Wednesday, December 14, 2022 – Advent Four
“So the Lord must
wait for you to come to him so he can show you his love and compassion. For the
Lord is a faithful God. Blessed are those who wait for his help.” (Isaiah 30:18, New Living Translation)
But in our text above, we
discover the rather unusual idea that God is also waiting for us, rather than
the other way around. God is waiting for us to make an appearance so that God
can show us his Love and Compassion.
I am reminded then of the
nativity shepherds who were told, “The Savior—yes, the Messiah, the Lord—has
been born today in Bethlehem, the city of David!” (Luke 2: 11, NLT). It
might have been the last place on earth where one would expect to find Love and
Compassion, but the shepherds took the
hint: “Let’s go to Bethlehem! Let’s see this thing that has happened, which
the Lord has told us about.” (2:15)
We are always expecting God to
come to us, but sometimes we have to get out of our big blue comfy recliners
and actually make the effort to see what God is doing somewhere else. There is no point in complaining that we
never experience God at his best, i.e. Love and Compassion, if we are the ones
who stubbornly sit by our campfires and tend our sheep and ignore angels who
tell us a brand new story just waiting for us to discover.
Some of us tend to wait in our
homes and churches and think God should meet us there. But we need to get out,
get moving, get looking and see what God is already doing in our communities,
cities and world. Despite all the bad news, there is a whole lot of Good News,
of people practicing, exampling, revealing, enacting the Love of God in so many
ways. Check out your particular
Bethlehem and see what is being done to make this world a better, more loving
place for so many. You just might decide to do something yourself. Why wait?
I have always been a keen advocate
of the idea that churches, for example, should seek and find what the Lord is already doing in our world and go join in. Too often, churches decide on what they want
to do and wait for the Lord to bless it. I am not saying that this can’t happen
but the more sure-fire way to be in the Way of Love, whether as churches or as individual
Christians, is to go and find Jesus and hear what he wants us to do and actively join
in.
To find Love, one must practice Love.
“Dear friends, I am not writing a new commandment for you; rather it is an
old one you have had from the very beginning. This old commandment—to love one
another—is the same message you heard before.” (1 John 2:7, NLT)
Or as Jesus would say, go and do likewise.
Go – don’t hang around here. God is waiting for you by the manger, by the
cross, by the empty tomb. Love is at work. It is not always pretty, facile, simple,
comfortable, convenient – just ask Mary about what it took to become Jesus’
mother. We don’t always get to choose
where to find Love or to whom we give Love.
But God is waiting for us to show up at the meagre mangers of our world
and discover the Love which is not only for a few of us, but everyone, all of us, no matter our
status, no matter our poverty or riches,
no matter our skin colour or gender.
Go and take a peek in the manger – it says it all. How God so loved the
world…
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