Increase or decrease?
Wide or narrow?
And this week slow or fast?
This week we measure our lives as disciples
with regard to speed.
Each week we have seen that to measure our lives as disciples of Jesus,
Is a counter-cultural way of life.
The world says increase yourself, promote, sell, grow
And the disciple seeks to become less, that Jesus might become greater.
The world says take the easiest road, the widest gate, cut corners
And the disciples seeks the narrow way, the small gate.
Advent has a lot to do with time and speed.
We look back in time,
we look forward in time,
we’re asked to wait patiently,
in a world that rushes headlong into Christmas.
I acknowledge I am one of those ministers,
who makes their church suffer Advent without Christmas,
who seeks valiantly, and yes, I know, without much success,
to hold their congregation in anticipation and expectation.
I am a firm believer, like the writer of Ecclesiastes,
that there is a time for everything,
and a season for everything under heaven:
a time for Advent and a time for Christmas,
a time for waiting and a time for feasting,
a time for getting ready and a time for celebrating.
I wonder how fast you live your life?
There’s the famous line from the film Top Gun,
when the pilot Maverick, played by Tom Cruise,
says ‘I feel the need, the need for speed.’
Is that you?
On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being very very slow
and 10 being very very fast,
what number would you give your life?
I’m conscious that for some of us life is lived at an incredibly fast pace,
and its as if we’re always trying to catch up with ourselves;
but there are others, perhaps those who are older,
whose lives can at times, or even all the time, feel incredibly slow,
and we’re always waiting for the next reason to leave the house.
Life has a speed,
sometimes we feel in control of it, other times, its as if it controls us.
Sometimes we cry ‘Hurry up!’ (especially those with young children!)
and at other times we cry ‘Slow down!’ (actually often those again with young children!)
I wonder how fast you think God goes,
what kind of speed is God’s speed,
is God one who is always pulling us to move faster,
or is God one who is always pulling us to move more slowly?
Our reading today says ‘God is not slow’
to which is then added ‘as some understand slowness’,
but ‘God is patient.’
God is slow, but not in the way we normally take about being slow.
God takes his time to do things.
The arrival of Jesus was a long time coming.
As Paul puts it in his letter to the Galatians,
‘when the right time had fully come,
God sent his Son.’ (Gal. 4.4)
The second coming of Jesus has been one expected at various points,
but still we wait.
God is slow.
One thinker has described God as the three-mile-an-hour God. [i]
Three miles being the average speed a human walks,
the average speed Jesus would have walked.
God is a three-mile-an-hour God
because God is love.
Love has a speed, love takes time,
it cannot be hurried.
As one poet expressed it
‘Nothing can be loved at speed.’ [ii]
Advent is the church’s set time to learn, or relearn, the habit
of moving at God’s speed,
which is patient, but not inactive.
Good things take time.
We are made to think that being slow is negative,
it can be used as a derogatory term,
but if God is perfect,
then we begin to see that being slow
is be much closer to God’s speed.
We should not think of being slow
as another way of saying being lazy,
of time-wasting.
Being slow has a speed, there is activity,
there is movement, a participation in time,
just not one that is forever rushing.
Living more slowly, or attempting to,
gives an opportunity to pay attention to the things that matter,
which most often will be the things that matter to God,
which is also to find our lives woken up to God’s desires
and as such a means of Christ becoming greater –
what Peter names as ‘holy and godly lives.’
Part of how we know God takes time,
is on the seventh day of creation he rested,
and he commanded the people of Israel to follow the same pattern.
We should think of Sabbath – days of rest –
as slow days.
Being slow is made holy.
Holy and godly lives build in rest,
of time for the soul, of space for just being and stillness
over the need to always be doing and constantly active.
If in God’s kingdom, the last become first,
we might also say, slow is the new fast.
I love the season of Advent,
because it returns me every year
to living in God’s time.
Advent says to us wake up,
its not a time for sleep
and at the same time, Advent says it is not time for endless activity.
It's a time for readiness,
or discovering patterns of life that enter into God’s time,
which embraces being slow,
and resists an endless need for speed.
The Advent person, unlike Top Gun’s Maverick, prays,
‘I feel the need, the need for slowness.’
I wonder who in your life helps you learn to be slow?
Maybe it's a child, or grandchild, maybe a neighbour or friend,
Maybe it's a parent or work colleague.
I wonder if you appreciate them for that gift
or find yourself forever frustrated.
What would it take to thank God for the slower people in your life,
and to see them as means of living in the way of God?
I want to offer a final reflection on v.12,
which can be translated as either:
‘as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming’
or
‘waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God.’
Peter here joins waiting with speed.
On the face of it the phrase sounds absurd. [iii]
How can you wait for something you’re at the same time hastening?
It sounds like an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms.
The hastening that waits.
I wonder if that’s a description of your life.
We live between wanting things to happen faster,
but knowing that time is often needed:
whether it be a healing of body,
a job to appear,
an acceptance of forgiveness
a birth to arrive,
sometimes even a death.
The hastening that waits.
I wonder if that’s an apt definition of love.
We live between wanting a person to change
But knowing that time is often need:
Whether it be a child’s behaviour,
a spouse’s habits,
a friend’s self-confidence or worth.
The hastening that waits.
I wonder if that’s a suitable self-understanding for the church
It’s what we’re doing together right now:
pausing to wait on God in the midst of all our urgency.
We want to speed the future of our buildings,
And we are learning to wait.
We want to speed journeys of coming to faith,
And we are learning to wait.
It’s certainly a phrase that sums up the season of Advent:
the hastening that waits,
what we might call the slow speed of God.
Let me invert the famous mission statement of Star Trek,
‘Go slowly, where Jesus has gone before.’
Amen.
[i] Much of this sermon has be helped by reading John Swinton, Becoming Friends of Time (Baylor/ SCM, 2017).
[ii] Michael Leunig, ‘Another Way of Being’ cited in Stephen Pickard, Seeking the Church (SCM, 2012), 213n.
[iii] This final section borrows heavily from Sam Wells’ Advent sermon, ‘The Hastening the Waits’, 10 Dec 2017, St Martin in the Fields.
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