Did you survive the busiest shopping day of the year, the day after thanksgiving?  The malls were a mess, as was Wal-mart, Target, Toys-r-us, and about everywhere else you can imagine.  Lines were forming out the unopened doors of some retailers as early as 5 in the morning to take advantage of the best selection and those irresistible super early bird sales.   My step mother and her daughter got up at 4 and hit eight places before noon.  Dianna and I hit Wal-mart by 10 for our big black Friday outing.

            I understand that sales were brisk, and nation’s retailers were watching anxiously, having already suffered significant declines this year thanks to the weakening U.S. economy.  But the first nationwide returns were evidently positive for merchants. ShopperTrak RCT, a retail industry research firm, said total Black Friday sales rose 3% this year, to about $10.6 billion nationwide.

            So black Friday was a success unless of course you were in Long Island New York where a 34 year old Wal-mart employee was trampled to death after a mass of people broke open the door at 5 and he was overcome in the rush.  Friends, I have never wanted to go to Wal-mart that bad and might even risk certain death to not have to go to Wal-mart.

            Seriously, I am going to avoid West Little Rock and the malls as much as possible for the next month.  I can’t take the crowds, the long lines, the insolent shoppers AND discourteous sales people.   Many people, my wife and daughter included, aren’t too fazed by the crowds, and in fact they can slug it out with the most seasoned of shoppers.  I think my problem is that I am not a patient enough of a person.

            Dianna is the most patient person in the world.  That is why she excels at her job of taking those new and very frightened nursing students in the hospital for the first time.  She is patient. She is real calm in a crisis.  This patience is also a quality that makes her excel in being my wife, for she knows how to handle my high maintenance temperament.   I think it has taken a lot of patience to be married to me, and I am grateful for such a soul mate.

            But I digress, back to my lack of patience.  I hate to wait.  I hate to be late.  I always have to be on-time for everything, no matter how trivial.  I hate long lines, I hate traffic, and I really hate to wait.  I hate to wait on slow elevators at my work, I hate waiting in the traffic on Maumelle Boulevard every morning, I hate to wait at checkout lines at Wal-Mart, I hate to wait for slow fast food, and I hate to wait until my vacation gets here.  I hate to wait at this city’s many slow traffic lights, AND I really, really hate to wait to next season for a chance at another good football year by the Razorbacks. 

            I suppose that is why I never was in the military—they have the motto “hurry up and wait,” as I am better at hurrying up than at waiting.  There is also the reason that I am a chicken and basically against killing people, but mainly I really don’t like to hurry up and wait.

            I will never forget a couple of years ago hearing a about a soldier who was looking forward to coming home from overseas, Diego Garcia I believe, for a few days leave and spend Thanksgiving with his family.  He was actually at the plane to board when they discovered a mix-up in the paper work, and he was not allowed to take leave.  He actually had to stand there and watch as all the other soldiers and sailors boarded the plane as he was not allowed to board.  The plane took off with his seat the lone empty one.  He called home to break the disappointing news and the whole family was in tears.

            Can you imagine, serving you country in the middle of a war, be granted a rare, precious leave, a few days of respite from the war on terrorism and at the last minute not be able to come home?  Instead of spending time at home as most of us did over the holidays with good food, family and friends, he was stuck in a God-forsaken place in the middle of nowhere. I can’t imagine that kind of homesick.   How slow the time must pass for him. We need to remember to pray for all our men and women in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Indian Ocean, and other foreign soils during the holidays.   There must be some lonely folk over there.   I am sure this man will wait once again for his turn to come home, and I am sure it will seem like a long wait now that this chance has come and gone. 

            On this first Sunday of advent, we have a difficult passage of scripture from the gospel of Mark.  It is by all accounts about the return of Christ, or about some kind of judgment, or perhaps about the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.  It is decidedly not about his birth in Bethlehem which you might expect on this first Sunday of Advent.  So if you came ready for Mary and Joseph, you have to wait a while longer.

