Colour Supplement

Articles by Christians around the world

Sunday 9 December 2007

 

Waiting for Christ-mas

by Revd Jim Cox, Vicar of St. Andrew's Church Taunton

 

You can always tell when it's nearly harvest time, the shops are full of Christmas cards - or so we used to say in Birmingham.

Waiting is not very fashionable these days. Everything has to be instant – including ­the coffee --and the church can appear terribly out of touch when -it-keeps a whole season of waiting, which is what Advent really is. But actually, we do have to wait for some things in life and Advent still has the power to speak to the needs of modern people.

We wait differently for different things. We anticipate the biopsy from a lump under our arm in a very different state of mind to the arrival of a friend we haven't seen for a long time; and different again is the wait in the queue at the Post Office when the lonely soul at the front shares her concerns for a wayward nephew at great length with perhaps the only person she "knows" who will listen. We can wait with frustrated impatience, with joy and with utter terror.

So how, if we can wait at all amid the busy demands of the "pre-Christmas" commercial and religious cycle, are we to wait at Advent? The Psalms talk about waiting on God as being how a servant stands watching the hand of a master, ready to react immediately to a gesture. It's a lovely image and a good one. But God is not always as obvious - thankfully - as a lord from the ancient world. Being attentive to God can be an elusive exercise.

It might help if we have a certain clarity about what it is we are looking or waiting for. Although Advent   is  hung    conveniently  on  the  build-up to the commemoration of the birth of Jesus, we are not,   traditionally, awaiting the baby, we are anticipating the Second Coming - looking forward to the time when God's kingdom comes among us in power. It's not that we think God will necessarily inaugurate the new age on the 25^th of December one year, but the church's calendar offers us the chance annually to reflect on the signs of the kingdom, what they might be, how we might be ready for them and even be instrumental in their appearing.

Although there is a popular and enduring and valid view that the new kingdom will come with alarming and cataclysmic suddenness, this is not the only view. It is also legitimate to assume that our task as Christians is to be alert to God's smaller initiatives, to react promptly to signs of hope and life and growth, of justice, righteousness and truth - be they from within the church or at the instigation of some foul-mouthed Belfast rocker focussing the eyes of the world on African poverty. Signs of the presence of the kingdom are all around us and within us if only we recognised them.

And so I suppose the wait of Advent is not a wait of impending panic at the short time left to get a bird-flu-free turkey, but a wait with a sense of alertness. If we have time to pray our prayer might be to ask God to broaden our vision, to deepen our sympathies and enlarge our minds so that we will perceive divine action when it happens. But we might also just take a minute each day to sit and think of nothing ­as God has a habit of filling those little spaces of nothing with mountains of grace and insight. And we might even find that by giving this minute we have more time than we'd thought.

Jim           

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