“Waiting in God’s Time”
Isaiah 30:18-26
2 Peter 3:8-15a
When
I was a child, the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas might as well have
been a lifetime. It was the longest
month of the year. No matter what I
tried to do to make time go faster, Christmas still took forever to come. But that is how it is as a child. Our eager anticipation for the excitement
that Christmas brings makes our waiting for it that much more pronounced in our
lives. It’s all we think about. Even though we know it is coming soon, we
want it to be here now.
But
as we get older, the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas, as well as time in general, goes much faster. The eager anticipation we had as a child
slowly starts to wane. Our lives become
filled with other priorities and our thoughts become centered on other
things. Now, instead of being prepared
and ready for the coming of Christmas, we find ourselves distracted by all the
other things we need to do. Now, instead
of rushing to our calendars every day to count, and recount, and recount, the
number of days we have left, we realize that time is running out and Christmas
will be here before we know it.
The season of Advent reminds us that we need to recapture
that eager anticipation we once had, and to be prepared and ready, not for
Christ’s first advent, but for Christ’s second Advent,
when Christ returns in all his glory at the end of time. Advent reminds us that the promise of
Christ’s return will be fulfilled. Even
though we do not know the time of Christ’s return, we do know that he is
coming. We do know that Christ’s reign
will finally and fully be realized, not in some distant future, but at any
moment of time.
But waiting can be difficult especially when the event we
are waiting for has not happened yet, and has not happened for nearly two
thousand years. Time as we know it
continues to march along at a steady beat.
History continues to be written.
The sense of being prepared and keeping awake for Christ’s return has
lost some of its urgency. We may throw
around the idea of Christ’s imminent return, but that promise now seems to be
nothing more than wishful thinking. The
reality is that Christ has not returned and will probably not return at least
in my lifetime.
When Peter wrote this letter in about 90AD, the first
century Christians were experiencing this same kind of
anxiety over Christ’s return. Some 60
years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, those who were eyewitnesses to the
life of Jesus, who had experienced his miracles, and had seen his ascension and
heard his promise to return were starting to die
off. Even those who became Christians
later were now much older, and Jesus had still not come back. Yet they kept their faith in spite of the
taunts and jeers of those who scoffed at such an outrageous claim of Jesus’
return. How much harder is it for us?
Just try to imagine what has happened
in world over the last two thousand years, the last 730,000 days. Whole empires have risen, flourished, and
fallen. Dynasties have ruled over
countries and have been overthrown.
Whole countries have come and gone, been split up, and have fallen into
the past. Not even the church has been
immune to the marching on of time. Just
think about all that has taken place in the 2000 years since Jesus’ walked the
earth…the formation of the Bible as we know it, 264 Popes, the discovery of the
Americas, the Reformation, world wars, airplanes, space travel, the combustible
engine, the splitting of atoms.
Time
continues to tick away. The boundary
between the past and the future continues to move forward with each tick of the
clock. Yet, in spite of all this,
Christians still make the same outrageous claim that Christians made in the
first century: Christ is going to come again.
But when?
How soon? We may say openly that
Christ will return, but in private we may also wonder what has happened to the
promise of Christ’s return? Shouldn’t he have come by now? Is his return really near, any day, any hour,
any second, or are we in it for the long haul?
When is the time of his return?
Time. We think we have a handle on time. We keep it on our watches and clocks, our
calendars, and palm pilots, but do we really understand it, do we really know
what time is? We are supposed to be
preparing ourselves for the coming of the Lord, but how can we possibly prepare
ourselves for an event that we cannot mark on our calendars, an event that we
cannot mark with time as we know it? No
wonder we await anxiously for it, because everything we do in life revolves
around time. We have a time to get up,
and time to eat our meals, a time to go to work, a time to watch our favorite
show, a time to pick our kids up from school, a time to go to bed, a time for
worship, even a time for teeing off. Our
lives are programmed around time. Just
try going a day without a watch on and tell me how many times you look at your
bare wrist.
So
what are we supposed to do during this time of Advent, during this time of
preparation? How are we supposed to live
our lives in this in between time, between the first Advent and the second Advent?
Peter
reminds us that Christians live by a different time than that of the
world. In the Bible, there are two words
for time, chronos time and kairos
time. Chronos
is the time marked by our watches and clocks, the continuous time of history,
but kairos time is something completely
different. Kairos
time is not about time as we know it, it is not about
what time it is, but about whose time it is.
Kairos time is God’s time.
As
Christians, we are called to live in kairos time, we are called to live in the reality and in the
conviction that it is God who is the God of all times: past, present, and
future. God is not controlled by the
ticking of the clock but by the eternity in which God is at work. For God, a thousand years is like a day, and
a day is like a thousand years. The
eternal God transcends space and time as we know it, but in every moment of
eternity, in every second of time, God is present and at work, not only in the
world, but also in us.
The good news of our text today is that God is not absent in history, not absent in any time or place, not slow to act, but is acting even now, this very second, out of divine patience not only for us, but for the whole world. All of us strive every day of our lives to live in holiness and godliness. We really do try to be Christ-like in every way possible. We don’t always get it right, we know we fall short, but we do try to be faithfully obedient in response to God’s abundant grace. It is truly good news to know that God is being patient with us all, and wants all of us, every human being, to come to repentance, because the day of the Lord is coming like a thief in the night, and time as we know it, chronos time, will not just cease to exist, but it will be dissolved along with the heavens and the earth, and their will be no turning back. Thanks be to God that God is so patient with us every moment of our lives.
But
the problem is that we are still governed by chronos
time, time which turns our lives of faith into lives of hectic schedules,
distractions, and other priorities, time which causes our hearts and minds to
be centered on other things, time which diminishes the sense of urgency for
preparedness and readiness. The problem is not having to wait in kairos
time, it is having to wait in chronos time for the
exact moment when Christ returns.
But Peter tells us that we are not to wait in chronos time, but rather that we are to wait by living in
and for God’s time, by living in holiness and godliness, by living a life
oriented toward God, living a life focused not on the ticking of the clock or
the reading of signs of the coming day of the Lord, but on the work that is
before us that will bring about Christ’s return and hasten the day of his
coming.
There is an old story about
Colonel Davenport, the Speaker of the Connecticut House of
Representatives. On
I’m
not suggesting we throw away our watches, clocks, and calendars, although
sometimes I have wanted to do just that, but what I’m suggesting is that during
this Advent season we begin to re-define time for ourselves, that we look for
ways to slow down, to commune with God and with each other, and like Colonel
Davenport, to use our time for God’s purpose in the here and now, so that when
Christ comes again we will be found doing our duty, our faithful duty to the
gospel of Jesus Christ, the faithful duty of a faithful people who living and
waiting in God’s time. Amen.