The Witness of Waiting

I recently finished rereading one of my favorite books, Peace Like a River by Leif Enger. The story is narrated by Reuben Land, an eleven-year-old boy. In the opening pages, Reuben recounts how all he ever wanted to do was breathe, and he tells the story of his birth. His first twelve minutes of life passed without a breath, and the doctor who delivered him gave him up for dead. His father was not in the room at his birth but came in running – God had told him that his son was in trouble. After his father’s third command: “Reuben Land, in the name of the living God I am telling you to breathe,” Reuben finally took his first breath.

Reuben reflects that it was not until much later in life that he realized that he had received a miracle. And he adds, “No miracle happens without a witness. Someone to declare, “Here’s what I saw. Here’s how it went. Make of it what you will.” The rest of the book is Reuben’s attempt to witness to the miracles God performs through his father.

Like Peace Like a River, the Bible is a selection of stories witnessing to who God is and what he has done for his people. Over and over, we hear of what God has done, and we then are invited to pass on the same good news. We take on the role of witness. In church tradition, one of the ways we live this out is by participating in the church calendar. We remember and celebrate what God has done through the birth of his Son, Jesus Christ, at Christmas, and in his death and resurrection at Easter. We map our lives onto the life of Jesus.

Before we celebrate Christmas or Easter, however, we step into a season of waiting: Advent before Christmas, and Lent before Easter. These are seasons designed to help prepare us for the time of celebration; they are times of fasting before the feast. Traditionally, we are invited into a time of repentance and reflection as we wait to meet God in his birth, and then in his death and resurrection.

“. . . They are songs that praise God for what he has done through Jesus and through his coming. They are the celebration after the good news, the songs born of waiting.”

— Dr. Kira Moolman Pettit

When we think of waiting, we often think of something passive. Or perhaps more pressingly for us in the modern West – we think of something unproductive. Waiting is simply time mismanaged. Think of the waiting room at the doctor’s office. It is a place where we are reminded of our vulnerability and fragility, where we cannot get any real work done. Whether we are there alone or waiting for a loved one, the waiting room is often a place of fear, anxiety, and impatience. It is hard for that time waiting to produce anything good, we think. It is just lost time, a waste.

But Advent is a time that invites us to slow down, to pay attention, and yes, to wait. This waiting is far more like the discomfort of the waiting room. Advent is a season where we are supposed to notice our weakness, fragility, brokenness, and sin. It is a gift for us to have weeks dedicated to this, uncomfortable as it may be, because it is also a time of preparation. Our waiting is not passive. It is the taut anticipation of the family in the waiting room, waiting to hear the good news of birth. It is the very real wrestling of waiting for deliverance, the pushing and pulling of the child breaking free of the womb and gasping into life.

We are not good at waiting. We tap our toes, huff, and sigh. We pull out our phones, check our emails, try to distract ourselves from ourselves. But Advent points out to us that our whole lives are a form of anticipation as we wait to meet our maker – and it gives us some time to get ready.

In Advent, we step into that waiting time of God’s people, Israel, waiting for centuries between the Old Testament and the New. When will deliverance come? It is easy for us to forget that by the time the New Testament started, Israel had been waiting four hundred years for God to deliver them from oppression. Four centuries passed without a whisper from the Lord. 
And so, during this Advent at SJD, we will be exploring the faith of four lesser-known characters from the New Testament: four early witnesses after those four hundred years of silence. They are all, in different ways, witnesses to Jesus’ birth: his aunt and uncle, Elizabeth and Zechariah, and two strangers, Simeon and Anna.

If you have grown up in the church, you might be familiar with some of the songs taken from Zechariah and Simeon. They are songs that praise God for what he has done through Jesus and through his coming. They are the celebration after the good news, the songs born of waiting. They are the music of that shaky first breath when the doctor had given up hope; the song of that first lullaby sung after the difficult delivery, home again from the hospital.

Witness the Waiting is a three-week Advent series on Sundays, December 8 – 22 at 10:15 am in the Hall Life Center. Dr. Kira Moolman Pettit and the Rev. Sutton Lowe will dig into the words and the witness of ordinary saints, folks who were given the gift of seeing their hope fulfilled in the birth of Jesus. Each week will feature conversation, music offerings from our talented staff and parish musicians, and small group discussions.