We’re going to practice counting. I want you all together, in unison, to count to ten. I’m not going to do it with you. I’m sure you can handle it. I’m just going to say, “On your mark, get set, go.” And then you count to ten. Do please help. This entire illustration counts on congregational participation. On your mark, get set, go.

[People start counting to ten. They inevitably start with one. I start interrupting around five.]

Now, wait just a minute. I’m not saying you’ve done this wrong, but you’ve done something interesting, if expected. At least, I expected it. I notice that you’ve started at one.

But as you all know, numbers do not start at one. You’ve all heard of zero. Why didn’t you start at zero? Or, for that matter, -7. Or start at 20 and count down. The possibilities are—literally—infinite.

It seems that we don’t know how to count. Or the counting that we render is only one very particular measurement of counting. It would be impossible for us to account for all the ways to count to ten. But we have to count! We need some way of making sense of our world. We have to start somewhere, so we start at one.

You may be saying to yourself at this point, “I’m glad this guy is leaving.” Or maybe you’re saying, “You know, sermons are usually less mathematical.” What’s this about? Well, in short, since this is my last sermon to you in my present capacity, I want it to count.

Much more importantly—if we are to enumerate Abraham’s descendants, or account for Jesus’s healings, or calculate what would make Matthew leave his tax booth—and if we are to reckon with our own faith—we’d better learn to count. So today we will talk about counting—what counts, and how we can figure our faith.

How do we account for faith? In one sense it’s unclear where faith starts. What makes Abraham go from his kindred and his father’s house to the land which God shows him? What makes Matthew leave his post? What enables you and I to believe? We’re told—called—to believe. But if I don’t believe, how can I just start believing? Do I pretend? Belief, in this way, seems impossible to measure.

And so sometimes we have anxiety about our beliefs. If faith is calculated and rewarded—”take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well”—then why haven’t I experienced the healing, spiritual or physical, that I need? Have I believed enough? Or believed in the right way? Where do you even start counting to know?

Being finite humans, we seem utterly incapable of accounting for such things. We can’t even measure our own lives. Having been here for seven and a half years—2,765 days, to be exact—with this church, I’ve been filled with memories and experiences. I will hold them, count on them, enumerate them for years. But of course there are many things I’ve forgotten to do or failed to account for. And innumerable things that I simply cannot know about. I—and we—cannot make a full numbering of our lives.

Some of you musical theater types now have “Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes” in your head. How do we measure a year? My apologies.

If we can’t truly and fully know ourselves, how can we say anything concrete about faith?

An answer comes from one of my favorite Bible words: “reckon.”

Reckon is still a Southernism, I reckon, but it has fallen into disuse in everyday language. I’m trying to give it a comeback. I’ll slip it into conversation every now and then. I reckon I’m trying to do the same thing with “oblige.” I like to sign off emails with a “much obliged. Some of you will say to me, “Stop trying to make ‘reckon’ happen. It’s not going to happen.” (If you didn’t get that reference, don’t worry about it.)

“Reckon” is a beautiful English word because of how layered its meanings are. It’s a counting term, first of all. We reckon something by calculating it. Thus, you see the abacus on your bulletin. (I had an abacus in my office, but apparently I’ve lost it. I have yet again failed to account for everything.) Because reckon is a counting term it’s also a cognitive term—thus we might say “I reckon” I’ll do this or that. It’s also a navigational term (so appropriate for our example of Abraham). To navigate by “dead reckoning” is to figure out where you are based on your speed and direction rather than observing the stars or your GPS. It’s also a term of judgment. “There will be a reckoning”: an accounting of and punishment for wrongdoing is coming.

Though that’s our English word “reckon,” but it’s not at all far from Paul’s meaning (the Greek has similar layers) when he tells us in Romans that Abraham’s faith was “was reckoned to him as righteousness.” There is a reckoning not just for Abraham but for us as well. Paul goes on to say, “the words, ‘it was reckoned to him’, were written not for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead,who was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.”

Faith is a reckoning. But not something that we reckon, but something “reckoned to us as righteousness.” In this way faith is a response. It points to a reality outside us. We don’t have faith in faith, belief in believing. Our faith responds to a promise, a guarantee, not of our own creation.

