Faith Venture

Anticipation
Anticipation
Is making me late
Is keeping me waiting

Carly Simon

We have been told for at least a week that today a blizzard is coming. At 10:00 this morning the temperature will be 28 F; at dinner time it will be close to 0 F. When I get up tomorrow the temperature will be -11 F with 25 mph winds gusting to 50 mph. Forecasters initially predicted 10 inches of snow. Now it’s 3 inches. But it will be messy.

We have been living in anticipation of the blizzard for a week. I went to a store yesterday to purchase a present for a Christmas gift exchange. The place was packed. People stocking up on bread, milk, toilet paper, and the like.

Talk about layered anticipation. We are in the anticipation period of the Christian church calendar–Advent, the anticipation of God visiting Earth.

I wonder, which anticipation is more real?

If you don’t have small children with the anticipation of presents under the Christmas tree, can you still work up emotionally the sense of anticipation that was the atmosphere in the Mediterranean world 2,000 years ago? The sense of anticipation that the first couple of generations of Jesus-followers felt?

Or, maybe like Carly Simon sang, we are paralyzed into inaction in the anticipation not knowing which way things are going. (I could write a whole sermon on that topic, but I won’t. I’ll leave it to your own imagination.)

Advent is a time of anticipation. We celebrate completion on Easter.  Christmas day is sort of a completion—the celebration of Jesus’ birth. Even that birth is pure anticipation.

The question for us lies in whether we can live in anticipation.

Tension hovers thickly in the atmosphere. Living with tension requires developing a tolerance for uncertainty. It means living a day at a time. Sometimes an hour at a time. Living looking forward to a future condition without certainty of its completion.

I’m not an expert on US situation comedy TV shows. Probably people in China are more knowledgeable. But how many have you seen where there is romantic tension? The show will play for several seasons living with that tension. Then the writers can’t take it anymore. They write in a scene of sexual completion. Now, the show is changed forever. They have to find a new tension. It’s a different show.

Advent teaches us to live in the last century before Jesus’ birth when large groups of people were saturated with the anticipation of God’s stirring. That something new was going to happen. What would that new time look like? No one knew for sure. OK, I bet many people thought they knew. Mostly, they were wrong.

Now we are living in anticipation. What will happen? How will it change me? Change the community? Change the world?

Stories come my way every week about people who call themselves “Christian”, perhaps they are regular, bubbly, smiling church attenders, and yet the congruence between how they live and what Jesus taught us about how to live exists only in their minds.

I was going to write another brief essay about my disappointment. And then, I thought, what good would that do?

Most of us are probably just trying to infuse thoughts Jesus left us about how to follow him. After all, when he decided the time was ripe to start bringing people together, his invitation was simply, “Follow me.” He didn’t ask for belief first. No one of his first followers believed (maybe Martha and Mary?). Three years later, they still didn’t believe. That is, until the resurrection, they didn’t believe.

But they all followed.

And they stumbled. And argued. And learned a little. Forgot a little. Were disappointed a little.

Still they followed.

Even though I don’t feel it, I am an old man. I’ve seen many things. Experienced many joys and disappointments. Sometimes I feel like Mark Twain, “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them have never happened.”

This is Advent. It’s a remembrance of a time when people were looking for Jesus. But they didn’t know it, exactly. And when they had it, they didn’t know what it was. And when they followed, they didn’t know where they were going–even unto the last days.

Later reflecting on the journey, they realized it was the best days of their lives.

And they shared it.

What can we do but to take that same journey and look back and say it was the best days.

We are now in the Advent season. The sub-head of my blog talks about living with God. But there are so many things I wonder about. Matthew (the gospel writer) says that an angel told Joseph to name his “son” Yeshua (through a series of transliterations, we wind up with Jesus in English) which means Yahweh (God) is salvation or God saves. Immediately after that thought, Matthew quotes from the Hebrew prophet Isaiah that the name of the child shall be Emmanuel–God is with us. Thank you, Jon Swanson, for today’s post that sent me down a rabbit warren of internet searches to refresh my memory of all this.

Even though the sub-title of my website talks of living with-God, I didn’t choose that because I know. I chose it because I want to puzzle it out. What does that mean? How do I live it?

I’ve read where the first Century Jesus-followers literally felt Jesus’ presence when they gathered. The small group movement had a tradition of the empty chair–an invitation to fill it with someone new. I think the first Christians must have had that tradition of an “empty chair” where Jesus sat with them. After all, his last words were, “I will be with you always…”

I miss the formal attention to advent of the Methodist church of my youth. But the tree and decorations around the house that my wife prepares every year are a reminder. It’s where I attempt to focus on God With Us amidst all the distractions of the season.

“I will be with you always…” I guess “always” means, well, always. Even now. It’s not a theory. It’s a presence.