Isaiah 35:1-10 | Luke 1:46-55
Jeremy Richards
In 2006, the popular singer John Mayer released a song called, “Waiting on the World to Change.” This song, which I’m sure most of you have heard, sounds at first listen like a catchy, even hope-filled song, but it is, in fact, one of the most hopeless songs I’ve ever heard. In the song, Mayer claims that he and his generation see the problems in the world, but the problems are too big for them to do anything about, and so they’re waiting on the world to change – apparently all on its own.
In the first verse he says, “Now we see everything that's going wrong / With the world and those who lead it / We just feel like we don't have the means / To rise above and beat it.” This leads into the chorus, “So we keep waiting (waiting) / Waiting on the world to change / We keep on waiting (waiting) / Waiting on the world to change.” He goes on to say later in the song, “Now if we had the power / To bring our neighbors home from war / They would have never missed a Christmas / No more ribbons on their door.” But they don’t have the power, he says, so they might as well “keep on waiting, waiting on the world to change.”
For John Mayer, waiting is resignation. It’s hopelessness. Waiting is what happens when you give up the fight. That’s probably how most people think of waiting. It’s passive. It’s leaving the results to someone else. When we wait for the bus, we expect the bus to come to us, we don’t go find the bus. When we wait for our order at a restaurant, we wait for the chef in the back to make the food and the waitstaff to bring it to us. When we wait at the doctor’s office, as my family has done a few times in the last couple weeks, we wait for the doctors and nurses to finish up what they’re doing, prepare the room, and let us know when we can come in. When we wait, we divest ourselves of responsibility. It’s up to someone else.
For this reason, I’ve been struggling with the fact that the theme of Advent is waiting (luckily I missed the first two Sundays of Advent). I don’t feel very good about telling you all to divest yourselves of responsibility. And yet I know it’s important to remember that the redemption of the world does not, ultimately, rest with us, but in the Creator God revealed in Jesus Christ. Advent is a time of humility, when we admit that we can’t save the world on our won, that forgiveness, reconciliation, and salvation are the work of God. The future is in God’s hands, not ours, so it is important to wait on God.
And yet, at the same time, we know that God has called us to forgive, to work out our salvation along with God, to do our part to be reconciled to God and one another. 1 Corinthians 3:9 says that we are co-laborers with God. In the Gospel of John (14:12), Jesus says that the Church through the Holy Spirit will do greater things than Jesus did. 2 Corinthians 5 tells us that Christ’s work of reconciliation has been handed on to us to continue.
The future rests in God’s hands, and yet, at the same time, we are given a very active role in bringing that future into being. In light of all that, what does Christian waiting look like? How does it differ from the message of waiting in John Mayer’s song, “Waiting on the World to Change”?
This week, Greta Thurnberg, at the young age of 16, was named Time Magazine’s person of the year. Thurnberg, has become the face of the global climate justice movement. But only a little over a year ago, she was an unknown Swedish girl, who started a school strike for climate change – a strike consisting of one person: herself. She stopped going to school and sat outside the Swedish parliament with a sign that said, “School Strike for Climate” in Swedish. This one girl sitting outside the parliament waiting for those in power to make a change, sparked a movement. In September 2019, an estimated 4 million people protested climate change, all inspired by Greta Thurnberg, who envisions a world that is different than the one we currently live in, a world where politicians and lawmakers listen to science, where everyday people make sacrifices in order to live sustainably, where human flourishing and the flourishing of creation are understood to be interrelated (which seems like a no-brainer).
This vision, which people all around the globe are catching sight of, especially young people, doesn’t seem far from the vision of Isaiah 35. In this one single prophetic vision the desert blossoms and the eyes of the blind are opened, waters break forth in the wilderness and the ears of the deaf are unstopped, the burning sand becomes a pool and the lame leap like deer, the crocus blooms and the mute sing for joy. Human flourishing and the flourishing of creation side by side, inseparable. We shouldn’t need modern science to tell us what Isaiah knew a few thousand years ago.
But Greta Thurnberg knows that this visions will not just suddenly come to pass without any effort, just as Isaiah knew his vision wouldn’t just happen, and so he proclaims, “Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who are of a fearful heart, ‘Be strong, do not fear!’” There is work to be done in the present.
Greta Thurnberg isn’t John Mayer, waiting for the world to change on its own. She knows that this change requires a total reversal of the way things have been done up until now – a change of mind, a change of action, and a change of priorities. The Bible calls these kinds of changes repentance, which is the word John the Baptist and Jesus both began their ministries with according to Matthew. “Repent! For the kingdom of heaven has come near,” they both say. Change requires something from us. It requires us to turn from the old way, the way of harm, domination, greed and exploitation, to a new way of responsibility, care, compassion, and moderation.
Greta Thurnberg, like John and Jesus, doesn’t mince words. “I want you to panic,” she told a group of world leaders and CEOs at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The world is beginning to panic, but also to catch sight of a new vision, a new possibility. The words of Isaiah 35 come to life. All because a young, teenage girl sat alone, without any fanfare, outside the Swedish parliament roughly 16 months ago.
2,000 years ago, another young, unknown teenage girl found herself at the beginning of a revolution, though, unlike Greta Thurnberg, she did nothing, as far as we know, to prepare for it. Her name was Mary, and she was probably only 12 or 13 years old, younger than Greta Thurnberg. Mary was going about her day – I imagine doing household chores, maybe daydreaming about her marriage to her fiancé Joseph, maybe sulking because her parents just don’t get her, who knows? – when an angel appeared to her with strange words. “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” The angel went on to tell her that God was doing a new thing, and God wanted her to be a part of it. “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” When she asks how this can possibly be, since she’s a virgin, the angel says, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child will be holy; he will be called the Son of God.”
Already we begin to see the work of God and the participation of humanity coming together. We begin to see a holy kind of waiting. God will do this work, but Mary is the one who chooses to respond “Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word,” and she will be the one to carry the promise in her body, the one to nourish the salvation of the nations in her womb, the one to labor and strain to birth God’s hope into the world.
There is no waiting quite like waiting for a child to be born. I can’t speak from the experience of a mother, but I can speak from the experience of a father. There’s no doubt it’s a kind of waiting. Once the process is begun, you don’t have to do anything. Of course it’s good to take vitamins, get lots of sleep, and eat whatever weird cravings you have – there are things you can do to help the pregnancy along – but there’s nothing you do to keep that baby growing, nothing you can not do to keep it from showing up when the time comes.
And yet, of course, it’s a waiting that’s full of anticipation and full of action. There are preparations to be made, rooms to be decorated, books and blogs to be read, podcasts to be listened to, endless visits to the doctor’s office, baby showers to be thrown. And this waiting creates change, most strikingly in the mother’s body. The mother feels it herself, feels it in her bones, her stretching ligaments, and, of course, in her growing belly. She feels the baby kick and hiccup. There’re other changes as well, maybe changes in priorities. What was important before this new life came along – maybe going out to the hippest new restaurants late at night or dedicating lots of time to travel – is maybe not so important any more, and maybe what seemed of little importance – a steady job, a secure home – becomes much more important. Waiting for a child is far from passive. This is especially true of the baby Jesus.
Not just Mary and Joseph, but all the world awaited the coming of the Messiah. The universe prepared for the upheavel it would bring. But Mary alone felt it in her body, in a way no one else could. And so, when she visits her cousin Elizabeth, a song burst forth from her young, teenage lips, welling up from deep down in her pregnant belly, a song about a new world, a song about change born out of holy, active waiting:
[God] has shown strength with [God’s] arm;
[God] has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
[God] has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
[God] has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
[God] has helped [God’s] servant Israel,
in remembrance of [God’s] mercy,
according to the promise [God] made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”
Both John Mayer and Mary sing songs. Both, to some extent, divest themselves of responsibility, and yet these two songs could not be more different. Mary’s brims with hope, while Mayer’s is utterly void of it. Mary shows us what godly waiting looks like, what the kind of waiting we’re supposed to practice in Advent looks like. It’s the waiting of one who is pregnant with God’s promise. We wait as those who know that this thing we’ve been caught up in – this thing we call faith – began with God and will find its conclusion in God, and yet we are called to carry it, to testify to it, to feel it growing in us, transforming us, filling us with life, so that all the world will see it and know that God is here in the world, present in the everyday.
When we talk about God acting, we often think of the big, flashy examples in the Bible: the 10 plagues, parting the Red Sea, Elijah’s alter consumed in fire, Jesus walking on water, but Christmas brings it all down to earth, quite literally. The angel appears to a young girl in a backwater town. The savior of the world is born in a cattle stall with no one to greet him but his poor parents, the animals, and some shepherds.
We are waiting for God to save, and God will save, but God most often works from within creation and not from outside it. God changed the world by entering the world. That’s what Christmas, what the incarnation (God taking on flesh and bone and blood), is all about. It’s about God working in the midst of the everyday, in unspectacular ways, through seemingly insignificant people – Jesus, Mary, Greta Thurnberg, you, me.
We aren’t waiting for the world to change, we’re waiting for the God who’s changing the world – who’s saving the world – to come to us – most likely in the most mundane, ordinary, everyday way, when we’re in the midst of the chaos that is family and work and the holidays, just the way babies continue to grow while mothers continue to work at their careers, and make decisions in their households, and go shopping, and grab coffee with friends. And yet, in the midst of it all, if we stop long enough to pay attention, we’ll feel God’s promise growing inside us, kicking and hiccupping, taking on flesh and blood.
As I think about Grant Park Church specifically, there are quite a few new things God has been doing in us – the ministry team, our potential partnership with the Cupcake Girls, our new children’s ministry, and our search for a new pianist, to name a few. I think, as a church, we’re feeling the weight of these new things growing in us. They take time and thought and preparation, even if they aren’t here yet. And once they come, there’ll be a learning curve.
If you’re feeling tired or overwhelmed, it’s okay. I do too. These are wonderful new things God is doing, and yet they take a lot out of us. That’s the nature of these things. So I’ll tell you what I told Brie, I think (or at least what I should’ve told Brie when she was pregnant with Esther): You’re doing a great job, you’re all beautiful, and I’m so glad I’m doing this with you.
Amen.