Patience?

There are certain children who are known to be unable to wait for Christmas morning and feel compelled to tear the paper just a little bit and see what might be inside the package.

There are otherwise normal-seeming adults who race each other for the parking space 10 steps closer to the door, glaring at each other all the while.

And there is always someone who will say that we should dump all of the Advent hymns, John the Baptist, Isaiah and rest, and get right to Christmas carols...and then on December 26 want to get rid of everything Christmas and rush on to something else.

Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord.

The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth...

You must also be patient...

As an example of suffering and patience, beloved, take the prophets. [James 5]

That is what James says in our Second Lesson today.

It is an interesting comparison James makes with the work of a farmer.

The ground is plowed and prepared, the seed is planted at the right time...

and then we wait for the rain, and the sprouting and growth of the seed.

A long while later comes the harvest, at the right time, in the fullness of time, when the crop is ripe and the place prepared to receive that harvest.

Each step is in its proper time.

The epistle of James was written to a church whose impatience was growing.

It had been some years since the death and resurrection of Jesus, and still they waited.

Be patient, says James, wait for God's time, and look for what is already happening.

Oh, but there are so many things, so many important things, that irk us.

We might want a more satisfying prayer-life.

Why does it seem like my prayer goes nowhere?

Why does it seem that God is so coy and evasive?

I want revelation!

We know that we should be spending more time directly with the Bible.

Why is it difficult to understand?

Why doesn't God make it clearer to me, to us, today?

We struggle with illnesses and limitations.

Why are prayers for healing not answered right now, in the way that I demand?

I need to see the love of God demonstrated, right here!

Be patient, says James, and wait for God's time, and look for what is already happening.

But William Willimon suggests that there is another way to look at all this.

To be impatient with God may be an important step toward a deeper relationship with God.

This kind of impatience suggests a “hungering and thirsting for righteousness” that Jesus commended to us in the Sermon on the Mount.

Perhaps there are worse problems in our spiritual lives than this impatience – namely, that sort of low level expectation which believes so little about God that one is never, ever disappointed by God, never frustrated by the seeming tardiness of God's actions.

C.S. Lewis took this a bit further, when he suggests that our great problem is not that we are impatient with God not coming to us now, but rather that we settle for too little of God in the future.

We get comfortable with our situation and don't want to risk God upsetting the things we like.

Lewis writes that if we take into account all of God's tremendous promises,

it would seem that our desires are not too strong, but too weak!

We are half-hearted creatures, fooling around with drink and drugs and ambition,

when infinite joy has been offered to us.

We are like children who are satisfied to continue playing in a mud-puddle when we have been offered a trip to the beach.

When this is the case, we are too easily pleased, and not impatient enough!

At least the impatient believer can be a bold believer, who truly wants to see the love of God shown forth, now.

If it is hard to wait for Christmas during the Sundays of Advent, how much harder is it to wait for cancer to be healed, or for the wayward teenager to come to his senses, or for our other prayers to be answered?

At least our impatience may show a burning desire for God

that will not be satisfied

with cheap or flashy substitutes.

But still, James urges Be patient.

Let's take the case of illness.

When we are sick, that may be when we are the most impatient.

We demand that the doctor do something...a procedure, a drug, something.

Yet doctors keep telling us that a large part of healing is not what we do but what our bodies do.

And we hate to wait for our bodies, and so we spend all kinds of money to do something.

If the doctor refuses to prescribe, and says “Go home, drink liquids, and go to bed,” we assume that he is incompetent.

“My mother would say something like that!” we protest.

Your mother was right,” the doctor replies.

We need to have the faith to wait on God to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.

Our Stephen Ministers regularly remind each other that we may be caregivers, but it is God who is the cure-giver.

And God does not always take away suffering, but rather God gives us something redemptive to do with the suffering.

Simone Weil said it this way: “The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it.”

We need to think about that statement carefully, especially when we are chasing pleasure all the time as the greatest good.

Pleasure-seeking is the search for an artificial paradise, Simone says.

Only when we are aware of our limitations do we reach a higher plane; God meets us in the midst of our pains and sorrows.

So in the end, we as Advent-waiting Christians practice patience,

because we know that we are not God,

that our lives are not our own,

and that the outcome of our lives is not a matter of our actions but of God's grace.

Have patience, says James.

With patient confidence we pray: Come, Lord Jesus, quickly come! Amen.

Please note: The preceding sermon is provided as a resource for the thought, prayer, and meditation of the members and friends of St. Mark's. It is the residue of a verbal event, and thus it does not have academic footnotes and other details that would be expected in a written document. The writer gladly acknowledges the prior thought and work of many Christians before him.