Advent and the airportI’m sympathetic with the waiting that travelers must endure in December. Several years ago during this season when we were living in New Mexico, my wife and I flew into Portland International Airport to visit one of our daughters and her family who lived in McMinnville.

On our return, we were scheduled to fly out of the PDX early on a Monday morning. Our daughter had business in the city that day, so she wanted to take us to the depot herself, but it entailed rising early and driving while it was still dark. Both my wife and I were very tired and half asleep in the back seat as we entered the city, but I found comfort in the fact that we were early for our flight and would have ample time to check our baggage before our scheduled departure. Then frequent stop-and-go gave way to frustratingly long stops. I looked at my watch to see that precious time was slipping by quickly.

We arrived at the airport with little time for check-in, so both of us jogged to the gate where we were to receive our seat assignments. When we got to the check-in desk, we had to stand in a long line at the counter. Little time was left. We learned that a delay in the incoming flight would set us back by almost an hour. We had rushed for nothing and now we settled into another wait.

Once on board and in the air, it was announced that one runway was closed in Las Vegas, Nev., our next stop, and that air traffic was backed up almost three hours, leaving planes circling the airport there or being sent to other airports. The two of us were fortunate to get rescheduled to Salt Lake City, and from there directly to Albuquerque, N.M. But one more hour of waiting at each of those places caused us to arrive in Albuquerque three hours late. Tired and impatient, we made the four-hour drive in our car to Raton, N.M., where we arrived home in the early hours of the next morning. We had spent a full day waiting, along with others, all of us caught helplessly in a web of human shortcomings.

The liturgical season of Advent commemorates human waiting. It began with the Jewish people who were disappointed that their preconceived expectations were not being met. They were not getting to their promised destinations soon enough. Once they did arrive, there were additional delays in occupying the land.

No sooner did they get settled than the surrounding nations invaded their homeland and caused further delays in their hopes of becoming a great nation. Their own human failures made a bad situation worse. They often were their own worse critics. All chances of happiness and fulfillment eluded them when most of their people either were killed or carried away into captivity. Once they returned to their homeland, rebuilding their nation was complicated with still further delays. Would their waiting never end?

Centuries of their history passed. They realized through painful experience that they were not able to remedy these interminable delays by themselves. They began to recognize that divine intervention alone could make the desired difference.

Their literature expressed the hope that God’s chosen servant would change the natural world around them as well as change all their human frailties. This divine agent would stop human hostilities and teach people a better way to live. History itself would culminate in a peace and prosperity that was mostly a matter of their imagination. The world and its creatures would return to God’s care and compassion. And their waiting would be over.

For Christians, Advent is a period of waiting. We believe that the long- hoped-for servant of God was none other than Jesus himself. In many ways Jesus’ coming did end our waiting, and he does change human lives if people will let him. But that choice is not forced and as a result our world has not changed completely. So we wait still, wondering whether the universal change we hope for will come slowly out of the changes in the lives of a few individuals or out of a great, cataclysmic change brought about by a final and dramatic intervention in our world by one we believe to be the Lord of all creation. And so our waiting persists, and we hope that breach in human history will be both merciful as well as mighty. We remain convinced he will come again.

Doug Rich is the pastor of Pioneer Presbyterian Church in Clatsop Plains in Warrenton.