Rev’d Caroline - [email protected], 01285 712467
Rev’d Vicky Falvey - [email protected]
Readings for Sunday: Genesis 12.1-4a; Romans 4.1-5, 13-17; John 3.1-17
‘Hurry up and wait’
One of the most obvious characteristics of our purple seasons of Advent and Lent is the idea of waiting. We are not allowed to just jump into the wonderful celebrations of our Lord’s arrival, or his victory over sin and death. No. We have to wait for them. And honestly, waiting for things in this impatient world of ours can be a hard discipline to master! We’ve all noticed how Christmas seems to creep earlier and earlier in the year, seeming to swallow up and eclipse Advent. The same is true of Easter, with Easter eggs in the shops long before we even catch a glimpse of Holy Week. Waiting is hard. It seems grey and austere. Why can’t we just celebrate something that is truly worth celebrating, and get a bit of joy and excitement into our days?
I want to push back against that! Waiting may seem a terrible fate. Even the word might point our minds towards bus stops or railway platforms or dentist’s surgeries. Any place that has a ‘waiting room’. The kind of places where boredom and greyness are built into the experience. But the kind of waiting we do in Lent is nothing like that. We’re not asked to sit still and passive, minds wandering while our bodies are inactive.
No, the waiting we do in Lent is expectant. It’s passionate and transformational. We spend time in the wilderness not in passivity, but in looking and thinking and working. We consciously move into an attitude of inviting God into our lives and embracing the change he brings. This is what it means to be ‘born of the Spirit’ as Jesus teaches Nicodemus in our reading for today. This is what we see in the life of Abraham, as he embraces God’s covenant and sees his entire life turned upside down.
Our waiting is about reaching out and being changed as a result. Psalm 42 begins in words that resonate in our hearts this season: “As the deer longs for the water brooks, so longs my soul for you, O God.” We are thirsty in this season. We let ourselves feel that thirst, respond to it, seek the only one who can slake it. And we let ourselves be transformed by it.
Because the truth we are seeking to embrace and understand ever more deeply is so amazing, we cannot truly encounter it without being affected. “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
This Lent, let those words sink into your soul, and may our thirst for the Living God drive us out into true transformation. May your waiting be fruitful, this season.
Rev’d Caroline
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