“Skipping Advent: No Waiting”; First Sunday of Advent; Isaiah 64: 1-9; December 3, 2023; SAPC, Denton; Dr. Richard B. Culp
O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence— 2as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil— to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence! 3When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect, you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence. 4From ages past no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who works for those who wait for him. 5You meet those who gladly do right, those who remember you in your ways. But you were angry, and we sinned; because you hid yourself we transgressed.
6We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. 7There 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. 8Yet, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand. 9Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord, and do not remember iniquity forever. Now consider, we are all your people.
Introduction: One of my wife’s favorite Christmas movies is Christmas with the Kranks. We watch it every year. In fact, we’ve already watched it this year.
Based on John Grisham's novel Skipping Christmas, which tells the story of Luther and his wife who decide to skip Christmas. No Christmas preparations, no gift giving, no parties – nothing to do with Christmas. And with the money they will save, they will go on a cruise starting Christmas day.
As I reflected on our Advent journey this year, it occurred to me that skipping Christmas might be an interesting idea - but being a liturgically-minded Presbyterian minister, I quickly realized that we would need to skip Advent and Christmas!
So this year we will spend Advent imagining what it would be like to skip Advent, and then on Christmas Eve and the Sunday after Christmas, what it would be like to skip Christmas.
We begin this first week of Advent imagining what it would be like to skip waiting - no Advent waiting this year!
Admittedly this is contrived - in fact, the whole idea of Advent is contrived to help us reflect on what it means to welcome the Christ-child into the world.
I realized that this week as I was driving back from a hospital call. I sometimes use my driving time to focus on my upcoming sermon.
I was thinking about waiting as I drove down Ft. Worth Drive. As I waited at the red light, I looked out my window and saw the day laborers standing there waiting for someone to come hire them to work for the day.
I suspect their waiting brings a sense of hope for work and the fear their wait will not end with work and the money it would provide for food and bills.
For most of us, our Advent waiting is more contrived than real,
but our Advent waiting gives us a chance to practice waiting and put waiting into the context of what God is doing.
Move 1: If we did not have Advent waiting, we would not be reminded that God’s time is not our time.
a. We want to plan our time.
1. Good to plan our time.
2. some of us manage to get through the holiday season because we have made plans.
3. Sometimes, the meaningful moments we experience only happen because we have planned and created those moments.
3. Advent waiting reminds us our plans are not necessarily God’s plans.
b. One of the themes that emerges from the biblical text is that God’s plan will play itself out over time, but it may not be on the timing that God’s people hope for or want.
1. God’s people spend much of their time waiting and wanting God to appear again.
2. The passage we read from the prophet Isaiah was probably prophesied after the Babylonian conquest and before the return of the exiles to Jerusalem and the rebuilding of the Temple. (Feasting on the Word, Year B, Vol. 4, 4; David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, editors)
2. The passage we read from the prophet Isaiah reveals the impatience of God’s people in this time of captivity and displacement
and their need for God’s time to match their time.
3. “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence”
“What is happening to us is not what we had planned.
God, Come rescue us!
Now!”
3. We know that sentiment.
"It would be really good, God, for you to show up right now because my plan for how things are going to work out need that to happen!”
2. “My pastor, Veronica, says that believing isn’t the hard part; waiting on God is” [Ann Lamott, Grace (Eventually): thoughts on Faith, 56]
3. Advent waiting teaches us to turn to God,
to trust in God,
to wait for God.
Move 2: If we did not have Advent waiting, we would miss out on time for our lives to be shaped by God.
a. Again, listen to the words of the prophet Isaiah:
we are the clay, and you are our potter;
we are all the work of your hand.
1. I am not a potter, but ai have seen potters at work.
they take a blob of clay and spin it, wet it, shape it, re-shape, all the while transforming the blob of clay into a pot.
1. That is a powerful image for how we might spend our time waiting:
allowing God to shape us,
and reshape us
to be changed from the unclean to the righteous as God molds us into the new creations God calls us to be.
2. our Advent waiting time is not pointless time, but a time of shaping and preparation.
b. I read an article awhile ago about tenants in an office building who complained that the elevators were too slow and they had to wait too long. Consultants recommended adding more elevators or installing computer timing devices on the existing elevators. Both solutions were too expensive. Then a creative new employee suggested installing mirrors in the areas where people waited for elevators. It was done, and the complaints stopped. While people waited, they looked in the mirrors at themselves and others, and the wait seemed shorter.
Without Advent waiting, we would not have the time to stop, reflect on our lives, and open ourselves up to God’s transforming power.
Move 3: Finally, if we did not have Advent waiting we would not be invited to connect to our hope in the God who comes again.
a. Advent is the time when we read texts like the one this morning from the Gospel of Mark.
It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. 35 Therefore, keep awake, for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening or at midnight or at cockcrow or at dawn, 36 or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. 37 And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.”
1. By the time Christ speaks these words, he has already arrived as a baby, grown up, been out performing miracles and teaching, and now his death looms near.
2. He is not talking about his arrival, but his return after his death and resurrection.
b. advent is not simply an anticipatory playing out of a historical story that we love to tell.
1. Advent invites us into the story of the God who has already arrived in Christ
and the God who will come again.
2. Advent waiting is more than preparing for the birth of the Christ-child - it is about joining with the God who has already come and will come again.
If we skipped Advent waiting, we would miss that invitation to join with the God whose work is not yet done.
Conclusion: consider this story Jim Lowry tells about the nativity scene his grandmother put out every year during Advent.
It was not one of those delicate, beautiful, no one can touch it manger scenes. Instead, it was built with children in mind.
His grandmother had a great gourd almost as big as a bushel basket. His grandfather had cut a hole in the side of the gourd and painted the inside dark blue to look like the sky. He dotted the sky with stars and then he did a most remarkable thing. He installed a little electric light in the sky that could be turned on to be the Christmas Star.
Best of all, they had a shoe box filled to overflowing with a wonderful assortment of mix-and-match figures. Most of the figures were chipped and bruised, and the angels’ wings were bent from years of handling and pretending. For weeks before Christmas, as a way of getting ready, the gourd was kept on the floor with the box of figures beside it.
Together they were an invitation for children of all ages to arrange and rearrange the figures and to tell the story to anyone who would listen; it was a chance for little people and big people alike to become part of the story of that remarkable birth. James S. Lowry, “Introducing the Luke Cycle: Advent Preaching for Year C,” Journal for Preachers, Vol. XXI, No. 1, Advent 1997, 9-10.
do not skip Advent waiting.
Wait,
prepare,
find yourself in the story of the God who comes and will come again.
find yourself in the story of the God who comes and will come again.
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