Advent 3A_2019

Advent 3A_2019 December 15, 2019 “Advent is a season of waiting,” she said to me. “What are you waiting for?” What are you waiting for? Anyone else, I would have just made something up, maybe even made a joke about it, but since she was my spiritual director, I told her the truth. Sadly I responded, “I’ve been too busy to wait. But I’m hopeful there is still time yet to wait, and I’ll be thinking about what I am waiting for.” What are you waiting for? We see John the Baptist in greatly reduced circumstances just in the course of a week. Last week, he was loose in the wilderness, preaching about repentance and calling the religious authorities who came out to see him a “brood of vipers.” Now, we see him imprisoned after having angered the wrong person, and he sends a single question back to Jesus: “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” Many other commentators have read John’s question as one of uncertainty and doubt, but this year, it struck me that maybe there is another interpretation. What if John’s question comes, not from a place of anxiety but a place of curiosity? What if John’s question reflects that he is comfortable waiting for as long as it takes because he trusts that the Kingdom of God will be brought to fulfillment; he knows that his job, his only job at this point, is to wait and see? What would it look like for us if we trusted whole-heartedly that the Kingdom of God would be fulfilled, not through any work of our own but through the grace of the Holy Spirit and through the person of Jesus Christ? How would our waiting be different? Would it change what we are waiting for? I had a conversation with a friend of mine the other night. She was telling me about a season of discernment that she finds herself in pertaining to her work and her family needs. “What are you waiting for?” I asked her. And she responded that she did not know. I then told her about one of my touchstones of discernment, a print my mom had gotten me years ago on a trip out west. It’s a drawing and poem by an artist named Brian Andreas, and the title is “Waiting for signs.” “I used to wait for a sign, she said, before I did anything. Then one night I had a dream & an angel in black tights came to me & said, you can start any time now, & then I asked is this a sign? & the angel started laughing & I woke up. Now, I think the whole world is filled with signs, but if there’s no laughter, I know they’re not for me....” I’m going to invite us to sit in silence for a bit today. During that time, if you feel anxious or agitated, I invite you to pay attention to your breath, and to ponder: What are you waiting for? Where is the laughter in your life in this season of expectation and waiting?