We (usually) start counting from one. But the God who calls Abraham and later Matthew starts counting at zero and reckons infinitely. Who is the God in whom Abraham believes? The one who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. The one able to do what he had promised. Abraham has a hundred years. But Abraham’s God—our God—cannot be counted but can be counted on as the one who counts all things. “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of his mouth,” says Psalm 33. “He gathered the waters of the sea as in a bottle; he put the deeps in storehouses.” God counts everything, and God counts from zero. “For he spoke, and it came to be. He commanded, and it stood firm.”

Faith does not begin with us. Faith looks to the promise of God, a grace that we cannot calculate. Faith is a reckoning.

Consider Matthew. His job is to count. We sit with him at his tax booth. Jesus comes to him—comes to him, and comes to us—and says, “Follow me.” And Matthew leaves his counting behind.

Or consider the leader of the synagogue. He comes to Jesus, but he comes and kneels. Back home people think they know how to enumerate death, but he rightly sees that Jesus is the one who calls into existence the things that are not. Jesus will take his daughter by the hand—with little fingers that could count to five—and raise her up.

Or consider the woman suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. Twelve years. She has probably counted every day.  But now she only needs to count to one, because she goes to the one who accounts for all. “If only I touch his cloak”—that one thing—“I will be made well.” And she was.

Or consider the tax collectors and sinners. Jesus takes an accounting of them when others would write them off.

What is faith? Faith comes from God. It is the work of God in us. Faith is always a response to the being and action of God toward us, and faith looks forward to God making a reckoning with all things in our world so that all things may be made new.

So when you take an account of your faith, consider this. St. Augustine writes, “If it is God who produces our faith, acting in a wondrous manner in our hearts so that we believe, surely we should not fear that he cannot do the entire work.” Faith begins and ends with the work of God.

Is this Methodist? You might say to me, I thought Methodists were supposed to believe in free will and in personal and social holiness. Doesn’t that involve us, you know, doing things? It does, and we do! But never forget that faith and holiness come from grace, which is the power of God. We believe in a God who can do more than we can ask or imagine. And that means God can meet us at any point—with Abraham in Haran or with Matthew in the tax booth or in the midst of death and illness, physical and spiritual—and also carry us to the very end, perfection in God’s own love.

Friends, the promise of the gospel is that there is a reckoning—a reckoning of a God who counts from one, who accounts for all, who numbers us as Abraham’s children. The promise comes through the righteousness of faith and rests on grace given to us. That’s a promise you can count on.

——————————

This was my final sermon at First UMC Tupelo before taking an appointment as the pastor of a new United Methodist church in Fulton, Mississippi. I will also serve as the pastor of Verona UMC and as a member of the Tupelo district staff, where my focus will be shepherding people who wish to remain in the United Methodist Church after their congregation has disaffiliated.

At one level this is obvious. There’s no other way to be as a human being than to be at a particular time in a particular place. As Clint Black sang when country music was still good, “wherever you go, there you are.” Christmas throws this into relief for many of us. There is the question of where you will celebrate the holiday who you will celebrate it with. From here many of you will go this place and that to see family and friends over the next couple days. Many of you have already travelled just to be here. You must be somewhere, after all. It’s a reality that can bring both joy and sadness.  Some of you, maybe quite a few of you, come to Christmas and for all kinds of sorrowful reasons wishing that this were some other time and some other place. But here is where you are.

As we read the story of Jesus’s birth, we find ourselves here and there—or rather, here, and then here, and then here, and then here. This is more than the sort of detail that a historian, which Luke very much is, might give us. This is the language of someone who wants us to feel like we are living the moment—the here-ness—the presence of Jesus, God with us. 

I hope you got a hint of that as our kids helped us act out what Luke tells us. First we are with Emperor Augustus—Caesar—issuing a decree from Rome. A man wants to know what only God can: where everyone is. Then we are with Joseph and Mary, first in Nazareth in Galilee and then on the road to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, then with them in by the manger. After that we found ourselves in the field with the shepherds and sheep—and then, suddenly, the angel of the Lord with the heavenly host! You heard them say, “Glory to God [where?] in the highest heaven, and [where?] on earth peace….” The angels leave, but the shepherds go, then and now, to Bethlehem, to the manger, with Mary and Joseph. And finally the shepherds go back to their fields, but Mary stays. And we are at once with her, treasuring what the shepherds have said, and with them, glorifying and praising God for what we have seen and heard.

