No More Waiting: An Advent Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, November 30, 2025, the first Sunday of Advent, at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 24:36-44.

You know how they say that the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result? Well, call me what you will, but I am guilty of this in at least one way. 

Every morning, as I get up and get going, I open the various news apps on my phone, and I think to myself as the headlines are loading, “well, maybe today there will be some good news about the state of the world.”

And then I look at the headlines. Oof. Nope. It’s pretty rough out there. 

So I hit the refresh button. How about now?

And I hit refresh again. How about now?!

I keep waiting. I keep waiting for that morning when I’ll wake up and there is nothing but good news in the headlines; good news on the radio as I drive to the church; good news in the streets…

Good news that somebody, somewhere has turned all our swords into ploughshares. That somebody, somewhere has discovered the cure for cancer and stopped war and found the surefire fix for loneliness and broken hearts. The good news that–at last–love has come like a thief in the night to abscond with all of our complacency; to make off with all our regrets. 

I keep waiting for those headlines. Refresh, refresh, refresh. 

And I will tell you, friends, I am pretty darn tired of waiting. Maybe you are, too. Not just because I am impatient (though I can be), or because I am, more than ever, aware that life is too short for nonsense (which it is). 

No, I am tired of waiting because I cannot be satisfied with a world where people must wait for love, for peace, for dignity, for safety, for daily bread. And I am not impressed or convinced by those who argue that some people don’t deserve these things right now.

I don’t think anyone should have to wait for those things. Too many people, across too many generations and in too many places have waited far too long for crumbs from the table. And so I keep hitting that refresh button waiting for someone more powerful or popular than I am to figure that out, but they’re not, and it’s getting old. 

I am over the waiting game. There is no virtue in the delay of the common good, of common decency, of common care for all God’s children.

So maybe we need to rethink this whole waiting thing. 

It’s funny: the season of Advent is often characterized as a time of waiting, too—we recollect the long history of our waiting for God to show up, to act, to save. It’s what Isaiah and all the other prophets dreamt of for Israel. It’s what Jesus will soon make manifest to us in his birth under the star of Bethlehem: that our waiting will have somehow been worth it.

And yet I think we miss something urgently important if we satisfy ourselves with waiting—if we merely frame it as something pretty and pious and noble. 

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Advent candles and the songs and the old stories. I will always love them. But what I would love even more is to live in a world, here and now, that looks more like the realized promises which those songs and stories contain. I don’t just want candles and hymns about God’s love and justice. I want God’s love and God’s justice. The real thing. No more waiting. Frankly I think God wants that, too. 

And hitting the refresh button on my phone isn’t going to cut it anymore. 

What I am coming to realize is this: Advent is not about celebrating the wait for God’s good things. Because the wait for those things…is bad. Love delayed is love denied. That is not holy. The wait for those good and fundamental things like peace and safety and sustenance should make us ablaze with impatience. 

Advent should be a shout; a refusal of the dull and stultifying darkness in which we languish. 

Advent is about saying, come, Lord Jesus, and meaning it. Saying, come, Lord Jesus, and if I must be the vessel of your arrival, then let it be so. Let your light blaze in me, in us. For we have grown weary of waiting for someone else to make the good news happen. With God’s help, we reclaim that power for ourselves.

I find this urgency woven into today’s Gospel passage, too, when Jesus warns his disciples against passivity. It is true, he says, that no one knows the day and the hour when God will bring us all to our knees—a truth that most of us have already experienced in our own lives—but, he says, that is no excuse for dozing our way through history, waiting for someone else to fix things.

No, Jesus tells his disciples. No—you do not get to sit idly by, hitting the refresh button on your phone, waiting for someone else to make that good news happen, waiting for heaven to come and call you in some day. No, the Kingdom of God has come NEAR to you. It is alive in you.

So wake up! You do not have an appointment with God on some far off day; you have been appointed BY GOD here and now to be the good news that you are waiting for. 

Stop waiting! This Advent, this arrival of our salvation in Christ Jesus, is OUR advent, too—it is OUR arrival as the dreamers of the dream of God, it is OUR coming into the world as the Body of the risen Lord, it is OUR raging against the darkness as the bearers of the light of love; it is OUR time to be the ones who bring a word of peace and justice and compassion to a world grown sick and dull and bitter with waiting. 

So with all due reverence to the waiting language of this holy season of Advent, my friends, let it be said of us in this time and place and parish: they were the ones who refused to wait. They were the ones who decided that the Kingdom of God is not a coming attraction. It’s here, it’s now, in the words we choose to speak and the lives we choose to live. In the forgiveness we can offer and in the truth we can tell. In the service we can render and in the stories we can pass on. 

Because I, for one, am tired of waiting for a world shaped by love, and I imagine our Lord is tired of us waiting for somebody, somewhere to make it visible. So come, Lord Jesus, and let your Kingdom arrive in me. 

I promise, Lord, I’ll stop hitting the refresh button on my phone. I’ll try.

And maybe I’ll try refreshing my neighbor’s spirit instead. Refreshing my prayer life. Refreshing my commitment to speaking out for the vulnerable. Maybe you will join me in that. 

And if you do, I have a challenge for you. I’d love for you to join me in this. If you do or experience something this Advent season that is a small sign of God’s love—an act of charity given or received, an act of truth-telling spoken or heard, a moment of grace offered or found…I want you to write it down on a post-it note, and when you come into to the church, I want you to stick it on the wall right in the hallway out here. Just a sentence or two about whatever it was that made God’s love real to you. Put up as many as you like. 

I wonder, come Christmas, how many pieces of good news we could collect right here. I wonder, come Christmas, when visitors join us at St. Anne, if they might read our collection and say, oh, I see, yes, this is what it’s all about, isn’t it? This is what church can be. 

And I wonder, come Christmas, if we might read them ourselves and look back at this season of waiting in which we refused to wait, and I wonder if we might realize: God has already come. Jesus is here, and we have seen his advent, and we have been his advent. We have become the good news we longed to hear. And we have been refreshed. 

I’ll tell you, that’s the kind of headline I’d like to read.