As it’s the first Sunday of Advent, the beginning of a new church year, as well as the beginning of December and less than a month ‘til Christmas, I want to add an extra reading this morning, from the gospel according to Dr Seuss:

St Luke’s, Havelock North – Advent 1 2007 – Sermon

Readings: Isaiah 2: 1-5, Romans 13: 11-14, Matthew 24: 36-44

We’re here! The beginning of another Church Year and another Advent, a graphic reminder that Christmas is only just around the corner and with all that in mind we get our first gospel reading in the new cycle, and there’s not a skerit of Christmas to be found. No angels, no shepherds, no babys in mangers, or even the promise of such. Instead Matthew gives us Noah and signs and thieves breaking in in the middle of the night. So having listened to one gospel for the day, let me offer another, perhaps more contemporary, alternative. This, then, from the Gospel According to Dr Seuss:

The Waiting Place ... for people just waiting.
Waiting for a train to go
or a bus to come, or a plane to go
or the mail to come,
or the rain to go
or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow
or waiting around for a Yes or No
or waiting for their hair to grow.
Everyone is just waiting.

Waiting for the fish to bite

or waiting for wind to fly a kite

or waiting around for Friday night

or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake

or a pot to boil, or a Better Break

or a sting of pearls, or a pair of pants

or a wig with curls, or Another Chance.

Everyone is just waiting.

The waiting place. If you read the whole of ‘Oh The Places You’ll Go’ where that reading’s taken from you’ll find that Dr Seuss doesn’t think much of the Waiting Place. It’s ‘a most useless place’ where confused people go and long to escape from, which is perhaps what makes it an appropriate reading for our time and place – although I’m not sure I’d call it gospel – because, let’s face it, many of us feel the same way. We too think waiting is pretty useless, and the generations after us are even more convinced.

I was watching an item on TV the other night about the millennial generation – usually called Generation Y in this country – and how employers are coming to grips with this whole generation who, among other things, aren’t prepared to waste time waiting. While my parents might have been prepared to work their way up through the ranks to one day be a manager, this generation wants to have flexible hours, six weeks of holidays, and be chief executive by lunchtime. I don’t want to knock the younger generation really, because they’re only following our examples. None of us likes to wait very much. We like to be able to get everything from coffee to cars to million dollar mortgages immediately, if not sooner. We want what we want and we want it now, and much like Dr Seuss we think that any time wasted on waiting is useless indeed.

So to all you confused would be escapees who hate to wait, I say welcome to the Waiting Place of Advent.

This is the point where I should give you the standard speech about letting Advent be Advent and not ignoring it altogether as we rush headlong into Christmas, and that’s OK because it’s a speech worth making and listening to. Advent’s not a season most people know a lot about and there is a tendency to ignore it, not least because if we start to look at Advent seriously we might discover we’re not that comfortable with what it stands for.

At a time when the rest of our community is winding up into party mode and Christmas preparations, in a culture already uncomfortable with the whole concept of waiting around anyway, Advent asks us to stand still, to stop, to pause a while and simply wait – not for Christmas parties or pageants or even the birth of Jesus, not, quite frankly, for Christmas period, but to simply wait for God.

Waiting for God – it’s not a common concept for us anymore really. We might chase God, or run search for God, or seek God or even run away from God, but I’m not sure many of us pay much attention to the idea of waiting for God these days?

It’s a common enough theme in the scriptures though. In the psalms we’re told to ‘wait for the Lord, be strong.’ Proverbs informs us that we should ‘wait for the Lord, and he will help you.’ Later in Isaiah we get another of these wonderful images when the prophet announces that ‘those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles.’ And in Lamentations we’re promised that ‘the Lord is good to those who wait for him,’ and ‘it is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.’

Why is there such a focus on waiting for God in the scriptures, especially in the Old Testament? Perhaps because so often that’s all they could do? That’s certainly part of the message we get from our real readings this morning. In Matthew and Romans we find these portraits of the early Christians, those first century pioneers, anxiously anticipating the imminent return of Christ, waiting alert and expectant, wide awake, but that’s all they can do, wait, because, as Matthew makes clear, there’s no way they can make it happen or even know when it will happen, this return of the one who will come like a thief in the night. So they simply wait.

Isaiah paints a different but not all that different picture. We’re going to hear a lot from Isaiah over the next few weeks and let me just put in a plug for Kirsten’s column in the new issue of Waiapu News, for a good introduction to the Isaiah Advent readings. Today we hear those wonderful and famous words, describing a time in days to come, when people will stream to Mt Zion, to the gloriously restored Temple, at a time without war when all Israel’s tribes will come together and walk in the light of God. It’s a glowing picture, brimming with hope and gladness, and it’s all being painted for a people in exile, a beaten, conquered and captured people, helpless and able to do nothing but wait for God.

What we find over and over and over again is that at the end of the day waiting for God is what God’s people do when they’re face to face with a sense of despair and left with nothing but a great hope, grounded in the conviction that the God who acted in the past is still among us now, and that this is not all there is to it – a simple faith that things are not yet as they should and one day will be.

That’s why the Israelites waited for God – they really had no choice, and neither, I want to suggest, do we.

We, like Dr Seuss, may think the waiting place a useless places and do all we can to escape “all that waiting and staying” in favour of “the bright places where Boom Bands are playing” – and goodness knows there’s plenty of that to be found in the run-up to Christmas. But ultimately, I believe, we too will occasionally, eventually, have to admit to our own helplessness in so many ways. As we make our way through the traditional Advent themes of peace, hope, joy and love, I doubt that we’ll be to avoid noting how little there is of each of them in our world at times. Yes, we can pray and even work for peace, we can do all we can to give hope and bring joy and love our neighbours as ourselves, yet still people die, still there is hate, still there are more swords in our world than ploughshares – so what else can we do?

Wait for God.

So here we are, in the Waiting Place. Can we choose to avoid it? Escape all the waiting and staying in favour of the bright places and boom bands of Christmas? Of course. We can choose to ignore Advent entirely if we wish. Or we can wait. It’s our choice really.