Christmas: After all the waiting, what changed?

In my local grocery store, the Christmas items were stocked and displayed from the day after Halloween. Now, the day after Christmas, they are gone without a trace. It was just merchandise to them. In my home, the Christmas decorations are still here; when their time is past there will still be signs of the one who was born. The celebration is of an event that matters. 

In worship this morning, the gospel reading focused on people who had waited a long time. Mary traded nine months of waiting for the reality of being a mother. At the Temple in Jerusalem, Simeon and Anna traded a lifetime of waiting for a chance to see Mary and Joseph present Jesus. But even for most people in Israel, it was another thirty years before they realized something important had happened. Simeon and Anna were paying closer attention to God's promises. They were watching, they were waiting, so they saw it sooner. Those who are paying attention to God's promises get "spoilers" about the future: that he has not left us, that he is with us, that he is acting for us even now. They enjoyed the hope and the celebration that others missed. The watching and waiting are not for God's benefit -- it is for ours. 

Advent 4: The fullness of time

We live in a culture that does not do well with time. Sure, we're obsessed with time. We pay close attention to time. We are expected to make good use of time -- and may think of that in terms of over-scheduling. And we like to do things faster. So another approach to time may not make sense to us. 

Jesus taught us about the kingdom of God, explaining that it is like things that cannot be rushed: growing seeds in a field, growing a mustard plant in a garden, baking bread. They take their time. Going faster can spoil things that are growing at their own pace. 

In this week's reading in church, we read of Mary and Elizabeth -- both pregnant -- meeting each other. Babies are another thing that takes time. They take the better part of a year to grow to full term. We know how long to expect, and the end of the wait is usually blessed, in the fullness of time. 

God challenges our faith in his promises to be as fixed as the faith of a pregnant woman: someone who knows that the fullness of time will come, and at the end of it a child is born. The present hardships are not to be compared with the good that is to come; in fact, they will be forgotten in the light of what comes after.

Come, Lord Jesus!

Advent 3: It's the waiting that gets us

God promised Abraham a son. And he couldn't wait! So he had a son, Ishmael, by his servant-woman Hagar. The son of the promise, Isaac, came later. That impatience has complicated the history of the lands inhabited by their descendants for millennia.

In the desert, God promised to lead the Israelites, and Moses went up the holy mountain for 40 days. The Israelites couldn't wait. And so they made a golden calf as an idol.

In the Garden of Gethsemane, the disciples had a different kind of trouble waiting: While Jesus went to pray, they fell asleep. 

As human beings, patience is not our strong suit. When God asks us to watch and wait, we either don't watch, or we don't wait. Sometimes we try to force a miracle to happen on our own terms and our own deadline. Sometimes, when something important is happening right in front of our eyes, we don't realize and aren't paying attention.

Part of Advent is waiting -- where we remember not just Jesus' original arrival in our world, but look forward to his return. Until then we have been asked to watch and wait, among our other tasks. The Gospel of Matthew records Jesus teaching parables that I think of as the Parables of the Long Absence: where a whole collection of sayings and parables drive home the point that the wait will be so long that the wait itself becomes a problem (Matthew 24:44-25:30). We can't say he didn't warn us. 

The wait is a temptation to force our own solutions, or find other solutions, or give up our expectations. That's what people do, when we are asked to wait a long time. But even when we try to force a solution, God still has his own. After Abraham had Ishmael, he still had Isaac. After the golden calf was turned to dust, God still led his people, still sealed his covenant with Israel. Those who have kept their expectations in God's promises have seen God prove himself faithful.

Advent 2: The Wisdom of Hope

I remember watching a football game some time ago, professionals playing. The team with possession needed a big play. The receivers went deep, but they were tightly covered. They kept scrambling to get open, but the people covering them were sticking close. Meanwhile the quarterback's defenders broke, and the quarterback was dodging erratically to try to stay upright against the people who had gotten through the line. He was nearly tackled more than once. Still the receivers were scrambling to get or stay open. It's not an unfamiliar scene in football, but this particular down kept going, the scenario playing out longer than it typically does, so it stuck in my mind. The quarterback persisted and eventually found an opening -- and found one of the receivers who had shaken free of his pursuer by just enough. The quarterback completed the pass to the open receiver. Those who supported that team were elated at the victory. It was a game-changer, a momentum-changer -- but it was not luck. None of it would have happened if any of the players on the one team had given up. For such a physical game, that play had a large psychological element. The receiver trusted his quarterback, or at least still hoped. Hope was not delusion, it was a shrewd play.

