December 16, 2007 Des Moines
Advent 3
James 5:7-10
Lousy Patience
“Are we there yet?” begins the poem
by Virgil Ellis to which Garrison Keillor recently introduced his listeners.
Are we there yet
you'd say, tired of our prompting
to see the world as you should:
train-thunder as we go under a trestle,
smiling face painted on a barn.
You'd even get bored looking for signs
that had the rare q, x, or z.
Are we there yet?
So we gave up telling you the miles
and just said, we're closer, getting closer,
whenever you asked, so
you made it into a chant:
closer, closer, closer
until, turning onto our road,
we joined in, and then
we all rocked in our seats,
making the old car bounce and sway,
closer, closer, closer.[1]
And whether or not we can identify with the rocking and the
swaying, we are surely familiar with the question: “are we there yet?” Time on our hands. Tedious time.
Time as a vast and limitless ocean on which we float, adrift, on a
raft. Too much time between where we are
and where we want to be. A future
that won't arrive, and a present that, like a bad guest, simply does not
know when to leave.
Years ago,
a friend moved back to town after a short stint in another city with a new
job. Back now with his old employer after what had initially seemed like
a significant advancement, I asked him what had gone wrong.
"Well,"
he started slowly, "it wasn't an environment in which I cared to
work."
He went on
to describe a morass of office intrigue and corporate politics that sounded,
indeed, untenable, and I responded to his story with the familiar, "Yes,
and life is too short to put up with that sort of thing."
To which he
corrected, "No, life is too long to spend it that way."
Life is too
long. It's funny how true both of those descriptions can be true.
It's true, of course, that life can be too short. We can all cite countless examples of people
who were not privileged to realize their own potential, or complete a promising
project or career, or see their children grow into mature adulthood because
their lives were abbreviated too painfully, regrettably soon.
But my
guess is that we can likewise offer personal testimony of those seasons of life
that seemed to drag on forever -- when time, itself, seems to stand still
without any remedy available to jump start it back into motion:
·
Times
of illness that never seem to arrive at health;
·
Times
of terminal struggle that death does not seem willing to end;
·
Times
of unemployment when the phone never seems to ring;
·
Times
of estrangement when the glacier between you and a significant other seems
vast, cold and unmoving;
·
Times
of rehearsal and practice and drill and repetition when it seems like you will
never get it perfected;
·
Times
of simple and unabated wreckage when it seems like everything bad that CAN
happen in life, does.
In those seasons, it's not that life is too short; it's
rather that it seems SOooooo long. Indeed, to use the language of scripture, it
seems like between here and wherever “there” might be is always a wilderness --
between Egypt and Canaan, between exile and returning home, even here in James,
between the time of Jesus and that promised time of consummation. There
is this vast and numbing dry space to cross before the harvest finally comes.
I know that
patience is supposed to be one of the fruits of the Spirit, but if that
particular fruit were all we had to eat, most of us would go hungry. Patience
may well be our least favorite virtue.
Lousy patience! And in this
season, perhaps most of all, patience seems difficult to muster. There are tasks to accomplish – presents to
buy, boxes to wrap, cards to send, groceries to buy, and cookies to bake -- and
we want them out of the way today.
And for kids, of course, there are those gifts beneath the tree just
baiting them every time they pass – taunting, tempting, smirking at the torture
they are occasioning. “Isn't it time,
yet, to open them?” “Are we there yet?” Lousy patience, indeed!
Little
wonder, then, that James, in the passage we heard, commends this miserable
virtue to us.
Be patient, beloved, until the
coming of the Lord. The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth,
being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains. You also
must be patient.
I'll confess that I initially resisted the
comparison. I'm not a "bona fide" farmer,
you understand -- maybe not even a "Gentleman Farmer" though I
secretly aspire to the designation -- so my credibility is admittedly
suspect. I only own inherited land in
south Texas along with my brother that a professional farmer cultivates on
shares. But all those disclaimers conceded, James would certainly not use
me as an example. Every year I watch the
weather forecasts on my computer, I wring my hands at every report of rain – or
lack thereof – I keep the phone lines hot asking, “how's it look?” until the
harvest is in or the inspector declares it “dead.” Patience is not this farmer's
virtue.
Which, the
more I think carefully about it, is perhaps the surest testimony most
discrediting my farmer credentials. The
real farmer in our little family enterprise is a guy about my age by the name
of Troy who is the son of a man my
father's age who farmed those same acres before him. And though it seems
like drought or flood has destroyed as many crops as have actually been
harvested, Troy and Troy's Dad before him work that land year after year –
sowing on schedule, and reaping when they can.
And while I'm worrying and wringing my hands, Troy rides the constant
and sometimes violent ups and downs of weather and wild hogs and expenses and
price fluctuations as tenaciously as any rodeo cowboy on a bucking bull.
It's not
that he is apathetic. It's not that he
just stoically, robotically soldiers through.
And it's certainly not that he is inactive. Indeed, it seems like he is always checking
this or responding to that; spraying or disking or replanting seeds rained
away. It's just that his activity
is not impatience. He simply does
what he can as best as he knows how and lets go of that which is out of his
control.
Which, of
course, a lot of life is – and seemingly more every day. So how do we handle that? How do we live as advent people – patiently
waiting, watching, expecting for what never seems to come – when the most that
we can do is keep ourselves afloat in the vast and deep ocean of time, when so
much of life seems out of our control?
Like all of the New Testament writers,
James was addressing a people anxiously watching for Christ's return. The prevailing wisdom of the time was that
time was short – most believers convinced that Jesus was just around the
corner. Other writers, like Mark and
Paul, urged their readers to stay on high alert. “You never know.” “Always be ready.” But if their warnings
spoke of the violent or sudden interruption of God to redeem the world – like
a star falling from heaven or a thief in
the night – James speaks a word to those for whom time was a heavy weight to
bear – not short at all, but tediously, oppressively long. “Trust,” he urges, “in the absolute
reliability of God -- as predictable and reliable as the changing of the
seasons. Time, not as volatile, but
rather methodical – steady, divinely ordered, productive; out of our
hands, perhaps, but hardly wild and reckless and careening randomly from one
moment to the next.
Do what you
can, and trust that God is God. Don't
allow your impatience to discourage you, on the one hand, or turn you into a
nervous, bickering, grumbling nag on the other.
Don't give up, but neither poison the time with tension-strained words
and jagged critique. Think “process”
rather than “explosion.” The promises
God has made are precisely the promises God will keep. If it seems like it is taking forever; if it
seems like the good will never come – that peace will always elude us, that
lions will never sleep with lambs, that our upside-down, inside-out-edness will
never fold neatly back in order -- think of it less as a flight that is
annoyingly delayed with no way of knowing if or when it might
actually board, and more like winter that seems, perhaps, like forever, but
will surely give way to spring – on its time, if not always our
own.
And then
make of your forward looking faithfulness a song, and set the car to bouncing
and swaying:
Closer. Closer.
Closer.