Where are we, then? As we go this place and that in the story of Jesus’s birth, we might ask ourselves where it is that we are now.  You might be hounded—if not by Caesar than by other demands of life, insisting that you be here and there to be counted on. Possibly like Joseph and Mary you find yourself displaced—perhaps journeying some place new, for good reasons or bad, or perhaps not where you had intended to be or wanted to be in life. Or are you with the shepherds, tending to your everyday business then suddenly interrupted by something you can’t possibly begin to understand? Where are you, this Christmas Eve?

Wherever you are, the good news of Christmas is that God is here. 

There’s a detail in Luke’s telling of Jesus’ birth that differs from the way we often conceive and illustrate the story. We imagine the angels over the manger. Perhaps the were there—invisibly. But Luke says that the angels leave the shepherds in the fields. They have delivered the message: “To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” The shepherds take that message to Mary. It’s as if the angels are no longer necessary. They have passed on the word to the shepherds, and the shepherds now go with that word to Mary and Joseph. The shepherds tell them about the angel’s message. All who heard it were amazed, but Mary had heard something like this already. The angel Gabriel had told her that she would bear a son and name him Jesus, and that he would be called Son of the Most High, and that he would hold the throne of David forever. She’s had her own angelic message. She doesn’t need one second hand. Yet, Luke says, she treasures all these words and pondered them in her heart. Why? Their words not only confirm what Gabriel had told her; they reveal that the decisive word had arrived in Mary’s son. Gabriel speaks to Mary. The angel of the Lord speaks to the shepherds. But now, in a baby who cannot yet speak, the very word and promise of God is here—for that time and all time. 

Mary, who had carried the Word of God in her body, now carries the word in her heart. And the shepherds, returning to the fields, carry the glory and praise of God with them. The Word of God has come, and now the word of God goes out with Mary and the shepherds. It goes and it comes even to us at the span of two thousand years. Mary and the shepherds show to us that God’s presence in Jesus won’t be just the stuff of historical memory but rather, because of what God is doing when he arrives in the flesh in a Bethlehem manger, a living promise for them and for us. We’re not just celebrating that God was there on a night long ago, incarnate as a man who lived at a time long before our own. No, we celebrate that God is here, that night and this night and every night, that time and this time and every time. The baby laid in the manger will, after his life, death, and resurrection, say, “I am with you always, to the end of the age.” As one of his followers will say in Hebrews 13, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” And he again says from heaven to his disciple John, “I am the Alpha and the Omega…who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.” Mary and the shepherds know this. 

You can know it too. You don’t need a decree from the emperor. You don’t need a journey from Nazareth. You don’t need to be in Bethlehem, even. You don’t need angels showing up with a new message. The promise of God, the fullness of the Word of God, is here with Jesus, yesterday and today and forever. God is here before all your actions—good or sinful. God is here with you in all your work and labor. God is here with you in all your sorrows. God is here with you before your first movement toward God; in fact, you can draw near to God only because God has already drawn near to you. In every location, in every time the author of time and space itself is here. God is here, for a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. From this time on and for evermore, God is here. 

You got up this morning at some time and place. Maybe it was early, still dark, as it was for Mary Magdalene. Maybe you rose full of sorrow, like she no doubt did that day. Or maybe you rose with purpose—if not to attend to a friend’s tomb then to do all of the things that need to be done in your day. You got out of bed, you got yourself ready, you got yourself some food. Perhaps you attended to your children or others that you live with. Perhaps you were one of the people who have worked hard this morning to help this church worship, and you rose with all those responsibilities on your mind. Perhaps you rose with aches and pains that leave no doubt that you are a living body. Regardless, you moved from this place to that. It was one moment, and then it was another. You occupied one specific space—a sequence of specific spaces—and with each passing moment you were somewhere different, and the moment that had just come had gone forever. You are a person with a time and a place. There is no other way for you to be.

