Waiting for Jesus...again

Most years, The Chetek Alert asks local pastors to submit messages to include in their annual 'Tis the Season Holiday insert. Here is my contribution for this year.

As a rule, we don’t like waiting. Whether it’s waiting in line or waiting to speak with a real person in customer service on the phone or a child waiting for Christmas to come, we don’t do waiting well. But waiting is one of the great themes of the Bible – Abraham and Sarah had to wait for the promised Isaac. Joseph – their great-grandson – had to wait for the strange dreams he had dreamt as a boy to come to their fulfillment in middle age. The people of Israel toiled insufferably in Egypt waiting for their deliverance for hundreds of years. Many of the notables in Scripture were schooled in waiting – the aforementioned Abraham, Moses, David, Jeremiah, Daniel. All of them found themselves between promise and fulfillment and the long wait between. As the pages of the Older Testament come to a close, the people of God now bereft of king and kingdom are waiting for the One to come who would at last Set Things Right.

Who knew?

I think of that night some 400 years later that Joseph and Mary show up in crowded Bethlehem looking for any place to lay their heads. As far as they are aware, they are the only ones that know that, to quote Paul, “the fullness of the time” (Gal 4:4, KJV) had come. Tonight He would be born of whom the prophets had spoken. At long last the Promise was on the brink of fulfillment. As far as all those people in David’s city were concerned, however, it was just another night in a little town already at capacity due to yet another government initiative to increase revenues for the Powers that Be. That was the Main Event as far as all those people were concerned - not what was going on in the cave behind the inn. The Census was as newsworthy as frac mining in Barron County but a baby born in Bethlehem? That happens all the time. Of course, now we know differently. We know that, to borrow a phrase from American scholar Thomas Cahill, a hinge of history was turning in that manger out back. God was making good on His promise to heal the woe of mankind and doing so in His way and in His sweet time.

We suck at this

That we moderns suck at waiting is a well-attested truth. Our conveniences attest of this: Microwave ovens, instant messaging, high speed internet – after all, who among us want to return to the good old days of dial-up (except maybe my parents who still live there)? But now we the people of God of the 21st Century find ourselves waiting, too. We join the Long Wait of the Faithful since the days that Jesus the Christ ascended to heaven outside of Jerusalem: we are waiting for His Return. In fact, many of the carols we sing at this time of year give voice not just to remembering His first advent but also longing for His second. I think of the final verse of “It Came Upon A Midnight Clear” that says:

For lo! The days are hastening on,
By prophets seen of old,
When with the ever-circling years
Shall come the time foretold,
When the new heavens and the new earth shall own
The Prince of Peace, their King,
And the whole world send back the song
Which now the angels sing.

Just like it was in Bethlehem “back in the day”, the Return of the King will be preceded with little fanfare. No crescendo in the musical soundtrack to announce that He is at hand. No tweet to declare His revival. It will be, in the words of the carol “Angels From the Realms of Glory”, “suddenly”:

Saints before the altar bending
Watching long in hope and fear
Suddenly the Lord descending
In His temple shall appear

In the meantime, while we wait, we worship and do what we must to remind each other that though that Day is long in coming, it will at long last come and He who was born in the stable will finally rule the nations.

One day...