The Christmas season brings a lot of waiting…waiting for the
Christmas cookies to be done baking, waiting to open all the Christmas presents
under the tree, waiting for the first big snowfall, waiting for Christmas
vacation to start, waiting for the party guests to arrive, waiting for the big
football game to start (and/or waiting for it to end), waiting to eat all the
delicious food and the leftovers.
When I was a kid the anticipation of Christmas morning was
often more than I could handle. I
remember one Christmas morning when the waiting was especially agonizing. I remember waking up early and then having to
wait and wait for my parents to wake up, go down stairs, and make sure
everything was all set before my sister and I could go down and see what Santa
had brought us. My sister and I sat at
the top of the stairs calling downstairs to my mom and dad to see if we could
come down. Time went by SO slowly. Didn’t they understand that I wanted to open
those presents?!? Didn’t they know I had
been waiting for weeks to see what Santa brought?!? How could they make me wait one more minute
to enjoy playing with all my new toys???
Then finally my parents called my sister and I, and we
rushed down the stairs and went right to the Christmas tree. “Santa” left us a
generous pile of toys to unwrap and play with.
And we began examining and opening all the presents. There was no disappointment. In fact, I received far more than I had asked
for, I unwrapped much more than I expected.
Once all the presents were unwrapped I spent hours playing with those
toys. And the joy didn’t end that day.
It has been many years since I had such excitement for
Christmas morning (in fact my parents are so much more eager than I am to open
presents this morning), but my Christmas seasons still require a lot of
waiting. We do a lot of things to
celebrate Christmas and a lot of those things require waiting, but the
Christmas season, Advent, is really all about waiting and preparing for Jesus’
birth. Advent also reminds me about that
better world that we are waiting for, the world of justice and peace that will
be when the Reign of God is present on earth.
Lately I’ve become very impatient and frustrated with
waiting, specifically I’ve become frustrated with waiting for Jesus to return
and establish a world of justice. I
mean, seriously, what is God waiting for?
God can do anything God wants to.
Why do we have to be stuck in this far less than perfect world for so
long???
I’m tired of waiting for a world where 18,000 children don’t
die everyday from hunger. I’m tired of
waiting for a world where one in four children in the US won’t live in
poverty. I’m tired of waiting for a
world where everyone has access to the basics: food, water, sanitation, health
care, education, and shelter. I’m tired
of waiting for a world where peace is the norm and war is a concept we only
vaguely remember. I’m tired of waiting
for a world where people don’t destroy and overuse the natural resources. I tired of seeing people and organizations
working so hard to make a difference and bring about a better world while
change comes so slowly if at all.
But there is so much that I don’t understand, so much that I
cannot comprehend.
It’s kind of like that Christmas morning many years
ago. I didn’t understand why I had to wait;
I couldn’t comprehend why something so seemingly simple could require so much
time to get ready (did Santa leave a mess or WHAT?). I still don’t know what my parents were doing
down stairs to prepare for my sister and I to come down and open presents. But my parents knew what they were
doing. And when the waiting was finally
over, there was only joy and celebration.
Likewise, my human brain cannot understand why God doesn’t just
establish the Reign of God on earth right now, but someday in the future there
will be joy and celebration many times greater than any Christmas morning.
But that doesn’t make the waiting any easier to bear.
Here’s where Christmas can help. The martyred archbishop of El Salvador, Oscar
Romero, had this to say on Christmas day in 1977:
“With Christ, God has injected himself into history. With
the birth of Christ, God’s reign is now inaugurated in human time. On this
night, as every year for twenty centuries, we recall that God’s reign is now in
this world and that Christ has inaugurated the fullness of time. His birth
attests that God is now marching with us in history, that we do not go alone.
Humans long for peace, for justice, for a reign of divine
law, for something holy, for what is far from earth’s realities. We can have
such a hope, not because we ourselves are able to construct the realm of
happiness that God’s holy words proclaim, but because the builder of a reign of
justice, of love, and of peace is already in the midst of us.”
The Reign of God isn’t here yet, but it is. The yearly celebration of Jesus’ birth
reminds us that God once lived among us in human form and God continues to be
present in each and every person. God is
waiting along with us, God understands the agony of our waiting, and so I must
trust that God has a plan much greater than any plan I could ever understand.
And so I wait and watch and work.