Mary Magdalene, while it was still dark (a time), goes to the tomb (a place). But there she finds that time and place are not what she expected. The stone is moved. She runs—this place to another—to Simon Peter and the beloved disciple and says that the place is not as it should be: “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” Jesus has been misplaced or displaced. Mary will repeat the same lament when she goes back to the place after Simon and the beloved disciple have gone to see for themselves. Mary sees two angels, sitting in the place where Jesus had been, and she says, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” Then she turns and sees Jesus. But she doesn’t know it’s Jesus. She thinks it’s the gardener—the man who keeps up the place—and says again, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Time and place have shifted beneath her. She doesn’t know what has happened or when. She doesn’t know where Jesus is. And she is looking—looking, searching through time and place for the one who can steady her, even in death, so that she knows when and where she is.

Jesus says to her, “Mary!” And then she knows—at that moment she knows where he is and where she is—because her teacher is alive. But if she is tempted to hold on to this time and place, Jesus has something else in mind. “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go….” He sends her—across time to a new place—because what he has revealed in this time and place is for all time and all places.

And so we say this morning that in Jesus Christ God has given us a new time and a new place—a new creation! Because Jesus Christ is risen from the dead at a time and place, every time and every place, including this time and this place, is full of the promise of God, who makes all things new. “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God,” says Jesus. When and where is Jesus? He is with God the Father, so that he is there—here—not just for Mary or even Peter and the other disciples but you and me today. He is the gardener—tending the garden of the entire creation, every time and every place. And so Jesus is here today. He is just as risen today, and just as present today, as he was with Mary Magdalene that morning. He is with us in the bread and the cup that we share. He is with us as the gathered people. He is with you as you rise in the morning, even when you rise with sorrow, even when you rise with much to do. He is with you whether you are alone or surrounded by friends or by adversaries. He is with you in the mundane and quotidian. He is with you in your most glorious moment. He is with you when you are devastated and it seems like your world is dead and buried. He is with you—hold on—he is with you through sin and death and into new life. He is with you in all times and in all places. As you make your way through the world this moment to that, this place to that—the Lord Jesus who rose at specific moment and particular place transcends time and space to be with us. It’s the miracle of miracles. The transcendent God, the maker of all things, is with us. “The Word became flesh and lived among us,” John 1 says, “and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” The Word became flesh and lived among us. The Word became flesh and died among us. The Word became flesh and is risen among us. And so the Word who became flesh, whose glory we have seen, we see today.

There is a time and a place. This is the time and the place.  Christ the Lord is risen today. Give thanks to the Lord. For he is good. His steadfast love endures forever. 

Yesterday we learned about the killing of George Floyd—a murder brought about by one police officer abusing power entrusted to him for the protection of life and others declining to use their power to intervene. His last words, “I can’t breathe,” haunt.

In Genesis 2 God breathes into Adam’s nostrils the breath of life. At Pentecost the Spirit comes as Jesus had promised at the Ascension. The Spirit to the disciples as a rush of violent wind (or breath—wind, breath, and Spirit are all the same word here), enabling each to speak. To speak about breath in the Bible is to speak of God’s power to give life and to save it.

Any murder causes a person’s breath to end, and thus it is an affront not only to the victim but to God. But George Floyd’s cry—like Eric Garner’s before—“I can’t breathe”—illuminates what seems to be happening again and again. A person, again and again a black person, made in the image of God is crushed by corrupt power presuming to be God. Their breath, God’s breath, is strangled from them. To murder a man in this way reveals what murder is—the supreme denial that he has God’s breath, the denial that he is made in the image of God, the denial of the power of God to speak to us and to save us. It is violence borne of rebellion against God. We may say much the same of racism. As Esau McCaulley (a New Testament scholar at Wheaton whose new book you should check out) has put it, “Racism is a heresy because it doubts the full imago Dei in persons by creating moral and intellectual hierarchies based on skin color. It’s a different account of creation than we find in the Bible.” Not all racism results in murder, but both arise from the same falsehood about God. Jesus says, “You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment” (Matthew 5:21-22).

