It's not that we're handling things just fine down here on this tightly wound mortal coil. Clearly, we are not. We've bound ourselves in enough knots that it might take another millennium to untangle ourselves. Or perhaps a fiery meltdown is the only way out of the mess we've made of things. But I'd like to think things aren't quite so bad, that not all hope is lost.
I'd like to think that there is yet reason to still wait.
And if we can manage to listen closely to what the author is saying in the epistle, there is a beautiful truth to be found among the deathly cold indifference of bombastic end-of-world warnings, like a bright crocus blooming and shivering in a quiet blanket of forest snow. The author's surprising point isn't that the return of the Christ means the destruction of the world. That was already an expectation of his readers and an understandably human vision of divine retribution from an author who had likely seen his brothers and sisters murdered, burned, plundered and raped. The unexpected assertion—the joyful good news of it—isn't that God is coming back, but that God has not yet come back as promised.
The good news is that God does not want the earth destroyed in fire, that God does not want anyone to perish. God wants all to come to repentance—which is to say, God wants all to live under the Reign of God, the way of peace, reconciliation and kenotic grace incarnated by Jesus. And when more and more of us commit ourselves to these kinds of "lives of holiness and godliness" as we wait for the return of Emmanuel, then, by the time our waiting is complete, we will have been co-creators and citizens of the a new heaven and a new earth already thriving on earth.
In other words, this Advent, realize that we are what we have been waiting for. This Advent, amid the old heaven and old earth in which things have continued as they were from the beginning of creation, be the return of Jesus, be Emmanuel, the God with humanity, be the second coming of Christ, bethe new heaven and the new earth.
The good news this Advent is that all this time, while we thought we were waiting on God, it was in fact God that was waiting on us.
And God is waiting still.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.
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