If you are of a certain age, then you well remember singer Carly Simon’s hit song of 1971, “Anticipation.” Its lyric refrain, “Anticipation is making me wait,” even made its way into a years-long series of TV commercials hawking ketchup. The ads used the song to build suspense, showing ketchup slowly dripping from a glass bottle to emphasize its thickness and richness.
Anticipation is the act of looking forward to or preparing for the future. It bridges the gap between the present and an upcoming event, involving everything from joyful, everyday expectation to thoughtful, meticulous life planning. The emotions of anticipation are powerful and often shape our day-to-day lives – even though our thoughts are focused on the long-game.
On one hand is pleasurable anticipation. Looking forward to a positive event – like a vacation, a concert, or simply the weekend – actually can stir more happiness than the event itself! Anticipation creates excitement, boosts motivation, and stirs imagination. Something of that is going on in this photo I took a few years ago during an evening of games at our Wednesday Church Night. The expressions of anticipation are priceless: Will the “shooter” toss the orange ball perfectly into a dimple of an empty egg carton? Possibly? Probably? Not as easy as it looks! But maybe!
On the flip side, anticipation can manifest as dread or worry when you focus too heavily on an uncertain or potentially negative future outcome. Think in terms of anticipating the results of a medical test, or a legal proceeding, or a job interview that you didn’t exactly nail.
Perhaps that yin-yang of anticipation is at play with my coming retirement. After working a number of good jobs over the span of 45 years, I’m now ready to clock out for the last time and start writing the next chapters of my life. Come September 1, God starts doing a new thing with my life – which may or may not include sitting on my front porch and yelling at squirrels, and my feelings of eager anticipation for what’s in store are definitely pleasurable. Truth be told, I don’t like squirrels!
Yet so also are there places in my heart for your anticipation of my retirement, which I’m guessing leans less toward pleasure and more toward sadness over saying goodbye, more toward worry about who next fills the pulpit, more toward fear of the unknowns that lie ahead. God intends a new thing for the life of this congregation, too, and the anticipation of those things surely can foment dread.
Our outlook on the future thus plays out as a mindset: Anticipation as worry, or anticipation as hope. Or perhaps more accurately, a natural and understandable mixture of both worry and hope. Be careful, though, of the temptation to worry. Your mindset of worry focuses on your fears, on worst-case scenarios. A mindset of worry fuels anxiety and stress; it drains energy and your ability to be present in the moment. Whereas a mindset of hope focuses on opportunities – on God making all things new, on the Holy Spirit making all things green and lush with growth. Hope imagines fruitful options and celebrates small joys. Hope fuels motivation and resilience; it restores energy and commitment.
Anticipation as hope, anticipation as worry. The apostle Peter in this morning’s Scripture lesson plays both sides of the coin. Make no mistake: Peter is pointing to a final end of all things, which one day includes cleansing fires of renewal and judgment. The pollution of sin and evil must be burned away, and anticipation of that sounds worrisome. But when viewed in the larger context of the Bible – and when properly seen in how Peter wraps up this passage, you realize that he’s not spelling the final doom and gloom of all earthly things.
Anticipate it all with hope, Peter urges. What awaits are fires of renewal not extinction. You and I hopefully anticipate a new heaven and a new earth, a new Creation where everything that’s familiar – maple trees and purple iris, chirping robins and red fox, soaring bluffs and great rivers – will find themselves in a world where righteousness permeates every nook and cranny. A world landscaped in righteousness: Creatures and plants and oceans we know will still exists, but no longer will they be under threat by human sin and pollution, no longer groaning under the weight of a broken and fearful world.
By the power of God’s Holy Spirit, listen now for the Word of the Lord –
This is now, beloved, the second letter I am writing to you; in them I am trying to arouse your sincere intention by reminding you that you should remember the words spoken in the past by the holy prophets, and the commandment of the Lord and Savior spoken through your apostles.
First of all you must understand this, that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and indulging their own lusts and saying, “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since our ancestors died, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation!” They deliberately ignore this fact, that by the word of God heavens existed long ago and an earth was formed out of water and by means of water, through which the world of that time was deluged with water and perished. But by the same word the present heavens and earth have been reserved for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the godless.
But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day. The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and everything that is done on it will be disclosed.
Since all these things are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set ablaze and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire? But, in accordance with his promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home.
Therefore, beloved, while you are waiting for these things, strive to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish; and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation. (2 Peter 3:1-15)
Alice – a great-grandmother and matriarch of her family – fully spent 50 years praying for a wayward son who had fallen far from faith and belief. Then late in his life, when great-grandma Alice was well into her 90s, lo and behold he returned to the Church. “Just goes to show you what a little prayer can do,” Alice said upon the return home of her prodigal son.
Alice’s was a patient faith experienced by few. She clung tightly to the long view of eternity, to the long view of God’s Kingdom, and to an abiding faith that God in Christ by the Spirit abided with her – and heard each and every one of those half-century’s worth of prayers for her boy. Alice stuck with prayer, because she knew the Lord was sticking with her.
That’s a truth hard to reconcile with a world as fractured as ours. But the fruit of patience inspires us to keep trying, as we patiently stick with the God who patiently sticks with us. Our patience arises from assurance that Christ by his Spirit remains with us. Jesus has, in a very real sense, already returned by coming to us through the fiery breath of the Holy Spirit. By the Spirit, Christ is already with us in an ever-present warm and loving way. So also, then, in a very real sense, Christ’s eventual bodily return simply fulfills what we already enjoy – by God’s amazing grace.
That’s why Peter can write that, though we look forward to a glorious future, we now strive to live holy, blameless, and thus glorious lives that are at peace with God. No need to fret or obsess about the particulars of what actually will happen when God dramatically renews all things upon Christ’s return.
Of course, there are days when Jesus’s followers are tempted to lose patience with God’s patience: When people suffer, when creation groans for a Savior, we cry out in prayer, “Come, Lord Jesus.” And we wait for God’s thundering response of “yes.” And all the while we wait, we put God’s patience to good use – by word and deed, spreading the Good News as far and wide as possible, and loving our neighbors as we ourselves would want to be loved.
So no, God isn’t slow to keep God’s promise of returning Jesus to earth. Maybe, in fact, God is waiting to send Christ back not just because God longs for people to receive God’s grace by faith, but also because God isn’t yet done transforming God’s precious, dearly beloved people. And so in hope we anticipate good things: God is in charge; God is working it out, and God’s patience in all this just gives the Gospel a chance to grow and to spread more and more.
And that is a fine thing: A sweet taste of heaven that’s well worth the wait. Just goes to show you what a little prayer can do!
Glory be to Father, Son, and Spirit. Amen, and amen!
Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message during worship on Sunday, May 31, 2026, at First Presbyterian Church in Waukon, Iowa, USA. Scholarship, commentary, and reflection by Doug Bratt, Scott Hoezee, and Stan Mast inform the message.