Wait Up!

Isaiah 2:1-5; Romans 13: 8-14

November 27, 2016

The gospel reading this morning is an apocalyptic text from Matthew in which Jesus warns that no one knows when the Son of Man will appear. The text begins, “about that day or hour no one knows,” and it concludes, “therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”

It’s important to note that most translations render the phrase “Son of Man” in capital letters as a title, but, as Walter Wink notes, the phrase comes from an idiomatic expression in Hebrew, used notably, by the author of the book of Ezekiel, and it means, simply, “human being.”

Advent is a season of waiting and preparing. What are we waiting for? The coming of the human being – the authentic, fully realized human one.

In describing the vision that inaugurates his prophetic text, Ezekiel says that God appeared to the human being in the likeness of a human. I won’t drag us through the Hebrew other than to note it is richly idiomatic. Rather, I’ll simply repeat the questions Walter Wink raises about the passage:

“What does it mean to say that God is revealed as human? Why does God turn a humanlike face to Ezekiel?”[1]

For followers of Jesus, these are the questions the incarnation compels us to confront. The season of Advent presses them upon us with particular urgency. After all, what are we waiting for? What are we expecting? When we sing, “come, thou long-expected Jesus,” what are we inviting in to our lives?

Following Wink, we might begin to answer his questions by saying, “Perhaps God turns a humanlike face toward us because becoming human is the task that God has set for human beings.” Wink goes on to say of our human condition, “We are only fragmentarily human, fleetingly human, brokenly human. We see glimpses of our humanness, we can dream of what a more humane existence and political order would be like, but we have not yet arrive at true humanness.”[2]

In the season of Advent, with its mixed invocations of joy, hope, peace, and love, we know full well that our joy knows sorrow, our peace is never free from conflict, our hope is full of longing and doubt, and our love bears many wounds.

But this invitation to welcome the human one, to listen for his call, to follow his way into the fullness of being human still resounds in our Advent waiting. We hear it in the promise that someday we will learn to beat our swords into plowshares, our spears into pruning hooks.

These words are thousands of years old. It seems like we might have figured it out by now. But we’re still waiting.

How shall we wait? What is the tenor of our waiting? What is the shape of the meanwhile?

Paul captured it well in the conclusion of his letter to the Romans. Salvation is nearer to us than we imagine, he suggests. So wait for it as if you were living it already.

If we imagine our salvation – that is to say, our wholeness, our fully realized joyous, hope-filled, loving, just and peaceful humanness – as an elevated state, then Paul is saying, “wait up.” Wait up! Wait as if this has already been accomplished, and you have already been lifted up with Christ, because you have been, because we have been.

What does that look like? Love. Love.

Love is love is love is love is love is love is love.

The night is far gone, the day is near. Wait up. Wait up, for Christ is coming. Amen.

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[1] Walter Wink, The Human Being (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002) 26.

[2] Ibid.