If you want breakfast at Greggs, you usually have to wait in the queue. From 8.00am till around 9.30 am, Greggs is the favourite breakfast takeaway for folk going to work or school. The coffee and bacon rolls are very good, and very good value – I’m able to confirm this from personal experience!
If it’s worth waiting for, people don’t mind waiting. Patience isn’t a problem if you know that, when your turn comes, you’ll get what you hope for. But there’s another kind of waiting. It goes on and on and on, until it seems there’s no end to the waiting.
Advent is when we rediscover the importance of waiting for God. “They that wait for the Lord will renew their strength,” said Isaiah the prophet. True enough. But sometimes waiting can be so frustrating! Maybe that’s because we’ve become used to getting things done quickly. We value immediacy, right now - from making coffee, to ordering online with delivery today or tomorrow, to binge-watching a TV box set so we don’t have to wait for weekly episodes. Take the waiting out of wanting is one of today’s most powerful marketing promises.
So we need Advent to slow us down, to train us in patience, to recover the wonder of waiting. Here is Isaiah again, this verse is not so well known, but it's an important word from the Lord to hearts becoming impatient with long term promises.
“Yet the Lord longs to be gracious to you: he rises to show you compassion. For the Lord is a God of justice. Blessed are all who wait for him.” (Isaiah 30.18)
The story of Jesus, from Advent to Second Coming is a story punctuated by waiting, allowing God’s purposes to be worked out in God’s time, at God’s pace, and to our blessing. Mary receives the annunciation that she will have a child named Jesus, the Messiah, the Saviour, Emmanuel. Nine months later we are in Bethlehem, and not long after, the baby is a refugee. Please don’t overlook that dark corner of the Christmas story. Joseph, Mary and their baby were fleeing from the violence and terror of murdering soldiers. Christians of all people should understand the importance of welcome and protection for those fleeing for their lives.
The Bethlehem refugees waited in Egypt till Herod died and the threat was past. They re-settled in Nazareth and Jesus waited 30 years, “growing in favour with God and all who knew him.” For three years Jesus healed, taught and lived the life of one utterly obedient to the Father. There was a lot of waiting, because as John regularly says throughout his Gospel, “His time had not yet come.”
But come it did, and Jesus was crucified and buried. That three day wait was too much for the disciples. Rather than wait for the promise of Jesus rising from the dead, they panicked, ran away, hid themselves, kept busy, and gave up - anything but wait for something that was never going to happen. But happen it did. What started with angels and celebration at Bethlehem, came to an earth-juddering halt on Calvary. Until early on the third day! Just as the sun was rising, the Son was rising, and indeed as angels once announced his birth, now angels announced “He is risen!”
But still the waiting continues. “Wait in the city,” Jesus says, “till you are clothed with power from on high.” Pentecost comes and the Gospel overflows from the hearts of disciples now filled with the Holy Spirit, flowing out to the ends of the world and to the end of the ages. And the waiting continues, as we await the second coming of Jesus, the One to whom every knee shall bow in heaven and on earth.
This Advent, we will try to learn again that God’s purposes don’t work out to our timetable, nor to our agendas. As Isaiah said, “The Lord is a God of justice.” He will make things right. Why? “The Lord longs to be gracious to you: he rises to show you compassion…” No wonder Isaiah goes on to say, “Blessed are all who wait for him.”
Those queues outside Gregg’s are their own testimony. Experience has shown those folk that it’s worth the waiting. You can almost hear those words of Jesus in his favourite teaching style. If waiting at Gregg’s is worth it, “How much more” is it worth waiting before God, in quiet trust, in patient faith, and with hearts open to the coming of Jesus into our world, into our community life, and into our hearts. Live this week with Isaiah 30.18, and discover again the Lord who longs to be gracious to you, who rises to show you compassion, and who blesses you as you wait before him,
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