Scripture Text: 2 Peter 3: 8-15a (Advent 2B)

⁸But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day.

⁹The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance. ¹⁰But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and everything that is done on it will be disclosed.

¹¹Since all these things are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness, ¹²waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set ablaze and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire? ¹³But, in accordance with his promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home. ¹⁴Therefore, beloved, while you are waiting for these things, strive to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish; ¹⁵and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation. 

All in God’s time…don’t you hate it when people say that?  I mean, this whole waiting thing would be a whole lot easier if we just knew how long we actually were going to have to do it.  Well, it has become apparent (and this passage has confirmed it) that God’s someday is not the same as ours.  It makes sense when you think about it because, after all, as we get older, as we have more years in our quiver, so to speak, time seems to move faster for us.  So, God’s notion of time, as One who is, of course, eternal, would do the same and that is exactly the timing that God has envisioned.

So, we wait.  We wait for that day of the Lord.  Now, I don’t know if it’s going to dissolve in fire or not.  That seems a bit overly-dramatic to me.  I tend to err on the side of the Peaceable Kingdom thing, the ushering in of peace and unity and eternal shalom.  Just as an aside, fire is often a symbol for God’s divinity and work (think refiner’s fire from the Old Testament) so maybe the author is just expressing an image of the time when God’s divinity, when “God’s time” will be instilled in the earth.  But whatever it is, whatever it looks like, we don’t control it.  We don’t know what will happen or when it will happen or how long it might last.  So, we wait.

But lest we get bored with this waiting, the writer reminds us that there is stuff we’re supposed to be doing.  Now the first hearers of these words were probably more impatient than even we are.  After all, Jesus had promised to return.  So, these people would have started getting their affairs in order, completely convinced that the return was imminent in months or weeks or maybe even days.  But as time marched on and nothing happened, they had slowly begun to fall into a way of being that was, well, NOT filled with peace and righteousness, if you know what I mean.  Essentially, they had lost interest.  They had simply gone back to their lives, back to what they knew, back to what they could control.

I remember a science project that my class did together.  It must have been in 3^rd grade or so.  In what was probably our first introduction to botany, we were each given a little pot, some gravel, some soil, and some seeds.  And together we each planted our seeds in our little pot and placed them where the sun from the window would reach them.  It was a fun project, much better than sitting at the desk and listening.  But when it was done, it didn’t really LOOK like a plant.  The next day it looked the same.  And the next, and the next, and the next…it soon seemed to me to be a rather pointless endeavor.  Well, my little plant was in the last group (of course it was!) a few weeks later to begin to peek out from beneath the small bit of earth.  But you know what?  While we were waiting for that to happen, we watered it, we fertilized it, and we turned it around so that all sides would get sunlight.  Just because nothing was noticeably happening didn’t mean that we didn’t care for it and nurture it.  Things do not always happen in our time but that doesn’t mean we don’t continue to do our work.  That was the lesson.

That’s actually the point.  Our waiting, our holy waiting, is not passive.  Holy waiting is active waiting.  Holy waiting is waiting for that time that we do not control, that time that is not ours but God’s while we care for and nurture the world that is ever so slowly growing into being.  And as we wait, we are the ones that God is filling and gathering and sending.  We are the ones that are peacemaking and justice-building.  We are the ones that are feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless, wiping out racism and welcoming everyone into our midst.  We are called to be the manifestation of Christ on earth.  We are called to be the ones that help bring that Peaceable Kingdom in.  We are called to care for that little shoot while it roots and grows and begins to peek out from beneath the earth.

In this Season of Advent as we practice holy waiting, when we both remember those who looked for the coming of the Messiah so long ago and look ahead for Christ’s coming into our own lives, we are also reminded to live as if it’s already come to be.  The truth is, this IS God’s time.  It’s ALL God’s time.  And we are smack dab in the middle of it.  We wait for the darkness to be pushed away by the light but in the meantime, we need to do a little of our own darkness-pushing.  God is waiting for us to respond, for us to proclaim God’s love and mercy, for us to live “as if”—as if the coming of the Lord is now, as if God’s Spirit has already spilled into the earth, as if justice and righteousness was the only way, and as if we knew no other way to live.  Be patient.  It will all come to be in God’s time.

When we’ve been there ten thousand years, Bright shining as the sun,

We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise than when we’d first begun.

                                                      -John Newton, “Amazing Grace”

Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God;  But only [they] who see, take off [their] shoes—the rest sit around it and pluck blueberries.   (Elizabeth Barret Browning, from “Aurora Leigh”)

Grace and Peace,

Shelli