A Christmas Rant: But Wait! There's More!

I hate road construction.  Why is it that states and counties only seem to do roadwork when I am in a rush to get somewhere?  Why is it that the pothole which I repeatedly hit and damaged my car’s suspension goes unrepaired for months until the day I need to get to an appointment and am running ten minutes late to begin with?  Most of all, I hate that awkward situation, when after yelling in my car about the roadblock ahead, I move to front of the line and have to sit with my window open, just a few feet away from the guy with the sign at whom I was yelling just a few minutes earlier.   That’s when I do that little sheepish hand wave gesture of “Hi. Nice day.”

 My opposition to road construction goes way back to when I was a child.  On family vacations, when we would get stuck in construction traffic, I would whine from the back seat.  My childhood whines were not the usual ones of “Are we there yet?” I’m proud to say.  My whines consisted of what I thought was a brilliant question, “How come they’re still working on the roads?  When is everything in the world going to be finished?”   I had all these books as a child about how things were built and how they worked.  So I couldn’t understand why once something like a road was built, that wasn’t the end of it.  Why did they have to keep working on it?  When was everything going to be finished?

Even as adults, I believe we express that same frustration. Before we own a home, we look forward to it. We picture moving in, renovating the rooms we want to change and just settling in.  Then as homeowners, we quickly discover that age-old axiom that the house is never done.  There’s always something left to do.  There’s always a project that needs doing, or re-doing.  There’s always a repair to be made.  Just when you feel you’re catching up, you or your spouse get the idea to add-on something new, a deck, a room, a pool.  It seems it never ends.  Like a whining child, we may well ask, “When is the world going to be done?” 

Over these past few weeks of Advent, we have heard the Christmas rant of John the Baptist.  In the rant of this wild desert preacher, he tells his audience to make a way for God, that the Kingdom had and was about to arrive, that its arrival would mean the end of their world as they knew it, and that there was no need to wait for anything else to happen.  They could just start living this Kingdom life, right here and right now.  In reaction to this message, the crowd wonders if John may be the Messiah.  They think that perhaps John is the guy for whom they have been waiting.  Finally, will the world be finished?

Think about this story from their perspective.  Sometimes, when we read a story, especially an ancient one, we read it from our side of history.  We forget that the people in the story didn’t yet know how things would turn out.  John’s audience was first century Jews.  As such, they had been raised under Roman occupation.  The glory days of Israel and her people lie in the past for them.  They were reared with the promises of the Hebrew Bible, that one day Israel would be restored.  For them, that meant tossing the Romans out of their homeland.  For many Jews, it also meant that the corrupt Hasmoneans, who were in charge of the Temple in Jerusalem, would also be removed from power.  These things would occur by God’s actions in their world through someone special.  God’s blessing would be restored to Israel through God’s anointed one, the Messiah.

Now here before them, was John the Baptist.  Could he be the one they had been waiting for? If he was, I imagine that for some in the crowd there was a sense that their story as a people of God was finally resolving.  For some of them, the idea of John as the Messiah provided a way that they could look to him and say, “So we’re done then?”  Like an interstate highway system or a house, the world was finally about to be completed.

From the vantage point of two thousand years later we know that wasn’t the case.  Little did they know that about thirty years earlier, a baby was born to an obscure peasant family.  Rather than John the Baptist, it would be that baby, now grown, who was about to emerge from the very crowd in which they stood and take his place as God’s anointed at his baptism.  From there Jesus of Nazareth would begin his revolutionary public ministry, preaching good news to the poor, bringing sight to the blind and setting captives free. When his way of being in the world got him in trouble with those Romans and the Temple authorities, they killed him.  But the story wasn’t over.  After his death, his followers experienced him in a new resurrected way which empowered them to spread this Jesus movement throughout the world.  The story didn’t end there.  The story was far from over and the world was and still is far from being completed.

As we approach Christmas, it is comfortable to look back.  We look back at the story of Jesus’ birth.  We look back at “Twas the Night Before Christmas”, “It’s A Wonderful life” and “A Charlie Brown Christmas”.  We look back at Christmas memories from our own past. Those things are all good and important.  They comprise who we are and make up our own stories.  But I wonder if, like some of John the Baptist’s hearers, we too are guilty of believing the story is over - that the world has been completed.  We miss the point of the story we proclaim if we do that.  The story of Jesus, whose birth we celebrate, should teach us that the story is never truly over.

Perhaps you’ve seen the bumper sticker that says, “Be Patient.  God Isn’t Finished With Me Yet.”  That ‘s a very healthy and humbling attitude to have about ourselves and others.  Yet I believe that sticker applies, not just to individuals, but to the world and Creation as a whole.  Jesus’ coming into the world changed the world, but it didn’t solve everything.  The world and all of us are far from completed.  So perhaps the world should just be plastered with one giant sticker, thousands of miles across that says, “Be Patient.  God Isn’t Finished With Me Yet.”

The Kingdom of God, or the way God wants the world to be, was at hand and arrived with Jesus and continues today.  The Reign of God is right now, but it is also not yet.  As followers of Jesus, we live between the now and not yet of this amazing dream of God to restore all of Creation and all of us back to God and one another.  N T Wright describes it this way.  It is as if we are in the final act of a play.  We know the acts that preceded us and we know how the play is supposed to end.  That ending has been given to us by God in that vision of a new heaven and a new earth, and heaven descending to earth.  In the meantime, our role is to improvise the scenes to get us from where we are in the story, to that ending of peace, love and reconciliation.

One of my first jobs was as a production assistant (basically a gopher) for a film production company.  It was a difficult and highly competitive job.  I wanted to do everything right.  In fact, I promised myself that I would do everything and anything they asked me to do; getting their sushi for lunch, delivering packages to bad neighborhoods, watching cars parked overnight, picking up the Director’s dry cleaning.  I did it all and I would patiently wait to be asked to do the next assignment.  Thinking that would make my bosses happy, I was shocked on the day they told me they were disappointed in me.

“How could that be?” I protested. “I do everything you ask me to do, when you ask me to do it.”

The Production Manager said, “Sure.  But that’s not enough.  You’ve been here a while.  You know the drill. You know what needs to be done.  We need you to anticipate what we need you to do, before we ask you to do it.”

At first, that sounded absurd, but eventually I realized they were right.  If they had to wait for me to be asked to everything, they might as well do it themselves.  So that changed my work attitude.  I quickly learned to put that phrase in my resume’s job descriptions, “anticipated tasks before being asked to do them.”  Employers liked reading that.

I started this Advent series by saying that I believed waiting was overrated in this season of Advent.  Often, as followers of Jesus, that waiting becomes sitting around doing nothing, waiting to be told what to do.  Perhaps it is better to see Advent as a time of not waiting, but of anticipation, in the best sense of the word.  When we turn to the Gospels, we discover what Jesus wants for the world and from us. It’s been 2000 years.  By now we should know the drill.  We should anticipate what God is doing and is about to do in the world.  We should anticipate the motion of the Spirit in the same way a champion athlete anticipates the motion of a ball.

You and I cannot change the world or re-create Creation.  Only God can do that.  But we can anticipate and join in with the motions of the Spirit in our world.

At Christmas we celebrate not just the Christ who came in the past, but the one who continually comes to us in the present and will come to us in ultimate fulfillment in the future.  God’s story did not end with John the Baptist, or with Jesus coming into the world, his ministry, his death on a cross or even his resurrection.  It didn’t end with Pentecost, or in 95 AD, or even with the Protestant Reformation.  The real Christmas story, continues with you, with me, our churches and with Christ, both today and in the future.

 The world isn’t finished yet.