2011-11-27–Advent 1–How to Wait
How To Wait
Our neighbours to the south have—so it seems—survived another Black Friday. I read that in some places, people began camping out days before so that they would be in the front of the line when the stores opened in the wee hours, this past Friday morning. Have you ever wondered why Black Friday is called Black Friday?
It’s not because of the swarms of people and the incredible amount of stress they put retail sales staff through. Those workers may indeed feel like it’s a black day, but that’s not what Black Friday means. Nor is it because the stores open while it is still dark outside. It is now taken to an extreme where. One store in Detroit closed at 9 for three hours in order to restock so that they could re-open at midnight to take full advantage of the 24 hrs that Friday would provide. Not to be outdone, many Walmarts never closed Thursday and simply started bringing in Black Friday inventory Thursday night at 9.
No. Black Friday is black because that’s the day that many businesses hope to move from operating in the red to operating in the black. From Black Friday until the end of the year, it’s all profit. The payroll, the rent, the utilities, the inventory—all the costs have been met. Now it’s time to reap the rewards.
In that sense, Black Friday is the fully secular equivalent to Christmas Eve. It represents the end of waiting and the beginning of celebration. The kingdom really has come—it comes every year. Then, come January 2, it’s time to start all over again. You’re back in the red and you start the climb to the next Black Friday.
An awful orgy of mass consumption in front of the idols and altars of false gods might be how the prophet Isaiah would describe it.
Come on, Rector. Do we really need all this religious language? After all, it’s just shopping. Consider these words: “Christmas is all about money. With money, we buy stuff to pour into that great sucking hole in us and it’s never full.” The words could easily come from a fundamentalist preacher or an Occupy Wall Street protester. That’s a strange set of bedfellows, isn’t it? But either could have said it. In fact, it comes from the character, Max Black, one of the leads in the sit-com “2 broke girls.” Here we have a frank acknowledgement from mainstream culture that the Black Friday version of Christmas is indeed about metaphysics. For on Black Friday, like no other time of year, we are confronted with the fact that money is being used to satisfy not needs for food, clothing, and shelter, but a hole inside of us; a hole that is never full.
St Augustine, who wrote, “You have made us for yourself O Lord and our hearts will not rest until they rest in you,” could not have said it better. Of course, where Augustine would point us to what Christians believe is the true satisfaction of ultimate desire—the most Glorious and Blessed Trinity—Max and her roommate Caroline confront the fact that they can’t do any better than money. The episode from this past week ends with them committing to tap-dancing at the edge of the abyss because the Black Friday version of Christmas is all they have. They’ll keep throwing money down the hole. They’ll keep watching “Miracle on 34th Street.” They’ll keep embracing what I can only describe as sexual anarchy. And they’ll keep hoping for better because that’s all they have. And this was supposed to be a happy ending. I think it’s sad.
What on earth does this have to do with Advent? Advent is a time of waiting. Of waiting not so much for Christmas as for the coming of Jesus. And as we followers of Jesus attune ourselves to him and turn our heads and hearts to his coming, we might just begin to see ourselves and the spaces our lives occupy in a different way. I hope that Advent gives us opportunity for distance from all the noise that surrounds us, noise that seems deliberately to distract us from the deep sadness and cynicism that undergirds our much of our Monday-Saturday lives.
Advent—consciously adopting a frame of waiting for the coming of Jesus forces me to face the stark psychological and spiritual emptiness at the core of our culture. Whatever the kingdom of God is, this—this that bombards me whether I’m walking down Larch or watching Monday Night Football—is not it. This is not the Kingdom.
And it puts impatience into my prayers. We hear a similar impatience in the opening words of the Old Testament lesson. “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence!” Do you ever feel that sense of holy impatience? I felt it when I watched 2 Broke Girls this past week. Not because I found the humour crass—though I did. But because, as I said above, the humour seemed designed to paper over a deep sadness and it couldn’t quite pull it off. And the truth lay in that sadness. The truth lay in not simply in the realization that all the means and gadgets and conveniences the modern world provides—and they are good in their proper place—become an insatiable idol when we try to fill our need for the transcendent with them, The sad truth lay in the fact that there was nothing they could do about it—except look the other way and laugh.
“O that you would rend the heavens and come down!” It is the same kind of impatience that is to underlie our prayer, “Your kingdom come, your will be done.” So much of this world is not Christ’s kingdom; so much is not Christ’s will.
As we begin yet another Advent, let us as God to instill in us a holy impatience for the coming of the promised kingdom. Not, however, so that we can look down our noses at our fellow human beings. Not so that we can be like Jonah and take out our beach chairs just outside the city walls and wait for the coming judgment! Not at all.
