Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
December 12, 2004

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Are we there yet? Daddy, are we there yet? Mommy, are we there yet? That impatience of children on a car trip is legendary; and it drives us parents straight up nuts, right? It sure did me when my kids were little-not as nuts as their incessant bickering that even caused their mother and me on occasion to take two cars on trips to visit the kids’ grandparents when one should have been enough-but nuts nevertheless.

I remember being really impatient like that when I was a kid. I don’t specifically remember pestering my parents with "are we there yet" on car trips, although I suppose I did. The thing I remember being the most impatient about was Christmas. I just couldn’t wait for Christmas. I still remember the exquisite agony of anticipation, the sense the "I just can’t wait," as though I really had any choice in the matter. My brother and I kept pestering our parents to let us open just one present early. As I recall they eventually gave in and let us open one present on Christmas Eve. For the others I still had to wait until Christmas morning. I always had a very clear idea of what I wanted. One year, when we were ten, my brother and I wanted a record player. We got a Siamese cat instead, so we named the cat Hi-Fi. I suppose the thing I was most impatient for as a child was those presents; but as I think back on it what was really precious wasn’t the presents but the closeness of family, the warmth of a loving home, singing Christmas carols in front of the fireplace with my Dad strumming along on the guitar. Although I couldn’t have articulated it at the time, I think I was as impatient for that wonderful time as I was for the presents. I certainly remember the feeling of that time more than I remember any of the presents, except maybe Hi-Fi, who was with us until well after I had grown up and left home..

As an adult I’m still awfully impatient. I hate to wait for things. I hate lines. I will even walk out of Starbuck’s without my morning latte if the line is too long even when I would have time to wait. Maybe that’s why I usually go to Fiddler’s Bluff now instead. Shorter lines. I hate being stuck in traffic, even when I’m not in a hurry. Not that I condone it, but I understand those drivers who give in to their anger and fall into bouts of road rage when you just can’t get where you want to go because of the traffic. I just hate waiting.

This Advent season in my sermons I’ve been talking about waiting for God and about where we need God to come into our lives and our world. I’ve said that Christian waiting isn’t just passive but rather is active, preparatory waiting. This morning I want to take a closer look at the waiting itself to see if we can make any sense out of it. The Bible after all has a lot to say about waiting, sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly. Jesus told lots of parables about waiting, usually with a warning to keep awake and alert, for we never know when God may come to us. We don’t have one of those parables this morning. Rather, we have passages from Isaiah and the Letter of James. The first is implicitly about waiting, the second talks about it explicitly. Let’s take a closer look.

The passage of Isaiah is one of several from that prophet that promise a glorious future in which the presence of God will be so real, so vital, that nature itself will be changed. These passages were written to comfort people who were either threatened with exile or were already living in exile in Babylon, far from their homes, from the land they believed God had given them, under the oppression of a foreign empire. In Isaiah’s vision here, the deserts will become fertile, those with disabilities will be made whole in body, and the people will return home with joy and singing. It’s a beautiful picture, but it is a picture of a world that doesn’t actually exist and that certainly did not exist for the people to whom Isaiah first prophesied. They had to wait. That’s why Isaiah says God "will come." God may always be here, as Isaiah suggests when he says "here is your God;" but for the complete coming of the Lord we still have to wait. Isaiah’s word here was intended to help his listeners do just that, wait.

Then there’s the passage from James. The author of this letter gets more explicit about waiting than Isaiah did: "Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord." The early Christian communities, like the one for which the author of this letter wrote, thought that Jesus would be returning soon to do essentially what Isaiah had said God would do, end oppression and suffering and bring wholeness and peace to the earth. Yet that didn’t happen, and as time went by those early Christian communities had to deal with the fact that their expectations in that regard were being disappointed. James’ advice is simply be patient. He illustrates his point with what he apparently takes to be an example of patience: "The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains." Be patient for the coming of the Lord, he says, like the farmer is patient for the coming in of the crop.

That’s an interesting and illuminating example of patience, I think. Now, I’m no farmer, although when I was about four I wanted to be one, having had then even less idea than I do now of what being a farmer is all about. I know that many of you know a lot more about farming than I do. Still, I know enough to know that James’ use of the farmer as a model of patience has more to it than appears at first glance. The way James presents it you get the idea that the patience of the farmer is just about waiting, that farming is a largely passive activity. James talks about waiting for the rain. Now, at least in the days before irrigation, it was true that all the farmer could do about rain was to wait for it. Pray for it maybe, but basically just wait. The farmer has no control over it. Maybe that’s the image James wanted to convey. After all, his community had no control over when the Lord would return.

But, as I’m sure you all know, farming isn’t exactly all about just waiting. If a farmer just sat there and stared at his fields waiting for a crop to come up, he’d go broke, or worse, starve. If all farmers just waited passively, we’d all starve. Farming is very hard work. The farmer has to prepare the field. He, or she, has to plow it, weed it, fertilize it, and water it. Unless he wants a field full of whatever just comes up on its own, he has to plant the seed in the field he has prepared. He has to protect the crop from pests as it comes in. Then, he has to know when the time is right to reap the harvest, to bring in the crop and take it to market. I’m no farmer, but I know that farming is not a passive activity. Yes, growing crops takes time. You have to wait. You can’t rush it. You can’t harvest too soon or you won’t get the maximum yield, or maybe you won’t get anything usable at all. There may be times of just waiting passively; but for the most part, farming is active, working waiting.

That’s what waiting for God is like. Maybe, unlike a farmer’s crop, God will come eventually even if we do nothing. The earliest Christians certainly thought so, but we’re still waiting. Occasionally some kook will announce that the end is near and that the Lord will come on clouds of glory on some particular day, but it never happens. Most of us don’t really believe that it ever will despite the statement in the Christian creeds about it. At least, we sure aren’t going just to sit around waiting for it to happen. It seems to me that the fact that it hasn’t happened in the last 2,000 years is pretty good evidence that waiting for God has to be about something more than just waiting. The coming of the Lord has to mean something other than so many people have thought it means. Isaiah says God "will come with terrible vengeance, with terrible recompense." It hasn’t happened, and we have to assume that it isn’t going to.

Still, God can and does come into the world. God speaks to us in that famous still, small voice that we read about in 1 Kings. God calls God’s people, not with blaring trumpets and roaring cannon but with the quiet urgings of the Spirit. And that quiet urging calls us not to passive but to active waiting. We are called to be like that farmer James talks about, but not the passive farmer that James suggests. We are called to the active, striving, struggling life of real farmers. We are called to prepare the field for the crops of the Lord, the crops of peace, justice, and compassion for all people. They will come. That’s what the promise of the coming of the Lord is really all about. But they won’t come if we who so passionately desire them just sit and wait. We have to work. We have to speak out. We have to speak truth to power, naming evil when we see it and calling all people to lives of greater justice and greater peace. That’s Christian waiting. That’s what waiting for God is all about.

Does that help me with my problem with impatience? Not really. I’m impatient for the coming of the Kingdom of God too. My impatience here gets expressed as anger. I get so angry at all the things in my world that, and all the people who, contradict that blessed vision of peace and justice for all people. I despair that the promised day will ever come. Sometimes I think I just can’t wait. But just like fifty years ago when I couldn’t wait for Christmas, I really don’t have any choice in the matter. So I wait. I walk out of overcrowded Starbucks stores. I chafe at long lines of traffic that don’t move, but I know that those things are trivialities. If I can just remember what we’re really waiting for, maybe I’ll get over it and get on with the work of preparing the field for God Amen.