Waiting & Longing

I have made a decision concerning my health and well-being: no more Gerard Butler movies. Ever.

After watching more than half of the egregious Machine Gun Preacher (recommended by the DVD guy, because he knows what I do for a living), someone suggested Olympus Has Fallen was much better than it sounded.

They were wrong.

To save you the ordeal: bad people kill almost all the good people, except the President and Our Hero. Our Hero then kills all the bad people and limps from the mostly destroyed White House with the wounded President. Everyone left alive cheers, pumps fists and kisses various damaged flags. The End (yes, I stuck this one out). Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

It wasn’t just the stunning amount of violence, or the execrable plot, or the actors who weren’t really; it was the glib handling of the terrorism issue and the cheering in the face of so much slaughter.

Is this how we live in our world when bad things happen? Some of us are thinking, “It’s only a movie”, but have you heard the rhetoric from Donald Trump and his cronies recently?

Jesus’ words in this week’s Gospel reading challenge us to live in the world where the events appear all-consuming and it seems that the end of everything is around the corner. How will we respond – with violence, or denial, or despair?

We know that if our diet consists of all the stories of brokenness and horror in our world then despair will control us. We know that bad news gets more hits on websites.

So, says Jesus, lift your heads and look for the promise of God. In the face of the world’s despair and lostness, be on the watch for the hope of God in the world. We don’t hope in a wistful way; our hope is based on what God has already done in Jesus.

This is Advent, when we expect the coming of Jesus – infant, Emmanuel and returning Lord. We watch actively, enacting hope and justice and forgiveness, not allowing what Jesus calls “the anxieties of this life” to define who we are and how we live. We watch in this way because of the hope which has saved us and which shapes us.

We will not allow our lives to be so corrupted that we forget the worth of our lives and of the world for whiich Christ died and was raised. We will grieve our loss, we will acknowledge our fear and we will turn to the only hope which loves, forgives and restores – Jesus Christ.

We wait because you are the one and only one,
We wait for your peace and your mercy,
for your justice and your good rule.