Sermons

Advent is for Waiting

22 Dec, 2024

By the Rev’d Andrew Coyle

Season: Fourth Sunday of Advent

Readings: Micah 5:2-5a | Hebrews 10:5-10 | Luke 1:39-45

  • Advent is a time of waiting,
    • waiting for the coming of God.
  • As a season, it culminates in our Christmas celebration,
    • when God did indeed come among us,
    • when the hope of Israel for a messiah, a saviour and redeemer was realised.
  • But Advent also looks to that time when God will come again,
    • and maybe even again and again,
    • entering our lives repeatedly with the hope and the promise of freedom and peace and salvation.
  • And in this sense Advent is a constant season in our lives, a constant thread running through our existence.
  • A colleague of mine offered these words which I think capture that sense of continuous Advent.
    • Advent is a precious time of waiting, waiting for God.
    • Being human includes waiting, desiring, longing for the infinite possibilities which can only be fulfilled in God. (1)
  • And then he quoted these words from Maria Boulding,
    • If you want God, and long for union with God, yet sometimes wonder what that means or whether it can mean anything at all, you are already walking with the God who comes.
    • If you are at times so weary and involved with the struggle of living that you have no strength even to want [God], yet are still dissatisfied that you don’t, you are already keeping Advent in your life.
    • If you have ever had an obscure intuition that the truth of things is somehow better, greater, more wonderful than you deserve or desire, that the touch of God in your life stills you by its gentleness, that there is a mercy beyond anything you could ever suspect, you are already drawn into the central mystery of salvation. (2)
  • The moments that Maria Boulding speak of can come upon us at any time.
  • At any time we may find ourselves living in Advent – waiting, waiting for God.
    • When we find ourselves sick or bereft,
    • when we find ourselves between jobs,
    • when we find ourselves waiting for something, anything, that will change our lives and renew us in hope and purpose,
    • then we are experiencing Advent.
  • And if we are open to the possibilities,
    • if we watch and wait,
    • if we look for the signs of life and hope,
  • then just as Advent prepares us for Christmas in the church’s year, so our time of waiting will lead us into a new experience of God coming into our lives and bringing something new to birth.
  • And we will find that that time of waiting was a time of gestation,
    • of unseen growth and movement quickening within us, within our lives, until something new is brought to birth.
  • And what God brings to life within us and within our world may surprise us.
  • In our readings this morning, the prophet Micah says,
    • “But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days”.
  • Now, it is true that Bethlehem was the birthplace of David, the great king, but at the time of the prophet, it had slipped into insignificance,
    • “a town of the littlest among the littlest”. (3)
  • Yet, this place will give birth to the Messiah, the one who calls us all to new life.
  • And this dynamic of unexpected birth and life is also present in our gospel reading.
  • Mary runs to meet Elizabeth.
  • And both women are improbably, impossibly, pregnant –
    • Mary is an unknown virgin with neither royal blood nor an important family, while Elizabeth is the barren wife of an aging priest. (4)
  • Yet within them both, the new life of God is quickening, getting ready to be born into the world so that we may be born again and remade in the image of the God who is love.
  • And then Mary sings,
    • “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour”.
  • And her song is ours.
  • Because when she sings of God bringing down the powerful from their thrones and lifting up the lowly and filling the hungry with good things, we too rejoice because we understand that “God loves us enough to come to us – to the most
    barren, the most unnoticed, the very least of us – and to plant in us, and in our world, God’s own life, God’s own hope, and God’s own promises of peace”.
  • So, even though this season of Advent is drawing to a close and our waiting is nearly over, we can trust that in all our other Advents, in all our other seasons of waiting for the new life of God to be born again among us, that new life is indeed growing within us and within the world, preparing to transform us and, through us, to renew the world.

    (1) Richard Hancock(?), Liturgy for Advent.
    (2) Maria Boulding, The Coming of God ( SPCK: London , 1982).
    (3) James Liggett, “Fourth Sunday of Advent, Year C.” [Cited 18 December 2006]. Online: http://arc.episcopalchurch.org/sermons-that-work/031221sr.html
    (4) Liggett, “Fourth Sunday of Advent, Year C”.

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