2
Not Done with Waiting
Advent 2, Year C, 12/10/06
Episcopal Church of All Saints, Indianapolis
Charles W. Allen
Luke 3:1-6: In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah, "The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.'"
I know of a people who’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting to see “the rough ways made smooth.” They’ve been waiting for quite some time. The people I’m talking about are the people of Indianapolis, and what they’ve been waiting for is the completion of all that road work around the intersection of 38th and Meridian. For people who have to drive through that intersection, it’s getting hard to remember when there wasn’t some sort of traffic restriction. We’ve watched crews dig everything up, then cover it over with a patchwork of really bumpy concrete, then dig everything up again, cover with more patchwork, and on and on. We hear all kinds of explanations about why it seems to be taking so long. People in power seem to have all sorts of explanations that amount to saying, “It’s all somebody else’s fault.” But no matter who’s to blame, we’re tired of waiting.
The good news is that it’s still projected to end shortly after the fourth Sunday in Advent—this Advent. How appropriate! Finally that intersection will be finished. We’ll be able to stand on paved sidewalks at the corner. We can appreciate the jazzed-up fixtures and medians. And then … we can start fuming about other construction sites. They seem almost planned by some malicious power to spring up without fail exactly where we need to drive. The waiting may be over at 38th and Meridian—may it be so!—but we’re not done with waiting, not yet. There’s always more roadwork that’s needed somewhere, and it’s always going to wind up getting in our way. No, we’re definitely not done with waiting—even after Advent ends.
Advent is a season of waiting. It’s partly a season of make-believe, of course. We act as if we’re still waiting for Jesus to show up, two thousand years after he actually did. But this isn’t just make-believe. Yes, Jesus did show up, but that didn’t put an end to the story, and it certainly didn’t put an end to waiting. He got something started in us, and it’s something priceless, but he never pretended that everything was finished. After his death, when we’re told he showed up again, his followers thought that everything must surely be almost finished. They didn’t expect to be around much longer, but they turned out to be wrong by about 1900 years (and still counting). So here in the 21st century we’re still waiting to see if what Jesus started in us will ever come to fruition.
And we’re still not sure what that’s going to look like. When we stand with our ancestors and recite, “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end,” we’re not claiming to know all that much about the future, no matter what some best-selling fundamentalists may say. Instead, we’re admitting that, even after Christmas and Easter and Pentecost, we still don’t have any final answers, much less any final solutions, thank God! We’re admitting that this story isn’t finished.
We’re still in a season of waiting. The valleys haven’t been filled, the mountains haven’t been leveled, the crooked paths haven’t been straightened out, and the rough places haven’t been made smooth. Just read the Iraq Study Group’s report. Our nation’s war on terror hasn’t made the world terror-free. If anything, it’s provoked a whole new generation of terrorists. So if you were hoping that peace, or security, was just around the corner, you’ll have to keep waiting. We Americans haven’t brought that day any closer.
And we church folk haven’t brought that day any closer either. Over and over again, generation after generation, we people of faith have heard, “Prepare the way of the Lord,” and too often we’ve taken it to mean that we were entitled to impose our blueprint for the common good on everybody else. We mistook Jesus’ new beginning for the finished product. We decided we had all the answers now, and that certainly nobody else had anything to teach us.
We didn’t stop to think that maybe “the way of the Lord” ought to follow the way of our Lord, Jesus the Christ. We settled for the image of a controlling God, and conveniently forgot the God who reigns not by imposing a blueprint but by embracing us even at our worst. So we cut deals with kings and emperors and presidents. We equated faith with unquestioning obedience to somebody else’s directions. We dismissed other faiths as ignorant or downright evil. So guess what? We’re not done with waiting, not yet. We haven’t brought that day any closer. Here in the 21st century we’re still waiting to see if what Jesus started in us will ever come to fruition.
So today more than ever, it’s high time we heard Isaiah’s and John the Baptist’s call with fresh ears: Prepare the way of the Lord. This is not a call to impose our way of life on everyone else. After all, “prepare” doesn’t mean “take control.” “Prepare” means, well, “prepare.” It means we need to get ready for surprising things to happen. It’s a call to make room for a God who acts like Jesus. It’s a call to start living like that God, not some divine dictator who makes the trains run on time. It’s a call to be just as patient as God seems to be with followers, like us, who keep missing the point and having to start over again and again. It’s a call to trust that, no matter how long it takes, no matter how many obstructions we put in the way, a day will come when “all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” Prepare, get ready, make room, start living, be patient, trust.
Jesus “broke bread with outcasts and sinners, healed the sick, and proclaimed good news to the poor.”[1] That’s how my favorite Eucharistic prayer sums up his ministry. He spent his time with people on the margins of his culture—outcasts, sinners, the sick, the poor. His behavior was probably more irritating than threatening to people in power, but either way it eventually it got him killed. When he started showing up again, it didn’t make headlines, except among his closest followers. Everybody else could dismiss the news as one more irritating rumor.
But with that news something got started that still, even today, draws people into new ways of looking at God, new ways of looking at power, new ways of looking at outsiders, new ways of sharing a meal. It doesn’t make the trains run on time, and it certainly won’t speed up the work at 38th and Meridian, but nevertheless, something did get started 2,000 years ago that nobody’s been able to stamp out yet.
We’re not done with waiting. We’re not exactly sure what’s coming next. But we know that something’s already begun that’s made the waiting worth every moment. Prepare the way of the Lord. Amen.
[1] Enriching Our Worship1: Supplemental liturgical materials prepared by the ECUSA Standing Liturgical Commission (New York: Church Publishing Incorporated, 1998), p. 61.