Dec 01 2024 10 mins 1
Well good morning and happy Advent! We made it. We survived Thanksgiving and now we are well on our way through the holidays. This morning, we celebrate the first of four Sundays that make up the season of Advent.
As you can see, our chapel has been wonderfully “Advented”. My personal favorite feature of our chapel in this season is our beloved Advent wreath stand. I affectionately call it the “Shin Cracker” as I have painfully bumped my shins into so many times when moving it in and out of the chapel. Thanks be to God I was spared that duty this year.
We all know that the season of Advent is often most famous for being about patiently waiting. I must confess that I’ve never really known what that means but it always sounds good. However, I can say with honesty that I do know what the opposite of patient waiting looks like.
A few weeks ago, I got cut in line. Don’t worry, it was not here in the chapel or in the refectory. It was actually at Logan Airport.
You see my plane had landed and taxied and I had spent several minutes doing my best waiting for all the rows in front of me to get up and leave. When it was finally my turn, I started to stand up and felt a pair of shoulders brush up against me and a man sliding past me. I quickly realized I was being cut! I turned to look at who had cut me, and I met eyes with a man who looked back at me with cold indifference.
I’d like to stand here and tell you I acted like a calm, cool, collected monk and immediately started praying for the man, but I would be lying. I wouldn’t say that I was filled with murderous rage, but I was definitely angry. It was late, I was hungry, and I just wanted to go home. All I could think about was that this guy had ever so slightly delayed that from happening.
So it was great irony that about twenty minutes later, I stood shoulder to shoulder with this same man waiting at baggage claim. Something had gone wrong and our bags had been delayed getting on the right carousal. As I stood there watching the empty carousal go round and around, I couldn’t help but laugh at myself. All that rage I felt over being delayed a few seconds just to go wait in another place for another thing to happen felt so ridiculous. Yet, that’s me, another human being.
In this season of Advent, we are called to examine our relationship with waiting. Not just waiting for anything, but waiting for God. It’s a serious task.
Every at the beginning of every Advent, I try to remind myself how much time and energy I spend waiting, planning, and comparing what is happening with what I had planned for to happen. Speaking as a monk, I often feel embarrassed at how often my mind is not where my feet are.
One of the greatest dangers in life is to be constantly waiting for one thing to end just so that you can hurry up and move on to waiting for the next thing to end. It’s an easy trap to fall into. A permanent mood of stop and go traffic with your day to day life.
It can be hard to see God when we are constantly looking at our watch. It can be hard to have compassion for our neighbor when we see them as obstacles on our way home. It can be hard to be honest with ourselves when we are hyper focused on getting things done as quickly as possible.
We often know what we are waiting for and why we are waiting for it. However, we don’t always ask ourselves the question how we are waiting? Are we waiting with anxiety? Are we waiting with anger? Are we waiting with God? Are we waiting with love?
These are the kinds of questions we answer with our lives. Both in the big parts of our life, like family, friends, and health, but also in the tiny parts of life, like getting off of an airplane. How we wait for one thing is how we wait for everything.
So what does Jesus have to say about how to wait? In our Gospel this morning, Jesus speaks in a serious tone about how to wait. Jesus is speaking about the Kingdom of God coming near. Jesus tells us to stand up and raise our heads. Jesus tells us to be on guard. Jesus tells us not to have our hearts weighed down by the worries of life. This is serious.
So how do we follow Jesus’ words here? How do we stay on guard and wait in the way Jesus’ wants us to?
Start by considering the world in which we live in. I know it’s cliche to say, but we live in weird times. It’s ok to admit it. It’s gotten hard to tell what’s going on nowadays, it’s gotten hard to know what’s going to happen, and it’s gotten especially hard to know what to do about it.
We always run the risk of temptation in times of darkness, confusion, and anxiety. We run the risk of indifference becoming the norm. We run the risk of cold heartedness becoming acceptable.
To be present, with Jesus, in the world we live in, with the life we have, is always a challenge. To put aside our fears, our regrets, and sometimes even our strongest desires, in order to be fully aware and present to God takes a lot of effort. We must run to meet God.
The good news is that God is always present. No matter what we’ve done or how we feel, or how tired and hungry we are, God is present to all of us. We must be on guard to meet God, no matter what the circumstances of our life are.
In just over three weeks from today, we will gather here again together to celebrate the Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and it will be a joyous occasion. In between now and then, we are bound at some point to be stuck in traffic, or waiting for a response to an email, or waiting for better days. Stay awake. Be vigilant. Be ready for God.
