Season of Advent:
What are your Expectations?
Isaiah 64:1-9, 1 Corinthians 1:3-9, Mark 13:24-37
The scriptures for the first Sunday of Advent filled us with anticipation and hope. They brought us into a time to expect, and to wait, hope, watch, and prepare for God’s Advent in Jesus Christ. We look forward to Christmas and the unfolding of the great love story between God and human life. But there is even more. Advent is both the time to wait the birth of the baby Jesus in Bethlehem and the time to anticipate His coming again in majestic power and great glory. Advent reminds us that God has given our lives great purpose and that we look for Christ to return and establish the Realm of God forever.
But some of us have a hard time staying with our Advent expectations. Waiting and watching can be very difficult at times. We keep busy. We like to get on with it. We fill up our time with parties to plan, events to attend, places to go, people to see, and shopping to do. We have to keep moving because if we slow down and pause, then we risk discovering the spiritual loneliness that may lie just beneath the surface of hustle and bustle. If we give up controlling our own lives, let go and allow ourselves to wait and hope, we will discover how much we need God. Simone Weil, a Jewish mystic and writer, said, “Waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life.” Waiting patiently in the expectations of Advent helps us to receive the power and the glory of a Savior coming into our midst.
There are times in Israel’s history when the people had lost sight of the divine purpose. The prophet Isaiah spoke God’s word in such a dark time and challenged the people to return to God. Israel had acted so badly toward God and so unjustly toward the neediest people that God allowed her enemies to invade. Offering a prayer that begins in Chapter 63, Isaiah confessed Israel’s sins and begged for God come to them with grace and mercy. Isaiah hoped that the divine return would tear open the heavens, make the mountains quake, and boil the seas. The Israelites would acknowledge God as Creator. ‘We are clay and you are like the potter” God would not remain angry with penitent people.
In His final words in the Last Supper, Jesus told His disciples that the Advent of the Son of Man will be the greatest event in history. Just before His return the suffering faithful will have reached the lowest point of despair. Then without warning “the sun will grow dark, the moon will no longer shine, the stars will fall from heaven, the powers in space will be driven from the courses. The Son of Man will appear, coming in the clouds with great power and glory. People in Jesus’ day had witnessed solar and lunar eclipses, meteorites shooting across the sky, and large storms with surging clouds. But put them together and magnify them a hundred times, and we can imagine what the Advent of the Son of Man will be like. No one will know the day or the hour. No one except God.
Jesus tells us that although His return does no abide by human calculations, we still have much to do to prepare for it. Advent does not require us to do nothing, to be passive and lifeless. Nor does it invite us to be consumed in frenzied activity that loses focus and meaning. Advent prepares us to embrace the most important even that will ever occur. For that, we have to wake up, keep alert, be ever watchful, and hope for the signs of God moving through our world. Act as the doorkeeper with our houses, being ready for the master return. Live each and every moment as the apostle Paul wrote in his first letter to the Corinthians, to be faultless on the “Day of The Lord Jesus”, stay on the path that Christ has created to heal and comfort, to build up and strengthen the lives of others that Christ may embrace when he returns.
At the age of fifty the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy began a profound interest in Christian spirituality and studied the Gospels in earnest. Nothing summed up his faith better than this story he wrote on Jesus’ teachings to live in the expectations of Advent. This was a story about a humble shoemaker.
Martin Avdeitch, who wanted very much to meet Jesus one night, dozing over his Bible, he suddenly heard a voice saying, Martin! Look thou into the street tomorrow, for I am coming to visit thee”. Convinced that the Lord was coming to see him, Martin woke the next morning with nervous excitement. He cleaned his home and shop, put his wares in order, cooked a pot of hearty soup and waited patiently. Soon an elderly peddler woman came to his door and she looked so hungry, he gave her a bowl of his soup. Then a shivering mother and her young child came in and gave them two blankets to keep them warm. And then a veteran soldier appeared and the shoemaker gave him a pair of boots.
With a kind heart, Martin cared for each person, but as the evening fell, he was disappointed that Jesus has not visited him that day. Putting on his spectacles, he took up his Bible, with a sigh, and he opened it to The Parable of the Last Judgment in Matthew 25 and read: Assuredly I say to you, inasmuch as did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it also to me.” Then Martin understood that the vision had come true, and that his Savior had in very truth visited him that day, and that he had received him.”
Our Advent expectations lead us to prepare for Jesus Christ coming into our lives. We do that through love of others and helping those whom we know are in need, by welcoming a stranger, giving shelter to those who are homeless, and making sure that no child will ever to bed without food. These are lessons that the world, after 2000 years, still needs to learn from the first Christmas.
Advent means that God has come into our lives in the birth of Jesus Christ and is coming again when Jesus Christ returns. Advent is the time to keep awake and be alert, to watch and wait, to be prepared for the power of Christmas and to get ready for the greatest happening the cosmos will ever know. Paul also wrote to the Philippians 3:13-14: “Forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead. I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. I pray the lights of Advent- hope, peace, love and joy in Jesus Christ-shine through your lives and this world to everyone during this season. And may you always live the expectations of Advent until Christ comes again. Amen.
download