We are waiting. We are waiting for things to change, for God to make the world anew, for the world to find peace. We wait for justice to rule. We wait for a time when fear does not rule our world but love, joy and hope. We wait.

We wait as the ancient Israelites did, in hope for a renewed future, one where the covenant promises given to them by God would come to pass. They had faced exile. They had faced what seemed to be the end of all their hopes and any possibility of assuming their role in the world as Yahweh’s chosen people. They faced absolute despair. But they survived the exile and they had maintained some measure of who and what they were before the devastating effects of that disaster. This small bit of Isaiah that we read today comes from that time; a time when Israel had returned and were once more able to lift up their eyes and look to a future they once believed denied to them. Now, they could wait in hope and expectation. They could foresee a time where Yahweh would be enthroned in Jerusalem. Where the nations would come to Jerusalem not to defeat its people and subjugate the nation, but in peace, in a peace that was unlike anything that the ancient world would have known. It would be a peace that would see the instruments of war turned into instruments of peace and sustenance. It was a peace that would transform the world. There are definite overtones of this in the Psalm. Used as a psalm for pilgrim to Jerusalem, it refers to the power that Jerusalem has as the center of the covenant that God had given to the people. When peace ruled in the walls of Jerusalem, there was still hope for peace for Israel. Although the Psalm comes from a much earlier time then the section of Isaiah we have read today, it must have been held up as something of a prayer for peace, even centuries after it was written. For those returned from the exile, it represented the hope that they were once more able to foresee in their future. They were called back to hope of a consummation of Yahweh’s covenant, where they would become the covenant people and become central to the world. And while that promise was still a future hope, the Israelites were asked to walk in the light, to understand that they were called to wait in the hope of God and live according to that hope. So they waited. So we wait.

We wait. And we hear of a very different kind of waiting in our Gospel reading. It is a reading that speaks of terror filled days to come, instead of days of peace. It talks of some disappearing and some being left, of a humanity that has apparently forgotten God. It depicts a time of uncertainty. For those who wait, this reading is about holding fast in spite of what is coming, to the hope that the dark times about to come will not be final, that the light still burns in the darkness and will not be overcome but will in fact overcome the darkness. When the reading from Isaiah was from a time of renewed life for Israel, the reading from Matthew is from an extremely uncertain time. The temple was destroyed, Jerusalem had been sacked. Everything had destabilized. What to hope for was not so clear. Christ had not yet returned. Where did hope lie? Matthew tries to give hope in the words of Christ, calling for the readers to be awake and to stand firm, but it would have been hard. It is hard. We wait and often that waiting feels interminable and full of suffering.
The passage from Romans seems to offer little insight of what it means to wait with hope. Paul gives a list, an ethical standpoint that seems legalistic and stern. How does this help us to wait? For although we wait, it is not an easy task in the world we live in. We live in uncertain times, times of war and hate, poverty and despair, a disintegration of human relationships which is only replaced by vice and further ways of detaching one’s self from those around us. We wait and we hear these passages and we anxiously listen to where we may find hope, where we may find Christ both here in these readings and throughout our lives. We listen and we lament and wonder sometimes how we can go on waiting.

Yet Paul offers more to us then a simple set of rules. For his “ethics”, if that is what one wishes to call them, are about how we may go forward in this life in service towards others and towards our God. The greatest hope that we as Christians cling to is that Christ has saved us through his actions and that means that we have been reconciled to God in ways that we could never have managed on our own. We are justified by God’s grace in our lives. And that is the starting point for everything for Paul. We would never be able to follow our God as we should if left to our own strength, but Christ gives us the strength and desire and so we can go forward to serve others and God. Thus for Paul, all things begin in Christ. All things are centered there. And from there, we go forward.

For Paul, we derive strength to continue on in the fact that Christ is with us and leading us. When we are called to wait, we are not called to be simply idle. Christ is leading us on, to wait in readiness, to be awake, to walk in the light. Waiting then becomes a verb of action, not of passivity. We are called to wait in readiness, in the service, joy, celebration and hope that such readiness enables us to participate in. Christ calls us to be awake, not in some rigid state of fear and apprehension, but in hope and in trust that what was promised will be given.
This excerpt from Romans then gives us an answer as to where we find Christ. If we wait in hope and expectation for peace to come and God to reign and the world to be changed into something good and new, as the Israelites longed for, or if we wait with a hope that defies the world around us because we can not truly see how we are to go forward nor if they is any real hope for the world around us, we wait in Christ. We wait, in hope or despair, in confidence or doubt, in Christ. We wait in readiness and we can know that there is one thing that we can indeed rely on. Christ is with us and guides us. We do not have to lose all hope. We can wait in renewed expectation for we have donned Christ in our baptism and made his love a part of us. We are have been made God’s and so we still have hope.

We wait, in readiness. We wait in service. We wait for a Christ Child to be born, for Christ to fill our hearts this day and for Christ, our King and Savior, to come again and make the beautiful visions of peace found in Isaiah the nature of the world that we live in. We wait in hope. Christ is here in that readiness, guiding us forward. We wait.

Amen