Luke 21:25-28, 34-36
The world was very different when I was learning to drive. For one thing, we gave very little thought to insurance, to the possibility of being arrested for traffic violations -- after all, we knew the police officers by their first names. I had been going out with one or the other parent learning to drive. One day I was bugging my mother to take me on another training run, when she said, you go by yourself. So I called up my best friend and told him that I was coming to get him and we were going to go on a drive. I picked him up and off we went, cruising the drag, we called it. You would start at Gertie’s drive-in at one end of town and proceed to the other end of main street, then turn around and go back, and do this till you got tired of it or ran out of gas. We teenagers were pretty cool as you might imagine. Anyway, somewhere around the third pass we decided to park and get something to eat. I had not been sufficiently instructed in parallel parking, and managed to quite seriously damage the right front fender. To add insult to injury this happened in front of Officer Sam’s patrol car, as he had been following me. He called my dad, who got someone to drive him to the car. After pulling on the fender enough to get the metal away from the tire, he drove me home. It was a while before they resumed my driving lessons.
I’m sure most of us have had similar experiences -- experiences where we got in trouble because we didn’t wait long enough. I wasn’t ready to drive on my own, but I couldn’t wait to make this all-important step into independence. I think advent is a time to practice waiting. In advent we symbolically join all those spiritual ancestors -- Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Moses -- and the list goes on. Why did God make the human race wait so long for the Messiah he promised? Today we heard Jesus tell his disciples, “Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy from carousing and drunkenness and the anxieties of daily life, and that day catch you by surprise like a trap.” Waiting means paying attention to what is important right now, listening to what God is telling us through our experiences; it means reflecting on what is really important and what is not. It’s very easy, especially as we approach Christmas, to get so busy that we lose sight of what the season is all about.
Father Ron Rolhauser relates waiting to chastity. Chastity, he says, is not something to do with sex. It really has to do with how we experience reality in general, all experience. To be chaste is to have the proper reverence, towards God, towards each other, towards nature, towards ourselves, and of course, towards sex. We can see why chastity is about proper waiting if we look at the opposite; to lack chastity, to be irreverent, is to be impatient, selfish, callous, immature, undisciplined in any way so that our actions deprive someone else of his or her uniqueness and dignity. Since matters having to do with sex touch us in our deepest souls, you can see why chastity has come to be associated with our attitudes towards sex, and unchastity dehumanizes people through the misuse of sex.
The gospel today is from a section of Luke’s gospel called “the little apocalypse”. It does resemble parts of the Book of Revelation, and you can find such passages throughout the New Testament as well as some of the later books of the Old Testament. Apocalypse comes from Greek, and means “to unveil”, or to draw aside a curtain. It isn’t really about the future; it’s a reminder that there is a bigger picture, our lives really aren’t under our control, and everything that happens, no matter how good or bad, is temporary, and if we wait with reverence, if we accept all our experiences in a sense of anticipation of what will happen at the end of time, then we are living the virtue of chastity.
As to why we had to wait so long for the Messiah -- as to why we seem to be waiting so long for his second coming, before the messiah can be conceived, carried in Mary’s womb and given birth to, there must always be a time of waiting, a necessary advent, a certain quota of suffering. As one poet said, “God is never in a hurry! Every tear brings the messiah closer. It is with much groaning of the flesh that the life of the spirit is brought forth.” A feast can only happen after some fasting. Advent is a time when we learn to wait for God’s coming, for Christmas.