            Well, when it comes to the big shebang at the end of the world as we know it, I don’t know if you a pretrib-premillenial-dispensationalist, or a no-trib-realized-eschatological-amillenialist, or a preteristic post-millennialist like the author to hymn number 586 in your Baptist Hymnal was, or if you really even know or care.  Whatever your views on the “coming of the Son of Man in the clouds with great glory” may be, you have to admit that the lectors picked a strange passage for this first Sunday in Advent.  Or did they?

            The message of this passage despite whatever the meaning of the first few verses are becomes clear in the last verses beginning with verse 32:  No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Be on guard! Be alert! You do not know when that time will come. It’s like a man going away: He leaves his house and puts his servants in charge, each with his assigned task, and tells the one at the door to keep watch. “Therefore keep watch because you do not know when the owner of the house will come back—whether in the evening, or at midnight, or when the rooster crows, or at dawn. If he comes suddenly, do not let him find you sleeping. What I say to you, I say to everyone: ‘Watch!’

            So what are we watching for?  Moreover, how do we stay alert when we have longed for a little divine intervention in a crazy world more than a few times in the last 2000 years? Centuries have come and gone, and Christ has not returned.   Jesus said he didn’t know the day or the hour, but made many statements to lead the disciples to believe that it wouldn’t be long.  It is also true that the other New Testament writers believed Jesus return to be imminent, in their lifetime.   So we wait for what has to be the longest wait ever, even worse than a slow Wal-mart cashier on a Saturday afternoon. 

            But more importantly, we wait for a word from God, and that is not that much different than it was when that baby was born in that barn in the middle of nowhere in the still of the night.  And today, we still wait for that word.  You see, if you open your eyes and your heart you see your friends, family, colleagues, and neighbors struggling to detect some glimmer of hope in times of confusion, pain, and darkness.  One writer states it this way:

Aging parents battle chronic loneliness and deteriorating health, while their adult children with their own families with their own problems feel helpless to help. A struggling teenager gulps a bottle of pills. A friend in Arizona hopes his kid will graduate not from Harvard but from high school. Divorcing parents fight bitterly over custody of their kids. One night last week a police car pulled into my neighbor’s driveway.  Can we discern even the faintest signal that God is not entirely absent and silent? Might we legitimately hope for even a modicum of health, wholeness and healing for ourselves and for those we love?[1]

            He goes on to say, that the disconnect between what we sometimes experience and what we pray for that results from God’s apparent silence is a source of  understandable anxiety and frustration. Praying to God for mighty acts of deliverance is an entirely human and genuinely Christian response to the pain and suffering of the world, of our neighbors, and of our own lives. I intend never to stop praying for God’s miraculous intervention; such prayers remain a staple of my morning runs. But the season of advent that we now enter adds an important qualification. God is not a Cosmic Concierge. Human experience gives the lie to the delusion, so deeply embedded in the American psyche, that every problem has a solution and that every question has an answer. Sometimes we must wait.

            It is the waiting that I hate.  I hate it every time that someone is in pain or suffering and wonders where God is in the middle of their suffering.  I hate it when life is so unfair and one wonders where the one is who is the essence of justice.  I hate it when sickness and death rob us of people very important to us and we pray for mercy from a loving but seemingly silent God.   I hate it when the evil prospers and the righteous suffer, and the whole darn world seems backwards and worse it seems as if no one cares who is powerful enough to change it.  I hate waiting, and I find myself over and over again waiting for answers to some very hard questions. 

            Why is there war?  Why is there evil? Why is there hatred?  Why is there domestic abuse and drug addiction?  Why is there evil in the hearts of so many which stands in stark contrast to what we long for, what we are waiting for in this season of advent.   Why is there so much ill-will when we all long for goodwill?  Why is there so much hatred when every major world religion has love at its center?  Why do we long for peace on earth and our history is one of war — take the wars out of the story of civilization and there is little left. We have too many questions and not enough answers.   All I know is that I have seen every kind of human illness you can imagine working in a major hospital for 24 years.  I have heard the cries of the suffering, but sometimes I wonder as I wander if God has as well.

