Sunday 1st December 2024
Jeremiah 33:14-16
Psalm 25
1 Thessalonians 3:9-end
Luke 21:25-36
Waiting isn’t a state that the modern world feels very comfortable with. Everything around us seems to demand that we act now. All last week I seemed to get messages telling me that If I waited too long, I might lose out on the best Black Friday deals; everyone who messaged me seemed to want me to rush to buy stuff I didn’t want and didn’t need. The world tells us that to keep up to speed with the frantic rush to get everything we need we’re told we must act and act now. But Advent Sunday, coming as it does just as all those Christmas tunes are becoming ubiquitous, reminds us that there is a different way to live. That ‘waiting’ in the Christian sense of the word doesn’t mean missing out, but rather that to wait is to have time to enter fully into the mystery that is God made real on earth here amongst us. And in today’s Gospel Jesus tells us how to wait; waiting he tells us is about two things, faith and prayer.
Last Tuesday I had two very different experiences of waiting. Driving home from work the traffic slowed to a complete halt and there we stayed. For two hours. Occasionally an emergency vehicle would rush by, reminding us that just a few miles away from the emergency services were working to help those involved ,but for the most part there was nowhere to go, and no way out. We just had to sit in our cars and wait. There wasn’t anything we could do except listen to the radio, and stare at the lights of the other cars, but all the time there was this restlessness and frustration-we didn’t want to be there-we wanted to be rushing to the next destination. Paradoxically, being forced to sit and do nothing was very stressful; I didn’t want to be stuck on the A27, and I got to Lewes feeling cross and impatient. And then I went straight to silent prayer where we sat in silence and in the candlelight. And here in church there was nothing to distract us-just the shared silence and the flickering of the candlelight. And during silent prayer I felt a deep sense of peace and contentment. I found myself repeating the opening to psalm 62;
‘On God alone my soul in stillness waits’ and gradually entering a form of waiting which was still and restful. I thought about those two very different experiences of waiting when reading today’s Gospel, because here Jesus helps us to understand how we should wait.
Luke’s listeners were waiting for the end of times; they’d seen the fall of Jerusalem and distress of nations. I’m sure every generation reading Jesus’s warnings of ‘distress among the nations’ since the time of Luke has made connections with their own time; in the past few weeks we’ve heard Russia threatening to use a new form of weapon to strike Kiev, we’ve seen violent storms across Europe and all the disturbing consequences of climate change. For many people today the ‘fear and foreboding’ that Jesus speaks of are a real and current state of being. This is waiting as intense anxiety, and connects us with Luke’s own listeners, but Jesus tells us not to be overwhelmed by the troubles of our times, whenever or wherever we may live. . The same natural world that seems to be in such upheaval offers promise of something better; Jesus tells us that as soon as the trees sprout leaves you know that summer is near’. We know that even though winter nights are long and dark the spring will come eventually. It’s having faith that transforms our waiting, and us. That message from the natural world is the one which Jesus wants us to have faith in. Faith in waiting is central to Jesus ‘s message in today’s Gospel. Jesus tells us not to be passive, not to give ourselves up to hopelessness, the sense that there’s nothing we can do, that everything is getting worse. ‘Be alert at all times’, he says.
And prayer, he says, should be our constant state of being.’ Prayer is how we should stay alert; listening and responding constantly to what’s happening around us, responding to events such as natural disasters or the strains on our mental and physical health or our anxiety about what the future might bring not by giving in to a sense that there’s nothing we can do to but instead having faith that our prayers can make a difference.
As we wait, we are being commanded to act by engaging calmly and quietly with God immersing ourselves in his presence through prayer. And that was the difference between the two experiences of waiting I experienced last Tuesday; stuck in that traffic jam I missed the opportunity to let myself rest in God, and it was silent prayer here in church that same evening that enabled me to do just that.
One of the things we struggle with in silent prayer is that urge to fill the silence with things we must do, with all the business of life. But Jesus calls us to use our waiting as time to put all of that to one side: to focus solely on encountering God through prayer. We don’t have to find words for what we’re thinking or experiencing, in fact too many words may hinder us and get in the way. The only words that matter are those which Jesus gives us; ‘my words will not pass away’, he tells us today. Perhaps Advent is partly about reflecting on the revelation that comes in our Christmas readings when we hear that ‘the Word became flesh and lived amongst us’. It’s our readiness to have faith in the truth of this statement, in that sense that God lives in us and in everyone and everything that we encounter, even when we’re afraid and fearful, or impatient not to wait any longer; the truth that Jesus says should inform our every waking moment. R.S Thomas expresses this mystery beautifully when he writes of kneeling before the altar in the silence of a church and sensing the presence of God and his saints there in the silence with him
‘the air a staircase
For silence….
And the audiences
Still; all that close throng
Of spirits waiting, as I,
For the message.’
R.S. Thomas is a priest himself, but he doesn’t have a way of putting that message into words, instead he tells us that the ‘waiting’ is its own message, and the silence of his prayer is how he encounters God
‘Prompt me , O God;
But not yet. When I speak,
Though it be you who speak
Through me, something is lost.
The meaning is in the waiting.’
The meaning we find in our own waiting will be different for each one of us, but as we enter Advent and the beginning of a new church year, perhaps we can learn to rest quietly in God, to grow in faith through our prayer and alert to his presence within and around us. We might try waiting in the silence of silent prayer here every Tuesday at 7, or we might use the Advent study groups as a way of deepening our faith. And then we, like R.S. Thomas, may discover our own meaning in waiting.
Amen
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