You may ask, “Isn’t it enough to say that his killing is wrong? Why bring religion into it?” I bring religion into it because, one, that’s my job and, two, there are people who say they believe in God who will deny or excuse what happened to George Floyd, Eric Garner, Ahmaud Arbery, and every other name we have heard, remembered, or forgotten. And there are many of us who will decline to take a hard look at our own internal prejudices and heresies. But if we believe in the power and life-giving breath of God, we need not fear difficult examination. And if we really believe in the power of God—the power shown in Jesus’s resurrection and ascension and in the Spirit’s coming—then we can trust that neither heresy nor death will have the last word. God’s power to create life is God’s power to raise the dead—and the Spirit of God will breathe life and power into us—because the one who ascended will come again to make all things new and can make us new even now.

Before in-person classes ended, our weekday routine delivered us to school just before they closed the car rider drop-off. The cone keeper was merciful. I loved her. But occasionally we would still arrive late, just beyond the limits of her graciousness, to find a row of orange cones blocking the way. I became convinced that Emmy was moving slowly on purpose. Eventually she confessed that she wanted to miss drop-off so she could walk down the Kindergarten hall and see her friends. Beating the cones was ordinary but stressful, and I might have appreciated its graces more than I did at the time.

Social distancing replaced that order with another—a disorderly order of the struggle to muster the will or wherewithal for schoolwork, the clutter that came with always being at home, the chaos of unscheduled time, the sadness of missing friends and celebrations, the fear of sickness and death. But I found the new stresses illuminating the old ones. They were different in form but, in fact, not really new at all. Exhaustion and mess and disruption and sorrow are always at hand. There is always struggle in parenting—whether the struggle to beat the cones or the struggle to make the Zoom.

Struggle, but also meaning and goodness. As I came to appreciate the daily graces of the cones, it seemed to me that there was grace in this disorderly time too, though I may not have eyes to see it, and not only in good things (time together, meals at home, reconnection with distant friends and family) but in the hard things too. Just keeping going, caring for children, doing our best were acts of faithfulness, patience (though it didn’t always feel like it), and endurance–holy virtues all.

In In the Midst of Chaos: Caring for Children as Spiritual Practice, Bonnie Miller-McLemore writes of the discipline of seeing theological significance in the difficult but ordinary tasks of parenting. She cites Martin Luther, who found God’s presence in the everyday family life. One might ask, Luther said, why one would desire life with a spouse and children: “Alas, must I rock the baby, wash its diapers, make its bed, smell its stench, stay up night with it, take care of it when it cries, heal its rashes and sores, and on top of that care for my wife, provide for her, labor at my trade, take care of this and take care of that, do this and do that, endure this and endure that…?” That’s what natural reason, according to Luther, might say. But he goes on: “What then does Christian faith say to this? It opens its eyes, looks upon all these insignificant, distasteful, and despised duties in the spirt, and is aware that they are all adorned with divine approval as is the costliest gold and jewels…. I confess to thee that I am no worthy to rock the little babe or wash its diapers, or be entrusted with the care of the child and its mother…. O how gladly I will do so, though the duties should be even more insignificant and despised. Neither frost nor heat, neither drudgery nor labor, will distress or dissuade me, for I am certain that it is thus pleasing in [God’s] sight.”

If you’re out the in midst of new daily struggles, know that they are holy. You are being faithful. God sees and honors your everyday work, as different as these days are, and will meet you in the midst of it.

To point out our restless eagerness for happy season is one thing. That is an understandable and forgivable impatience, and only a superficial symptom of our times. But there is an impatience that is much deeper within us, the impatience of a people so blessed with material abundance that we’re convinced we can have what we want when we want it. Walmart is there for us 24/7; Amazon Prime will have it to you in 2 days; Crosstown Kroger finally getting ClickList so we won’t have to leave our cars; Tupelo 2 Go means you don’t need to leave the house for supper; ESPN, except for the announcers, is more comfortable than the stadium; Twitter is faster than the newspaper; Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat will put your filtered face in a thousand friends’ hands; buy your ticket at the right time and you can fly to Nashville for 19 bucks. What a time to be alive! It’s all perfect and convenient–and so we think that we do not have to wait.

