When the waiting becomes rejoicing

Sermon for the Second Sunday of Advent

Behold the Ellison family table holiday wreath.

Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA

Readings: Isaiah 40:1-11 | Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13 | 2 Peter 3:8-15a | Mark 1:1-8

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[Note: The audio of this sermon is available at the top of this post☝️if you care to listen.]

My daughter’s spirit squad got to march in the Santa Cruz holiday parade a couple of weeks ago. My normal inclination during these kinds of events is to take a million photos and video the entire thing on my phone. I’ve always been the one with the nicer phone in the family that has a better camera. And I love chronicling things; it’s what I do. But Alex recently got a new phone that is way fancier than mine and has a much better camera. So, at the parade, she took most of the photos and videos (she’s way better at not overdoing it like I usually do; she can put the camera away after a few shots, unlike me). 

But I felt weird. Like, I didn’t know what to do with my hands. Do I just stand there? The urge was real. I was missing out on capturing so many moments! 

But after the initial withdrawals, I noticed how free it felt to just be there. To walk down Pacific Ave. in Santa Cruz with Alex behind our daughter and her friends and their proud parents to the tune of Mariah Carey on repeat.

We try so hard to capture life. We’re human, it’s fine. But when we obsess over the capturing, we remove ourselves from life. We have to in order to grab it and manipulate it. You can’t capture something you’re a part of. You can only BE IN IT.

Do you ever do this? Like maybe you have a really good day with your kids or grandkids. No one says anything awkward or offensive. There’s laughter, connection, and joy. And as their headlights pull out of the driveway, you think to yourself, “Wow… We need to do that every time. How can we keep doing that?” You want to freeze it and replicate it. And then, the next time you get together, what happens? You stick your foot in your mouth before they even sit down, and the evening snowballs into a big dumpster fire from there. So, in this scenario, as those headlights screech out of your driveway, you beat yourself up over it. 

It’s hard being a mortal creature (who is conscious of that mortality, nonetheless, like we humans are). 

We don’t know when our expiration date is, but we are very aware that life flies by. There’s tremendous pressure on us to get this thing right. To hold onto the good and root out the bad. And when we have kids of our own, it’s not just our life we try to hold onto; it’s theirs, too. So we snap a million photos and videos and post them online to get validation for our good parenting from others and stress out so much about keeping our kids protected from this thing called mortality and the storms that await while journeying through it.

Why did God set it up this way? Why is life so fleeting? Why does everything wither and die? We race and clamor for control because this thing is moving so darn fast. And the things we want seem to move so darn slow and take forever to get here. 

Like Santa Claus. When I was a kid, Santa took foreeeeeeever. Now, Santa seems like he’s flying down my chimney every weekend (I swear he was just here last week).

But here’s the reality that this passage from Second Peter reveals… We cannot stand outside of life to get, capture, freeze, and manipulate it. This is because life is not a thing that we are outside of. We cannot HAVE life. We can only BE IN it. 

In one of my favorite email newsletters from the fantastic thinker Oliver Burkeman, he quotes a book called Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are by J. Jennifer Matthews, where she says, “We cannot get anything out of life. There is no outside where we could take this thing to. There is no little pocket situated outside of life” to which you could take “life’s provisions and squirrel them away.”

So, if I cannot get, have, control, or manipulate life, what is the point? It’s easy to get nihilistic here. Everything passes away. Nothing happens on our time schedule. We cannot get, have, or keep anything. All we are is just hanging out here… Waiting. What’s the point? 

(Sure sounds a lot like being in the wilderness, doesn’t it?) 

But what if waiting IS ACTUALLY the point? Maybe Christ teaches us this in Advent. To wait, but to wait well. What if this IS the point of being human?

This line from Second Peter is a great one to take into contemplation: “Since all these things are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be…”

This is the question at the heart of life. 

God didn’t put us in this predicament to punish us. As it says, God doesn’t want us to perish. God put us here to LIVE. Our life - THIS life - is worthwhile to God. God delights in seeing us in repentance. Transformation. 

Now… Repentance has a bad reputation. We’ve deadened the word to a moralistic meaning and have likened it to saying sorry to a distant punitive God. 

This is such a shallow way to see repentance (and this is not the God that Jesus reveals). 

Repentance (Greek: metanoia) means a change of heart, mind, and behavior (in that order, I’d say). The chain reaction of repentance does not start inside the individual self as god waits from a distance. It is not something we can will. If it was, all we’d need would be Moses’ commandments, and we’d all get along and achieve world peace in one day. 

But repentance doesn’t work like that. It comes from God’s grace and forgiveness that encounters us in the depths of our lives. It comes when Jesus meets us in our depths and loves us back to life. Like a thief in the night, it comes when we least expect it. We can only BE repented. 

This is what happens in the waiting. We haven’t gotten our lives together yet, and Jesus shows up for dinner. No, not yet! Do we enjoy the meal or tell him to come back... Later? When we have our stuff together?

Jesus knows better. Without him, nothing changes. Might as well let him pour you a glass of wine (that he grabs from your shelf, nonetheless). This is how Jesus ministers to us in the waiting.  

When we’re truly waiting, we’re not trying to get to the end of the struggle of life. We’ve gone through the sorrow, knowing that everything perishes and withers away. We’re not trying to overcome or escape our fleeting humanity. In waiting well, we sink deeper into it. We love because love is all that is and all that lasts. 

Whether you know it or not, Christ is working repentance in you right now to take you deeper into the joy and sorrow (one cannot come without the other) of life with others. This is where Christ finds you and ministers to you. And it’s where you find and minister to others. This is when the waiting becomes rejoicing. 

Not to jump ahead in the story, but what does God do when he takes on flesh in Jesus and shows up in the wilderness with John the Baptizer? He doesn’t say, hey y’all, I’m here now; you can stop this baptizing thing cuz I’m going to rocket you all off to utopia if you sign on the line that you believe x, y, and z about me and my dad. 

No… Jesus gets in line behind the townfolk to be baptized, too. Apparently, even God needs a good blessing every now and then. Even God, the eternal Word made flesh, needs to hear those words of forgiveness echoed back to him through his crazy cousin, John. 

And then, after he gets baptized, he goes on a vision quest in the wilderness and returns to daily life, where he drinks wine with sinners and outcasts and befriends sketchy wealthy elites. He goes straight to those that the ‘good citizens’ like you and I scowl at. He gathers a ragtag group of disciples who would never choose to hang out together. The disciples were not in the same social media algorithm, that’s for sure. I have no idea how Jesus kept Simon the Zealot from killing Matthew the tax collector. 

This is how God operates… Jesus doesn’t rush in to fix everyone’s life and make everyone the same perfectly pious robot. He heals some and does some miraculous things, yes (you would expect this from a divine being), but the REAL miracle of God made flesh is that he ministers to us BY BEING WITH US in the waiting. Even after we hung him on a cross and he came back, what did he do? We found him on a beach cooking fish, and he invited us for a snack. Waiting. Being here. Together. This is Advent. In the waiting, we live in this groaning world because it is the one that God loves and made good. (Not perfect. Good.)

So, for now, in Advent, we learn to surrender to a life of waiting. What a gift it is to be able to do so. We pray to be repented away from obsessing over things that perish and toward the eternal nowness of life. Yes, parents, keep taking those photos and videos. They are holy, and God rejoices in them with you. But maybe this takes the pressure off the grasping and allows you to rest in the fleeting nature of life as you wait with your quickly growing little ones. Maybe it allows you to just... Be... More often than not. And in this waiting, we know that God waits with us as we wait with each other.

Amen.

In Joy,
Jonas+