First Thursday of Advent
Scripture Reading for Today:
Hosea 6:1-6
A Call to Repentance6 “Come, let us return to the Lord. He has torn us to pieces; now he will heal us. He has injured us; now he will bandage our wounds. 2 In just a short time he will restore us, so that we may live in his presence. 3 Oh, that we might know the Lord! Let us press on to know him. He will respond to us as surely as the arrival of dawn or the coming of rains in early spring.” 4 “O Israel and Judah, what should I do with you?” asks the Lord. “For your love vanishes like the morning mist and disappears like dew in the sunlight. 5 I sent my prophets to cut you to pieces— to slaughter you with my words, with judgments as inescapable as light. 6 I want you to show love, not offer sacrifices. I want you to know me more than I want burnt offerings.
Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13
For the choir director: A psalm of the descendants of Korah.1 Lord, you poured out blessings on your land! You restored the fortunes of Israel. 2 You forgave the guilt of your people— yes, you covered all their sins. Interlude 8 I listen carefully to what God the Lord is saying, for he speaks peace to his faithful people. But let them not return to their foolish ways. 9 Surely his salvation is near to those who fear him, so our land will be filled with his glory. 10 Unfailing love and truth have met together. Righteousness and peace have kissed! 11 Truth springs up from the earth, and righteousness smiles down from heaven. 12 Yes, the Lord pours down his blessings. Our land will yield its bountiful harvest. 13 Righteousness goes as a herald before him, preparing the way for his steps.
1 Thessalonians 1:2-10
The Faith of the Thessalonian Believers2 We always thank God for all of you and pray for you constantly. 3 As we pray to our God and Father about you, we think of your faithful work, your loving deeds, and the enduring hope you have because of our Lord Jesus Christ. 4 We know, dear brothers and sisters, that God loves you and has chosen you to be his own people. 5 For when we brought you the Good News, it was not only with words but also with power, for the Holy Spirit gave you full assurance that what we said was true. And you know of our concern for you from the way we lived when we were with you. 6 So you received the message with joy from the Holy Spirit in spite of the severe suffering it brought you. In this way, you imitated both us and the Lord. 7 As a result, you have become an example to all the believers in Greece—throughout both Macedonia and Achaia. 8 And now the word of the Lord is ringing out from you to people everywhere, even beyond Macedonia and Achaia, for wherever we go we find people telling us about your faith in God. We don’t need to tell them about it, 9 for they keep talking about the wonderful welcome you gave us and how you turned away from idols to serve the living and true God. 10 And they speak of how you are looking forward to the coming of God’s Son from heaven—Jesus, whom God raised from the dead. He is the one who has rescued us from the terrors of the coming judgment.
NLT
How to Wait
Heather lives in Barrie with lots of disabilities shared between herself, her husband and her two incredible young adult kids. She is a disability advocate and life coach with a focus on supporting families and individuals with disabilities. In September, Heather started her Master’s of Divinity at Emmanuel College at the University of Toronto, where she hopes to focus on Disability Theology.
As I write this we have a big appointment for someone in my house tomorrow. It’s a medical appointment that we’ve been waiting on for more than a year and a half. There’s a lot riding on it, and there’s no way to know whether it will be helpful or unhelpful. In fact, with three medically complex people in my family we’ve had a lot of experience waiting for medical appointments and procedures, for test results and treatment options. And despite all that experience we’re still waiting for a diagnosis!
At our house we’ve had a lot of practice in waiting and - shock of shocks - we’ve discovered that waiting is hard! But we’ve also realized that waiting is a discipline. It’s a practice.
So. Do we know how to wait?
Maybe that seems like a silly question. Waiting is something we learn how to do when we’re a kid and mom tells us we have to wait until the cookies are cooled before we can try one. Waiting is counting down the days until our fiancé(e) arrives or our baby is born or our results from our exam come in the mail. We all wait, so what kind of a question is it to ask if we know how to wait?
Well, I actually think it’s a pretty reasonable one.
Because most people I know aren’t super comfortable with living in the unknowns of waiting. Most of us seem to struggle to find tools and strategies and practices to reach for when we are faced with the reality of waiting.
Yet it turns out that there’s an art to this waiting business that can actually be learned and practiced. And part of the point of this season of Advent, I think, is to encourage and invite us to practice the art of waiting so that those muscles are strong and capable for the waiting life will inevitably throw at us.
Each of our readings today remind us of practices that help us to wait well.
Paul tells us that waiting well will be an active, not a passive process. With the pride of a parent Paul describes the “work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thess. 1:3, emphasis added) that the believers in Thessalonica are demonstrating. And this isn’t some random, time-filling type of work that he’s talking about either. This is about putting work into faith, labour into love and steadfastness into hope. So what does that look like?
We often think of faith as a mental belief but for my friends Tim and Rhonda, waiting for the fulfillment of their belief that people deserved to be housed only turned into something when they worked at it - putting everything they had in terms of time and money into it - for many years. In the process there was a lot of waiting. There were years of waiting for permits, money, and of course the actual building of the units. But after ten years my friends and their charity have created 49 new affordable housing units with many more ideas on the horizon.[1] Faith in their beliefs alone didn’t get them here. Work - even in the midst of the waiting - was required for things to change.
Love is spoken of as a feeling. As an emotion that is either on or off. But for my husband and I, love in the face of infant loss and multiple severe disabilities in our family, required a more robust love than just a feeling. We realized almost five years ago that if we wanted our marriage to continue in love, we were going to have to put a lot more labour into it than we’d been doing up until then. We started carving out lengthy amounts of time for one another. We started talking about the hard things that we hadn’t wanted to say over the years. We both went to therapy for a while to work on ourselves so that we could better show up for each other. In some ways we had to wait for our marriage to get better, but a lot of labour accompanied the waiting!
And what about steadfastness? It doesn’t really feel like an action word. It feels like an inanimate object that isn’t going anywhere one way or another. But have you ever held hard on the edge of a canoe you were trying to launch from a rocky shoreline on a choppy day? It’s work to hold on tight while the waves crash around you - work to not lose your grip when your hands get wet - work to steady it while other people transfer not-so-graciously into the boat. Steadfastness requires a sometimes-tenacious effort that allows you to hold on matter what - and in this case, Paul says the thing you must hold on to is hope. People want to hope for answers, but more than that, I think this is a hope for God’s presence - for Emmanuel - for God with us to be felt with us in the midst of the storm. This is the call of Hosea that we “press on to know the Lord” (Hos. 6:3). And whatever roots we need to tuck our feet under to help us stay steadfast in the face of the waiting is worth the effort, according to Paul.
This model of waiting - full of effort and labour and work - is anything but the passive concept of waiting we so often imagine when we hear this word. David tells us, though, that this active waiting will bring peace to us as God’s people. Indeed, that waiting like this will allow love and faithfulness, righteousness and peace to meet (See Psalm 85).
And for me, this isn’t just theoretical. In my experience there is peace to be found in the rootedness of steadfast hope that allows me to find myself in the presence of God in the face of even the most choppy and challenging of waves. When I surrender my fears to the labour of love, God has been faithful to God’s promises. And when my friends leaned into the work of faith, a vision of God’s righteousness that has created peace and shalom has begun to make a tangible difference to those experiencing homelessness in my community.
So as you take the first tentative steps into Advent this year, I invite you to think about how you have been waiting, and how you want to wait in the days and weeks to come. How you might reach out for the presence of God, hold tight to the faithfulness of God’s promise, or work towards the righteousness of God’s Kingdom come? Because we all get to choose how we wait.
[1] For more information about the amazing work of Redwood Park Communities, please see: redwoodparkcommunities.com
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