I will confess to you that I am not the best at waiting. Before my oldest daughter Emmy was born, Jessica and I were anxious to know if she would be a girl or boy. And so we got an early ultrasound—not from our doctor’s office but from an imaging center catering to impatient potential parents like us. When we went for our “official” ultrasound, we were a little red faced at our over eagerness, and so we faked that we were discovering for the first time that Emmy was a girl.

Harmless, I suppose—but there is a darker side to our impatience. This week you may have heard about the two Chinese twins born after their DNA had been altered with a technology called CRISPR (that’s Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats). Scientists and ethicists have roundly criticized the experiment. Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, called it ‘a “profoundly unfortunate,” “ill-considered,” “epic scientific misadventure” that “flout[ed] international ethical norms” and was “largely carried out in secret” with “utterly unconvincing” justifications.” The story conjures fears of eugenics and designer babies. But we should be surprised that human beings, who can scarcely wait for their groceries, who want what they want now, would find in themselves a rationale for hastily experimenting with human life itself and cavalierly disregarding the cost of our impatience?

But the darkness of our own impatience tells something of why we are impatient. We are in deep need. Our impatience—even when it is unhealthy—points to something true. There is something in us that knows that the world is amiss. We live in a world of scarcity. The grocery store may be full, but if we do not regularly eat we will soon eat no more. And, indeed, no matter how many regularly meals we get, no matter how much medical technology we access, all of us, eventually, die.  We are impatient because we only have so much time, and the time that we have is full of things that ought not be. And so the Psalmist cries out to God against the enemies who exult over him (v. 2), the wantonly treacherous (v. 3), and even his own sins and transgressions (v. 7). He knows that something is wrong. And do we not know it too? Do we not see our own enemies? Our world is full of rampant and pervasive evil. You know this when your heart is moved hearing about, say, the 88 people now dead from the California wildfires. Or the tens of thousands dead from the civil war in Yemen, where as much as a third of the country is at risk of famine. Or the more than 70,000 dead last year in America from opioid addiction (compared, just for reference, to around 42,000 deaths from AIDS in 1995, the worst year of that epidemic). Or the two children shot this week in front of the University of Mississippi Medical Center. And each of you I’m sure can point to tragedy and heartbreak and wrongdoing and disease and death in your own life and among your family and friends—situations that seem utterly hopeless, desperate, godforsaken. For many of us, all of us at some point or another, it’s like C. S. Lewis describes Narnia under the rule of the White Witch—“always winter but never Christmas.” We cry out with the psalm, we pray with the psalm, “Do not let me be put to shame; do not let my enemies exult over me” (v. 2). We cannot wait. We cannot wait for God to do something.

This all may seem too dark as people are starting to set out Christmas lights. But it’s important for us to look reality fully in the face. Fleming Rutledge puts it like this, ‘Hope is a central key to the meaning of Advent, but hope is a very meager concept if it is not measured against the malevolence and godlessness of the forces that assail the creation and its creatures every day in “this present evil age” (Gal. 1:4).’ The Psalm is not embarrassed or reticent about the reality of evil. Neither should we be. It is why we call out to God, why we wait for God.

But we do not wait without hope. Sometimes when we think of waiting, we think of something pointless—a waste of time—something with no guarantee on the other side. That’s not the waiting of Psalm 25. It’s not like Waiting for Godot—when Godot never arrives. Nor is it even like waiting for a call from the doctor—when you don’t know what the diagnosis will be. This is waiting with trust in God to make things right. It’s a waiting that has taken full stock of the painful reality of the world, but then said to God, “To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul. O my God, in you I trust” (vv. 1-2). Think about the implied motion there. The Psalmist, adopting the traditional Hebrew posture of prayer with uplifted hands, bears his soul itself up to God. The Psalm will call upon God to remember who he is—“be mindful of your mercy, O Lord”—but that’s a reminder that is assured of God’s “steadfast love” that has “been from of old” (v. 6). Another way you could translate “steadfast love” is “covenant faithfulness.” God has revealed who he is in his relationship with his people. The terms here—God’s mercy, God’s goodness, God’s steadfast love or covenant faithfulness—are very close to the description of God in Exodus 33 and 34. Moses asks to know God’s ways and see God’s glory. And so God tells Moses, “I will make all my goodness pass before you” (Ex 33:19) and as he does, the Lord proclaims, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness…” (Ex 34:6). God has revealed to head people a promise rooted in his very identity, and God will be faithful to that promise. And as we stand between the revelation and the fulfillment, that same God is present with us, hearing us, inviting and enabling us to call upon that covenant.

