Toward Pentecost (42): Wait

A Video for December

It is December. Here's my video pick for the themes of December. The amazing Mumford and Sons, I Will Wait. (Any "alt-folk/rock" group that uses brass has my vote any day!)

And I'll kneel down
Wait for now
And I'll kneel down
Know my ground

And I will wait, I will wait for you
And I will wait, I will wait for you

Raise my hands
Paint my spirit gold
And bow my head
Keep my heart slow

Cause I will wait, I will wait for you

An Extra Week Before Advent

Most of us are so used to the Christmas "season" beginning after Thanksgiving that when Thanksgiving is as early as it can be (like this year) everything seems a little off. We have our star already lit in our front window, but Advent doesn't start for another six days. I uploaded my Christmas playlist to my iPod and iPhone yesterday, but it is technically a few days too early. (But I still put them in my shuffle on the way to work this morning!)


It seems really odd to be waiting for Advent. That's like a double negative or even an oxymoron of some odd kind or another. Advent is about waiting.

But it isn't time to wait yet. But it's time, we want to say. Thanksgiving is past. Let's get on with it.

Ah, but that other word for Advent- patience. Actually it is a year-round word.And I can have a difficult time with it. Advent will get hear on its own schedule. Christmas will follow as sure as night follows day. Not on our schedule, but on its own. God's time. Kairos, not chronos.

Kairos (καιρός) is an ancient Greek word meaning the right or opportune moment (the supreme moment). The ancient Greeks had two words for time, chronos and kairos. While the former refers to chronological or sequential time, the latter signifies a time in between, a moment of indeterminate time in which something special happens. ...While chronos is quantitative, kairos has a qualitative nature. ... In the New Testament kairos means "the appointed time in the purpose of God", the time when God acts.
--Wikipedia

I guess that means I should take this as a week of kairos, a week UNTIL I have to wait. Perhaps it is a week to learn patience by staying in today and looking for the special quality of God's time when something special happens.

I have a hunch that time is now.

Don't Pray for Patience...

...because God will make you wait.

I thought of that on Sunday morning as we began the Advent season- a season of waiting. As was said in the sermon, Christians have been waiting now for 2000 years.

So, who's praying for patience?

Well, we all need it, I am sure. It is a cliche that we live in an instant gratification world. We want what we want when we want it reinforces that need to have it at the minute we want it. It wasn't that long ago (in historic timeframes) that the only things you bought on time were cars and houses. Now, as we pile up consumer debt encouraged by the world around us, we might even end up paying high interest rates on a candy bar or case of Pepsi.

We are not willing to be denied. Our waiting is avoiding the longer line.

Advent is no longer about waiting. It is about getting things done earlier and earlier, doing what we want as soon as we can. It is no longer the "hopeful anticipation" that the church knew for centuries before we became more aware of the greater world and its possibilities and we became jealous or covetous.

Lord, I don't like it when my ramblings take me where I don't want to go. Cure my impatience and jealousy by letting me celebrate what I already have, and then to live in the hope of what can yet be.

Is It My Imagination?

As I have been watching the news recently I get the feeling like I am watching some Sci-Fi disaster movie. It's not quite Cormack McCarthy's The Road, but it has a feel to it.

• There are earthquakes all over the place with the wailing and death and overwhelming grief every where we look.
• There are floods and tornadoes all over the Mid-West.
• Don't forget global climate change which may actually be helping cause the previous and many others including the next one.
  
• There are food riots and shortages where there aren't just high prices.
• The gas prices sound like doomsday projections with truckers in Europe throwing appliances off an overpass to protest the trucker who was trying to get through the blockade.
• And now tomatoes are the latest food to fall prey to being dangerous or even lethal.

If I were one of those religious fanatics (of just about any stripe) who see the end of the world coming, I would probably look at these and see the end of the world coming. We sit and look around us and see more problems than there are easy solutions. We see problems that potentially could start more wars than we know what to do with. One has already been started at least partly over access to oil in Iraq.

What's next?

Unfortunately it is in times like these that we can easily fall into despair, fear, anger, hopelessness, and just about any emotion. It is in times like these that we can begin to think that the end of the world is near. It is in times just like these that the Book of Revelation was written. Now I don't want to get into any of the controversies of the End Times Theologies based on this book and others like it.

But what I do want to do is remind myself that the overarching, underlying, and completely surrounding message of that book is hope. Then you add to that the power of faith and you are called into patient waiting. Why? Because the world is just as the world is. And God is just as God is. And God is still right where God has always been. In heaven.

And we Christians would add, within us through the Holy Spirit.

Does that mean we are immune to the problems of the day? Absolutely not. Does that mean that we can escape higher gas prices, the rumbling of the earth or the floods that arise out of nowhere? Of course not.

But it does mean that even in the midst of all those there is God. And that God loves me unconditionally. And that God will guide us in whatever ways are possible to make it through these times with our faith strong and our hope fulfilled.

At times just like this I am consistently reminded of the powerful and comforting words God gave to Julian of Norwich. Julian was a true and deeply faithful mystic of the church. She wondered how good can happen in the midst of sin that can destroy God's very own creatures. His words to her still ring out as words of eternal promise. They were spoken within a Christian context but I think they can speak of that deep faith that ultimately says "Yes!" to life and God and hope, no matter what the name given to those.

I make all things well,

and I can make all things well,

and I shall make all things well,

and I will make all things well;

and you will see for yourself

that every kind of thing will be well.

...And in these words God wishes us

to be enclosed in rest and peace.

Advent Expectations

Advent is coming to a close. Sunday will more likely be seen as a Christmas celebration than as the 4th Sunday in Advent. But Inward/Outward had a post yesterday that reminds us that, as I see it, we are always living in a time of Advent- waiting for his coming. It's from Evelyn Underhill, a remarkable and deeply spiritual writer of the 20th Century. Read it slowly and let it move you closer to His Coming.

As we draw near Christmas, the sense of our own need and of the whole world’s need of God’s coming–never greater perhaps than it is now–becomes more intense…. We seem to hear the voice of the whole suffering creation saying, ‘Come! Give us wisdom, give us light, deliver us, liberate us, lead us, teach us how to live. Save us.’ And we, joining in that prayer, unite our need with the one need of the whole world. We have to remember that the answer to the prayer was not a new and wonderful world order but Bethlehem and the Cross; a life of complete surrender to God’s will; and we must expect this answer to be worked out in our own lives in terms of humility and sacrifice.

If our lives are ruled by this spirit of Advent, this loving expectation of God, they will have a quality quite different from that conventional piety. For they will be centered on an entire and conscious dependence upon the supernatural love which supports us; hence all self-confidence will be destroyed in them and replaced by perfect confidence in God.
Source: The Fruits of the Spirit