Well, friends, if we haven't met again, I'm Josh.
I have the joy of serving as a pastor here at the Garden.
It's great to be with you today. It's great to be celebrating
this amazing season of Advent together.
If you, like me, grew up in a church tradition, they didn't
really talk about Advent. It's just like the time leading
up to Christmas, the time in which we prepare for Christmas
and, and we've been in this season of Advent these four
weeks kind of leading up to Christmas.
We're talking about waiting in hope.
What does it look like to wait when you're expecting something?
When you're hoping for something, you're looking for
something, but it hasn't yet arrived.
Of course, all of the kids know very well about this right now
because they're counting down the days till they get to open
presents and celebrate Christmas morning.
But for for many of us, we find ourselves in, in big or small
ways, in a similar space. Even in the season where there's
so much joy, we've got the Christmas music and the wreaths,
the decor, there's a lot of parties.
There's things to distract ourselves.
Many of us, if we pause, we'll notice that there are other
things as well that we're waiting for the reconciliation
of a relationship in our family, a job situation that's really
painful or difficult or uncertain, a health scare or a
chronic situation that just continues to linger and to
punish in some way. And we're just not sure.
Will with will it resolve? How will it resolve?
When it will resolve? Perhaps it's an addiction issue.
Many of us find ourselves in this season of Advent, whether
it's an internal thing or we just look outside at the world
beyond us. And there's so many
opportunities to be grieving, to be lamenting, to be hoping, to
be waiting, to be longing for something new.
And this is what we're talking about today down here at the
front of the stage. We have this collective art
project that we were working on earlier in the lobby.
Some of you had the opportunity to contribute to this.
We're going to go back to this a little bit later in our
gathering today. But on this, on this painting,
you could see written a number of words that represents
longings or desires that we have individually or as a community,
things that we're waiting for. And as we get started this
morning, I want to invite you to take just a moment to pause.
I know coming in laughing about kids, drinking some coffee,
eating some sugar cookies, The pivot to like, what are you
longing for deeply? It's like, it's kind of a hard
pivot. So we'll take a minute, but I
want to invite you, whether it's on your phone, a journal, just
to take a moment and get in touch with that.
We're going to actually pause here for just a second.
In your life right now, what are you waiting for?
What are you longing for when you allow yourself to get quiet
and still? What is a thing that rises to
the surface that you hope will come?
Take a moment to see if you can fix that in your mind.
Got it. See some nods.
I also see some deep reflection. You can keep noodling.
What is it that you're longing for?
All right, so this morning we're going to be talking about John,
John the Baptist, Jan the Baptizer and, and the question
of what we do in the waiting. Before we get there.
I want to tell you a story. So a couple months ago I was
meeting Phil Amato for coffee. We were both work, we both
office in the Copley area just down the street from here.
And one day we had carved out some time on our calendar.
We were going to get together to catch up to have a conversation
over lunch. And so that time kind of
arrived. I I was scrambling out of a
meeting, came rushing into the tote, looked around and where's
Phil at? Don't see Phil.
All right, well, he's, he's meeting, probably ran late.
No problem. So I take a seat and I start to
wait a minute. Ticks by a couple minutes tick
by. Not very long.
I'm not very patient. So it didn't take very long.
And I'm sitting there. I'm thinking I'm like, oh, he
probably got he's probably on a call ran late.
What should I do in the space? Should I like get in the line?
That lunch line at Tate really builds up.
And then it occurred to me, Did I clarify which Tate?
There are a lot of tates downtown Boston.
So I jump on the phone. I call Phil.
Sure enough, Phil is patiently waiting for me, wondering what
is going on with this guy. I carved out time.
He's not here, so he's on Boylston, I'm on Clarendon.
We're both waiting for each other in opposite places because
we hadn't actually taken the time to clarify what our part
was. And that's really the question
that I want to invite us into today.
The the curiosity about what is our part in the waiting.
Because I wonder how often friends, we find ourselves
actually waiting on God for something when at the same time
God is waiting on us. Because patience is a virtue.
Don't get it twisted. Like patience is a fruit of the
Spirit. It's waiting is an essential
part of the Christian life. In our spiritual development.
