Advent: It’s a Waiting Game

By The Rev. Ted Thornton

It’s a Waiting Game

If you got to church on time this morning, a few moments ago you sat through a major event in the geophysical history of our planet. It happened at three minutes past ten while we were listening to Heather’s welcome. Happy Solstice!  Spring is right around the corner, right?

And, here’s one more word about today: today in the Anglican tradition, December 21st is  the Feast Day of Saint Thomas, perhaps the most famous voice of doubt in all Christian history, Thomas, who in John’s Gospel says he won’t believe in Jesus unless he can touch the wounds made by the nails of the cross; Thomas, who, in turn then also in John’s Gospel, is invited by Jesus to put his fingers in those wounds, and thereupon utters the strongest affirmation of Jesus’ divinity found anywhere in the Bible, “My Lord and my God.” (John 20:28)

I was ordained to the Priesthood on the eve of the Feast of Saint Thomas, the evening of December 20th, 1978 (forty-seven years ago last night). Thomas has always held a special place in my heart. 

Advent: It’s a waiting game. Our gospel eyes and ears this morning turn to Joseph, one of the great biblical models of faithfulness, endurance, and patient waiting: patience, faithfulness, and endurance in the face of powerful social and cultural forces aligned against him, against his decision to stay with Mary and help her raise the son of God. In Joseph’s part of the world, women pregnant out of wedlock and their male partners were and remain to this day targets of honor killings, carried out usually, by the unlucky woman’s father and brothers. Thank God Joseph listened to and heeded that dream!

Joseph, patron saint of all fathers, and, I like to think, the unofficial patron saint of all step fathers, step fathers like me. 

The patience, faithfulness, and endurance of Joseph are visible in some of the greatest Christian art in history. By the seventh century Byzantine period, artistic conventions of the manger begin centering our attention more fully on Mary and the baby Jesus. Joseph is more often moved to the side, standing among the animals, and we all know what stabled animals do on stable floors. Sometimes he’s brooding. Often he looks lonely. Often he’s depicted as a much older man, more of a grandfather to the adolescent Mary than a husband. 

Beginning in the sixteenth century, at the behest of Counter-Reformation theologians like Johannes Molanus, this trend is reversed somewhat and artists are encouraged to bring Joseph back to center stage, now depicted as a younger, more vigorous man, as most fathers of newborns tend to be. 

And, for all the attention devoted to Mary and the baby, it’s a very vigorous Joseph who in his own way makes the story move, especially in his efforts to save his little family from the wrath of Herod by leading their escape into Egypt, Herod, the Roman puppet King, whose paranoid jealousies led him to murder one of his wives, along with his eldest son and heir, and before that the high priest of Jerusalem, whom, according to the Jewish historian Josephus, Herod drowned at a pool party at his winter palace in Jericho. The story of Herod’s “slaughter of the innocents” in Matthew 2, all boys under the age of two, certainly fits with what we know of his paranoid, murderous proclivities. 

Advent is the season of waiting in our Christian calendar. Patience, endurance, and faithfulness, as embodied in Jesus’ step-father Joseph, are the marks and the fruits of waiting.  

Much of life is spent waiting for things to happen. We wait to board flights. We wait for people to arrive. We wait in lines at checkout counters. Life is largely a waiting game.

If we know what’s good for us, we learn early on to do our waiting with patience and mindfulness. Doctors and nurses refer to us as “patients” because we spend a lot of our time in their offices patiently waiting to see them. 

Our younger daughter, Annie, learned the word “wait” at a very young age from her grandmother as they sat in a doctor’s office before one of the countless medical appointments and procedures Annie has had to endure since her birth. “We’re waiting, dear,” her grandmother would say. Since that first time, Annie, who has multiple health issues, was encouraged to regard the word “wait” in an active sense, as an opportunity, never as a passive chore, never something that happens to her. Waiting is a discipline. She doesn’t like it, but, now in her forties, she does it, time after time.  

Perhaps the greatest literary meditation on waiting and what it means is Samuel Becket’s play “Waiting for Godot.” It’s a play about two men on a lonely road who await the arrival of a third named Godot, who, you may have guessed by now, never shows up. It’s also about the hopes and fears that go along with waiting. It’s a play that underscores the importance of patience and how to endure the discomfort and lack of certainty when we’re waiting for something to happen. 

