Just a week ago, right there in the balcony up on the left hand side, I was sitting for the Christmas Spectacular. The Spectacular indeed lived up to its name! For those of us who were here, it was a great, great afternoon! But, I heard when I was there one of the cutest things I have heard in a very long time. Sitting behind me were some grandparents I think – or maybe parents – and a little girl. She had been given some candies in preparation for all of this, and was rustling her wrappers and consuming chocolates as quickly as possible, and it was very obvious that this girl was excited about being here.
So much so that when word came out up from the stairs that Santa Claus had arrived, she bolted from her seat, grabbed the arm of one of her parents, and charged down the stairs. She just had to see Santa no matter what! So, Santa came and sat down, and afterwards the little girl ran back up the stairs to report her encounter with Santa Claus. She was ecstatic! She said, “Santa knows me by name. Santa says that he will see me again in two week. Can you believe that? He’ll see me again in two weeks!” She just kept saying it over and over again, as if she couldn’t wait.
There was something about that moment and that encounter and that sense of wonder that was so moving in its simplicity and in its power. It reminded me of a story that I heard told by the great Philip Yancey, and maybe it was to do with his own family, but he decided that it was time to teach his own daughter how to understand the importance of money. So, with his wife they sat down and they went over the implications of investing financially. The young girl was quite taken by everything she heard, because she was told that it was not only important every now and again to spend money, but it is perhaps even more important to save money.
They explained to her for the first time in her young life the power of interest. This little girl’s eyes lit up when she heard that she could in fact get something for what seemed like nothing. The parents decided it was time for her to open her account at the bank. They phoned the local bank and spoke to the manager in the town where they were – and this was in the States, small town banks – and the bank’s president actually answered the phone and said that he would be willing to give the girl an account. The parents said that they would fill out all the paper work at the conclusion of the transaction – maybe a day later.
The girl goes to the bank and she sits down and meets the bank’s president, and they have a wonderful encounter and a meaningful conversation about the power of compound interest. The girl definitely decides to open her account, takes out her piggy bank and empties everything that is in it, carries it to the banker, and receives her receipt. The transaction is now complete, and the banker is about to leave, but the little girl isn’t. So he says to her, “We are finished now. There is nothing more to do. You can take your piggy bank back home and start collecting your pennies again. You have an account here, and everything is fine.” The little girl wouldn’t leave.
The bank President was really quite concerned at this point. He said, “Look, why won’t you leave?”
She said, “I am waiting for my interest.”
I think this is great! I think we should all get our interest up front, don’t you? Maybe for bank presidents and managers who are here listening today, this could be a novel idea. We’ll have the interest up front and then we’ll pay the money! But, I am not sure that would actually succeed, and I would not invest in such a bank that would do that, but that is all another point. “I want my interest!”
Both the girl in the balcony and the girl who went to the bank had to learn an important lesson, and that was the lesson of patience: that not everything that you want can come right now, that there a need for a sort of endurance, and waiting for something that is worth happening. Is that not the case with our lives and our faith as well? Are we not also people who wait expectantly for something? I mean, if you think about it, between where we are now in our lives and where God wills us and wants us to be, there is a need for patience.
Between the Incarnation, the coming of God in Christ in Bethlehem over two thousand years ago, and what the Creed refers to as “the return of Christ”, what is required is patience. Between celebrations of Christmases past, and those moments where we have sung great and glorious hymns to next week when we celebrate his arrival again, although only liturgically of course, what is required is patience between now and what is to come. Patience!
One of the greatest and the most challenging lessons for humanity is that lesson of being patient, and to realize in that patience – and this is the key – there can be growth. In that moment between now and what we hope and wait for, we ourselves can develop and our faith can strengthen. Nowhere do we see this more clearly than in our passage from the lectionary from the Book of James that was written for those who were in the early Christian community, who were probably of Jewish origin, and because of the persecution of the Romans had been scattered all over and had to leave Jerusalem and had to find safer places, sometimes in exile.
James writes a letter, really almost as the Bishop of Jerusalem in some ways or the Head of the Jerusalem Church at that time in its very fledgling state. He says to them, “You have got to be patient. You have got to be patient, because the Lord is near.” Now, the word “near” in Greek is not the same as the word “soon.” We tend to read “near” as “soon.” But what James is saying is that there will come a time when Jesus, the Messiah, the Lord, will come again. We don’t know when it is, but it is near, it is in some time, and between now and that some time we need to have patience.
He brilliantly likens it as an analogy to what many of the people in Israel at the time would understand: it is about a farmer, and a farmer is somebody who plants seed in the ground and, having planted a seed in the ground, then has to wait, to use the phrase “patiently for the autumn and the spring rains to come” and for the crops to grow. In other words, between the sowing and the reaping is the waiting, and what has to happen is there has to be patience.
In what I think is a brilliant insight, our organist suggested to me last week that maybe as the hymn before the sermon we sing We Plough the Fields and Scatter, because it summarizes the wonders of what James was talking about: the good seed on the ground. But it is the Lord who waters and it the Lord who gives growth. Christopher had it absolutely right! So, rather than sing it, maybe our Choir can reprise it.
We plough the fields and scatter
the good seed on the land,
but it is fed and watered
by your almighty hand;
you send the snow in winter,
the warmth to swell the grain,
the breezes and the sunshine,
and soft refreshing rain.
All good gifts around us
are sent from heaven above;
we thank you, God, O holy God,
for all your love.
See why we chose it – from the Book of James? Perfect! He was also prophetic – the snow in winter and everything. Isn’t that a wonderful rendition of exactly what patience means? It means waiting between the actual sowing and the reaping, and in our lives and in our spiritual lives at Christmas, we have to wait patiently. But, what does that patience look like in real terms and in real life?
One thing that we need to be clear of and that is that patience does not mean passivity. Passivity is that sort of fatalism that says that everything is going to be all right and everything is going to work out, and there is no need for us to do anything. In his great I Had a Dream speech, Martin Luther King, Jr. referred to “the tranquilizing pill of gradualism” that sort of sense that everything will work out all right, and that it will give us a tranquilizing sense of peace. But it is fatalism.
There are many people who actually misunderstand fatalism. They are not actually people of faith in the sense that they believe in the power of God acting in the world; they are just fatalists who believe everything is going to work out all right. As I said before, one of the most dangerous things that human beings can practice and believe in is fatalism. Why? It is because there is no room for prayer! If you believe in fatalism then why bother asking God for anything? Why bother invoking the holy name? Why not just let everything happen as it is, let things fall where they will. Sometimes, it can even be dangerous.
Not long ago, I was in a conversation with somebody not from our church about a project that I had been involved in and an organization that I had been involved in that had helped native housing and put in sinks and plumbing and safe water and electricity in native housing in the north, and how wonderful it was to see the response of the people to this gift right before Christmas. The person corrected me, raising his arms in indignation or resignation, and said, “Andrew, the problem is just so big that sort of thing is just a drop in the ocean. It doesn’t really deal with the systemic issues that are facing the people. It doesn’t really help that many people at all.”
I thought to myself after that conversation that person needs to look in the eyes of those families that had been helped and look into their living rooms and see them rejoicing and see the warmth that surrounds them, the fresh water that is secure for them. And yes, sometimes these things seem like a drop in the bucket in an ocean of inequity and social problems, but really what he was advocating was passivity.
Somebody else will deal with it. What kind of a faith? That is not patience; that is passivity. We could do the same thing with our own El Hogar Group and say, “Don’t bother going to Tegucigalpa and bringing love and joy to the children who are there and learning from them and giving them learning. We can just hope for the bigger picture to change: the street children in Tegucigalpa are not victims, but are safe” and we can sit back.
That isn’t patience and it isn’t faith; it is passivity. Even in my beloved South Africa, as we talked about last week, one of the great dangers that we faced was not those who were actually overtly supporting apartheid. They were there, but it was those who sat on the sidelines passively just allowing the injustice to continue without, as Dietrich Bonheoffer would put it, “putting a spoke in the wheel of injustice.” Passivity is not patience.
Patience, biblically, is active patience. It is the active seeking of God’s will for our lives and for the world. It is discerning God’s leadership and activity in our lives. James is saying to that church that is being persecuted and scattered all over, “Be patient, but do not be passive. Be expectant, but do not give up. Stand firm.” He even uses a wonderful phrase, and you can translate it any way you want, but it really means be steadfast, be strong in the interregnum in a sense between the coming of Christ and what is still to come. But, believe as you are patient, and believe that God’s grace is greater than any passivity or anything that you might expect.
I read a lovely story – I really am on to children today, I don’t know why – about a mother and a son who went to a corner store. It was in the days probably when corner stores were a little more personal than some of them are today. The owner of the store saw the little lad come in, and after the mother had made the purchases, he reached down and handed him a jar and he said, “Would you like to pull out some suckers and take them away with you?”
The little boy was coy and shy, and said, “No thank you.”
His mother looked perplexed and said, “Are you sure you don’t want the suckers, dear?”
The boy replies, “No mother, I don’t want the suckers.”
So, the owner reached into the jar and he pulled out suckers and he gave them to the boy, and the boy smiled and left. The mother said to the boy, “Why were you so reluctant to take the suckers? Why didn’t you do it yourself?”
The boy said, “It is because the owner of the store’s hand is bigger than mine, and I get more suckers from him than I can get for myself!”
Oh, wise children today!
This is true in our faith, is it not? Is it not that God gives us greater than we ourselves can ever anticipate? Oftentimes, when we lose faith and we cease to be steadfast, we lose that sense of hope and optimism that our faith in Christ brings. It seems to me that wherever you are in your life this day, there is the need for patience. There is a need for patience and wisdom and growth between, for example, the conception of a child and the birth of a child. For those who are waiting for a new job or new employment between now and that moment, there is patience. For those facing legal challenges and problems down the road, there is a need for that growing patience. For those between the moments when they receive bad medical news and healing, there is patience.
Our faith teaches us patience but the patience is a faithful patience. It is also a patience that requires the love and the nurture and the support of one another. James realized that those early Christians who were being persecuted for their faith needed each other. He says to them quite clearly you know, “You must stop grumbling and arguing with one another. If you are continually divided amongst yourselves, if you are not working for a common goal and a common purpose, then this waiting can be a very difficult time.”
The great G. K. Chesterton once wrote this about Jesus, and I have thought it is fantastic. Chesterton is arguing that Jesus was human and divine, fully human and fully divine. He says that the church reflects this. Chesterton wrote: “It is a paradox, our faith, that Christ was not a being apart from God and humans like an elf, nor yet being half human and half not like a centaur, but both things at once, and both things thoroughly: very human, very God.”
Chesterton suggests that the church that follows that very Christ, who we celebrate at this time of the year is the body of Christ and reflects that very paradox: the paradox of being human with all our frailties, but also following the divine and God’s guidance. Patience requires us then not only to be patient with one another, but to patiently wait on God’s strength and God’s spirit to work through us.
He also requires of us the need to be resolute in our patience, persistent in our patience. It is so easy to give up! I see that in all kinds of situations: people who are struggling with ill health just give up, people who are wrestling with their studies just give up, and people who have a job that seems to be unfulfilling just give up. People give up. They don’t remain resolute at times. To those who are patient and resolute, often the really good things happen, but they need to be patient in wisdom.
Some years ago when I lived in Ottawa, I went to the National Research Council, and the NRC is an amazing organization. I was taken with a group of dignitaries – even though I am not a dignitary, I am a free-loader who went on to a good lunch – I went along to see what the NRC was doing, and it is quite remarkable: some of their research is mind boggling for a non-scientist like myself, quite exceptional.
One thing that I really understood was how important Canada is to the area of astronomy, and how some of the leading thinkers in astronomy have been Canadians and how we have been engaged and involved in space, not only with our star candidates who are the astronauts, but with the Canadarm and many, many other things we have provided over the years. It is amazing what our country does!
One of the researchers told us a story about a man called Clyde Tombaugh who was a researcher in astronomy from Kansas in the United States. He told the story because he wanted us to understand how diligent and patient you have to be to do that kind of detailed work. He described what this man did between March of 1929 and April of 1930. In that year, this man discovered Pluto. For a hundred years they had been looking for Pluto, but in one year he found it. Using a particular type of microscope, I think it was called the Double Microscope, but it is a long time ago when I was told this.
With this microscope they would take pictures of the Universe, and they would take millions of pictures: frame by frame by frame. Under the microscope, he would spend all his time looking at hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of photographs, just looking for one thing in all of it. And what he had been looking for was Pluto. Tombaugh was asked what the single most important thing required by a scientist. It is patience!
What is one of the greatest gifts a Christian can have? It is patience! Between now and the yet to come, between the Incarnation and the return of Christ, between our lives as they are now and where God ultimately wants us to be, what he calls us for is patience. In Advent, to quote the hymn, we simply plant the seed and we open ourselves to God, who gives the growth. Be patient – for what happens with God is worth waiting for! Amen.