Our Season of Waiting
For many people, December is the season of waiting. For Christians, it is the Advent season, a time when they remember the birth of Jesus, recall his message, and then wait with clear expectation that Christ will come again. Often, it is forgotten that “Christ” is not a last name or a family name, it means ‘the anointed’.
Christians wait in anticipation that their lives, this time and place, this humanity, and this speck of dust we call home in the vast universe, will be anointed –with the love, the life, the hope, the confidence, the honesty, the willingness to suffer with us, the humility to learn and be impacted by others, the fearlessness in the face of utter greed and violence– that embodied that human being who walked on our planet some 2000 years ago.
December is also the season for Hannukah, an eight-day Jewish celebration, that commemorates the rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in the Second Century B.C. When I think of this celebration, I think of the eight days of waiting that the first celebrants lived through. They had to wait while others searched for oil for the temple lamps, not knowing whether the oil in the lamps would last or even whether more oil would be found.
December is also the month where we in the Northern Hemisphere experience the shortest day and the longest, darkest night – Winter Solstice. Imagine our ancestors of thousands of years ago waiting for the darkness and cold to end, hoping and praying to their gods that the light would come again as it had the year before.
December is the season of waiting, but waiting is oh so hard! — as the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed. We can’t wait to rip off our masks, get back to our favorite pub, get these children out of the house, and back into school. We can’t wait to get back to the job we had, even if before the pandemic we were bored and ready to quit. I, for one, can’t wait to smell those fumes when all those cars get back on the road traveling into Boston. Hey, walking in the town forest is a great privilege and works for a while, but I can’t wait to get back to the streets where I can dodge cars, whisk through traffic lights almost turning red in this fast-paced life we live.
Before I forget, I can’t wait to get back to my church on a Sunday (the most racially segregated hour in America) where I can sit and hear sermons about individual sinfulness, how better my faith is than other faiths, and how I can’t be saved without a personal relationship with Jesus. Oh God, get me back into my church so I don’t have to think about who I really invite into my life and who I keep out and why, what sinful social structures I participate in that make up my lifestyle, and who I might think I’m better than.
In all seriousness folks, after this pandemic ‘time-out’, do we really want to go back to the way things were- the segregated churches, the segregated lives, and experiences? The wait may have revealed that we are still the land of the free and the home of the brave (think of all those women and men who freely sacrificed their lives and jobs and professions in the care of others), but it has also revealed our capacity for selfishness (think of those people that won’t make the simple choice to wear a mask for the sake of another’s health and safety, or people who use their freedom to brandish assault rifles on state capital property and in front of elected officials homes, and who use their freedom of speech to plot kidnappings and coups, and say the nastiest and hateful things from their pulpits, social media platforms, and media outlets). Yes, we are the land of opportunity (as founder of a successful business), yet the wait has revealed that we are also a land of deep inequality and lack of opportunity for many in our school, healthcare, housing, and the criminal justice systems. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. so wisely stated decades ago,
“We have before us the glorious opportunity to inject a new dimension of love into the veins of our civilization.”
Do we really want to go back to the way things were – especially, since waiting can reveal an Advent future?! An Advent future (paraphrasing the prophet Isaiah) – in which we can decide to roll up our sleeves together and help one another make straight in the wasteland a highway that leads to a caring society for all people. . . . (Is.40:1-5) We can work towards a future in which the psalmist of old says: “kindness and truth shall meet; justice and peace shall kiss. Truth shall spring out of the earth, and justice shall look down from heaven”. (Ps. 85:11-12)
Be well,
Bill