Wait-ing for God-with-us

sermon by Torin Eikler
Isaiah 2:1-4 Matthew 24:36-44

I want to introduce you to a quirky little group of people I first met back in the last 90s. The five of them: a dentist, two travel agents, a Dairy Queen employee, and a small time theater producer live in a small Missouri town called Blaine that claims the first alien visitation and was once famous for the stools produced there. By the time I met them, the town they lived in had become a small, depressed community clinging to its heritage just like so many communities in the Midwest, but they had a dream of putting it back on the national stage by putting on a Tony-award-worthy musical celebrating the town’s history

Over the course of several weeks, they overcome a lack of funding as well as several other obstacles (including their own lack of any real talent) and put the show together for the sesquicentennial celebrations. The real coup, though, is that using his New York connections, Corky arranged for a representative of the prestigious Oppenheimer Organization named Mort Guffman to come and watch the production. If Mr. Guffman liked the show, Corky said, they would have a good chance of taking it to Broadway.


You should know (if you haven’t figured it out yet) that this is not the real world … not exactly. This is the world of a satirical movie called “Waiting for Guffman” that has become something of a cult classic on a small scale. As the title suggests, the climax of the movie comes on opening night when the cast and crew are waiting anxiously for Mr. Guffman to show up so that they can start the show, having pinned all their hopes for a golden future on what is sure to be his good review. But Guffman is late, and so they wait and wait … and wait. And the audience waits and waits … and waits.

(pause)

That’s one kind of waiting – nervous waiting, waiting with anticipation, waiting for something that will change your life … maybe save it? Or, if you’re in the audience, it’s waiting with frustration for a distraction that you’ve been looking forward to.

(pause)

Let me tell you how the story ends. I’d hate to keep you waiting, after all.

Of course, the show has to start eventually. So, they begin, all the time keeping an eye out to see if the empty chair in the front row has been filled. Finally, just before the intermission an elderly gentleman is directed to the chair, and the cast throws everything they have into the second act. When it’s all over and they have taken their final bows, they wait eagerly in the dressing room only to discover that the man in question is not the right guy. Mr. Guffman, as it turns out, was not able to attend the show. And life goes on in Blaine – plain ordinary life, life with a little less luster for the hope unfulfilled.


Now let me introduce you to another group of wait-ers. This one is much, much bigger, and it has been growing for a long, long time. In the beginning, it was a movement of just a few thousand people spread across a lot of space, and they were waiting for a prophecy to be fulfilled. That prophesy said that Christ would return before the first generation of his followers passed away, and they interpreted it literally. So, they, too, were waiting and waiting … and waiting. Waiting together. Waiting through suffering and persecution. Waiting in poverty. Waiting with anticipation. Waiting with hope. Waiting for the promised Kingdom of peace and love foretold by the prophets and by Christ himself.

(pause)

Well, it didn’t happen. The first generation came and went, and no parousia – no second coming. And life went on in the Roman Empire, BUT … But the hope and the promise did not die. It was passed on from generation to generation, and down through the ages, believers have been waiting. At times, when prophetic reminders swayed them enough, people have sold all they own in preparation or gathered on hill tops to await the coming of the Lamb. Once, they even overthrew the government of Muster, Germany, convinced that it would become the New Jerusalem – the capital of the Kingdom that was coming.

Most of the time that hasn’t happened. Most of the time Christians have lived “normal” lives. Most of the time they have lived, in large part, like we do. They … and we find a way to muddle through: marrying and having families (if that comes our way), earning money to make ends meet, eating, drinking, sleeping, etc., etc., etc.

Each year at the beginning of Advent, we hear the story of Jesus’ birth again. Each year, we are reminded of the way God broke into the world at an unexpected time in and unexpected way. Each year we hear the promise echoing down the centuries, and we pick up the anticipation that we have left behind as the months wore on. And we get excited. And we sing hosannas. And we wonder at the strange compassion of a God who would become human and dwell with us.