There are many times in life when we are called to be still,
to be patient, to wait on God. But patience can also be a
really clever way of spiritual bypassing.
You know what I mean? Like the, the, the waiting,
which sounds so virtuous, can also be a way to abdicate our
responsibility to, to opt into a kind of passivity that actually
keeps us stuck in our life. This morning we meet an
individual, John, who I think beautifully exemplifies the
tension that we're talking about this morning, the waiting and
also the action. John who as we know as John the
Baptist or perhaps John the Baptizer, the latter probably
being more descriptive of course, gets his name from the
text that we look at today here in Luke chapter 3.
As we read in Luke chapter 3 and verse 3, John went out into the
country around Judea preaching a baptism of repentance for the
forgiveness of sins. We find that the whole area,
everybody is coming out to John to get baptized, and this is all
happening in a moment in the life of the people of God, as
Mandy described for us last week, when there is an intense
longing, intense longing, because candidly things are
pretty bad. The government is oppressive,
life circumstances are very difficult.
And on top of all of that, like there is this messianic fervor,
this hope, this longing about when the prophetic
pronouncements of this Messiah, this one who will come to renew
and restore God's people will finally come true.
Everybody is waiting and looking and then all of a sudden John
steps onto the scene and he starts to say, basically, hey,
it's about to happen. Y'all need to get your stuff
together like this is going down.
Repent, be ready. And he's baptizing people into
this now. Jesus and John's stories are
intertwined. As has already been suggested
today. Jesus and John were cousins.
In Luke's narrative, which we talked about last week.
We met the Angel Gabriel who had come to tell Mary that she's
about to have this miraculous baby who will be God, right?
Well, just before that happened, this same Angel had gone in the
narrative to John's parents to, to Zechariah and told him that
his his wife Elizabeth would soon be with child Mary.
When she finds out that she's pregnant, basically the first
thing that she does is she runs off to Elizabeth's house for
comfort and support as somebody else who is also pregnant.
So, so John and Jesus are coming up at the same time.
Jesus, of course, goes on. We know his story to be the
Savior of the world, the one we celebrate at Christmas.
But John, what was his part? What was his role in this story?
Well, John understood his role based on what we see here in
Luke chapter 3 and verse 4 as the fulfillment of Isaiah's
prophecy as the one who would be calling in the wilderness, the
one who would prepare the way of the Lord.
And we see specifically that there's a description in this,
that that as John prepares the way of the Lord, that he will
basically do some Rd. building. He's telling the people of God
that in this moment, as God is about to show up, as as God is
going to do his thing, that they also need to prepare the way of
the Lord to make straight paths for him.
John says every valley needs to be filled in, every mountain and
hill made low. The crooked roads shall become
straight and the rough ways made smooth.
This is an image of road work. I don't know if you've ever
driven through West Virginia before.
It's kind of crazy if you do, even if you're barely paying
attention, just a kind of rolling down the Turnpike.
It's hard not to notice that the road there is insane like it is,
it is it is a road that has been built into just this, this wild
terrain of valleys and and mountains and hard edges in
order to to build the Turnpike that now exists through West
Virginia with these extra truck lanes for climbs and the kind of
like run off here if you've lost the brakes and need to go uphill
to stop the vehicle kind of situation, right?
In order to create all of this, there was an enormous amount of
work that had to happen, right? They came in with dynamite.
They blew up chunks of the mountain and hauled away copious
amounts of rock by the thousands of tons.
They built these crazy bridges over gorges.
And so now when you when you want to drive through the
Turnpike, there's still some twists and turns and steep
grades, but more or less it's a straight shot in a way that
wasn't the case for millennia. But all of this took a lot of
preparation. I think this is a helpful image
as we think about the kind of thing that Isaiah has in mind
when he says, make straight in the desert a highway for our
God. Here's what I'm trying to say.
John comes in at a moment and he says the Messiah is about to
come and we all have work to do. God is going to do a thing, and
in order to be ready to receive that thing, there is
preparation. I think this is a beautiful
image of Advent because the season of Advent is all about
road work. It's all about preparation.
It's all about removing obstacles so that we can receive
the one who is coming. But there's a trap.
