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Wake up! Advent is a season of waiting, but sometimes it feels like we’ve forgotten what we’re waiting for. Or that we’ve settled for what we’ve got because what we’re waiting for is taking too long to get here. I wonder how many people have hollered at God to wake up?
This past Monday I felt like yelling at God to wake up. I know God doesn’t actually sleep, but I couldn’t either, after the news from Ferguson. The same day I saw that news, there was a twelve year old kid shot and killed on a playground in Cleveland, because somebody called 911 on him for playing with a toy gun in public. Kids see guns everywhere, turn sticks and even Barbie dolls into guns, they play cops and robbers all the time. But tensions are higher in some communities than others, and we stop seeing each other as people when we see only the weapons and threats we might be.
In Chatham this might not seem to be news we need to consider. One story is from Missouri. Another from Ohio. But the church of God is bigger than place, and in the Body of Christ, when one part of the body suffering, all suffer together, just like we celebrate together when new parishes open, and we send food and money to world hunger as much as we do to local pantries. It is because God has connected us all together. Because God has cared for us so much, we are drawn to care for each other, even when all we can do is pray.
But it is precisely the problem of being divided - and I don’t mean by opinions or politics, I mean set against one another, or over and beneath each other - which the prophets bemoan. We can look at national and global news as a way to see ourselves more clearly, to think about those stories like the parables we have, where we put ourselves in the shoes of a few of the character types and consider what we would do, what we would wish we could do, what we would like others to do concerning us. We are part of this history just by being alive now. My kid sister was born the year the Berlin Wall came down. I was a freshman in college when the World Trade Center fell. The world we live in is different after those events, in ways we are still coming to terms with. And if our faith, and our hope, don’t say something about how to live in the here and now, then what good is it?
Yet the world isn’t all that different. History keeps repeating itself. It’s like the Old Testament prophets have the best job security, because we are always getting stuck in these cycles of fear and broken behaviors, so the prophets’ words of hope and peace are always relevant. As people beg God to wake up, God also begs us to wake up. To recognize our interconnectedness and our mutual dependence on someone and something greater than ourselves. The Body of Christ is riddled with cancers and gangrene for all of the ways we cut one another off and only share with those with whom we agree. We need a good and capable surgeon, strong medicine, and the desire to live, in order to recover. We need resurrection.
Advent is a time of waiting, but it is not passive. Waiting, and working, like Gandhi has said, to be the change we wish to see in the world, is expectant and hopeful. I’m not talking about the waiting in line for Black Friday deals, hoping to get the best price on a new television. I’m talking about waking up to the presence of our loving, creative God, here among us and between us. I’m talking about the waiting to see how God will bring about reconciliation and new life, as God has a history of doing even when we turn the other way. I’m talking about the end of the world as we know it. The end of the fighting and the fear. The end that must come so that we can be reborn into newness of life.
This is what we are waiting for. What we are hoping for. O that You would tear open the heavens and come down! That your children would stop fighting! That the nations would stop warring. That the hungry would be fed, and the naked sheltered. That our hearts would know true peace and every man, woman, and child would be welcomed and embraced and safe, here, and in Ohio, and in Ferguson, and around the world! That every pain we know, and have known, and might yet know, would not be our ultimate end.
That is the promise of Advent, brothers and sisters. Even at the end of the world, God will be there with us. Even at the end of everything - at the end of our rope, at the end of our patience, at the end of our strength and our joy and our life - there will be the promised Messiah. For every beginning must follow an ending. And we are beginning a new year, looking for the beginning of new life. Keep awake, therefore. Resurrection has already begun.
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