Patience is more than a virtue

 

 

One need only travel to Africa or South America, Western Europe or Southeast Asia, to you realise that time moves in a very different way. And the conception of time and what constitutes something timely, is very different, one culture from another. It’s important because it alters the way that we live our lives. It affects the pace of human development; some cultures move at a tremendous pace, rushing to achieve goals quickly; others have a more solid, slow approach to those forms of development.

 

It affects the way that we relate to one another. For some, we are moving on a conveyor belt so quickly that our relationships with others are passing, simply for the purpose of achieving the next immediate goal. Others simply stop, enjoy the conversation, and the goal is secondary to that preceding it.

 

It affects the way that we look at the environment. Some cultures are rushing headlong into development without thought of the consequences to the environment. Others find that they move at a slower pace. Even in the realm of decision-making, the conception of time affects how we do things and what thought we them. 

 

I might have mentioned once before, but when the CBC reporter, Brian Stewart, gave a talk here at the church, he mentioned that politicians in our culture, have to make very quick decisions, because of the demands of technology. We want sudden responses, an immediate tweet, that will tell us what we need to do and how we should live. So politicians often don’t have the time – what he called, the luxury of being able to inwardly digest all the information and contemplate its effects.

 

Cultures exercise themselves differently. An example of that occurred this past week and made me sit up and take notice. Outside of our building there was a gentleman who had begged for seven years, certainly since I’ve lived there. I’d gotten to know him quite well. Marial and I had talked to him many times. He was from the Ojibway tribe, and had been in the city for many years and was a mentor to many other young people who would come into the city and who were living often very dangerous lives. He was a good man.

 

This week, he was found him dead on the streets. He had entered into a coma and died. I was shocked and saddened by this news. I didn’t know how to convey it, so I went to some of the other young men with whom he associated, who sat in the same places he sat nearly every day and I asked them a bunch of questions: what happened, how did he die, when is the service? What is going to happen, who is going to be leading it, where will he be buried?

 

As I went on with the barrage of questions, they were astonished. They said, no decisions have been made. Some of his family don’t know, some of the people in the community haven’t heard yet. The elders will have to meet to decide what to do; there might be a service later on here, in Toronto, there might be one on the reserve from which he came – we don’t know. But we need time.

 

And so here was me with my agenda, wanting to know all the facts, because that’s the way I handle things. I want to know what is going on, what can be done. They’re still grieving, they’re still taking their time, they’re consulting the elders, there’s no hurry. Everything has to be sorted out, people have to know, people have to grieve first. 

 

I realised that our conceptions of time were just totally different. Not that one was any better than the other, just different. They had a patience about them that I didn’t possess, and I had an eagerness to know things and get things done, that for them was secondary to the grieving they were going through. So, I learned, I stopped, I sat on the wall and we just talked about it. It was a reminder that indeed our conceptions of time are different, and so too, our patience. Patience is affected by how we see time, and time is affected by how we understand patience. Patience is the sine qua non of a civilised society. A civil society needs a degree of patience, and perhaps if our culture is starved of anything, if there is something that we desperately need, it is patience. 

 

The Apostle Paul would totally agree. Today’s passage, which is familiar to many of you, from 1 Corinthians 13, begins with, “Love is patient and kind.” That whole passage on love, I liken to a prism; the love and the love of God reflects through that prism into many forms of light. Love is patient and kind, love is gentle, love does not keep a record of wrongs. Love does not enjoy evil, but rejoices in the good, love never ends.

 

Do you see what I mean? There are all these streams of light that come out of the love of God, as Paul describes, and patience is one of those. It’s interesting that in Greek, the word for patience literally means “long-spirited”. Love is long-spirited, and patience is long-spirited. For Paul, of course, the patience that he’s talking about is the patience of the love of God. In the fourth century, Dionysus coined the phrase, “patience is a virtue" and we repeat that many times over, don’t we? Patience is a virtue.

 

But it is far more than a virtue. It is predicated on two really powerful things, and these are powerful things that I think all of us need to grasp. The first is the belief that God is continually at work. Patience is based on the belief that God is continually at work.

