His children crowned shall… wait around?

Some years matter more than others. You know this. The year you were born. The year you tied the knot. The year you had your firstborn, or graduated or started that job or moved home. As long as they are not all in the same year-cumulatively that would be enough stress to kill a herd of elephants, never mind little old you- as long as they are suitably separated they are probably the years you remember, the good ones. There might be less happy years stuck in your mind too.  But good or bad those dates will be etched on your grey stuff if no-one else’s, significant years for significant events for insignificant little me.

If we all have our individual red letter years, so there are too for humanity: yes, we are all in this together.  So of slightly wider importance than the first appearance in the world of  baby  Lettice in 2022 might be the year 476 which saw the eternal city of Rome fall to the barbarians. In 1066 there were a couple of invasions of strictly local interest,  but 1453  saw the end of the Roman empire in the East as Constantinople fell to the Ottomans.  1492 was when Columbus brought greed, destruction and smallpox from the Old world to the New, 1789 when France revolted, 1939 when war once more came to Europe, 1969 when man walked on the moon.

You’d be forgiven for forgetting many of those dates. Long, random sounding numbers are difficult to remember, especially if they’re not personally important; with phone auto dialling now standard our brains will soon lose the capacity to remember strings of digits altogether. Many people no longer even know their own phone number, not without checking their phone first. 

In trying to remember things, it would help if especially important years in history were given easier numbers to remember: I don’t know, something like, Year 10 for the end of the Crimean war, 9 for the birth of Alexander the Great, 8 for the deposition of the last Chinese emperor, 7 for Agincourt and so on. Alas, history is not like that and the easy to remember numbers tend to be years when not much happened in the world.

Such as 1 AD. Easy date to remember of course; shame nothing happened. There are no drawers at the British Museum stuffed full of 1st century diaries all saying ‘what a year year 1 was’. If those diaries existed, we can rest assured they’d be in the Great Russell Street swag bag. But they’re not. All those ‘what a tumultuous twelve months’ accounts don’t exist because nobody wrote them because at the time, year one, nothing happened.

8 AD Tiberius defeated the Dalmatians (poor pooches). 9AD start of the Xin dynasty in China. 64 AD Nero fiddles, 70 Jerusalem is destroyed.

Year 1. Um.

You may know differently, at least I hope you do. But at the time nobody noticed. Maybe a few provincial peasants who were nobodies; so, true to say, nobody noticed. This is often the way at the beginning. It was some thirty years later that a few people started waking up to what happened. And what happened 2025 years ago, year 1, was that God called time on this world. 

Last time you looked, the world  is still here.

And God is still calling time on this world.

What’s happened?

Two thousand and twenty five years by anyone’s reckoning is rather a long time to linger when time’s been called. 

So. What’s happened?

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that because the world is still here that nothing has happened. 

Much has changed for the better, much of that thanks to the events of year 1. 

But also, much has not changed.

Satan is still here. He still walks the world; sometimes he slinks, sometimes he swaggers; but always, he is here. Evil sticks tenaciously to humanity’s souls. It will not go away if we ignore it, though that’s about the only solution we’ve tried so far.

Much has changed, much has not.

Time has been called. And Christians are still waiting.

You might want to ask what use is waiting? In the face of so much wrong in this world, why are we like that anticlimactic last verse of Once in Royal David’s City all in white waiting around.

Well…

Waiting patiently is not the same as hoping it will go away if you ignore it. 

Waiting patiently is not doing nothing. 

Waiting patiently is preparing.

Waiting patiently is building a fortress brick by brick, slowly; then suddenly it’s built and the drawbridge can be raised and there is no longer any way for what is wrong to get in.

Waiting patiently is not doing nothing.

***************************************

There are many tales of people coming to faith in the New Testament. Just open the book and new converts can be found leaping with joy in the aftermath of their conversion, praising God and generally losing themselves in excitement and exultation. There are the three thousand who became believers in a single day at Pentecost; later Samaritans, then the Ethiopian Eunuch, then Cornelius and his household; Simon, Lydia and proverbially, Paul on the road to Damascus. All high drama, and the New Testament writers loved a spectacular conversion, as many Christians still do. Each time a soul is saved the story briefly pauses for a moment of breathless  joy, before we’re off again to catch the excitement of the next sinner who sees the light. It’s a big buzz, one that it’s difficult sometimes to get beyond. Why bother with the boring bits when you can have one long conversion high? It certainly makes a much better story than the alternative, which I guess is why far less often in the Bible are  we told  about people who’ve come to faith quietlywithout a scintilla of razzamatazz and then kept it going and kept it going, on and on for the long run. Maybe Simeon and Anna when Jesus was presented at the Temple, but then again, maybe not: they waited, true, but when they saw the light Simeon goes off to die and Anna goes around praising God at the top of her voice. 

Not only do sudden conversions make better reading than doggedly plodding along keeping on keeping on, but the earlier parts of the New Testament, at least, were written in the very real expectation that time was short and the second coming was if not tomorrow then probably the day after. The first Christians were thus not overly concerned about how you keep your stamina for the long haul, because this was always only ever going to be a short flight.

Except it hasn’t turned out that way, and it seems, like the tortoise and the hare, it’s not flashiness that we need, but staying power. Burning certainty soon runs through its fuel and spends itself. The flush of new love– which is what conversion is– that flush eventually fades. The seed Jesus has planted in the believer’s heart must grow deep roots if it is not to wither in the heat of the world’s day.

So, how do you grow the roots of faith that will keep you going, keep you waiting patiently, keep you slow and steadily winning the race? How do I keep my faith?

One of you asked me this a few weeks ago, and before I could scrape together an answer, you answered it for me. It’s like getting good at a sport– you have to keep practicing. If sport’s not your thing, then how do you get good at singing or playing a musical instrument or playing Grand Theft Auto? You keep practicing. 

Which is lucky for us, because, for most of us faith is a plod not an explosion, but as I said a few weeks back (remember those good old days?) faith is still a verb, an action, not an emotion or a thought; it’s something you have by being something you do. Act it, you will have it.

You’re acting it right now. Attending worship is action; it is both loving God and, believe it or not, loving your neighbour. People feel happier worshipping when there are other people around, though like cats they’d rather the people were in the room but not sharing their pew. But, like so many things in life, it’s better together. Trust me, a person feels awkward in the extreme when it’s just them and the priest at a Mass. So just by being here, you’re helping someone else keep the faith. Our salvation is personal but it is also corporate. You’re here today, acting faith, loving God and loving your neighbour. It’s not all there is to our faith, but it’s a pretty good start.

Taking a wider perspective, yes, it can seem that whatever you do, nothing really changes. God has called time on the world… and nothing has changed. What can you do? I mean, really, what can you do? 

Here’s what you do.

Keep going. 

Keep waiting. 

Keep building.

Waiting patiently is not doing nothing. 

Waiting patiently is preparing.

Waiting patiently is faith.