Heaven is waiting

Pitsea, Tesco Extra, seventeen years and two weeks ago. In case you weren’t quite sure you heard right it’s P-i-t-s-e-a, Pitsea. Pitsea really does exist, it’s one of the less glamorous suburbs of Basildon, Essex. I can see I’m not selling the place to you, but Basildon has two types of suburb: less glamorous ones like Pitsea and then even less glamorous ones like Vange, so it could be worse. Anyway. Tesco, Pitsea it’s  mid-morning on a busy shopping day in those anxious stocking-up weeks running up to Xmas. It was business as usual in the mindless Stepford way it often is in supermarkets, when suddenly the checkouts in the store stopped working. Shoppers, till that point running on a happily tranquillised automatic found the gears of their clockwork schedule  grinding to a halt and uncharacteristically they started waiting. There was some tannoy apologising for the inconvenience caused, a desultory attempt at bribery with a free (cheap) sweet,  but surprisingly little of the famed British-blitz-spirit humour in adversity, no impromptu games of football or homemade variety shows featuring jolly builders in bad drag (you need to go to Billericay for that). We were at least, I suppose, spared Cliff Richard who made himself immensely popular by not turning up to sing to us while we waited.  And wait we did. Some weaker souls gave out and left half-full trollies marooned in the aisles while they pegged it to sunnier climes, or at least those where the tills still worked. But most waited. And waited. And waited.

So long was the wait that when the checkout was finally in sight, other people’s shopping, as it emerged from it’s unexpected trolley hibernation onto the moving belt,  became instantly fascinating. Which just goes to show how long the wait must have been because, despite the endless, ubiquitous  and wholly inexplicable fascination that the contents of a shopping basket attached to a hand attached to a clerical collar seem to generate- ooooh, milk Father-, other people’s shopping is not really interesting. Not even if it contains the twelve– yes I counted them– twelve family size bags of pork scratchings that the couple in front of me were purchasing that day. That would, I have to say seem unusual, not to say excessive. Perhaps it’s a local custom- it’s not Christmas in Pitsea without pork scratchings decorating the tree- well  they are a strange lot that over there at the end of the estuary. Perhaps I was behind the only interesting shopping trolley in town that day. Or perhaps all shopping is that interesting and I have been missing out all these years. All those years of being told to ‘get a life’ and that was what they meant. Most likely, I suspect, I guess a sudden enforced spell of waiting temporarily expands the boundaries of ‘what is interesting’. I’m sure if someone cracked open a bag of bar snacks now it would help ease the tedium as you’re waiting for this sermon to end. However, except for those bored easily, or listening to hopeless homilies, pork scratchings are not intrinsically fascinating. But they helped the wait go by.

Now had the said supermarket event happened in London rather than Essex, the store would by now be a simple folk memory, a sooty outline on a patch of waste ground  where a shop used to be before it was razed to the ground in the famous Ten-minute Till-wait Riots of ‘07.  Not I hasten to add because Londoners are more prone to rioting and wantonly destructive criminality than the people of Basildon, even with Croydon now officially part of the the capital, I think that would be difficult to make sound convincing, but because the denizens of London Town are notoriously bad at waiting.  

Our capital has long since eschewed the queue– provincials are still shocked at the Darwinian struggle that the waiting passenfer play out in real time everytime a London Bus draws up to the stop. We’ve forgotten how to get in line and we are busy exporting our attitude to the rest of the nation.  Waiting is a denial of our rights, it is disrespecting us, it is frustrating, belittling,  boring. Why are we waiting?

If the Daily Mail’s hysteria is right (unlikely, but  there’s a first time for everything I suppose), and, now we have a government slightly to the left of Oswald Moseley, we are all looking to an immediate future of Stalinist-style Soviet austerity, this bodes ill for the queue times ahead. We no longer know how to wait.

But, less of the doom and gloom. When you leave church it will be Christmas Day!  If this sermon has had you thinking about leaving early, don’t! It’s almost done and it gets better and better after this. So, stay the course, and when you leave church it will be Christmas Day! It is the least gloomy day any year. Tomorrow it will be only 364 days till Christmas (music to my ears); but not today. If we’re not very good at waiting, then this is the day for us. One wait, at least, is over. 

You see, of all the many millions of the human family that has ever lived, of all the generations of that great gnarled family tree of humanity stretching back into the dawn of time, of all the descendants of that first ape that fell out of the tree and got smart, you are some of the luckiest.

Not for you the yawning, empty, meaningless millennia. Not for you the  good life turned sour as you are chased out of Eden; not for you wandering in the wilderness; not for you slavery and exile; not for you the nail-biting wait for the Christ that never came. For you, the wait is over.

You may not know it, but you have been waiting all your life for this moment. All your life has been waiting for this moment, this moment two thousand and twenty five years ago, this moment that has already happened.  It is a momentous time, a portentous, momentous moment, and it is yours. Shepherds saw it. Angels saw it. Wise men saw it. Simeon and Anna saw it. Mary and Joseph saw it. And you have seen it. 

These are, belt-tightening, terror stricken, terribly-worrying times we are living through. Again. Many are anxious, many are glum. But if there is just one message we can take from this great and glorious feast of Christmas, it is this:

‘Cheer up, it’s already happened! ‘ 

No matter what this world throws at you, it is no longer the world it was.  The times of uncertainty,  the gnawing hollow anxiety, the hours spent in worried waiting: that day is done. The evils of this world— and they are many— will not triumph. To that new-born babe in Bethlehem belongs the victory. The wait is over. God is with us.