 

Our lives, are they not, are characterised by gaps. There are gaps between what we experience now and what we anticipate will happen. There are gaps between what we know and what we don’t know. There are gaps between what we think God is doing, and what we’re experiencing now, that seems not to be fulfilled. There are gaps in our lives, where we are. It affects our relationships, often becoming the source of anger and doubt. We become confused and irritable, sometimes with ourselves sometimes with others or the universe in general. The problem lies in, that we often fill those gaps with things that are not helpful, and we lose our sense of patience. We can’t stand the gaps of understanding between what we know now and what will happen next. We live with those gaps and those gaps make us impatient. 

 

One of the things that struck me as I was working on this sermon and reading some of the parables of Jesus in the light of the need for patience, was that so many of the parables involve patience. Take for example the parable of the prodigal son, one that most of us know, where a young man comes to his father and asks for his inheritance, while the other son stays at home. The son who wants the inheritance, spends it. He lives a life of pleasure and then a life of penury, he suffers for what he’s done. He was impatient; wanting his money now. He comes to himself and realises that in the midst of all his impatience, he has to return home to his father. Of course, the father is God, and God is waiting for this lost son to come home. When he does so, he kills the fatted calf, makes a big deal of him coming home, and he receives him with joy. But what does this teach us? Well, it teaches us that the young man was impatient but the father – the father was patient and waited for his son to come home. You see, the son filled the gap in his life with things that ultimately didn’t fulfill, because he was impatient and it nearly destroyed him.

 

Another parable is the parable of the sower, and the sown seeds. Of course, the seed has to grow, but it cannot just grow on its own, it can’t just spring up from nowhere. A seed has to be watered, see the sun, and to go through the seasons. When Jesus tells the parable of the sower, it’s like the Word of God has to take time to grow. It has to find a place to ferment and develop, it doesn’t just happen overnight; as Kierkegaard himself said, there is nothing that has ever been made that really happens immediately. There was patience, even for the Word of God to grow.

 

I think one of the greatest examples, and for those of you who are in business, this should be a classic one for you, was about the wise man who invested his money and became a money manager. As a money manager, he could have simply left the money, forgotten about it and then handed it back as it had come, giving a quick response to the owner who had had the money in the first place. Or to quietly, systematically, work hard to develop it and make it grow.

 

The problem was one client wanted instant success, practicing impatience. The other let the money grow and develop, was patiently faithful to God. What is it - it’s not when you’re in the market, it’s how long you are in the market, that they keep saying, right. Patience, patience, patience.

 

Jesus knew it. He knew that this was necessary for anything in life to grow and develop, because he knew that whether it was the prodigal and God at work, or a seed in the ground that needed to grow, or money that was invested, that was part of the kingdom of God, it required patience and it required faith.

 

In an interesting essay in the Hindu newspaper, writer S. Chatterjee, The Tyranny of Immediacy, in which he said, there is simply today not enough time to think, or reflect. Everyone wants an immediate response. Employers are driving people into the ground, because they want an immediate response without the thought that is necessary to produce good things. And if you think it’s only in the corporate world, that’s not true. Not long ago, I received an email from a friend, and it had one of those exclamation points on it, which means it’s very important, and so I opened it. He said, “Andrew, can you write me a few paragraphs, or a couple of paragraphs, on why God is good, and can you have it ready within the next twenty minutes before I go into a meeting?”

 

Well, you know, I’m a theologian. It takes me a little while to think about these things, so I mused on it and wrote three paragraphs for him. The first one said, “God is good.” The second one said, “God is great,” and the third one said, “Believe me, Andrew.”

 

I managed that in just under eighteen minutes. I’m kind of slow. But, I mean, really? Isn’t that the world we’re in? Don’t you get it all the time? We need it now – the tyranny of immediacy. The problem lies when we apply that to God. 

 

One of the people I’ve mentioned before, whom I met in Prague in the Czech Republic, is, I think, an absolutely great man, Tomas Halik, a Roman Catholic priest who was an advisor to Vaclav Havel. I spent some time with him and he introduced me to a book that he had written, entitled, Patience with God. In the opening paragraphs he makes this distinction, and it’s a brilliant one:

 

Patience is what I consider to be the main difference between faith, and atheism. What atheism and also religious fundamentalism and the enthusiasm of a too facile faith have in common, is how quickly they ride roughshod over the mystery we call God. And that is why I find all three approaches equally unacceptable. One must never consider mystery over and done with; mystery, unlike a mere dilemma, cannot be overcome. One must wait patiently at its threshold and persevere in it, must carry it in one’s heart just as Jesus did.

 

Wow. Part of the problem is our society does not have patience, and we lose mystery and we lose the faith, because we’re being driven to fill the gaps in our lives, rather than recognising that in the midst of those gaps, God is at work.

 

There’s another dimension, another thing on which patience is predicated, and that is even more powerful in some ways. It arises out of faith, but it is the expression of that love, it is a manifestation of that love, and basically it is the gift of living patiently with one another.

 

Rudyard Kipling once said, “We are all islands divided by seas of misunderstanding.” In other words, the seas are the gaps, and the gaps are misunderstandings, and if we’re not communicating, not patiently talking to one another, not spending time with one another, if we’re impatient always, like I was with those young Ojibway men, to get to the facts now, before dealing with the individuals that were right there in front of me, then those misunderstandings and those seeds become oceans. And those oceans, particularly in a world with such diverse cultures, with such diverse understandings and conceptions of time, become all the more awkward and all the more problematic.

 

As a form of confession, I must say that I was slapped across the head with this just a couple of years ago, when I was in a parking lot and a gentleman in a much larger vehicle backed into mine. He backed into the side of my car, and I can’t tell you the emotions that I had, because it would get me in trouble on air. I was ready to do very unpleasant things to him and say very unpleasant things to him. I got out and I could feel the rage, the adrenalin – it was a rugby match and he was going down – the brutality of my thoughts were such, until getting out of the vehicle, that by the way, was still stuck into the side of mine, a gentleman and his granddaughter. The gentleman exacerbated things by saying, “I think you might have just moved into me.”

 

Lord help me at this moment, and He did. I looked at the gentleman and I realised, this man did not look well – he really didn’t – he looked frail. So I suddenly calmed down and we exchanged information. No one was hurt, it’s only a car. I did remonstrate with him about the possibility that because my car wasn’t even running at the time, I couldn’t have moved into him. But having made my point, I realised, this was a sad man who knew that something bad had happened. I spoke to his granddaughter for a moment while he was fiddling through his dash, trying to get his insurance, and she just told me that they were just on their way to hospital for him to receive his chemotherapy.

 

I paused and thought to myself, I have no understanding of this man’s life at this moment, and if I only base this on what immediately has happened to my car, notwithstanding my juxtaposition in all of this, if that is all I know, and if I do not take into account who he is, then I am the one who is in error. It was as if the Lord had given me patience.

 

In the book of Jeremiah, there is this wonderful story about God, and it’s where Jeremiah is angry and frustrated. He is mad at his nation, and he’s mad precisely because they’re unjust, they’re not treating their children with kindness, they don’t take care of the innocent, they’re heading towards disaster. Jeremiah knows they’re heading towards disaster and he’s angry, and he’s worried about what’s going to happen. The Lord leads him to a potter’s house and when he gets there, he observes the potter has some clay on a wheel. At times, the clay becomes misshapen, but the potter carefully moulds and reshapes it, even though it’s gone wrong, and he creates something different than it had been in the beginning.

 

What came to Jeremiah was that the clay was Israel; the clay was the people of God and the potter was God himself. In God’s hands the clay was remoulded, and even though it had gone wrong and had been misshapen, the potter did not give up on the clay, but moulded it into something else. The image of the potter and the clay was powerful to Jesus. This was an image that was an epitome of faith – it was the epitome of the patience of the potter with the clay.

 

But the clay had to be moulded by the potter, and be patient and trust that the potter would create something beautiful. The potter had to be patient with the clay, that in remoulding it and reshaping it, he would turn it into something beautiful. This, to me, is the epitome of patience. It is God forming our lives and is us patiently recognising that we are in God’s hands and this is what should fill the gaps in our lives, and this is patience. Amen.