December 3, 2023
First Sunday of Advent, December 3, 2023 - Isaiah 63:16B-17, 19B; 64:2-7; 1 Corinthians 1:3-9; Mark 13:33-37
I have a question for all the children here in church this morning. If the answer to this question is yes, put up your hands. Have you ever just waited and waited, and watched and watched, and hoped and hoped that something would happen? If that ever happened to you, put up your hands. Good. Okay, that’s part of what today’s Gospel is all about. Waiting very eagerly and excited for something to happen.
I’m going to tell you all an old-timey Wurtsboro story from way before you were born. When I was a little boy growing up here, my parents lived here in the summertime but lived in New York City in the wintertime. We would come up right after school was over. And our dads had maybe two weeks, maybe three weeks, vacation to stay here. For the rest of the summer, they went home on Sunday night and worked in the city all week and then drove back again on Friday night. We couldn’t talk to our dads during the week because hardly anybody in Wurtsboro Hills had a telephone. It’s not like today, where you carry your phone with you. But the mail was so good back then, that if we wrote our dads a postcard or a letter on Tuesday morning and gave it to the postman, they would be able to read it on Thursday morning when it came to their mailbox home in the city. But by Friday, we were waiting and waiting, and hoping and hoping, and eager for our dads to come back again. So much so, that we would go out to meet them.
When you leave the main road out here and go up into Wurtsboro Hills, after you go up a little bit, there’s a very sharp turn this way. But, if you don’t take that turn, and keep going straight, there’s a big long hill. At the top of the hill there was, way back then and still is now, a little open space, what we call a meadow, with no house. And right on the corner there’s a group of three trees that formed a triangle. And somebody built a bench inside the three trees. And everybody used to call it Lurch’s bench. Not like the Lurch from television. Lurch’s bench. When we thought there was just about an hour before our dad should be getting here, we’d go and sit in Lurch’s bench and wait for the car to come up, up the hill.
Then we got a little bit older and could go anyplace we wanted all by ourselves. Sometimes we would walk all the way down to the main road, where the little restaurant is today, and sit there and wait for our dads to come. And wave at the car when they came, so they would slow down and pick us up and take us the rest of the way. That’s one kind of waiting. But there’s another kind of waiting as well.
Now I’m going to talk mostly to your parents about this kind of waiting. It’s not that excited, excited waiting. A very quiet kind of waiting. It happens whenever there’s a crisis moment in our lives. It could be a good crisis or a difficult crisis. The day that your significant other agreed to marry you. The day you took your first job. The day the last of the kids went off to college. The day you sat down to decide whether it was time to sell the house and move into some kind of semi-assisted living situation. The day the doctor sat you down and said there was some concerning news. Not catastrophic news, just concerning news.
At those moments, where a conversation had to take place, Jesus was part of that conversation. He was there. How do you know he was there? Because you brought him. From the day of your baptism, the Triune God - Father, Son and Holy Spirit - lives within each one of us. And, if we turn God out by serious sin, the moment that we are genuinely sorry, even before we go to confession, God returns to us in all his three-ness and one-ness. And he comes to us in a special way each time we receive Holy Communion. He comes to us in a special way each time we go to confession, whether we had to go or not. He comes to us if we are anointed when we are ill. He comes to us on our wedding day, like he came to me on my ordination day. And he stays with us always. A silent partner, as we journey through life. But in those key moments, he could be there for the conversation if we are watchful for his being there. And he may have something to contribute to the conversation about the best way and the not so good way to move forward from this particular critical moment. Whether it's a good one or a bad one.
A long time ago, when Jesus was preaching, he wanted people to be watchful because he might be passing through their town only once in the three years of his ministry. If they missed the opportunity, it’s like missing the rock concert, that they’d never get another chance to hear him. Today, he wants us to be watchful. That if we need to have one of those critical conversations with other people, or even inside our own head, we’ll remember that he can be part of that conversation.