There's a couple traps actually, but there's, I think so commonly
as soon as we hear language like this where our brain, at least
my brain immediately jumps is OK.
So I need to do a bunch of things so that God can come,
right? I need to do some work so that
grace can happen, right? It's on me to perform and to
produce in order that the latter happens.
And that is not it. That is not it at all.
See, there are two ditches on either side of the road that we
were talking about, the first this morning.
The first ditch I've already been describing.
And if we were going to give it a title, if there was a sign
above the ditch, the sign would say wait and wish.
It's the wait and wish dish ditch, right?
It's the place where we baptize avoidance, man.
It sounds pious too. It sounds like reverent
spiritual, but what we're doing is we're as we wait on the Lord,
we're actually using our avoidance of vulnerability to
avoid what is our responsibility.
The wait and wish dish ditch kind of pushes aside what is our
part and and pretends to hold on to faith in this incredibly
pious way that actually abdicates our responsibility.
It comes with a a payoff of some short term relief of the
pressure, but at the cost of being unable to produce any
change or outcome in a long term atrophy.
Some time ago, I encountered a woman who described her
situation and, and, and explained that she was waiting
on a partner and, and, and not only that, she was waiting on a
partner, she was waiting on this husband she was going to marry.
And she knew who it was. See, God had revealed it to her
in a dream and she was excited about it.
She was believing it. She was absolutely as devout and
faithful and committed as you can imagine.
But she was waiting and waiting. And as I learned more about the
situation, I discovered that she's been waiting for a while,
for weeks and then months and then now years.
And as she has waited, this, this, this man that she was
confident would be her husband in the plan of God had done a
lot of things included dated a bunch of other people.
In fact, now he was engaged to somebody else.
And here she was waiting, praying, hoping.
And as I began to ask the questions, I began to realize
like, well, no, no, she hadn't named it.
She was interested, but she hadn't asked him out for coffee.
She hadn't made a, a bid or, or anything really, because she was
confident that in his time that God would just bring them
together. And so here she was waiting
faithfully. And look, I'm not trying to
throw shade at this lady because she meant it.
And honestly, I felt a ton of grief for her, but I also was
like, sis, can we talk about discernment?
I'm not sure you got this one right.
That dude is engaged right now. And even if you did get it
right, was there something here that you were supposed to do?
Like it was God showed you something.
Sure. Great.
It might be that you had a role in that.
Sometimes I think we're like this.
We get stuck in these spaces of waiting and hoping.
Man, as I was reflecting on this this this week, Aries in my life
came to mind where I'm frustrated with a relationship,
man. Things are not working the way I
want it to. It's painful to me and I
complain about it to other people.
Sometimes I pray about it. Mostly I just kind of like
double down and kind of like grip my teeth and I'll just keep
going. Maybe it'll fix itself
eventually. You know, it's it's it takes a
courage, it takes a vulnerability to step in and
say, hey, I don't know if you know, this is not working for me
right now. This dynamic is not functioning.
There's an injury here that needs to be named friends.
Sometimes we don't do that. We don't step in, we don't press
in. Instead, we we talk about
waiting, but we're not waiting in the Advent way that we're
invited to. We're waiting in the the wait
and wish kind of a way. We're over in the ditch where
we've handed off a piece of our responsibility and we're just
waiting on God to do something. And look, here's the problem
with that. There's a lot of problems with
that. But I think that God, when he
looks at us in that, probably similarly to how I felt about
this poor girl. I like, I, I think God has
compassion, but I also think God is like, Nope.
Because I know, like, this is how this is I, how I am with my
daughter Ava. There are times when she is not
OK and she needs something, whether it's care or just
compassion or presence. And she's crying out for that
thing. And I will, man, I, I'm there.
I respond in a moment, I'm jumping in.
But there are other times where she's just like, you pick up the
shoes, Daddy, can you bring me that Apple?
Can you, can you do this? Can you do that?
And I'm like, girl, you, you're not grown, but you are 4.
You can walk across the room and put your shoes away all by
yourself. You do not need me for this,
right? You don't need me to climb on
this thing. I get that you're I get that
it's like a security blanket, but like, just go slowly.
I'm here with you, but you don't need to hold my hand.
