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This time of year, as we look forward expectantly, we often also get nostalgic. The familiar rhythms of Christmas time lend themselves easily to reminiscing. This year, I’ve been thinking back to Advent time 16 years ago when I was three months pregnant with my first child.
If you’ve ever been around a first-time mother in the early days of expecting, you’ve seen first-hand what it looks like to wait impatiently for something you have no control over. If I ate a large meal, I swore I was showing. I wore maternity pants far before I needed them. I read parenting books and resisted buying all the cute clothes I saw in the store.
We didn’t even know yet if we were having a boy or a girl. We wanted to be surprised, so we actually had an ultrasound the week before Christmas and had the tech write down the gender in a card that Lee and I opened over dinner on Christmas Eve. That waiting just about drove me mad!
So, here we are again in another exciting and uncomfortable season of waiting. Gone is the slow, steady rhythm of Ordinary time. This season always holds such excitement and promise—the anticipation of the holidays, then the imminent turning point of a new calendar year and a new semester. There are arrivals and beginnings all of us are looking forward to right now, like presents under the tree waiting to be unwrapped.
And also…I am positive there are other areas of waiting—questions of health, relationships, or finances—that hang over your festivities this year.
Certainly, we as a nation feel as if we are holding our breath for what is to come in this divisive time in which we live. We continue to pray together that God would help us in the midst of our struggles for justice and truth—all the while we watch more lives claimed every day in conflict around the world.
This second week of Advent, we light the candle of Peace. And yet, peace seems far off. So, what are we to do when a silent night seems impossible—when all is not calm and bright? Do we just sit and wait for peace to come?
The lessons of the second week of this season point us to something far more active than that. In each of the lessons this week, we enter the reality of a people deep in a place of anxious waiting.
Though scholars are not certain of the origins of the book of Baruch, we know it paints a picture of the people of Israel in Babylonian exile. Like Isaiah before him, the author of Baruch promises the people of Israel they will see Jerusalem again. But for now, the people are waiting for this restoration. For now, their enemies have won and their beloved Zion has been deserted.
Then, we pick up the story of the people of God over 500 years later both in The Song of Zechariah and in the gospel of Luke today. Rome has ruled Judea for a hundred years and again Jerusalem is in the hands of an occupying force. The people are once again facing oppression and awaiting rescue.
The pattern is the same throughout the biblical record—exile and restoration, disobedience and return. It’s only the names of the people in power that change. In Baruch, it’s Babyon and Nebuchadnezzar II. In Luke, the oppressors are Rome, Emperor Tiberius, Pontius Pilate, and Herod.
Yet, the message from God to the people remains the same, delivered through the prophets. We read in Malachi 3, another option for our readings on Advent II, as God says to the people: “Return to me, and I will return to you.” This is not a message of passive waiting, sitting around until the Lord shows up to deliver the people. The message from God is clear—peace will come but you will play a part in its coming.
That Christmas Eve 16 years ago when Lee and I opened the Christmas card that read, “It’s a girl,” my waiting wasn’t over. I still had many months to go before our daughter would be with us. One of the beautiful things about pregnancy and labor is there are so many things that are completely out of your control. This little life literally just takes over your body and change comes whether you like it or not.
But it’s also such a miracle that you, as a mother, get to participate in bringing this life into the world.
Five months later, we’d done all we knew to prepare for this little one’s coming. We got those clothes we’d been waiting to get. We got her room ready and a car seat installed. Her due date came and I thought all the waiting and all the preparation was finally over.
And then her due date passed, and another day and another. When I finally felt the first labor pains a week later, it was still another day and a half before she was born. I didn’t sit around just waiting for her to show up though. I walked what felt like miles around the hospital lobby, laboring before she was ready to come. I pushed for over two hours as my face-up baby delayed her entrance into the world. We often joke with her that at age 15, we are still waiting on her. If I’m late to meet you for something, it’s likely because I’m waiting for Nadia to get ready.
The beautiful Canticle we read today, the song of Zechariah - comes from the words of a father who knew what it was to wait on the arrival of his son. And it comes from a people who had waited generations for deliverance, looking for a Messiah to restore Jerusalem. Restless, anxious, ready for change—the people looked to God for rescue.
We read earlier in Luke 1, the story of John’s arrival on the scene. We’re told Zechariah and Elizabeth “were righteous in the sight of God, observing all the Lord’s commands and decrees blamelessly,” but also that they were old and Elizabeth was unable to conceive. Childless, living under oppression, and serving under high priests who were often corrupt—Zechariah and Elizabeth had every reason to despair.
Yet, we find Zechariah in the temple, performing his priestly duties. In his waiting, he is attending to his faith, right where he should be. He doesn’t give up hope and he doesn’t stop serving his community. And in his faithfulness to God and the people, he opens himself to an encounter with the holy…and God shows up. An angel of the Lord appears and promises them a child who will make the people prepared for the Lord.
When John is born, Zechariah declares God’s faithfulness to his people and looks forward to what is to come, saying, “The dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”
The next time we see the son of Zechariah, in our gospel passage today, he is doing what the prophets of old had done. He is calling people to action.
Isaiah, Malachi, Baruch—they all deliver the message to the people that they have worshipped idols rather than the one true God and that they need to repent, to return to God. This new prophet comes preaching a message of repentance too. John the Baptist is telling them the time has come and the peace they’ve been waiting for is at hand. But they must take part in its coming.
Time and time again in Israel’s history, we see the people asking God for deliverance but not willing to participate with God. They want a land flowing with milk and honey, but not at the cost of fighting the giants who occupy it. We too want all the brokenness of the world restored but not at the cost of the struggle God asks us to enter into in order to bring his Kingdom to earth.
How often do we want rescue, and end to our waiting, but not at the cost of letting go of our own comfort? Not at the cost of getting our hands dirty?
Today’s lessons go beyond calling the people to look forward to the promise that God is still working in the world. They call the people to act, to do something themselves instead of simply waiting around. “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight,” Isaiah says about John.
John, like the other prophets, calls us to repentance and to prepare for the Lord’s coming. Even this call to action though, contains a promise—you don’t do this alone. Zechariah says God will guide our feet into the way of peace. Yes, we must walk there…but it is God who will lead us. God does not expect us to set our own ways straight on without help. That is why Christ came, to be Immanuel, God with us.
The message from the prophets is this: You get to participate in what God is doing. In fact, you must.
Like the expecting woman who does not, can not do anything, to cause the life to grow within her—we are the recipients of the promise of God. But we also must act to receive that promise, to bring it into being. We must labor with God to bring it forth.
In our everyday living, we respond to the prophets' call to align ourselves to God’s work in the world - to repeately turn back to God and to look for the ways Christ is showing up again and again, the way he wants to be birthed in our world today.
Often at Advent, we focus on two comings of Christ, one in the past and one in the future. The first coming is the incarnation when Jesus was born into human history. Then, we anticipate the future coming of Christ.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux reminds us that Advent is really about three comings of Christ—past, present, and future. “We know that the coming of the Lord is threefold,” he says. “The first coming was in flesh and weakness, the middle coming is in spirit and power and the final coming will be in glory and majesty.”
Advent isn’t just about preparing for a baby born long ago, remembering an event in our history. It is a time to recognize that Christ dwells here and now in this world. He is with us in spirit and power. And it is a time in which we long for the fulfillment to the promise that says “the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”
In this season we wait and we prepare. Both of these things are true.
So, let us open our hearts to the reality that Christ, who is and was and is to come, asks us labor alongside him. And then Jesus will not have only been born in a manger 2000 years ago. He will be born in us today. Amen.
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