2 Peter 3:8-15a

Today we light the candle of peace. We anticipate the restoration of beauty and wholeness to a world that has been devastated by brokenness and brutality. And if you are anything like me, whenever you see news of another burst of violence around the world or in your own backyard you wonder – how long, oh Lord?

This question is not a new one. The prophets asked it. The psalmists asked it. And it seems fairly clear, the Christians that Peter was writing to, the grand diaspora of Roman Empire children of the Way, were asking too. Persecution, war, famine, and the general methods by which humans have hurt other humans have always engendered a longing for the Lord to overturn the status quo, to upend the oppressor and to usher in the wonder of the New Creation.

This is because we were created for paradise. Our longing for perfection was embedded in our very structure at the outset – especially since we had it and then we pushed it away. We want peace. We want the disorder to become order, we want the chaos to become manageable. We want justice and goodness and perfection. We want the Day of the Lord.

Peter tells us that he gets it: the Day of the Lord will be the final purifying fire, the moment that sweeps away the detritus of our rebellions and lays the foundation of a new heaven and a new earth characterized by righteousness. It feels long to us, Peter says, but to God it has barely been a minute. And God is being patient on our behalf – teaching us how to be the ones who do the right things for the right reasons, teaching us to be peace in the here and now, giving us room to find God and be redeemed by Christ’s blood and the Holy Spirit’s power before the Day of the Lord forces the issue.

God is not willing for any to perish, Peter writes, and we should not be either. We should be at work drawing others to the Christ of the cross, lifting high the Name that brings a peace that passes all understanding. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, that optimism of peacemaking and unity drew together disparate holiness voices. Their perspective was that if the Holy Spirit was empowering them, they could, in fact, reach everyone and draw everyone to Jesus, to a life of perfect love. They could work in conjunction with God to bring salvation to the whole earth and by doing so usher in the Day of the Lord without worry that anyone might be excluded. They were convinced that being hope, peace, love, and joy in a world that lacked those things so substantially could transform it. They believed that the Great Commission was an invitation to live out the Greatest Commandment, and by doing so they would and could see God’s will carried out around them.

We are the inheritance of that dream, that optimism. But we have grown tired, we have not seen what we thought we would see, we have witnessed bigger and more damning atrocities. We, like the Christians Peter is writing to, think that God is slow. We want to hurry up and get the new thing started already. We want to interpret things around us as signs that the end is coming so we can sit back and wait for the fire to fall. We want to skip out on the hard work of the good news so we can sit back and watch the world burn.

But advent is a reminder that God’s ways and methods are not ours. That our waiting will be answered, and the day of the Lord will arrive, but that the moment may not look anything like what we would have expected. Perhaps it is time to turn that question of ‘how long, oh Lord?’ from a plaintive plea that God would come quickly to a procrastinator’s desperate query extending an impending deadline: “We need more time, God! How much longer Lord, do we have? Can we keep going just a little longer? Stave off thy mighty hand, oh God, until we can yet reach the furthest shore. Hold back for our sake, that we might be your people, drawing all to you. Remind us that the best peace, the fullest peace, the truest peace is found in you.” May this be our prayer this advent season.