For the prophet’s prayer continues with these words: “There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.” Interesting that the prophet both despairs at the state of the people and identifies fully with them. Advent is a time for us to begin to cultivate, it seems to me, a similar disposition—not simply an impatient waiting, but also a repentant waiting.
Our culture is awash in a mass of overconsumption in which money has become a god who demands more and more sacrifice for fewer and fewer rewards. And we are implicated in it. It is not the problem of someone else over there. It is our problem. And so we pray with the prophet, “Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord, and do not remember iniquity forever.” Have mercy, in other words, on us.
It is very easy for us to pray “have mercy on them.” It’s very easy to draw a line between good and evil so long as we are on the good side of the line. We’ve been doing that since Eden. Remember the words of Adam at the Fall? “The woman you gave me, she tempted me.” Adam would place himself on the good side of the moral divide even if it meant that his wife and God himself had to be reckoned on the other.
But the prophet does not pray, “have mercy on them.” What does he say? Remember his words when he was called by God to be a prophet? “I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips.” The same sentiment is expressed here: “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth.” The prophet draws a line and—honest with himself and with his God—stands with the sinners. And he repents. “Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord, and do not remember iniquity forever.” Rather than call the judgment of God down, the prophet begs for God to have mercy on himself and his people.
And Advent, as a time of waiting, is a time for us to embrace repentance as well.
Advent is a time to wait impatiently and repentantly. And as we cultivate holy impatience and honest repentance, Advent is also a time to wait expectantly. Which brings us to our Gospel lesson, and Our Lord’s exhortation to, “Beware, keep alert for you do not know when the time will come.” What time?
In the context of the Gospel lesson, the “time” has multiple meanings. The time refers, most immediately, to the destruction of the Temple. In the run up to our Gospel lesson, Jesus predicted that the Temple would be destroyed. His disciples asked when, and our Gospel is the conclusion of Jesus answer.
Jesus longer answer to them is not to give them a date, but to tell them to observe the signs. When you see false Messiahs come, when you hear of strife at home and abroad, when you are persecuted—the time will be at hand. So be alert, he says. But at verse 24—where our Gospel begins—Jesus stops talking about local immediate events and begins to speak apocalyptically and eschatologically. He begins to speak, in other words, about the end of the world, about the wrapping up of history and the full manifestation of his reign, the full coming of his kingdom.
Jesus can bring the two events—the local and the cosmic—together because, in the disciples minds, the two were one and the same. Their world revolved in some way or other around the Temple and, were it to be destroyed, the only world they had ever known would come to an end.
My point is not to launch into a speculation about the end of the world. Far from it. It is to remind us that, just as for Jesus in Mark 13, the notion of “the time” or “the end” has at least several meanings.
Christians, for example, have seen the world “end” several times in our history. We have seen the end of the world defined by pagan Rome. We have seen the end of the world defined by Christian Rome. We have seen the end of the world defined by Christendom. We may well be living through yet another “end of the world”—only this time, it is the world defined by 20th century geo-politics.
Of course, the time or the end need not be so dramatic as all that. All of us are heading in some way or other toward an end. Despite all the advancements of medical science, after all, the human mortality rate remains constant at 100%. We are, all of us, born toward dying. And that means that for all of us, there will be an end.
And then, last, there is THE END. The final drawing of the curtain on the entire human story when all things are reconciled to God in Christ at his return. All that is wrong is set right. All that is evil is wiped away. Even death will die.
So, whether the Lord comes for us in terms of the passing of our culture or the passing of our lives or he returns, we are all, in Advent, charged to wait for the end expectantly. The end could come at any time. And this, in turn, is to infuse and energize how we live in the present.
Expectant waiting is active waiting—remember the parables of the bridesmaids and the talents and the story of the final judgment that we read last week—but it is also realistic waiting. Realistic waiting in the sense that, in the midst of all our activities, we are aware that our own efforts are not going to inaugurate God’s kingdom. It will come—and Christ will come—at a time known only to the Father.
Pope John XXIII was once asked what he would tell people were he to find out that Jesus was returning tomorrow. His answer was, “Look busy.” Yes. Exactly. Activity is to be a hallmark of Advent waiting. Of those of us waiting expectantly for the coming of the Lord.
When we pray—when we really pray—what drives our prayers? Or, perhaps better, who drives our prayers? Advent is the time to ask that question. Will we, this Advent, like Max and Caroline, pray to the god of Black Friday who demands so much, promises the world and cannot deliver? Or will we learn again to wait with the ancient church for the coming of the Lord? Impatient. Repentant. Expectant. These are the adjectives that Advent invites us to append to waiting. “O that you would rend the heavens and come down!” was the prayer of the prophet. The prayer of the ancient church, “Even so, come quickly Lord Jesus.” How shall we pray?