It is not unusual to hear people mocking the idea of hope as wishful thinking, delusion, or mere stubbornness. Cynicism is often mislabeled as realism. I can relate: the one play from a long-forgotten football game stuck in my mind precisely because I thought it was silly that they were still trying after everything had clearly gone against them. I wondered if they would accept defeat graciously. They may have been mature enough to do that; I'll never know because they were professional enough not to assume a loss just because they had more obstacles than any one player could overcome. Even when we advocate for hope, it can be difficult to catch sight of that clear opening that we're fighting for. Sometimes it can be hard to believe that our effort makes a difference. 

And yet it does. Our action -- based on our hope -- makes a difference to ourselves and to the people around us. Despair is a psy-op of evil. We live in a time when some rising causes of deaths are labeled as "deaths of despair" and yet people still mock hope. Depression -- in which a large component is adopting despair into the worldview -- is considered a major mental illness, yet people still manage not to consider the essentially healthy nature of hope. 

The reason it is easy to lose hope is because it is easy to misplace hope: to base it on someone or something that will fall. But for those who trust in God, hope is a shrewd play. 

Advent 1: A promise that we trust

In the general thought of congregations that I've attended, "The valley of the shadow of death" means this passing world, as does "The great tribulation." A sober or even gloomy assessment of this world is not limited to the ancient world; far from it. Some modern publications seem to revel in talk of doom, blame, and fear. And so it is well that we interrupt this scheduled programming for an important announcement: God keeps his promises. And he loves us, frightened little kittens* as he might see us. We're frightened because we know that human solutions will eventually fail us (see: estate planning, and insurance).

The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. And this is the name by which it will be called: "The LORD is our righteousness." (Jeremiah 33:14-16)

Those who believe in the promises made by the God of Israel dare to hope: not in our own names but in the Lord's. It allows us to let go of the fear, to breathe more deeply, and to look forward to the days to come.

---

* Hatchlings would be more scriptural, with the gathering chicks beneath the wings, but I find kittens more relatable if you'll pardon the license. 

Fellowship series index

 Fellowship series index

• Fellowship builds excellence: Iron sharpens iron
• In fellowship, we join our strengths and supply what is lacking
  
• Fellowship gives hope in adversity
  
• Fellowship create the friend that is closer than a brother
  
• There is fellowship is created by recognizing each others' worth
  
• Fellowship endures past the first test with forgiveness

Fellowship is not an optional part of following Christ. A new command he gave us, that we love each other. We cannot do that alone. 

Fellowship that endures past the first test

I plead with Euodias, and I plead with Syntyche, that they be of the same mind in the Lord. And I ask you also, true yokefellow, to help those women who labored with me in the gospel, with Clement also ..." - Philippians 4:2

Some quarrels are petty, others are understandable. Here we don't know the cause, only the effects: the disagreement was divisive. Quarrels hinder morale and productivity. They cause pain because they disrupt fellowship and friendship. Paul in his many letters explained so many things, and addressed all kinds of problems in the church. And he places enough value on fellowship that he stops to address this disagreement among members.

When we think about what matters in the church, it is easy to be high-minded: we think of teaching rightly, taking care of the poor, building peoples' faith, encouraging people in love, kindling hope, proclaiming forgiveness and reconciliation. All of those things are vital. But forgiveness and reconciliation are easier to teach than to live.

As for Euodias and Syntyche, we don't know which party was "right" or "wrong", or if those words even apply to the original disagreement. But it looks like the division was causing problems for the larger group, and in those problems we may recognize right or wrong. The people originally involved had not resolved their disagreement; had they let it fester? We've all been in the company of people who are in an enduring disagreement; it can be unpleasant. There is a cost to the hearts of other people around them. 

From inside the quarrel, it may have looked like a matter of right and wrong. It may have looked like a matter of harm and grudges. After awhile, from the outside, those things usually look like stubbornness and pride.

Is a heart ever cleansed without repentance? Is a harm ever healed without forgiveness? Repentance from one person, forgiveness from another person -- they seem like such different things. But they both require humility, and they both require that love becomes more important than the cause of division. Lack of repentance, lack of forgiveness -- in my experience, both generally come from pride. Christianity forbids us to turn the faith into a system of keeping score about who was right: "Love keeps no record of wrongs." When the system has no interest in keeping score about who was right, forgiveness and repentance are not such different actions. And no fellowship survives the first problem intact without both.