Advent Waiting and U2

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This post was sent to me by Julian, who is on our team for the study conference for theology students. The conferecen is particularly international and  most years conducted in English, in 2020 we could not get together, because European borders weren't open but we hope to meet late in July 2021 in Wroclaw, Poland.  

The purpose of the season of Advent is to remind the Church of the continual need to wait expectantly and actively for God’s coming. It is not a matter of sitting back and passively waiting for God to do something; but neither is it matter of grasping the initiative without any prayer and reflection and being frenetically busy. Rather, what is required is demanding combination of the passive and the active.
First, we are to wait patiently on God and take our cue from God’s initiative and guidance. Second, we are to be active in giving ourselves to the work of the kingdom, doing those things to help move the world toward that goal. As Karl Barth describes it, this is ‘the hastening that waits’; or, perhaps better: this is the waiting that hastens.
We are to pray the waiting prayer, ‘Your Kingdom come’ while hastening with others toward God’s coming kingdom. We are to do things; but our doing comes from the strength and direction that God supplies. To wait is not to acquiesce in the status quo; it is to expect that God is already doing new things, and our mission is to be partners in bringing them about.

Years ago, lost for words and forty minutes of recording time left before the end of studio time, U2 were still looking for a song to close their third album, ‘War’. They wanted to put something explicitly spiritual on the record to balance the politics and the romance of it. They thought about the Psalms and were led to Psalm 40. There was some squirming. They were a very ‘white’ rock group, and such plundering of the scriptures was taboo for a white rock group unless it was in the ‘service of Satan’, or worse, Goth. Psalm 40 appealed because it suggests a time in which grace will replace karma and love will replace strict adherence to law.
‘40’ became the closing song at U2 shows and on hundreds of occasions hundreds of thousands of people of every size and shape and t-shirt have shouted back the refrain, pinched from another psalm ‘How long to sing this song?’ Bono writes, “I had thought of it as a nagging question – pulling on the hem of an invisible deity whose presence we glimpse only when we act in love. How long…hunger? How long…hatred? How long until creation grows up and the chaos of its precocious hell-bent adolescence has been discarded? I thought it odd that the vocalising of such questions could bring such comfort.” The author of Psalm 40 writes:
“Patiently I waited for the Lord;
…he set my feet on rock and gave me a firm footing.
On my lips he put a new song,
a song of praise to our God.”

A prayer:
How long, O Lord?
How long before we put aside our tribal and partisan badges?
How long before we recognise the deeper humanity that we share?
As we wait, put a new song on our lips:
a song of praise and love and thankfulness.
Then, Lord, direct us toward your hastening;
toward your work of reconciliation in which are partners
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
Amen

Julian Templeton is Minister of St John’s United Reformed Church, Barnet, United Kingdom, and a postgraduate student at the University of Chester.