Anticipation
What is it about TV commercials that make a person recall them for decades? I remember a ketchup commercial from my college days that used the great Carly Simon hit “Anticipation.” It was a play on the richly thick sauce people had to wait upon to see come out of the bottle onto their food. As the slow ketchup-pouring footage ran, the song played, “Anticipation, anticipa-a-tion is makin’ me wait.” Leave it to Madison Avenue to make the infuriating experience of waiting on a stingy ketchup bottle seem like a selling point for the product.
The song is really too good for a TV commercial. It is light and easy to listen to. It leans on a folk sound but really plays fully into a pop focus: the age-old wonderment of personal romance. It asks the question, “What will become of us?” while looking at what has already just been experienced. It winds up on a kind of trust to be fully focused in the present as possible, “So I'll try and see into your eyes right now.” It finishes the repeating line, “And stay right here, ‘cause these are the good old days…these are the good old days.”
What do you think of when we hear: the moment, now, is the only part of “always” you have to work with? We learn what should ever be obvious, yesterday is gone; today is and tomorrow not yet here, is uncertain. As a more purely folksong put it, “Today is my moment and now is my story I’ll laugh and I’ll cry, and I’ll sing.” True, today is the moment for all of us, nevertheless, reflection on yesterday and anticipation of tomorrow will always be huge considerations for creatures like us. We are those creatures who have the brainpower to recall what has happened and can visualize possibilities of what might be. These considerations can influence how we live and move in the present because we interpret the past and dream of what can come.
Our hope might be to hang on to what has come before or to change what has been. Our hope might be to expand on what is or work for something brand new. The Bible is written with a linear view of time and a conviction that God has intersected with the time/space continuum. The Bible is a story of people of faith that began somewhere, and are heading somewhere. At any given point in salvation history as laid out for us in the Bible, the people of God are either rejoicing or regretting what has just been. They are either holding on or redirecting into the future. The Hebrew prophets, with their pronouncements, are chiefly agents of interruption and intervention. They are saying, “Wake up, take a look around. Use your present opportunity to find a different outcome than the one you are surely invested in now.”
We are still a few weeks off from the First Sunday in Advent, but as I think you will find, with the Scriptures we will hear this Sunday and the Sundays after that, our liturgies hold up for us a kind of “Pre-Advent” season to get us fully into the themes of waiting, watching and preparing. Are we ever not wanting to make the most of the present for a more hopeful future? We always want that. Let’s look in the coming days at messages from Amos, Psalm 70, 1 Thessalonians, and Matthew. Let’s realize we should anticipate the action of God in our lives. It will call us to act now, in the present, in preparation for the days to come. We are to apply wisdom, anticipate with wisdom, to move into a godly outcome. It will take longer than ketchup, but every day we are given is a treasured gift.