My Next Great Adventure: "Hope Grows in the Waiting" (Advent 1

Chetwynd Shared Ministry

December 3, 2017

Who remembers what it felt like to be a kid in the days and weeks leading up to Christmas?

In our family, the tree would be brought inside the weekend before Christmas – any earlier and there would be needles tracked all over the house! My father would anchor it with wires to the ceiling so that the cats couldn’t knock it over. The decorations would be brought out and the tree would be decorated with ornaments we had made at school, ornaments inherited from generations gone before – those ones usually went at the top of the tree, out of reach of children and pets – and always the brightly coloured lights and a star on top.

And then over the next week, carefully wrapped presents would be brought out of hiding and placed under the tree. And as kids, that’s where the fun began. We would poke the boxes through the wrapping paper, and shake them, all in an effort to figure out what was underneath the wrapping paper. My youngest sister was “that child” – you know, the one who counts all of the parcels to make sure that everyone is receiving the same number of presents.

And oh, the agony of waiting. The regular refrain around our house was “how many more days until Christmas?” or, in the family vernacular, “how many more sleeps 'til HoHo comes?!”

And finally it would be Christmas Eve. Our family tradition was that no presents were opened until Christmas morning, but on Christmas Eve we would hang our stockings by the fireplace in the living room, and then go upstairs to try to sleep.

And then finally it would be Christmas morning. We were allowed to get out of bed at 6am, but we weren’t allowed in to the living room until 7am. Sometimes that last hour of waiting felt like it took as long as the whole week leading up to Christmas. Usually our aunt would keep us company in the kitchen and make us hot chocolate as we waited for the magic hour of 7am.

And then finally, finally after all of those hours and days and weeks of waiting, and waiting, and growing excitement, and anticipation, we were able to go in to the living room. Christmas was here!

Never once did it cross our minds that Christmas wouldn’t come. Never, in all of the waiting, did we think that we were going to be stuck waiting forever. Never did we worry that Santa might forget to visit our stockings that year. Despite our cries of “how much longer?” in all of our waiting, we never gave up hope.

The ancient Israelite people were also waiting – they were waiting for God. At the time that the passage that Gloria read from Isaiah was written, the people had been through a lot. Their land had been taken over by the armies of a couple of empires, one after another – first the Assyrian army had taken over the northern part of the land, and then the Babylonian army had swooped in and had taken over the whole land, destroyed the city of Jerusalem including the temple that was God’s home, and had carted off many of the people into exile in Babylon. For more than 60 years, the people lived in exile in Babylon having lost their homes, their temple, their land, and many of them believed that God had abandoned them as well.

More than a full generation passed in exile, but then the political and military forces shifted, the Persian empire conquered the Babylonian empire, and the Persian king allowed the Israelite people to return home.

But things weren’t all rosy when they got there. There was tension between the people and families who had gone into exile and had returned, and the people and families who had been allowed to stay in the land. The beautiful temple that had been constructed under the reign of King Solomon, God’s dwelling place, had been destroyed. And God who had spoken to Moses out of a burning bush, who had led the people out of slavery in Egypt, who had given them their land, who had been so visible in past times, this God seemed to be absent and silent.

And the prophet Isaiah cried out,

“O that you would tear open the heavens

and come down!

From ages past no one has heard,

no ear has perceived,

no eye has seen any God besides you!

There is no one who calls on your name,

or attempts to take hold of you;

for you have hidden your face from us.”

How much longer, O God? How much longer do we need to wait for you to appear to us?

And yet the people never lost their faith. They never gave up their hope. In the waiting, they cried out for God, but they knew that God would hear them, and that God would eventually come from them. Our hope grows in the waiting.

When we look around our world today, it is easy to feel the same way as the ancient Israelite people. It is sometimes easy to think that God has abandoned the world. You only have to turn on your TV or open a news website to see calamity and disaster at every turn.

“North Korea’s missile capabilities may be closer than once thought.”