You're better off putting your hand on the monkey bars and
going up yourself. You've got this.
You know what happens when a parent in that relationship
steps in and does everything for their kid?
Like we mean well, we want help. Our kid is out here asking for
help. If you do that, you will stunt
the development of your child, right?
Your kid, your kid needs to do some things on their own.
They need to to grow and try things and flex their freedom.
Yes, to know that they've got you in their corner, but also
not to jump in all the time. Friends, God, I think is doing
the same thing with us sometimes.
I swear, I know we're over here and we're like, God, where are
you, God, God, I'm just, I'm desperate.
I don't know what's going on. I don't know why you're not
coming through. I don't know why you're not
solving this problem for me. We're starting to build up some
resentment and some frustration towards the Lord.
Has anybody been there? I know I have like God, come on,
what is with this? Why do you keep me stuck here?
I need you to come through and look, there is a time when that
happens and, and, and God just says, wait, that is all that
there is. That like that is the
responsibility that we have in that moment.
But there are also some moments, friends, where God is like,
dude, like do what I told you, you don't need more direction.
Just do the thing I asked you to do, right?
This is clear. You don't need like wisdom or
discernment on this. You just need to step in and do
the thing right. Friends, how often do we have in
our lives these longings, these things that we we genuinely want
to see God create something different, create something new.
We're waiting on God. At least that's what we tell
ourselves. And at the same times there are
clear actionable pieces that we're just saying that feels a
little risky. Maybe I'll just pray about it
some more. See to wait on God in this way
is not simply to to displace our responsibility.
I love that John shows us this when his audience asks John says
prepare of the way of the Lord. He gives this Rd. building
analogy and then later after they after he rebukes them and
says, Hey, you guys are not when Messiah comes, this is not going
to be good for you. This is not good news for you
because you are a mess. And they say, OK, So what should
we do? What does this look like And
John? Like he does not play, he does
not stutter. He is specific.
He says don't hoard your stuff, share with the needy.
You got something extra, give it away.
That's what he says in verse 11. He talks to the tax collectors
and the soldiers. He says hey, stop cheating, Stop
abusing your power. Stop, stop whining about all of
these things. Instead show up.
Don't cheat. Don't abuse your power.
Use it responsibly, he says. In verses 12 through 14, John is
saying that there are some specific and concrete things
that that they can do if they want to receive what God will do
at Christmas. There is some repentance.
There is some righteousness. There is some road work that
needs to happen if they are to experience the fullness and the
goodness of what God will do. This is something that I love.
How kind of Mandy drew this out in the Christmas story.
We think of the Christmas story through this lens of nostalgia.
It's all colored up by the Christmas lights.
The Christmas story was a mess. Guys like oppressive, tyrannical
rulers and genocide and like palace intrigue.
People hungry like the The Christmas story is a mess.
God, when he when Jesus broke into our midst, it was good news
for some people and others were like, can we kill this guy?
This is a problem, friends. Do we want it to be?
Do we want what God does? Do we want it to be in a place
that when God shows up that we receive it as good?
There's some road work that needs to happen.
John points us to this. If you were to visit Burkina
Faso around this time of year, you might see an odd sight.
Locals out in the plane in this dry, dusty, barren, hard packed
earth out there with these little scoops digging holes.
It would look weird if you were to go up and investigate you
would you would see that they were digging these round
circular holes not not more than a foot wide, maybe 6 inches
deep. Hole after hole after hole.
It's like kids almost in the sand but grid like pattern
working their butts off. This is not easy to chip away at
the hard packed earth, and if you looked at it, it would look
odd at best. Nonsensical perhaps, especially
if you not only watch them toil and labor and work to to to to
carve out these holes in the hard ground.
But then those holes just sat there for weeks, months, just
sitting around, nothing happening.
But what the villagers would know that you or I might not, is
that without these holes in the soil, the zaii as they're
called, there would be no crop that year.
See. Because when the rains finally
fall, when when rainy season comes and and and a downpour
begins, the hard packed soil cannot absorb the moisture.
Without the zaii, the the rain just barrels into a torrent and
rushes away and it's gone. These these IE can't really do
anything to grow crop on their own.
It's literally just a hole in the dirt.
