Patience

Charlotte Collins Reed
Christ Episcopal Church
December 11, 2022

3 Advent A

Don and I spent part of this weekend in Cincinnati having late Thanksgiving with our 3 ½ year old granddaughter Evelyn, her two-month-old sister, Sabrina, and their parents Slocomb and Leslie.  Apparently, I am being called to reckon with my attitude toward Advent calendars this year, because not only do I now have one of my own that Leslie sent me, Evelyn has two Advent calendars.  One is chocolate, of course, with a tiny piece of chocolate behind each door.  The other is made of fabric and has a little pocket with a number on it for each day of Advent.  Time is marked by moving a yellow star from one pocket to the next each day.  The way Leslie explained it to Evelyn is that when the star has finally been moved to the last pocket, Christmas is here.  Evelyn, ever the entrepreneur like her father, immediately took the star, moved it to the last pocket, and was convinced that Christmas had arrived.  That’s what her mother said, right? 

Patience is not the star quality of a three-year-old, and patience is not the star quality of John the Baptist either.  Last week, John the Baptist was calling the religious authorities a brood of vipers and telling them that every tree that does not bear good fruit will feel the blade of the ax. The One who is coming will separate the wheat from the chaff and burn the latter with unquenchable fire.  John’s message was an urgent one of judgement and fear, not patience.

Today, John is sitting in prison for the crime of telling King Herod that it is not lawful for him to have his brother’s wife.  Given John’s comment last Sunday about the brood of vipers, I think we can assume that John’s conversation with Herod was a little short on tact and did not go very well.  But John did have a very clear idea of what the Messiah was to be and do, and while unquenchable fire was part of that picture, his imprisonment and impending death was not.  Sitting in prison, John has an urgent question of Jesus “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we wait for another?” Since we last heard from John the Baptist, Jesus has called disciples, preached the Sermon on the Mount, made it clear that he has not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it, given the Lord’s prayer, and done many healing miracles.  John has not heard one word about vipers, wheat and chaff, or unquenchable fire.  John expected a little more hell fire and damnation out of Jesus, and there has been nary a lightening bolt.  John will soon have given his life to prepare the way for the One who is coming.  He needs to know and he needs to know now: “Are you the one who is to come, Jesus, or shall we wait for another?”

This week, we will mark the 10th anniversary of the Sandy Hook shooting, and we have stood in horror at the great loss of life to gun violence over and over again.  We have wrestled with illness, loss, and challenge that three years ago we could not have imagined thanks to a pandemic that continues to disrupt our lives.   We have seen natural disasters ravage parts of the country.  And we have had our own personal challenges and losses.  With John, we can easily find ourselves impatiently saying to Jesus “Are you the one to come or shall we wait for another?”  

Jesus’ response to John the Baptist and Jesus’ response to us is to quote from the very passage we heard from Isaiah this morning.  “Go and tell John what you see and hear: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.”  My guess is that John, like most of us, wanted a nice clear answer: “Yes, I am the one who is to come,” or “No, we must wait for another.”  Instead, as is often the case, Jesus’ answer to an either/or question is “Yes.”

The reading from James counsels patience. “Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord.”  James does not counsel passive waiting, however.  James compares the waiting we are called to do with the farmer who waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient until the crops receive the early and late rains.  The farmer worked the ground and planted the crops, doing the work of a farmer, before waiting for the crop to appear.  The farmer does not know when, exactly, the crop will appear or what condition of the crop will be.  But the farmer waits patiently, trusting that what has been planted will bear fruit.  The patience we are called to is expectant waiting, doing the work God has called us to do, preparing ourselves and the world around us for the arrival of the Messiah, and watching for what God is doing with the fruit of our efforts. 

The answer to John’s impatient question “Are you the one who is to come or shall we wait for another?” and to whatever our own impatient version of that question might be is “Yes.”  Yes, Jesus is the one foretold by the prophets and longed for by the Hebrew people and Jesus is at work in the world now.  We are called to open our eyes to all the incredible work God is doing in our midst.  And yes, we are to wait with patience and expectation for the Kingdom of God to arrive in all its fullness.  And yes, as the farmer prepares the ground, plants the crop, and waits patiently to see what happens, we are called to wait by preparing the ground and planting the seeds of the gospel of God’s great love, and watching to see what God will do next.                                          Amen.