1st December 2024
Waiting in Hope
I laughed out loud when I learnt earlier this autumn that the Church of England had picked "Calm and Bright" as their Advent and Christmas tagline this year. "Calm" is not the adjective I would choose to describe the month of December in vicar-land! It was other, much wiser, members of the Worship and Preaching team who persuaded me that, despite the busyness, we can still offer calm this month to a weary community, a space to be rather than to consume, to be still rather than to rush around. And so we have chosen a theme of waiting, as an antidote to our have-it-now culture, and have decided to explore the stories of four women whose waiting was characterised by our Advent themes: hope, peace, love and joy.
On Sunday, we begin with the story of Sarah. Like me, faced with the prospect of a "Calm and Bright" December, Sarah laughed out loud when she overheard three mysterious visitors tell her 100 year-old husband that, within a year, she - despite her age - would have a son. It was a ridiculous, an impossible hope... and yet, Sarah and Abraham learned that, in God, the impossible becomes possible. Sarah had a son, whom she named Isaac - which means, he laughs.
By the time of our reading for Sunday, Sarah and Abraham have already tried by human methods to make the impossible hope possible. Their impatience, their very human desire to hurry things along leads to much pain and heartache. Their story reminds us of the importance of waiting, of holding onto our hope in God even when it seems impossible... as well as of how difficult this can be.
"How long, O Lord?" is the cry of the psalmist as he wrestles with illness, enemies, defeat, disaster. "How long, O Lord?" must have been the cry of Sarah, disappointed month by month in her anxious waiting for a child. "How long, O Lord?" is the cry of all of us waiting for a diagnosis, an operation, exam results, the cry of people living in conflict zones across the world, the cry of the persecuted, the hungry, the abandoned.
Waiting is hard. In our impatience, we want to skip straight to Christmas without the waiting of Advent. We want God's gift and we want it now. Yet it may be in the waiting that we discover afresh the grace, the beauty of hope. "Who hopes for what he already has?" writes St Paul to the Romans. "But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently."