Because not only do wait not wait hopelessly. We do not wait alone. After all, it’s not as if we have run ahead of God and are waiting for God to catch up. Or that God has run so far ahead of us that he’s left us behind. According to the Psalmist, God is present. Moses asked to know God’s way, and God revealed himself to Moses; the Psalm asks God to be faithful to that same covenant identity, and then the Psalm says that God “instructs sinners in the way” (v. 8) and “leads the humble in what is right” (v. 9). There is a path to learn, a path to follow. Our waiting for God, then, isn’t just sitting still. It’s walking in the way of the Lord who has made himself known to us.

And, indeed, God has made himself known to us—and made himself known to us in a way more present and powerful even than when God passed before Moses. How does God instruct sinners, lead the humble, and demonstrate his steadfast love, his absolute faithfulness? He does it in Jesus, Emmanuel, God with us. The God we are waiting on is the God who has been with us in Jesus Christ—the one whose birth we are preparing to celebrate and whose life, death, resurrection, and ascension has shown us the promise of God’s future. It is the God we know in Jesus Christ who we wait for and call to and lift our souls to. We wait for the God we know.

Christina Rossetti’s poem “Advent Sunday” (the first selection in Malcolm Guite’s Waiting on the Word, one of our recommended Advent devotionals) captures this beautifully. Here are the first few stanzas of the poem, which draws from the imagery of the parable of the Ten Virgins in Matthew 25, a parable about Jesus’s own arrival and judgment:

“His Hands are Hands she knows, she knows His Side.” We are not waiting on an unknown, distant, detached god—a god removed from human life. We are waiting for a God who knows what it is to be us—a God with hands and a side, hands and a side that are wounded on the cross for us.

The God we know in Jesus isn’t just a God that we wait for; the God we know in Jesus is a God who waits for us and waits with us. God waits for us and with us in the cross, where he faces the full reality of the world’s evil and hopelessness godforsakeness, because God himself becomes godforsaken on the cross. All our waiting is not enough; we cannot solve the evils of the world, because as the Psalm reminds us our sins and transgressions are part of the problem. “Do not remember the sins of my youth or my transgressions; according to your steadfast love remember me.” We need God to separate our wrongdoing from ourselves. Our waiting won’t get us there. But God’s waiting for us is all sufficient, and so when we wait for God we are anticipating the faithfulness of the God who has already proven faithful to us—Jesus’s past in his death and resurrection and Jesus’ future return meeting us with hope in the present. That’s what we remember in Advent. We return to Fleming Rutledge: “The hope that we meet coming toward us in Advent, then, is the hope that lies beyond any possible good news that could arise out of the human situation. It must come to us out fo the future of God or not at all.”

God waits for us and with us to deal with the reality of the world. There is a beautiful picture of this right now in St. Paul’s Cathedral in Melbourne, Australia. Or, more accurately speaking, there is a beautiful sculpture of this called “Not A Creature Was Stirring” by Ben Quilty. The sculpture is a Christmas tree and presents made from the life vests of Syrian refugees scavenged from the beach on a trip that Quilty took with World Vision International. Quilty says that the goal of the sculpture is to “reignite compassion” to respond to crises like that of the Syrian refugees. If we’re going to be instructed in the way of the Lord, we would do well to listen to that message. But here too in the sculpture we have another image of what it is to be met by the God we’re waiting for. The dark reality of the world—lifejackets worn by refugees from a savage war—meets the bright hope of tomorrow, imaged in a Christmas tree. Andreas Loewe,the dean of the Melbourne cathedral, put it this way: “Ben’s tree of life-jackets is a sign what it means to be saved – literally being snatched from death to be given a new life.”

We are snatched from death and given new life by the one whose paths are steadfast love and faithfulness, the steadfast love and faithfulness of God revealed to us in Jesus. That’s what we’re waiting for. That’s what we’re lifting up our souls to God for. That is the hope of Advent. That is the promise of the Gospel.