2 Peter 3.11-13

 

Waiting always tries our patience. Stuck at an obstinately red traffic signal, anticipating a visit of rarely seen friends, counting the days to Christmas -- we wriggle with impatience.

 

We're especially restive as we await God's justice in a world which exhibits too little of it. The arc of the moral universe may bend toward justice, but its curve can be fiendishly difficult to discern.

 

The writer of 2 Peter says we simultaneously wait for God's justice and hasten it by being formed as certain kinds of people. There's a suggestion here of waiting as active, not passive -- of incremental steps hastening us to the goal. Waiting is pilgrimage; in the end, we're not in the same place we started.

 

Journeying as a metaphor of life in God is deeply rooted in Christian thought. The late Paul Minear, longtime professor at Yale Divinity School, said few images better illustrate that metaphor than the pilgrim. No pilgrim journeys without a backpack, stuffed with essentials but kept light for the road. Every day, the pilgrim asks: What can I take? What must I leave behind? Rigorous inventory is required, necessarily choosing and rejecting.

 

Our backpacks are filled with weights which keep us from being formed into people who hasten God's justice. What resentments, disappointments, and guilt overload us? What habits make us complicit in economic inequities and commodification, in marring God's creation, in undergirding systems of sexism and racism, in discriminating against sexual orientation and gender identity? What images of God do we retain which inhibit an embrace of God's open future?

 

This is a difficult business, easily rationalized and resisted. Advent isn't nearly long enough to see it through, but it offers plenty of space to begin. Explore every recess of the backpack that accompanies you. Maybe it's time to lighten the load.