For December 20

What Are We Waiting For?

My argument with Advent this year began with a hymn that is stuck in my head:

For you O Lord, my soul in stillness waits,
Truly, my hope is in you.
—Marty Haugen, ‘My Soul in Stillness Waits’

The problem is, my soul does not wait in stillness. It is impatient and fidgety, uncertain about exactly what it’s waiting for.

I know that I am not alone in my Advent uncertainty. When I turn to the Advent Sunday readings I find something like a medley of the greatest hits of expectation, generations of  stories of God’s people waiting in anxious anticipation. Three weeks of readings from the prophet Isaiah speak of God’s promise to bring the chosen people back home from the misery and desolation of exile. Peter’s and Paul’s letters to the early Christian communities give advice on how to wait for the time when Jesus Christ will come again. In the Advent gospels, John the Baptist prepares for Jesus to begin his ministry, and the Angel Gabriel prepares Mary for his birth.

So much waiting, and for such different things! So what then, am I supposed to be waiting for? Surely not for something that has already happened? Jesus has come, lived, died, been raised from the dead–historical and profound events which, at least on my good days, already shape my life. The Advent scripture’s long and varied traditions of waiting are not offering the answer I seek.

So this year, I am searching for a good metaphor for Advent. I have been looking for a familiar experience that can help me understand what I can’t quite grasp about Advent and waiting. I think about much of our lives is filled with all kinds of waiting.

We are waiting for a successful vaccine campaign, and we look forward to when our lives might seem normal again. We wait for our children’s births, as Chris Ross wrote about so beautifully in last week’s bulletin essay (read it here), and then we wait for them to finish their homework, to get home safely from a night out, to fly from the nest. We might spend months training for a marathon or triathlon; we might spend years preparing for our professional debuts. Google and Alexa can probably tell us exactly how much of our lives we spend waiting in checkout lines. And finally, we may find ourselves waiting for death to come.

As I’ve considered and discarded all these experiences of waiting, I find myself returning to the memory of one scene. It’s a bit blurry from repetition with different tiny actors in the lead role. Here it is:

In the middle of the night, I awake to the awareness that someone is watching me, waiting. I open my eyes to see a toddler in fuzzy pajamas with a blankie over one shoulder. Like Samuel, or Elijah in the cave, I’m not sure if I hear my name (“Mom? Mom? Mom!), but I slip out of bed and into a robe. Without turning on the lights, we head down the hall hand-in-hand to rescue a stuffed critter from under the bed, or for Tylenol for aching ears, or to curl up together in a child-sized bed until sleep returns for both of us.

The memory of this scene, as it played out over and over again, reveals how being a parent gradually transformed me. I became someone who could be awakened to answer the needs—even the inarticulate ones—of the people entrusted to my care. The memory of a child standing in quiet stillness by my bed helps me to understand the mission that John the Baptist points toward, the one that Jesus will teach and live: as disciples, we are to care for the vulnerable people who wait for our care, whether they happen to share our household or the planet.

But wait—what if I were to play a different part in this remembered scene? What if I am the one waiting in inarticulate and urgent need? What if I am waiting for God to notice me, to tend to all that tumbles together in my soul? I may not wait in stillness, but at least the second line of Marty Haugen’s hymn makes sense: truly, my hope is in you. Indeed, as Peter said to Jesus in John’s gospel, “Lord, to whom would we go?” Now my memory illuminates the almost unbelievable reassurance of Advent. God, the transcendent creator and sustainer of all that is, will be roused to comfort me in whatever hot little mess I have gotten myself into now.

But wait again—what if God is the one waiting for me? What if God waits with the same unspoken confidence of my child waiting for me to turn toward her? Isn’t this exactly the story that Luke’s and Matthew’s gospels tell us, as we move from Advent to Christmas—that God enters our world not only just like us, but as un-God-like as a newborn child? What wondrous love is this? as the anonymous hymnist sings.

 And so I have found my Advent metaphor: a memory of a familiar experience that by grace reveals some flicker of understanding of what my soul awaits. God’s people wait for me; I wait for God, and God waits for all of us, in confident hope that we will open our eyes to love.

Why do I tell you all this? Because I trust that our infinite God addresses each of us specifically and directly. Because I hope that whatever songs or phrases stick in your head in these unusual Advent days, whatever scenes play out over and over, whatever of Christmases past lingers in your memory, one or all of them may reveal to you where God’s grace is incarnate in your life. I pray that, this Advent and Christmas, you too will find hope where God waits for you.