Sermon for December 12th (Patience)

I’d like you to look at the symbol up on the screen this morning. It is the Chinese word for patience. In the Chinese language, words are expressed through symbols or pictures. Some words are made up of two or more word-pictures put together. In this instance, the Chinese word for patience is made up of two other word-pictures: the word for knife and the word for heart. The Chinese word for patience is expressed with a knife pictured directly above a heart.

What a magnificent expression of what being patient actually feels like! As that knife hovers over the heart, it seems as easily able to stab as to be taken away. There is a sense of expectation, of dread, of relief and of fear all wrapped up into one—all the feelings that are involved with being patient. “Be patient, then, brothers and sisters, until the Lord’s coming.” The book of James tells us.

There are many different times to be patient. We must be patient when we are waiting in line for a hamburger at McDonalds and there is a new girl training as a cashier. We must be patient when we are stuck in traffic during rush hour. We must be patient as we wait for our children to grow older and more mature. We must be patient as we pay off our debts and put off buying the things we really want. But, in the book of James, and in the story of John the Baptist that we will read again in a moment, we are called to be patient in another situation.

The book of James was written for a Jewish audience who had become Christians. Just before James calls his readers to patience, he has been talking about the oppression of believers at the hands of wicked people. It appears that these wicked people must have been rich landowners who were acting unjustly to their workers and harvesters so that they might claim more money for themselves. Those workers were probably the readers of this letter. James tells his listeners that, rather than grumbling against those wicked people, they ought to be patient and wait for the Lord to act. To continue suffering rather than making it go away by their own power.

Romans chapter 12, “Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord.” It is hard to allow someone to hold a knife over your heart. The word that we translate today as “patience” is sometimes translated “longsuffering” in the Bible and I think that that particular word might get to the point better. To wait on the Lord to fulfill his word often means suffering not just a little while but a long time. Patience is the hard road, the narrow road that Christ calls us to take. Even when it would feel better to take matters into your own hands, being patient means to suffer the wait of God’s perfect timing.

Being patient isn’t easy for anyone . . . not even for our favorite short-tempered, locust eating prophet John the Baptist. He was the one who cried out, “Repent for the kingdom of heaven is near.” He was the one who was preparing the way for the Lord. He was the one foretelling the coming Messiah who would baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire! John was there when the Spirit of God descended on Jesus like and dove. He was there when the voice came from heaven saying, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”

But, after that great day down by the riverside, time passed. Jesus began to preach, he called his disciples, he healed the sick and all, but the world wasn’t changing all that much. John was suffering in jail and there was the supposed Messiah, Jesus, walking around across the countryside. You might imagine that John was a little disappointed. The results he had hoped for had not occurred. Where was the kingdom of heaven that he had believed was so near?

Don’t tell me you don’t understand this. I know you get this. This kind of disappointment is par for the course for a Christian. It happens every time you come home from church all inspired to live a new life and then get in a big fight with your spouse. It happens when you are on your way to celebrate Thanksgiving or Christmas and run across a homeless man holding up a sign for needing food on the side of the road. It happened to the disciples when they saw their Lord and Master, Jesus, dead on the cross that Good Friday. We know what God has promised. We believe it. But as time passes and suffering increases we start to doubt the words, we doubt ourselves and we get impatient.

A professor of mine tells a story of a older man and woman who called him over one afternoon. They drank coffee for a while and then the husband asked his wife to go into the other room to get him something. She got up slowly and hobbled out to the front room with great difficulty. The husband looked at my professor and said, “Jesus said that he came that we might have life and have it abundantly.” He looked at his wife and motioned toward her, “So how do you explain that?” How do we explain this discrepancy between God’s promises and our predicaments? How do you think John felt when he was sitting in prison even though he knew, he knew, that the Messiah of God had finally come?

“When John, who was in prison, heard about the deeds of the Messiah, he sent his disciples to ask him, ‘Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?” You can just hear the disappointment maybe even the impatience coming out of that statement. Here God’s people have been waiting and waiting thousands of years for the Messiah to come and save them, to deliver them, and finally he comes and . . . and . . . yes he’s a nice guy, but . . . where’s the new kingdom? Why doesn’t he just take out his sword and start cutting off the heads of God’s enemies take over! The Israelites were expecting a warrior Messiah and what they got was Jesus.

But Jesus doesn’t back away. He’s knows what’s going on here. John is disappointed. He’s upset. He might even be a little mad! But Jesus says, “Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor. Blessed is anyone who does not stumble on account of me.”

Even though the world wanted a warrior Messiah who took charge and took names, that’s not what God had promised. God spoke through his prophet Isaiah chapter 35, “Then the eyes of the blind will be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then will the lame leap like a deer, and the mute tongue shout for joy.” And Isaiah 61, “The Spirit of the Sovreign Lord is on me, because the Lord has appointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners.” Jesus knew that it was necessary for him to die on the cross for the salvation of the world and so he followed God’s will rather than the will of others.

After James reminds his readers to be patient and wait until the Lord’s coming, he warns them against the temptation to do just the opposite. What is the opposite of patience? James says, “Don’t grumble against one another, brothers and sisters, or you will be judged. The Judge is standing at the door!” Think about it. When things don’t go your way, when you are standing in line for the checkout with ten bazillion people in front of you, when you are sitting in a chair waiting for your wife to try on her twentieth pair of jeans, when your husband says there are only one and half minutes of basketball left on the clock and you know that it will be another half hour what do we do? We grumble. We complain. We gossip. We slander. And yet, when we refuse to wait for God to do His work in His perfect timing and choose to go our own way the results can be disastrous.

James says to be patient until the Lord’s coming. That God has things under control and he will take care of it. Even, as I said before, if you are suffering! But it is so hard to keep suffering, to be patient, as we wait for God to do his thing. If we feel that we are suffering unjustly, we get impatient for God to relive that suffering and so we take matters into our own hands. Maybe if we hurt those who have hurt us by speaking negatively about them our suffering will end. At least we’ll feel better. It might be aimed at the slow cashier, your spouse or your boss. I don’t care if it is the truth or a lie—talking negatively about another person in public is slander. When we get impatient with God and slander another person we believe we are only hurting them, but God tells us differently, “Whoever slanders his neighbor in secret, him will I put to silence; whoever has haughty eyes and a proud heart, him will I not endure.”

Jesus said, “What comes out of a man is what makes him ‘unclean’. For from within, out of men’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and make a man ‘unlcean.’ And it is not simply those who are speaking who are suffer the consequences, it takes two to gossip and slander-a speaker and a listener. Please don’t do it! Repent and turn away from this behavior before it destroys you. There are going to be many times in your life when bad things happen to you or when you want things to change. God tells us to cry out to him, to leave room for his wrath, not to speak out against others in our wrath.

When you are struggling to be patient, the temptation is to grumble, to complain, to gossip and slander. But God teaches a different technique for dealing with suffering. It’s called: hope. Romans chapter 5, “We rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. We also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance produces chatacter; and character hope. And hope does not disappoint us because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.” We are called to trust in God’s power and in His perfect timing and not our own. “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Even in the midst of suffering, we have an opportunity to see the future that God has planned for us. To wait patiently and hope. God’s work is always worth waiting for. Amen.