Focused
Jeremiah 33:14-16; Luke 21:25-36

November 30, 2003

We begin the most overused season, the time of year we all anticipate, yet still cannot understand why. We wait for a birth for which there is no baby. We wait for a explosion of candle light in the midst of winter darkness, yet out here on the prairie it just gets colder. Whenever we have done something too much, it’s time to turn to listen to what the poets are doing, despite the popular wisdom of contemporary song.

William Butler Yeats wrote “The Second Coming,” a poem about the grim side of the Advent story. The poem concludes with a famous line, “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Slouching towards Bethlehem fits us as we commence the long wait of Advent. It’s hard to sit up straight for a long time, tense and super-alert. Slouching is the humanly inevitable consequence of waiting. Yet the most important spiritual skill is waiting.

Waiting is not emptiness of time, doing nothing. In recent years the liturgical thought police, having no better concept of Advent than that it can’t be Christmas yet, have tried to ban Christmas carols from the four Sundays of Advent. Events such as our 63rd Rotary Carol Festival beginning this evening are heresies of the highest order. Bah humbug! They don’t know how to wait properly.

To wait well is to live in a time of full expectancy - a pregnant period of change and development. There’s no anxiety in real waiting, no mulling over what might have been or what might be. No boredom either; for to wait in Advent is to live in every moment for the moment.

Artaban, the Fourth Wise Man of Henry van Dyke’s famous short story, is the parable of pregnant waiting. One of the Magi following the star of Bethlehem to see the One Who Comes, Artaban keeps getting held back and delayed on his mission by his deep compassion for the hurting human beings who stumble into his way. He is always a little bit too late to meet the Promised One, but he continues to pursue his goal, searching and waiting until the trail runs cold. That doesn’t mean Artaban’s life has been empty - it was rather full of all the people he had encountered and helped and healed with his knowledge. It was a life crowded upon by God.

33 years later when he himself was desperately ill, he meets the one for whom he had waited. All his waiting had prepared him, focused his attention for that time.

The best Biblical story of waiting is the tale of Simeon who waited most of his life to see the coming of the Messiah (Luke 2: 25-35). We are only permitted to listen in on the end of the story, when urged by the Holy Spirit Simeon goes over to and enters the Temple. The parents of Jesus were there doing the customary rituals for a newly born, but Simeon intuitively knew there was little ordinary there. He took the child in his arms, blessed the child and parents, and cautioned them that this child will be the cause of the rising and falling of many in Israel, opposed by some and revealing the inner thoughts of many others.

Just in case you think that waiting a long time back then in the sleepy first century, remember that Palestine was an occupied country by a hostile empire that barely tolerated Israel’s unique faith. Taxation and slavery and police brutality were a permanent part of the mental and physical landscape. It was hard to wait for someone about whom you knew nothing.

The poet speaks again, this time W. H. Auden in his For The Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio. The scene labeled, “The Meditation of Simeon,” begins with Simeon lamenting the shape of the world’s soul.

“As long as there were any roads to amnesia and anaesthesia still to be explored, any rare wine or curiosity of cuisine as yet untested, any erotic variation as yet unimagined or unrealized, any method of torture as yet undevised, any style of conspicuous waste as yet unindulged, any eccentricity of mania or disease as yet unrepresented, there was still hope that man had not been poisoned but transformed….”

During his decades of waiting in the midst of a world that couldn’t wait, Simeon saw, did, experienced extraordinary and ordinary events that prepared him to see that child and know that God’s got the whole world in his hands of justice and righteousness.

Simeon and Artaban were focused on seeing and participating in the myriad ways God becomes flesh and dwells among us – God becoming human; human beings becoming divine.

Lots of people spend most of their living days perceiving the worst in others and in life in general. For a second they feel superior being able to be the learned commentator, but when they finish their rant, there is no word that redeems.

Be alert, focus on the little incarnations of God in your ordinary and extraordinary comings and goings, and you will get practice in living divinely, even as you slouch again towards Bethlehem this dark Advent season.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan