Those Who Wait

Those Who Wait

First Sunday of Advent

No ear has ever heard, no eye ever seen, any God but you doing such deeds for those who wait for him. Isaiah 64:3B

“…[I]n (Jesus Christ), you were enriched in every way, with all discourse and all knowledge, as the testimony to Christ was confirmed among you, so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ. 1 Corinthians 1:5-7

Watch, therefore; you do not know when the Lord of the house is coming, whether in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or in the morning. Mark 13:35

Piety

“It Was A Hard Thing to Undo This Knot”

It was a hard thing to undo this knot.

The rainbow shines, but only in the thought

Of him that looks. Yet not in that alone,

For who makes rainbows by invention?

And many standing round a waterfall

See one bow each, yet not the same to all,

But each a hand’s breadth further than the next.

The sun on falling waters writes the text

Which yet is in the eye or in the thought.

It was a hard thing to undo this knot. (Gerard Manley Hopkins - 1844-1889)

Study

As we start a new Liturgical Year, we begin and continue periods of waiting and watching.  Our waiting and watching are not so different from the waiting that the prophet Isaiah encouraged his neighbors.  Maybe we are trusting in the work of doctors and nurses working in hospitals to cure the sick.  But we wait.  We wait for the sick to get well, healthy to stay healthy, and the separated by “quarantine” to return and rejoin.

Or maybe we are waiting on chemists and biologists working in the lab to develop a vaccine for this disease.  But we wait.

Or maybe we are waiting on the federal and state governments to put in place a plan to get that hoped-for cure to us. But we wait.

It’s easy to wander away from Jesus at times like this. We are much like the people with Isaiah.  They existed in a time before the arrival of Emmanuel (God to be with us) and before the Eucharist became the way Jesus could stay with us forever. 

As we step into a New Year, we continue waiting and watching with the grace of God not to be unprepared when the Master of the house returns.

Action

Life seems to be a crisis that never ends.  The hopes embedded in the Dallas Charter of 2002 were that the Church could put the abuse scandal in the rear-view mirror.  Yet, the reports on the abuses by Mr. Theodore McCarrick and the ongoing coverup in the Buffalo Diocese long after the Dallas Protocols continue to confront the Church in the modern world and us.

Now is the time to look ahead.  To look up in wonder and waiting.

As we begin Advent, tonight is both a full moon and a lunar eclipse.  The heavens realign for us the same way they did when ancient shepherds and Magi watched the skies.  Perhaps a few of us will be awake at 4:43 a.m. Monday to see it.[i]

Somehow, we’ve made our way to the final months of 2020. Although the unprecedented circumstances will surely trickle into the new calendar year (we’ve made it clear that we would like to be over the global pandemic, but the virus itself isn’t taking the hint just yet!), 2021 seems—perhaps even metaphorically—like the light at the end of the tunnel.

But we still wait in the tunnel.

What does it mean?  What does it matter? 

Maybe it merely means that we should continue to wait and watch the incredible power of God’s grace in the world. Perhaps it means that we must continually be aware of the conjunction between our wandering, independent, internal spiritual-self with the external, observable physical conditions that give us that God out there and in here -- moving all things toward hope. 

As Hopkins the poet-priest-scientist reminds us: "The rainbow shines, but only in the thought of one who looks. Yet not in that alone, for who makes rainbows by invention?

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[i] Lunar eclipses occur during the Full Moon. They occur when the Earth wedges itself between the Sun and Moon – precisely what will happen in the darkness of the first days of Advent. Most of North America will be able to see this eclipse. With more than four-fifths of the Moon becoming immersed by the penumbral shadow, a noticeable shading effect should be evident over the Moon’s upper limb for some minutes around the time of mid-eclipse.