Advent is a Season of Waiting on God

This coming Sunday marks the beginning of the Christian calendar with the start of Advent. The word Advent comes from the Latin meaning “to come”, and the season that bears this title consists of the four Sundays before Christmas that look with anticipation to the coming of Christ. While we observe this season as a time of looking forward to the celebration of Christ’s birth at Christmas, the practice of Advent each year is also focused on our faith and hope in what God is preparing for our future: “Behold, I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:5).

As we enter into this holy season, I want to focus my next four columns on four particular words that capture the essence of the season of Advent. While Christians have traditionally focused on the themes of hope, peace, joy, and love, important themes as they are, I would like to glean another set of ideas from the opening of the first Gospel to be written, the Gospel of Mark.

Although Mark does not say anything about the birth of Jesus, as do Matthew and Luke, this does not mean that Mark is without an Advent theme. Moreover, a careful look at Mark’s prologue produces some very important spiritual practices for our renewal during this season of Advent. These practices are: waiting, hearing, repenting, and believing. We will consider the practice of waiting first.

The opening of Mark’s narrative situates the story of Jesus in the context of the past; Israel’s history of exile, and God’s promise of redemption and liberation. Although all the statements that Mark attributes to the prophet Isaiah cannot be found in Isaiah, the intention of the Gospel narrator is to pick up God’s promises of the past spoken through Isaiah in order to declare the new work that God was doing in the present as the fulfillment of those promises. In the thought of the Gospel’s author, the theme of a New Exodus, which was prevalent in Isaiah’s prophecies, was now being realized in the coming of God in the person of Jesus.

But the fulfillment of this promise comes only after God’s people had experienced a long period of waiting. Indeed, a remnant of God’s faithful continued to wait and believe, hoping to experience the realization of God’s promise of redemption. In their minds, God was the only one who could act to accomplish God’s promises, and the waiting of God’s people was an act of faith and hope in the God who they believed would affect that which they had not experienced, but which God had surely promised.

In our nanosecond oriented world, we find it difficult to wait. We are extremely uncomfortable with delayed satisfaction, and we make every effort to achieve and obtain quick, but often fleeting, ways of gratifying our lives. We realize we hunger, but we fail to realize that our deepest hunger cannot be satisfied by those momentary pleasures. Our deepest longings will only be satisfied by the renewal of God, who is continually making things new, but perhaps not at the speed we would desire. And, thus we must wait.

Yet, waiting on God is not like waiting in line at the store or waiting for an appointment. Waiting on God is like a child waiting to open presents on Christmas morning. There is hope and expectation, along with the assurance that though she may not know what is wrapped in the Christmas paper, she does know the one who gives the gift and she knows that the gift is the expression of the giver’s love. While we wait on God, we do not wait in fear and anxiety of what might come in the future; we wait with faith and hope in the God who holds the future.

In our waiting, however, we do not separate ourselves from the reality of a creation under chaos. Rather, we wait with creation, and we suffer with those who suffer, proclaiming the gospel through service and healing until God’s final redemption. In doing so, we do not deny the reality of suffering and injustice, nor do are we complacent about suffering and injustice, but we work as a means of confronting the suffering and injustice of our world with the realization that they hold no eternal reign over us.

But more than anything, waiting on God is a time of preparation. Just as Jesus commanded his disciples to watch and pray in the garden as a time of preparation, so too God demands that we watch and pray while we wait. Through our time of waiting, we are preparing to experience God’s renewal as our lives of disorientation are continually oriented toward God’s future hope. And through our time of preparation, as we wait with faithfulness, we can learn to perceive and embrace God’s work in the present as we continue to look for the horizon of God’s blessings.

The period of Advent is a season in which we celebrate what God has done in the incarnation of Jesus. But it is also a time in which we wait on God to do something new in our lives, something we have yet to experience. Advent is a time of hope, anticipation and waiting. Yet, through our waiting we work, watch, and pray as we prepare for the coming God, the one who is making all things new.