John the Baptist, as portrayed in the beginning of Mark’s gospel, gives us a model for what active, generative waiting looks like. It’s waiting with hope that comes from outside of us, hope that transforms us, hope that points us toward where the spirit of the living Christ is active in the world, asking us to join him in helping to heal the world.
As we enter the second week of Advent, we are in the midst of doing one of the hardest jobs that we Christians are called to do: We are asked to wait.
And although it may not look like it, waiting was exactly what John the Baptist was doing in the passage from the Gospel of Mark that we read today. What was he waiting for? He was waiting for the person he and other Jews had long expected, the one he described as “more powerful than I,” the one of whom he said he was “not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals.” He was waiting for the Messiah.
Let’s not kid ourselves. It’s hard to wait. It’s sort of like being a 4-year-old at his or her own birthday party who first is told to wait for the guests to arrive, then wait to blow out the candles on the cake and then wait to open the presents. Wait, wait, wait.
But we should understand that waiting, especially waiting in Advent, is not a passive activity. For Christians, waiting is active and generative, to say nothing of essential.
Andrew Root, who teaches at Luther Seminary in Minnesota, says this about waiting in his recent book, Churches and the Crisis of Decline: “[W]aiting is an active passivity. The church’s activity is in its movement into the world, in its praying for the world. ... This active waiting allows the church to be in the world, not to have the world but to truly be with the world. ... Waiting offers a much different understanding of action,” Root says. “With waiting, energy is understood to arise not from within ourselves but from a hope that is outside us. Waiting attentively seeks the arrival of an all-new action that can save us.”1
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