When it was first performed in the United States, it starred two great American actors: Bert Lahr and Tom Ewell. Some of you may have never heard of Tom Ewell, but I’m quite sure many of you know who Bert Lahr is. He played the cowardly lion alongside Judy Garland in the classic 1939 film version of “The Wizard of Oz.” 

The first performance of “Waiting for Godot” in the United States occurred in – of all places – the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Miami. The year was 1956. 

Now, it turned out that choosing a Miami night club filled with vacationers to open a play about waiting for something to happen was a really bad idea. Think about it: do people go to nightclubs where the entertainment features waiting for something to happen? No, people don’t go to nightclubs to wait for things to happen. People go to nightclubs expecting instant gratification, instant satisfaction in the forms of drink, food, and entertainment. So, they started walking out in droves only minutes into the show. The play bombed; it closed after a very short run.  

One year later, in 1957, the play was produced in – again of all places - San Quentin Prison, one of the most notorious jails in the country and the former home of California’s gas chamber. The ferry into San Francisco from Larkspur passes up close right alongside the prison. I’ve ridden that ferry. San Quentin - close up - is a frightening sight. 

As the ferry glided along in the channel, an inmate stared out at us through a fenced in exercise yard, his fingers clutching the chain link wires, the high, thick walls of the cell blocks looming behind him. 

They put the play on in an old shed where, in the days before the gas chamber, condemned prisoners were hanged. The actors were nervous as the lights went down in the room with its 1,400 noisy inmates. 

Everyone in that shed knew that, contrary to what happened at the Coconut Grove, no one in the audience was going to be walking out.

But, fifteen minutes into the play a miracle happened: a deep hush descended on the room as the inmates began listening with rapt attention and kept listening all the way to the end. It turned out the play made such an impact on the inmates that they started a drama group inside the prison. 

Why? Why was the experience at San Quentin so different from the one at Miami’s Coconut Grove?  Because, the play is a masterful exploration of what it means to wait, and those convicts – many of whom were lifers with no hope of parole - knew what it means and what it takes to wait, and wait, and wait, and wait. 

Are there prisons in your life? What do you need to do to walk out of them? Do your cellmates include despair, hopelessness, and worry? If you’re feeling locked in a prison of some kind this Advent and Christmas season, try cultivating prayerfully the capacity to wait patiently for release. 

And while you’re waiting, remember that the good life is a life of good doing. What good things can you do while you wait? Take a lesson from the San Quentin inmates who, after watching Waiting for Godot, were inspired to start their drama group.  

It’s Joseph with whom we stand this time around on the threshold of one of the two chief theological pole stars of our faith - Christmas and Easter - the mix of flesh and spirit that constitutes our human nature: the two pole stars of our our Christian faith when what we’re made of becomes most intensely revealed to us. 

Christmas is one of those pole stars. Christmas is that point in history when Spirit, Logos, the Word, the omnipotent power of God becomes flesh incarnate, born into human form in Jesus.  

The Easter season is the other pole star of our faith, and the more important one. The weeks of Easter mark that time when Jesus’ earthly life ends and returns to Spirit. 

The dialectical relationship of flesh and spirit at Christmas and Easter, a relationship often experienced as tension, is a mirror reflecting our human nature, recalling in the story of Jesus’ our own birth, foreseeing in Jesus’ death and resurrection at Easter our own death and return to God, and pervading everything we think and do in the time between those two great events in our lives: the who we and the who we can be. 

It’s a waiting game. What are you waiting for this Advent? Perhaps the answer will come to you this Christmas. I pray that it will. If it doesn’t, keep waiting with patience and prayerful trust in God that in time your release will come.  

My wife wears a ring on the small finger of her right hand bearing her family’s motto, an inscription first ascribed to the Roman poet Horace. It reads, “Nil desperandum,” (“Never despair!”). 

Horace is also credited for first uttering the famous phrase, “Carpe Diem (“seize the day”).” Seize each day this Christmas season to love others even better. And don’t forget to love yourselves as you love others: get plenty of sleep, eat and drink sensibly, and do what you can to alleviate stress. You know the drill.  

Merry Christmas and Every Blessing! 

Amen. 

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