I don’t like to wait. I’ve been known to leave stores when I see that the lines are too long. I don’t like the waiting and I don’t like the frustration that comes with waiting and I especially don’t like it when it seems like all the other lines are going faster than the line I have chosen. And waiting can be even harder when there is some urgency or expectation to the waiting. Do you remember when you were a kid at Christmas? That time between the beginning of December and Christmas Day seemed to take forever. It proved the point that time is not a constant. Now that time goes quicker, because all time goes quicker, and yet there can also be times in which it goes excruciatingly slow, like while waiting in lines. Because there is good waiting, and there is bad waiting. We have been to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade several times. Where we have watched the parade, it arrives around 10 am, but to be able to get a seat up front so you can see everything, you have to arrive around 6 am. That’s four hours of sitting in the cold on a sidewalk in New York City. That can be hard time or easy time. The first year we were there, the police officer who was there I guess to protect us from ourselves, led us all in singing and chanting back and forth to the other side of the street, and it was a lot of fun. It was easy time. The next time, the officer was just there leaving us to our own devices. I spent the time going through French flash cards so I could pass the French reading exam that Harvard required for graduation. That was some hard time. But both times, the wait was the longest just at the time in which you could hear the parade, but could not see it. It was right there and yet it was so far away. It was there and yet the expectation and excitement of it coming, because it’s not there, were heightened and the wait was hard. That’s advent. A time of knowing that Christ’s coming is here and also knowing it’s not here, and so our series on the songs of the season continues by looking at Charles Wesley’s classic hymn Come Thou Long Expected Jesus.
Last week we found ourselves in exile crying out for God to send deliverance and remembering the promises that God has given to the people, given to us, especially the promises that we find in the prophet Isaiah, but not knowing when it would all come about. This week, not much has changed, except that we are now in the wilderness and we have John the Baptist making a proclamation of repentance as the one who prepares the way for the coming of the Lord. That means the time has come, but it’s not quite here. It’s the time in which you can hear the bands in the parade but you can’t see them yet. You know they are there but the closer it gets, the farther away it seems and the harder the waiting becomes. We know that Christmas is right around the corner, we know that Jesus’ coming is right there, the one who is more powerful is coming but when? When will it be? How much longer will we have to wait? When will the promises be fulfilled?