But this hole in the dirt becomes an opening for what only
God can do there. When the rain comes, all of a
sudden these become little tiny wells that that nourish the
ground. The water goes out, the termites
come in, they become interconnected and before long
you have the conditions for a ripe crop that would not have
been there without them. Friends, this is what so much of
the spiritual life is like. It's like digging zai.
If you get up every morning and and open up your Bible and and
carve out that time for prayer when you could be sleeping in.
I can tell you from experience, many of you know this, it
doesn't always like rain. The presence of God from heaven.
A lot of times it's like I'm tired.
I could be asleep right now. I'm distracted.
I'm thinking about my To Do List later today.
I'm starting to nod off, man. Like I have so many things in my
mind and my heart. Not every time that you make
that space is there some transformative, divine, magical,
supernatural encounter. But if you keep digging, if you
keep making the space, there is a time when the rain will come.
There's a time when the grace is there.
And then the question is, will it run right past you and you
miss it or will there be a space to receive it?
Friends, this is what the practice of waiting responsibly
looks like. Not to to shirk our
responsibility, but to say, hey, there is something here that
only God can do. I cannot make it rain.
I cannot be the Savior. John gets this.
He says I must decrease. He must increase In the moment
when everyone is coming to him, people are flogging to him.
We see it in chapter 3 here that people start to ask maybe this
guy is it, he's the Messiah, he's the coming 1 John doesn't
get a big head. He doesn't start playing outside
of his role. John says, Nope, I've got my
part and then there's God's and and this is the second ditch for
us friends, if the first ditch is is is just to wait, right.
It's just in this passive way to wait without doing anything
right to wait and wish the second ditch is to work and
worry. And some of us are in that ditch
too. Some of us.
In fact, I think sometimes I'm in both at the same time.
I don't know about you the but the other ditch is when we fail
to recognize what is our part in God's we start over functioning
that that relationship isn't right.
We want our parents to be differently so man we're going
to tell them how it is. That always goes well spoken
from personal experience, like sometimes we have this situation
and and I really want to achieve this outcome.
So I'm going to force it. I'm going to date this person
that I know is not a good fit, right?
I'm going to stay in this job because like I got to get there.
And I just think if I just keep going harder, maybe if I have
less free time, if I take less time with my family, less time
with the Lord and I just I put in the hours that somehow I'm
going to get there. We start to take on that which
is not our responsibility to do that which is only God's.
On the one hand there is responsibility without faith,
and on the other there is faith without responsibility.
See, when we look at Advent, the invitation is to both there is a
holy waiting on God for what only He can do, and also there
is a responsible stewarding of that which He has given us, that
which is in our corner to do. Friends, when we step into this
kind of holy, responsible waiting, we might just
experience the goodness of God. I think this is what it takes
for us to experience the holiness of Advent and the gift
of Christmas. As we close this morning, I want
to invite you to consider what does this look like for you?
What is your responsibility and what is God's responsibility?
Of course, this tension is captured perfectly in the
Serenity prayer, which many of you know Reinhold neighbors
prayer that's been made famous by 12 Steps groups.
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot
change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom
to know the difference. So that's what I'm asking you
this morning. I want to invite you to go back
to the beginning of our gathering where we we talked
about that thing that you are longing for, that thing that you
are waiting for. I don't want to ask what is your
part and what is God's as you consider your own waiting?
Are there ways where you find yourself in the the wait and
wish, ditch the places where you are avoiding or shirking the
work that God has actually given you to do?
Is there a piece of preparation that actually you can take?
What would it look like for you to give that to God Now, to
commit that to say, God, you can count on me.
I'm going to be responsible for my part.
I see that you're not just going to make this happen on my own.
There's something I need to step into here and I'm going to do
it. Or or maybe as you consider this
instance in your life, you, you say, ma'am, I think I'm in the
the work and worry ditch. I'm over here over functioning.
I'm going at it. I'm getting things done.
I'm making it happen as though it all hangs on me, as though if
I don't do it, nobody will. As though there is not a good
God who loves me, who I can trust.
I'm trying to do it all myself, friend.
What are you grasping so tightly this morning that you need to
surrender? What are you grasping so tightly
this morning that you need to surrender?