And then life goes on. The trappings of Christmas are put away along with the Holiday spirit of warm generosity, and we take up the task of making it through another year – paying bills (sometimes too big), losing the weight we may have gained, shoveling the snow, and all the rest. And, the anticipation wanes. The hope stays with us, but the sense of expectation fades away.

(pause)

It’s hard to hold onto a sense of expectation. As days and weeks pass we get a sort of “anticipation fatigue.” Our emotional, spiritual, and physical selves get tired of being held at the ready. We come to expect that nothing will change, and we fall back into old patterns - senses dulled, sense of wonder submerged, both overwhelmed by our sense that God’s timing is inexplicable. It is hard to stay alert, especially when you don’t know what is coming or when it will arrive.

That makes it particularly hard to follow the implied command that Jesus gives to his disciples in the guise of a metaphor. “If the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore, you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”

How does one do that? How do you prepare for an unknown thief who will come at an unknown time? Do you put in an alarm system, giving it your confidence and giving the thief time to figure out how to circumvent it? Do you hire security guards to watch around the clock, knowing that they will eventually succumb to the same fatigue I mentioned earlier? Would any of that really work against someone determined to get in?


When I was in elementary school, I participated in the Olympics of the Mind (it’s Odyssey of the Mind now … the International Olympic Committee objected to the name). It’s a program that challenges students to solve problems in creative ways, and one of the things they focus on is teaching you to think outside the box. It’s a useful skill, and it’s kind of fun. For example, one task we were given was to name as many keys as we could. The straightforward answers, of course, are things like car keys and house keys, but there are also monkeys and the Florida Keys. I think you can see how kids might enjoy this kind of challenge.

Apply this way of thinking to the question of being ready for a thief. What do you come up with?

(pause)

(I’ll give you a break. You haven’t had much time to think after all.) Here are a couple of ideas that I came up with.

You could leave your home completely unlocked and keep nothing there that someone would want to take. Or you could put up a sign inviting everyone who comes to your home to come in and join you for tea (I’m so sure that one would always work). Or you could work at changing the world around you so that nobody would need to take things from other people.

All three of those ideas require us to think and live in a different way, but isn’t that really what Jesus was challenging us with in his teaching and his living? Remember all those “you have heard it said …, but I say to you …” statements in the Sermon on the Mount. Loving enemies, turning the other cheek, and welcoming the stranger are all still huge reversals in our thinking today. The idea that in the Kingdom of Heaven the poorest, most despised members of society might have the highest status, if you really think about it, still defies our expectations – at least if the way we live is any indication. Yet these things define how we understand our dreams of the ultimate future and our lives as disciples in the present. These are the visions that we get so excited about when Advent comes along. They are the reality at the heart of the promise we hope for and wait for with or without an urgent sense of anticipation.


Often when modern pastors or theologians talk about Christian living we try to verb nouns. We characterize faith as not just a thing we have but a way that we live. We disciple people on their faith journeys. We belong people into the congregation even before they share our beliefs. But in this case, we might do well to noun a verb. Let us take the verb “wait” out of our everyday lives where it becomes a placid, tedious pause empty of action and make it something more exciting. We won’t even have to make up a new meaning. We just need to return to an old one.

“Wait,” as a noun, once meant a night watchman and developed over time into a name for a band of musicians who go around the streets during the Christmas season playing carols. What if we became a wait of sorts, wandering the streets around us while singing out the good news that God came to live with us and will come to be with us once more?

What if we went a bit farther … made our wait a little more hands on? We could share our wealth with those in need. We could care for those who are sick and alone. We could reach out with compassion to those that society despises. We could shine the light of hope and promise into the darkness of despair that sometimes seems to be overwhelming the world.

In that way, we would be living into being in a small way the promise of what is to come. We would be anticipating the Kingdom of God by living as if it were already here – as if peace, love, justice and mercy already ruled the world. And when God’s time is fulfilled, we will be ready and wait-ing to welcome the Son of Man among us.