"All we can do is wait" - a sermon for Advent Sunday

Isaiah 2: 1-5; Matthew 24: 36-44.

We have, as a Church, entered Advent, the season of joyful hope, the time when we are called, in the words of that wonderful prayer of the season, to be found by the Lord watching and waiting.

Unsurprisingly for Advent Sunday our readings focus on this theme of waiting. No where more so than in our reading from Matthew’s Gospel. In this Jesus implores his followers to keep awake because you do not know when the Lord is coming.

On Advent Sunday we stand with the first hearers of Jesus’ teaching waiting expectantly for the coming of the Messiah. Our waiting will be short lived – just over four weeks – although that will feel agonisingly long for some of the younger in heart among us. However, for Jesus’ disciples, for the people of Israel, the wait for the coming of the Messiah, the saviour, had been a long long struggle, centuries old.

Commentators remind us that this theme would have been at the forefront of the first hearers of this Gospel. For the people of Israel the waiting had got all too much for them. After the long-held promise of the Messiah had not seemingly come to pass, they were beginning to take matters into their own hands. Threatening and eventually taking up arms against their Roman oppressors, to do the work they expected their Messiah, and so God, to do. But this human impatience only led to the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem as Jesus foretold.

This problem of impatience, of not wanting to wait, is not an historical phenomenon, but one which we all experience day by day. We like to hurry things along, to get on with things, and if needed to sort things out ourselves if things haven’t got started soon enough for us. Impatience, a reluctance to wait, is, you could say, hard-wired into all of us. What, after all, were the actions of Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the Tree of Life, but the ultimate human act of impatience? We might want to get on with things, to hurry things along, but God does not want us to do this. God wants us to watch and wait. 

So, as we fast-forward two thousand years we find that this human impatience, this reluctance to wait, is still there. If your email inbox is anything mine it has been full of insistent Black Friday deals for the past two week telling us to buy things now before all the good deals are gone. “Buy things now, not tomorrow, now, and even better buy them yesterday, for delivery now!” Even if it was found that 98% of “Black Friday deals” weren’t worth buying.

Or perhaps you remember the story of voter in Sheffield at a recent general election who was furious because the polling stations had closed before they could vote; however as they told their story it turned out that they had gone to polling station several times earlier in the day, but had left, because the queues were too long and they couldn’t be bothered to wait.

But God wants us to watch and wait, and the thing is, if we do, then amazing, unexpected, and glorious things can happen. 

For a long time we, as a family, have loved the South-Tyne Valley running from Alston to Haltwhistle. It was a decent day trip when I was a curate in Whitley Bay and on our doorstep when I was Vicar a little further east in the Tyne Valley. When this job became available an attraction of it was that we would still be close to a place we have come to think of as home.

Once when walking there on a day off, we walked along the riverside. As we walked I saw, in the corner of my eye, a flash of grey-blue and heard a splash and we realised that the Salmon were swimming and leaping their way up stream. This is one of those natural wonders we had never seen before, so we decided to watch and wait and see if another Salmon would leap out of the river. There is no way we could make the fish jump, and no way of knowing how long it would take to see this would happen again, if at all.

All we could do was wait.

And as we waited, not really knowing what would happen, rather than get bored, we started to notice more and more the vibrancy, and beauty of everything around us: in the colour of the late-autumn trees; the sound of the river flowing; the changing patterns of the clouds in the sky – things we would not have seen, not have noticed had we not chosen to watch and wait.

The problem for all of us is that when we are asked to wait we assume it is for something and we get impatient for it. But we fail to realise that there are glories all around us, hidden in plain sight, if only we had the time and patience to watch and wait. When we are forced to wait we accept that we can’t do anything to change the situation. We could not make the Salmon leap. All we could do was wait. 

But in that waiting, in releasing ourselves into God’s time and God’s plan, we become more able to see the glimpses and promises of God’s grace all around us. And as we learn to wait we discover these glimpses of grace come not only from our attentiveness to the world around us, but to our attentiveness to God’s presence with us in the midst of our hurried and busy lives.

Ann Lewin finds this insight, as I did, by a riverbank.

Prayer is like watching for the

Kingfisher. All you can do is

Be there where he is like to appear, and

Wait.

Often nothing much happens;

There is space, silence and

Expectancy.

No visible signs, only the

Knowledge that he’s been there

And may come again.

Seeing or not seeing cease to matter,

You have been prepared

But when you’ve almost stopped

Expecting it, a flash of brightness

Gives encouragement.

All we can do is wait.

So, we are all invited to take the chance of Advent, this season of joyful hope, to take time to stop and to wait. You might come this evening to our Advent Carole Service and watch and wait in words and music in the beauty of this ancient place. You might buy and sit with an Advent Candle each day and allow yourself to watch and wait as the candle burns down each day closer to the end. You might stop and read scripture each day or realise that we are never ever too busy to pray.  Or you might simply wander somewhere and see the changing glories of the countryside all around us.

If we find the patience to wait and watch and hope, as we found standing by that river-bank, you will encounter more flashes of wonder, more simple signs of God’s grace, than you could ever have imagined.

So, did we see the Salmon leap? 

Well all I can say is that it was worth the wait.