December 3, 2006: WISHFUL THINKING: WAIT!
Luke 21:25-36; 1 Thess 3:11-13 (benediction); Psalm 25:1-10
Eileen Parfrey - Springwater Presbyterian

Waiting is hard enough when you're a kid. The four weeks before Christmas may as well be eternity. But once we're grown, the season of waiting takes on a new set of baggage. We adults bring a lifetime of experience to waiting. The time spent in the checkout line behind the person who pays in small change. At the longest stoplight in three counties, the one you always hit red. For your children to finish their lesson or game or teeth straightening.

It's a sign of your trust in me that you have politely waited to find out what I meant by titling this preaching series, "Fruitful Waiting." The term comes from the third year of my time as an Inquirer into the ministry, a time when I was still under the care of my presbytery's Committee on Preparation for Ministry but not in seminary yet. Expressing my frustration to the CPM at the family constraints that kept me from getting on with this part of my life, the CPM counseled to me view this time, not as a stall to my life, but as "fruitful waiting." This was practical advice, neither passive nor abstract, given my life's realities and my need to place my confidence in God's own good timing. Their concern was pastoral formation. My concern was to get on with things.

Advent begins with the eschaton-the ultimate fulfillment of waiting, the End of the World. That beginning reminds us as we wait that our situation is terminal. When a cancer patient hears "terminal" as prognosis, everything changes. Suddenly, what is important shifts. Now eating supper together becomes more important than getting to meetings. That special sweater you've been saving gets used. Phone calls and letters to loved ones aren't put off. The situation is terminal, the timeframe moves up. At Advent, our longing for meaning, our yearning for love, our deep, unspoken desire for God clamors for attention. Our situation is human, it is indeed "terminal." Our very brokenness reminds us of our need for radical hope. Advent's hope is not wishful thinking, too fragile and vague to call us to action. Advent's hope is Biblical hope-robust, worth risking your life for, a power that pulls us from the present into the future.

I learned a lot about waiting and concrete hope on Friday, when I spent a day at the Downtown Chapel in Portland, participating in their ministry to the poor. The hope I saw took courage, was acted out. That courage rose from both suffering and poverty. The prelude to receiving any services was spent in line, the embodiment of waiting, turst, and hope. The guests-the people who received the services of St Vincent de Paul parish-were the real ministers. Many of them have mental illnesses, and perhaps that is why they act out their courage in such raw, visceral, front row, concrete ways.

Barbara, who repeatedly gives up the housing the staff arranges for her, sleeping literally in the door of the building, because she needs to be in contact with her community, to literally touch the community, touching the chapel as she sleeps. Scattering rice and bread crumbs at the statues and around the entry door, in her effort to extend the Eucharist. Praying louder and longer than the priest and the rest of the congregation during the celebration of the Mass. She always has more words than anyone.

Roger, who had to prove to the Madison police that he had been born there so that he could visit his cousins, because he had arrived at the bus depot with a backpack and sleeping bag under his arm. The bus depot, transport of choice for transients and down-and-outs.

Peter, who brings the Eucharistic elements to the priest at Mass and pats him on the back, rushing back to the congregation to be the first in line to receive the elements. Because, if you're going to take communion, wouldn't you want to be first? Father Ron says that Peter spoke the best prayer he's ever heard during the prayers of the people one day: "Jesus, please don't screw me over today." That's faith!

Umo, so friendly and conversational during the day during the hospitality time and before Mass, and in the evening so uncommunicative, walking away as I tried to engage in conversation. He was waiting. Something was going to happen. He needed to be alert. "I know you miss, I saw you today." Vigilant, in deep anticipation for what was to come, but please don't distract me now.

The shiver of panic that ran through the gathered community, the fear that impelled everyone to get up and move, when the wailing of the sirens drew closer, the fire truck pulling around the corner, right next to the soup line. Too many knifings. Too many handuffings just for looking disheveled, too many runs down to the Cop Shop for sitting too long on a piece of cardboard out in public, too many humiliations around lack of public toilets.

These people are the in-breaking of God's kingdom at the most vulnerable point. Because, in this poverty, in this time and place, it's the place where God can break in. Father Ron, the priest at the Chapel, has a tendency to slip into aphorism as he speaks. Friday he said, "Stuff complicates the spiritual journey. The more stuff we surround ourselves with, the less we need to rely on God. The more crap we have, the less we need each other." As far as Father Ron is concerned, the lives of these people-his flock, the ones entrusted to his care-their lives have been broken open. In is in this broken-open-ness that they find the God of their desire. It is only in being broken open that we find the God of our desire.

The old hymn says it so well, "Live into hope of captives freed, from chains of fear or want or greed. God now proclaims our full release to faith and hope and joy and peace." Our yearning year-round is for God. Our Advent yearning is for God-with-us. Our Advent hope is a radical one-the good news that our condition as-it-is, is terminal. This hope can become a permanent part of us, because Advent comes-hope comes-not because we are powerful or smart or well-off or talented or gifted or resourceful, but because of who God is. And maybe because we're broken. But always because of who God is. When we put God to the test, when we test our hope by acting on it, we release God's power into the world. One writer called this our "hope muscle." Like any muscle, the hope muscle gets stronger as we exercise it. I lift weights. What my trainer tells me is that the muscles get stronger because micro-tears of the muscle occur as we work with progressively heavier weights. That's why we feel stiff or sore. Micro-tears that heal, making our muscles stronger. It's gonna hurt for awhile, but you're going to get stronger. Our desire for God becomes more compelling in this workout.

Maybe we need to get our sleeping bags and camp out on the church's doorstep. We could all stand to scatter a few rice grains and chunks of bread around, extend the Eucharist a little more into our daily lives. In the words of my beloved Aunt Norma, "Wonderful things will happen. And they are all gift and wonderment."

[Benediction] Oh! I almost forgot! We got a message this week: "May the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you. And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints." 1 Thessalonians 3:11-13.