Waiting
Advent is about waiting in the wilderness and pointing the way to Jesus the Anointed One.
One of my worst experiences of waiting would have to be the Greyhound bus that I travelled on from Johannesburg to Grahamstown when I was a student. The fourteen hours on the bus is the longest waiting I have ever done. You lean your head against the window to nap, a while later you lean forward and nap some more, and three hours later your sore neck wakes you up and as you glance at your watch you realise that only two minutes have passed in the three hours that you thought you were asleep. I learnt an important lesson in those 14 hours – I am not good at waiting. This makes me wonder how I would have fared in the Stanford Marshmallow experiment into delayed gratification.
In the Stanford experiment, preschool kids were left in a room with one marshmallow. The children were told that they could eat the marshmallow. However, the researcher had to leave the room for 15 minutes and if the 4-6-year-olds could delay eating the marshmallow they could have two when he returned. Two thirds of the children ate the marshmallow. The third that waited and were rewarded with two all went on to achieve remarkable success in their adult lives.
Advent is about waiting in the wilderness and pointing the way to Jesus the Anointed One.
It goes without saying that 2020 has been a wilderness in which the whole planet has waited for most of the year. COVID-19 lockdown, social isolation and quarantine is its own wilderness waiting hell. Many would gladly exchange lockdown for John’s bugs and honey and a camel hair jumper. If Advent is about practising our waiting in the wilderness, by this stage, many are wilderness waiting professional athletes.
Waiting in the wilderness is tough. Although NSW had high rates of COVID, our nightmare wasn’t as long as Melbourne’s, or the rest of Europe who have recently returned to lockdown.
What did people do while waiting in the wilderness of COVID lockdown? Social Media is littered with people’s creative ingenuity and many of us are grateful for their wit which kept us amused in the wilderness of lockdown.
A less helpful drive was all the self-help motivators who pressured us into learning a new skill or craft during lockdown. When you are trying to work from home, or you have just lost your work or friends, or you are trying to home-school your kids, or look after an elderly parent or spouse and get them through COVID alive, upskilling is the least helpful advice - I don’t care how good home-baked sourdough bread tastes.
We are already in a wilderness called COVID19/Climate Emergency/Bushfire season/Recession. Advent places high demands on our waiting in the wilderness. What are we meant to be doing in our wilderness? We are not expected to have well-ordered lives with military routines. However, our waiting is not passive either. Advent is about waiting in the wilderness and pointing the way to Jesus the Anointed One.
The reason the 14 hours on the bus felt so long was because it was passive –it was a waiting that I had to endure to reach my destination. In contrast the waiting that the preschool children in the Stanford experiment did before being awarded a second marshmallow was active. One napped, some sang, some walked around the room, some played with the one marshmallow, sniffing it before putting it down – several times.
Likewise, our advent waiting is active. Advent is not something we get through to arrive at Christmas. It’s a period of actively pointing to Jesus the Christ, the anointed one. With John the Baptist, advent people proclaim the Good News. Make no mistake, this is not a religious pastime nor a new age spiritual hobby. To stay present in the wilderness, waiting and pointing to Jesus, preaching the Good News means you take a stand against toxic political powers, you challenge the economic status quo and re-write history with an unfamiliar perspective. Mark’s Gospel shows us how; it launches right in “The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah,[a] the Son of God,[b] 2 as it is written in Isaiah the prophet…”. In this one explosive sentence Mark’s Gospel has taken a stand against toxic political powers, challenged the economic status quo and re-written history with an unfamiliar perspective. This is the background. In 31 BCE Octavia conquered Mark Anthony. Octavia was named Son of God, the Sacred One, the Anointed one – Augustus. His reign was said to be a new beginning: a time of peace, prosperity, and the end of civil war. Coins announcing his victory and the new world order were distributed – evangelions - which translate as “Good News”. In effect Mark’s opening line says Jesus, not Augustus, is the anointed one. The Kingdom of God and not Rome is the Good News. The Kingdom of God is the new world order, not Augustus. The Kingdom of God is closer than you think, it is at hand, it is present within you as your inner authentic self. Guided by this Inner Self, the Kingdom of God within you, you have been proclaiming the Good News all week. As Barbara Brown Taylor rightly put it:
Preaching is not something that an ordained minister does for 20 minutes on Sundays, but what the whole congregation does all week long; it is a way of approaching the world, and of gleaning God’s presence there.
Like John the Baptist you have been proclaiming Good News. Some of you proclaim the Good News through the unconditional love you show children and grandchildren. Some of you preach God’s healing and presence through visiting and volunteering. Some of you preached through charitable giving and being generous with your finances. Some of you preach hope and faith through your friendship and support to neighbours and strangers. And some of you preach the Good News simply through taking the time to phone someone and you didn’t know that that phone call saved them from a dark tunnel of loneliness or dissolved the fog of their isolation.
We are living in a critical time in human history and our preaching is urgently needed now. How are you proclaiming the Good News?