It’s that time of year again, when children say, “Won’t Christmas ever get here?” and every adult who has experienced quite a few Christmases says, “What? Is Christmas here again?” That’s the human equivalent of Peter’s observation about God’s time: “that with the Lord a single day is like a thousand years and a thousand years are like a single day.” Let’s face it, God doesn't operate according to Timexes, Casios, Bulovas or Swiss-made Rolex chronometers. God made time and stands outside it. We are stuck in time we have, accurate atomically to billionths of a second, although every so often a smidgeon of time has to be added to the clock because the rotation of the earth has ever so slightly decreased.
Time is said to be the fourth dimension after length and width and height. Einstein said that time is relative. Peter and the writer of Psalm 90 would agree, although certainly not in terms of E=mc2. God simply doesn’t operate according to our timetable.
Peter was writing to believers who faced persecution every day. They wanted out of their suffering, away from the threats to life and limb. And it wasn’t happening. Part of the issue was not just the seeming slowness (or even inattention) of God. Part of the issue was a misdirected sense that we human beings can tell God what to do.
Yes, God on occasion does follow human desires. Abraham bargained with God for the righteous inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah; Moses interceded successfully for the ever-disobedient Israelites as they impatiently bided their 40 years in the wilderness. (And we complain about an hour’s wait in the doctor’s office.) David prayed to God for forgiveness when the prophet Nathan called him out for his indiscretion with Bathsheba and his contract killing of her husband Uriah.
God even invites self-intercession. God told Solomon, “If my people who belong to me will humbly pray, seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, forgive their sin, and heal their land” (2 Chronicles 7:14).
The message that Peter wanted believers to get was that we are not “god” to God. The Lord God remains creator, redeemer, sustainer, and operates according to God’s own understanding of the flow of time and salvation history, whether we get it or not.
Peter was writing to people who had come to think that Jesus would return any time now, be it in a blaze of glory, a military victory, or a cataclysmic end of everything as we know it. Christ may return in any of the above or in none of the above.
John the Baptist knew that God’s promised one would cross his path at some point. He scanned the crowds every day thinking this one or that one might be the one, until that fateful day when Jesus came and John knew he was the one. That day was in God’s time, not John’s. As expectant as John was, it was about God and not about John. And for Peter it was about God and not about the recipients of his pastoral counseling.
To the Christians wondering about God’s delayed return, Peter offered a three-part challenge. He pushed them to think about God’s loyalty. When has God ever failed to keep a promise? Never, and God will not fail now. Peter pushed them a little further. When has God ever fulfilled a promise in quite the exact way all of us think that God should? Never. Why should God start now? Then Peter broadened the picture of on-going salvation history. What could God possibly be waiting for? Lots of reasons that aren’t about us but about people who are in desperate need of the Savior, people who are ignorant of God’s promise.
What has God promised? Peter said that according to God’s promise “we are waiting for a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness is at home.” Advent becomes the time when believers recognize the enduring promise of our faithful God, and receive afresh through the birth of Jesus the assurance that God’s will for creation will be accomplished in God’s time.
The remembrance of Mary’s pregnancy becomes the incubation period for our own reflection on God’s enduring presence. Through our own expectant remembering of Christ’s first coming we celebrate the metaphor of the birth of the new and final order that God intends. This yet and not yet time allows us to look forward to the end of the earth as we know it only because that ending means the fulfillment of another of God’s promises—God’s creation of new heavens and a new earth. God’s purpose for people is not destruction but re-creation; not annihilation, but renewal.
The prophet Isaiah recorded God’s promise to the people: “ ‘As the new heavens and the new earth that I’m making will endure before me,’ says the Lord, ‘so your descendants and your name will’ ” (Isaiah 66:22). All believers can joyously look forward to the restoration of God’s good world. That’s the message of the final visions of John’s Revelation, a beautiful description of the new heavens and earth (Rev. 21:1-4), that assures believers that righteousness is at home there because God himself will live among his people.
Peter concluded this series of thoughts with one final point for reflection: “Consider the patience of our Lord to be salvation.” Just as believers are asked to be patient, they are also called on to think of God’s patience as their salvation. God restrains the divine anger. God counts to “10” many times over because God dearly loves the created world and all who are in it.
Rather than fret over the timing of the coming of the new heaven and new earth, God invites us to participate in it. Yes, at some point, everything will be destroyed, but until then, our ancestors in the faith had an obligation which they passed on to us, and which we ourselves now transfer to tomorrow’s new disciples. That obligation is to consider in the words of Peter, what sort of people ought we to be? The apostle says that we “must live holy and godly lives, waiting for and hastening the coming day of God.” There are not one but two responsibilities – to wait for and to hasten the coming day of God.
That doesn’t mean that God’s day will happen tomorrow. What it means is that as we live godly lives, as we live as examples of godly living, as we instill those values in the next generation of believers, as we constantly review and reform those values to the faithful measure of God, we help to advance God’s kingdom work. None of us want to be accused of slowing it down.
To hasten the coming of God’s kingdom means that we must be in the world which God is seeking to redeem. Wayne Sams describes that activity this way:
We are to be of the world but not in the world. This can be illustrated by noticing the submarine. It is in the water but not of the water. If it is on the ground (out of the water), it is of no purpose ... it is not accomplishing its mission. But when it is in the water, it must be insulated (not isolated) from the water. If the water ever gets into the submarine, then there is cause for alarm and emergency. We must be insulated from the world but not isolated from the world.(1)Since God is our rock and redeemer, since Christ is the unquenchable light of the world, since the Spirit groans with us for the world, we can be in the world and we can endure our stretch of human time within the span of God’s time. There is hope for righteousness. It will be at home with God on one grand, glorious, and victorious day. Our faithfulness will have hastened it.
Thanks be to God.
(1) Cited by Homiletics, December 7, 2008; http://www.homileticsonline.com/subscriber/btl_display.asp?installment_id=93040423
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright 2014 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
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