Be Patient

​Our reading from James begins with some mighty difficult advice, at least for me: “be patient, beloved, until the coming of the Lord.”
 
Patience is not a strength of mine. I HATE sitting in traffic, and waiting in line, and waiting for food at restaurants. Waiting patiently is not something I do well. I should work on that.
 
But the patience James is talking about means something other than staying calm while stuck on hold on the phone—another thing I hate. James is talking about being patient as we wait for “the coming of the Lord.” And as an example of the kind of patience he means, James gives us the prophets.
 
The prophets were mostly a cranky bunch. But our readings this morning show us the patience the prophets needed as they waited for the coming of the Lord.
 
Our reading from Isaiah is from the time when the ancient Israelites were living as refugees in Babylon.
 
To his suffering people, Isaiah gave some really good news. “Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God….He will come and save you.” The day is coming, Isaiah promises, when “the ransomed of the Lord shall return [to their homeland], and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads.”
 
One day God will come, and will take the exiled people home.
 
If I had been part of Isaiah’s original audience, I imagine myself raising my hand, thanking Isaiah for the good news, and asking when it was going to happen.
 
And the answer to that question would have been a little discouraging. Probably Isaiah would have said he didn’t know exactly when. God tends to be cagey about the timing of things. But if Isaiah did give an answer, the answer would have been, “only after several decades.” The Israelite refugees were going to have to wait. Waiting patiently must have been really hard for a people languishing in exile. And holding on to the promises of God with hope while they waited must have been hard, too.
 
We see the same thing in our Gospel reading. John the Baptizer dedicated his life to preparing the way for Christ’s coming.
 
Right on time, Jesus showed up. Jesus began his public ministry. Jesus taught and healed, and crowds gathered, and it really must have seemed to John that all his hopes were coming true right before his eyes.
 
But then Herod arrested John. And nothing happened. In prison John’s patience and John’s hopes began to falter. In our reading, John, the one who had testified that Jesus was indeed “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), sends a message to Jesus: “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”
 
Clearly John was struggling with the challenge of waiting patiently for the coming of the Lord and the fulfillment of God’s promises. And John’s lack of patience made it hard for him to hold on to the promises of God with courage and with hope.
 
Waiting patiently and hopefully for the promises of God to be fulfilled hasn’t gotten easier over the centuries.
 
So, we pray, as we did at the beginning of our service this morning, God, come “speedily [to] help and deliver us.” The word I emphasize in that prayer is “speedily.” One of my regular “arrow” prayers comes from Psalm 70:1 “O God, make speed to save us. Oh, Lord, make haste to help us.”
 
I think about the challenges in my own life, which, thankfully, are relatively minor. I think about the challenges in our world which, unfortunately, are not. And like Isaiah’s people, like John the Baptizer, I want God to get to work right away.
 
And sometimes God does. But sometimes God makes us wait. And what the prophets show us, at their best, is the capacity to hold firmly to the promises of God even while they wait patiently, it may be for a long time, for God’s promises to come true.
 
Waiting patiently but still hopefully is a challenge.
 
When our patience falters, as happened even to John the Baptizer, the greatest among those born of women, one thing we can do is imagine living at the time of the very first Christmas.
 
Imagine that you were an ordinary Jew living somewhere in Israel on the day Christ was born. Your daily life is hard enough, and the oppressive presence of the Roman Empire makes it worse. You know the ancient promise that God would send the messiah to redeem Israel. But waiting patiently and also hopefully is getting more and more difficult.
 
What you couldn’t know, on that first Christmas morning, was that the one you were waiting for had already been born, that God had entered history in a new way, that all of human history was pivoting in that very moment. You couldn’t know it, but it was true.
 
What was true in an especially dramatic way at Christ’s birth is true in less dramatic ways in every time and place. God is constantly coming into our world and into our lives, blessing us, sustaining us, and inviting us to live as citizens of God’s own kingdom. We just need eyes to see. And when we can’t see, we need a heart that trusts.
 
And every once in a while, our patience is rewarded and our hope sustained with a little glimpse of God’s promises coming true.
 
Our centennial meal last Monday was one of those glimpses for me. It was wonderful being together as a Church family to celebrate our parish’s first hundred years. And it was great to see some old faces who have been important in our history but for one reason or another have had to leave us.
 
I had lots of great moments at the meal. But I think particularly about a conversation I had with a woman who left Saint David’s on my watch with some hurt. Monday night, she was all smiles. She had clearly enjoyed being with old friends. She assured me that she is happy at her current Church. And we parted with much good feeling on both sides.
 
When I think about conversations like that one, I realize our centennial meal was much more than a celebration of our past. It was also an opportunity for us to experience present reconciliation and the restoration of old relationships. And it was an encouragement—literally a giving of courage—for us as we prepare to go forward with a renewed sense of Christian unity and love.
 
Monday night was not the coming of the kingdom of God. Our celebration was not the ultimate fulfillment of God’s promises to us. But it was a taste of things to come in God’s kingdom, when God’s promises will be fulfilled.
 
Those tastes sustain us. They keep us going in difficult times. They help us to be a little more patient and a little more hopeful in the way that the prophets could be both patient and hopeful. They help us to do what James tells us to do.
 
As we continue to move through this season of Advent, as we prepare to celebrate the first coming of our Lord, I encourage you to take time each day to reflect on moments when you glimpse God’s kingdom. And then pray that God’s kingdom will come in all its glory, and that God will help you to be patient and hopeful as we wait for it.
 
In Christ’s name. Amen.