First United Methodist Church Hitchcock
· Pastor Mike's Homily: December 10, 2023 On this second Sunday of Advent, Christmas is right around the corner. The Season of Advent is supposed to be a time of patiently waiting. Trying to understand what it means to wait patiently; I looked up the definition of patiently. According to the dictionary it is a way that shows tolerance of delays or problems without becoming annoyed or anxious. The way my clock is spinning who are they trying to kid by even implying patience is a virtue. Here it is Sunday morning and I am already out of patience for the week. Others would be wise to stand clear of me the rest of the week! How impatient am I? Just the other day I was in a shop and the cashier asked if I had found everything I was looking for. I stared at her and growled, “What? Are you hiding something?” Walking out of the store my wife offered some very good advice. She told me before I judge anyone with a sarcastic comment I should walk a mile in their shoes. Now that’s really good advice. After walking a mile in their shoes I am a mile away and have their shoes! We just heard a reading from Isaiah 40:1, “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.” I am thinking, “Yea Right.” God must be having some kind of meeting warning his people about by my lack of patience. God is impatiently pacing the floor. The whole committee of heaven is holding their breath. Even the archangels have stopped tapping their feet. The cherubim stop eyeing the bagels on the side table. The seraphim put down their cell phones. All gathered are thinking God might be about to lower the boom on me, but they aren’t sure because God has the habit of doing the unexpected. “Comfort,” thunders the voice that made planets and galaxies. “O comfort my people!” The angels Michael and Gabriel exchange furtive glances. Daring to speak they ask, “Did we hear comfort? Comfort and not judgment? No relegation of him to the fiery furnace? ” After the initial shock those around the table begin to nod. In the amen corner a voice pipes up, “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord.” Hmm I get to thinking the roads in heaven must be under construction like the I-45. But the heavenly roadwork is not so I can get out of the wilderness, but rather so God can get in. I am being told to make straight the highway for God so I know God’s gentle presence. But God never goes where he is not welcome. He never opens doors I barricade. He never climbs mountains I build to block access to the deepest parts of myself. But God is telling me to make room for him. Make room for him and know a peace that is comforting, a peace the fulfills every longing of the Advent Season. There is a whole lot of me in all of us. We get really impatient this time of the year. We get short with others this time of the year. We nick and pick at the faults of others while camouflaging our own inequities. But despite all the barricades we throw up, God waits patiently for us to know the peace of Advent. To learn how long we need to patiently wait we turn to Apostle Paul’s words in 2 Peter 3:8. We are alarmed with his answer. He writes, “But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day.” Shazam! Doing a bit of math one year would be approximately six seconds and forty years slightly less than one hour! Good grief! We wonder if the wait will be worth it. We wonder what should we do in the meantime! The truth we need to realize only God knows what time it is, and unless one is attuned to God’s time as our faith allows, our timing will always be off. God’s timing is certainly different than ours. The Lord is not slow about his promise for us to know his peace in the same way we think of slowness. It is really a unique patience with us. What looks like delay to us, God looks at it like the incubation of his peace within us. We suddenly realize God has all the time of our lives for us to allow him to fulfill his promise of peace to us. Clearly Paul is telling us God’s timeframe of reality is the only one that counts. And yes, it requires patience to adapt to his timeframe. There is no better time than Advent to practice patience. There is no mistake about it, patience is a skill that requires practice. Otherwise we allow secular culture to define time for us. Then the incarnation of Christ is reduced to a doll in a basket. Commercialism then leads to every obscene form of Advent celebration. Our crassness demolishes any hope of knowing his peace. If we stop and think about it for a moment, something we rarely do, Paul is addressing eschatology in a completely different manner. Here eschatology is a theology of patience, our patiently waiting and while we wait we imitate everything about peace Jesus Christ represents. So we are to wait. And in Paul’s words, “while you are waiting for these things, strive to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish, and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation.” The Hebrew word for peace is shalom. It means the absence of quarrel and strife; unblemished tranquility. I am reminded of an old Jewish rabbi who had been going to the Wailing Wall to pray twice a day, every day, for a long, long time. One day an American tourist watched him praying. After about forty-five minutes when he was through he turned to leave. The tourist approached him and asked how long he had been coming to the wall to pray. He said about fifty years. Fifty years the tourist exclaimed! What do you pray for? The rabbi said he prayed for peace, for all the hatred to stop, and for everyone to live in safety and friendship. The tourist asked him how he felt after doing this for fifty long years. The old rabbi responded, “Like I’m talking to a wall.” We need to be like the old rabbi knowing peace will come to each of us in God’s time and not our own. In the interim we are to be as patient as he is with us. And yes, when we encounter others who are full of impatience and strife we are to offer them a blessing. “Shalom to you now, shalom my friend. May God’s full mercies bless you my friend. In all your living and through your loving, may Christ be your shalom, Christ be you shalom.” By so doing we know more and more a personal state of peace as the Lord gifts us our salvation on his timeframe. Equally important, it transforms the shalom of Advent from me to we. In The Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit May It Be So. Amen
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |