The theme of Advent is waiting.  Waiting is really a manifestation and a symbol of the limitations of our power and control.  We need to wait because we are not in charge of the universe.  The universe does not revolve around us.  Every time we have to wait, it is an experience of our finitude.

Some of us are not good at waiting.  We do not find it a pleasant experience.  I want to suggest that this may be because waiting confronts us with the reality of our limited power, our limited ability, our limited competence, our limited control.

The topic I want to address is oppression.  Not someone else’s oppression.  That’s easy.  We can talk about other people’s oppression very easily.  The hard topic is our own appreciation, yours and mine.  This is hard to talk about because most of us don’t like to think of ourselves as oppressed.

One of the reasons we need to wait is because we are oppressed by others or by systems of which we are a part or by the past or by our own selves and so do not have the power to make happen what we want ot have happen.  We do not like to think of ourselves as oppressed.  We are the ones who help oppressed people.  We are the helpers, not the victims.  One of the reasons we don’t like to think of ourselves as oppressed is because we are so incredibly better off than others.  We are so remarkably fortunate.  Who are we to complain about anything?

Then there are those of us who are afraid of anything that seems like self-pity.  Some of us may even have a visceral fear of self-pity because we are afraid if we indulge in it, it would destroy us.  We can’t and won’t think of ourselves as oppressed because we are so afraid it would kill our drive and determination and undermine our wills.  We are so determined to be in control of ourselves and our fate that we hate the very idea of self-pity.

But each of us has an obligation to our own pain.  We have an obligation to the pain of others, but we also have an obligation to our own pain.  We have an obligation to pay attention to our own pain.  We have an obligation to pay attention to our own oppression.  If we don’t pay attention to it, it will fester and infect us.

Having to wait can be a sacrament of oppression.  It can be a reminder of the reality of injustice and prejudice and powerlessness in the real world as it is.

One of the things we are called to do while we wait is to want.  It is out of our own pain and our own experience of oppression that we develop a wanting, a desire, a yearning, an ache for a better world where people do not have to experience the pain we’ve known, the oppression we’ve felt.  None of us can see into each other’s souls.  None of us knows really what another has experienced.  None of us can automatically know each other’s pain.

I’ve known people whom the world would consider privileged who carried within them the wounds of child abuse and deprivation.  You would never guess.  You just can’t know someone else’s oppression unless you are willing to listen.

Jesus always comes to the oppressed places.  He comes to the oppressed places of our communities and our world, and our own lives and souls.

What do we do while we wait?  We feel the particular oppression we’ve been given.  We share in the pain of the oppression of another and the oppression of our world.  We stay alive and tender and open.  We want and long and yearn and ache for a better world.  We keep alive in us the want.

The season of Advent is about waiting.  Waiting is a universal and common experience.  But waiting is about more than waiting.

Waiting is sacramental.  It is an ordinary experience that has a deeper meaning.  It is the outward sign of something more profound and intangible, but still very real.

Waiting is an outward sign of the reality that the universe does not revolve around you and me.  Waiting is a strange grace.

The question is: What do we do while we are waiting?  How do we handle our finitude, the reality that we are not God, that things we want to happen do not happen on our time schedule or maybe sometimes not at all?  There is a lot we are not in control of, not in charge of.  This is the deeper meaning of reality, needing to wait.

Frederick Buechner writes that faith is a kind of whistling in the dark: “an attempt to keep our spirits up while peering through the shadows for some glimmer of Meaning.”  He capitalizes the word “Meaning” to show the connection between meaning and God.  God and meaning may not be the same thing, but to believe in the one is to believe in the other.

What do we do in places of life where we are all too aware of the limitations of our power and control?  We whistle in the dark.  We keep faith.  We keep our spirits up.

One of the familiar readings during the season of Advent is Isaiah 9:1-7.  Verse one talks about “gloom.”  Verse two could be translated as being about people who walked in gloom…those who lived in a land of deep gloom.”  How do we avoid becoming gloomy about those experiences and places in our lives where we are not in control and all we can do is wait?

One way is through denial.  However, denial doesn’t work about anything that really matters.  Isaiah 9 is not about denial.  It is about how to keep our spirits up in our most vulnerable situations.  It is about whistling in the dark.

Isaiah 9 is one of the starkest, gloomiest chapters in the Bible.  There was good reason for gloom in Judah, and Isaiah doesn’t try to deny it.  What he does in the midst of the gloom is to sing a messianic hymn: “For a child has been born to us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; he is names Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.  His authority shall grow continually, and there shall be endless peace for the throne of David and his kingdom.  He will establish and uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time onward and forever more.”  (Isaiah 9:6-7)

Scholars can’t figure out why Isaiah sang this particular hymn.  They can’t figure out the occasion.  I think Isaiah was whistling in the dark.  Kings come and go; no human king rules forever.  The one who will bring peace and justice is being born now if we could only see him.  Isaiah is not in denial.  He is looking at gloomy realities straight in the face, but he is choosing to keep the faith.  He is whistling in the dark.

We sometimes think the word “faith” means doctrines or ideas that we believe intellectually, but that is not what faith is.  Faith is the decision to trust, even when things look the gloomiest.

I have heard that it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.  But even if we don’t have a match, we can still whistle.

The theme of Advent is waiting.  And waiting itself, which is a very concrete experience, is about more than waiting.  Waiting is a universal human experience.  It is also a symbol of our finitude, the limitations with which we must all live.  It is a consequence and symbol of our lack of control.  There are things we cannot make happen.  There are things we cannot make happen at all.  We have to wait for them.

We plant a seed in the ground, and there are lots of things we can do to create good conditions for the seed to grow and to keep ourselves busy.  But we still need to wait.  At best, we are cooperating with some other forces and powers.

What do we do while we are waiting?  What do we do until Christ comes?  What do we do with those places and situations in our lives where we are not finally in control?  They are scary places, vulnerable places for many of us.

One of the traditional Christian answers to the question of what we do during Advent is to watch.  Watch and pray, Jesus tells his disciples more than once.  One of the things we do in those places and dimensions of our lives where we are not fully or finally in control is to watch.  Stay alert.  Pay attention.

We do this because life or the universe or God has a way of sometimes having something else in mind other than what we are waiting for.  The reason we have to wait, the reason we are not fully in control of our lives and world, is because something greater and bolder and more wonderful is happening here than we could imagine, plan, or engineer.

Most of the time, the most amazing parts of life are not the things we’ve planned for but the things life throws at us.  The growing edge of our lives is not the stuff we are managing and in control of, but the place where we are not in control.

The psalmist in Psalm 130 adds another dimension to this. 

He begins the Psalm by praying, “Out of the depths I cry to you,

O Lord.”  From the profound places I cry out to you, O Lord. 

“I wait for the Lord, my soul waits for the Lord…more than those who watch for the morning…”  In the midst of whatever profound sadness or grief the Psalmist is in, he waits, and the waiting is hard and long and seems to take forever, but he waits with confidence that the Lord, like the morning, will come.

The struggle of waiting, of not being fully or finally in control, is the struggle of trust.  Is life, with all its ups and downs and fears and surprises, finally good?  After the darkest night, will the morning eventually come?

To watch for the morning in the profoundest night is an act of trust, the essential act of faith.  It is what we are invited and called to do as people of faith.  It is what we are invited and called to share with all those around us in despair.

While we wait, in those places where we are not in control of our future, our own existence, on the other side of the night is the morning.  Watch for it.