princess Bride that makes me giggle a whole lot...the wedding scene where Peter Cook, playing a priest with a speech impediment presides over Princess Buttercup's almost wedding to the evil Chris Sarandon (and I hear he's still pretty evil).   Here it is. Wuv...  true wuv...  gotta love that. I've been reading and re-re...
Read more

Rapha & Yada - "Be Still & Know": Reimagined

-
Image
One of the most well-used verses in the Bible comes to us from Psalm 46:10, which reads like this:  He says, “Be still, and know that I am God;     I will be exalted among the nations,     I will be exalted in the earth.” That one line---"Be still, and know that I am God"---finds its way into greeting cards, wall art, church signs and the like.  And it sounds so nice, doesn't it?  But what does it actually mean ? What does it mean to be still  and know  that God is God?  Well, to dig deeper into that phrase to see what it's really saying, I'm going to have to bust out some Hebrew--so, don't hold it against me. The Hebrew word that's used here for the phrase "be still" is the word  rapha. And get this... It means "to hang limp, sink down, be feeble."  That's a heckuva lot different than what we usually take the phrase "be still" to mean, right? I don't know about you, but whenever I have heard that verse ...
Read more

The Lord Needs It: Lessons From A Donkey

-
Image
This Sunday is Palm Sunday---the beginning of Holy Week. It's also one of those Sundays when you can't ignore the church calendar and just preach whatever you want.  I am sure that some people do just that, but they probably aren't Presbyterian, and I am sure that the liturgical rhythm of the Church is not first and foremost in their mind. And they probably have had no trouble at all working on their sermon this week. I'm not one to blindly follow tradition, but there are some things that you just don't do---and you can't just ignore  the story of Jesus' Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.   But this leads to a bit of a quandary...  In the short time I have been doing this whole preaching thing I have gone through the Palm Sunday story a few times.  After a while you sort of wonder if your congregation has heard your Palm Sunday riff a few too many times. That sermon needs to get preached, though.  While we celebrate the che...
Read more