Can we sustain the waiting any more; is it possible to wait any longer..? And yet we must. Today is the winter solstice. But it is not yet Christmas. There are still a few days to wait. As I write, many people are discovering the powerlessness of waiting, as the weather insterferes with plans, and means that they must wait until things change, until flights become possible again, or trains are running, or roads are clear. And when plans have been made, and meetings anticipated, and expectations raised - it is hard to be left waiting with no knowing when things will be resolved.
And yet it is the nature of our waiting always - our waiting for the Kingdom, without knowing when it will come. We know and trust the promises, we know that, as we celebrate Christmas - eventually - we are being given the promise that the intentions of God will be fulfilled.
But not yet, not fully.
And as we ask, why not yet, why not fully, there is a question that comes back to us. If this is the promise we live by and claim to trust - will we, dare we live it out. And who might be waiting for us to do so, in order that the goodness, the yes that is the incarnation might invade their life?

And our waiting continues. We are three weeks into Advent, and Christmas feels so near - so near we can almost touch it. Today, we have had Tuesday Christmas lunch, and sung carols. On Sartuday we will sing carols at Trafalgar Square (come and join us 6-7 pm at the Christmas tree) and on Sunday we have our nativity play in the evening - 6.00pm, all welcome.
But we are not there yet. So near we can almost touch it, flashing out into our days, sparkiling in the corner of a glace - but we are not there yet.
We wait and still wait, and there is a discipline in waiting, a discpline it is all too easy to abandon. There was a report recently that some people were looking for a faster way of communicating with people - email is too slow apparently. Waiting to hear, waiting to respond, waiting to consider what is said and to consider how to reply. How much better would some of our communication be if we learned to wait.
And how much might our communication with God increase and deepen, if we learned to wait - to wait in God's presence, to wait for God's response, to recongise that the waiting is part of the process.
This Saturday, we have another in our season of Playing at Prayer - a time to experiment, wait, not achieve anything, - and meet God. A good advent practice. Come and join our waiting if you have time.....

And the waiting continues. It is hard to wait. We are struggling hard not to sing the carols, or reading the readings, or go straight to the story of the angels and shepeherds and the baby in the story.
But Advent makes us wait.
One of the gifts of waiting is the opportunity that it gives us to exercise our imaginations. For much of waiting is made up of fantasy - we wonder what is to come, we imagine what is to come, we construct possibilities and write scripts and project ourselves forward into the future.
It can be a problem. It can allow room for anxiety to gorw ansd take root. We have a deep capacity to imagine the worst, albiet vaguely and in shadowy outline. Much of our resistance to waiting comes from this anxiety.
But it can also be a gift. We can begin to think "what if"? "What should this future be?" "How might I allow what is best in me, in us, shape what is coming?"
And we can allow the Spirit's imagination to be at work in us, alerting us to possibilities. As we listen to the promises of Advent, we hear the divine imagination at work; of a world of wholeness and peace, where lion and lamb live together, where people's work is properly honoured and rewarded.
Waiting through Advent, listening to the promises, not rushing through them, but letting them invade our imaginations, draws us more deeply into God's imagining the world that will be.
And the promise that Advent points to is that God's imagining will be fulfilled and completed - Emmanuel, God with us; Jesus, the yes to all God's promises.