            It says in verse 30 that the truth is that this very generation that Jesus was speaking to would not pass away until these things would happen:  the sun refusing to shine and the moon turning to blood and the son of man coming in the clouds with great glory. 

            What the heck happened?  Did not the sun also rise this morning albeit behind the clouds?  Do we not expect it to rise tomorrow as well?  And the day after that and the day after that?  We take for granted that whatever else that might have happened to us when we wake up in the morning, at least the sun will still rise in the east.  No one doubts that at all.  It may burn out in another 5 billion years, but who cares? Yet we wait for answers, we wait for intervention to our plight, we wait for God to be vocal about our cries as he did in the days of old, we wait for our deliverance from our humanity.  I know we live by faith and not sight, but I would like once in a while a burning bush experience, where the Almighty makes it plain that he is up to something.

            So how many more generations must pass?  Then again, maybe we have it all wrong. Maybe we are looking in the wrong places.   Many first century Jews longed for a powerful leader to rout the oppressive Romans.  They waited and watched and waited some more as the Jewish people were the most kicked around people in history.  Maybe in the next universe, God would choose some other people to be the most chosen race, to take this kind of abuse. 

            Friends, God did answer their prayers, but in a manner that was easy to miss. Instead of military might God sent a baby born in a barnyard.  God did speak, and spoke at first with a whisper and then with a shout.   So many questions so much suffering so many cries, and he sent one great big answer.  A baby born in the middle of nowhere in a barn.  And that is the part that doesn’t make sense to us.  Because we want to solve our problems with force, we want to solve them with might.  We want to coerce people into submission, we want to carry the biggest stick and right all the wrongs done to us with it.  But the problem is while we might solve some of our problems that way temporarily, we don’t solve our biggest problem and that is ourselves.

            I did some plumbing work this past week, and it is tough crawling around on your back contorting yourself to fit under the bathroom sink.  But my sink was always getting clogged.  I would pour Draino down it constantly.  I am always on the look out for a more powerful drain opener at Home Depot.  I finally bought an auger to help to clear the trap.  Still didn’t flow very freely.  So this week when I changed out the faucet I made a discovery:  the trap was clear.  The problem was in the mechanics of the old faucet all along.  I have been trying to fix the symptoms for months, but the problem was in the very faucet itself.

            We try to fix things all the time.  We are classic fixers.  And most of the time we look for a patch or for a temporary fix, a quick fix or cure, and never really get right down to what is causing the problem.  I am here today that what needs fixing in this world is us.  It is not someone else, it is not other nations, it is not out there it is in here. 

            Whatever is wrong with us as a people is going to be fixed by divine intervention to be sure, but it has already happened by a baby in a manger.  One who brings peace on earth by bringing peace to us.  The peace of God that rules our hearts and minds; the peace that overcomes the darkest nights of our souls; the peace that is born in the midst of our suffering and our cries, not a peace that is transitory because we are free from difficulty; the peace that was born in the still of the night, a dark night illuminated by a very bright star.  No wonder the angels sang, “Glory to God in the highest – an on earth– peace, goodwill to all.

            It then behooves us at advent to re-enact their watching and waiting, their prayers and longings, alert to God’s whisper as well as His shout whatever that may in the end be.  Because what needs fixing is us, and that is not going to be fixed by a man on a white horse carrying a sword to smite his enemies with weapons of mass destruction called hell and death that follow him.  Because if you are waiting for a cataclysmic end to all things to solve your problems, you are going to be frustrated waiting.  You will know the frustrations of “hurry up and wait.”  Because I can promise you one thing about tomorrow:  the sun will also rise.  And I can promise you one more thing as well.  Everything we need came to us on a night long ago in an obscure village in a very humble way. Peace on earth from the prince of peace, but a peace that begins in me and you.  A peace that is realized one person at a time.  A peace that gets to the root of the problem.  And for all of us who have ever wanted an answer to our plight that is it. You see before we look up, we must look within.  And before we look ahead to someday, we must look back 2000 years.  And it is the Good News we call Advent.  And even though it most always takes longer than we want, Christ still comes to us today.  And that is worth waiting for. Thanks be to God, Amen.