2 Peter 3:8-15
July 9, 2023
Be patient, therefore,
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. Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of
the Lord is near. Beloved, do not grumble against one another, so that you
may not be judged. See, the Judge is standing at the doors! As an example
of suffering and patience, beloved, take the prophets who spoke in the name of
the Lord. Indeed we call blessed those who showed endurance. You have
heard of the endurance of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how
the Lord is compassionate and merciful.
Yesterday morning, one of you sent me a comic strip from the
local newspaper. A young boy sits in a rowboat with a fishing pole in his hand.
He says to father, “No bites.” The father replies, “Catching fish requires
patience, son.” In the second and final panel, they return home. As they walk
in the door, Mom says, “No luck?” And the son says, “Dad lost his patience
after four hours.”
I had a good chuckle, so I sent a note to the one who shared it with me. “This is why I don’t go fishing.” I have no interest in sitting in a boat for four hours, only to have nothing bite.
So I might not be qualified to preach a sermon on patience. That’s the “fruit of the day.” We’ve heard about love, joy, and peace. Today, the fruit of the Holy Spirit is patience. What does it mean to say that God can make us patient? Or that patience is a personal quality developed by the Spirit’s work in our lives?
Love, joy, peace – all of those are great gifts. Patience? That will take some work and a whole lot of time.
If you’ve been blessed with children in your life, you’ve probably learned a lesson or two. Those little shavers can be easy to love. Then the day comes when they talk back. Or they resist all that great advice that you want to offer. Or they struggle with math problems that the parents can’t figure out. Or they borrow the family car and return it with an empty gas tank, not once, but every time. And you had asked to just go pick up some milk.
Of course, the
kids grow impatient with the parents. The voice cries out from the back seat, “Are
we there yet?” The mother comes home exhausted from work and the teenager
complains there are no snacks in the cupboard.
The son pulls up a chair alongside his father’s wheelchair. With deep frustration, he says, “Daddy, you need to have something to eat. Come on, take a bite. Please?”
A good friend barely got to his job on Friday. He was driving on I-81. (Need I say any more?) He knows that, in Pennsylvania, we have only two seasons: winter and construction. He gave himself plenty of time. But there he sat, with no evidence for the delay. Traffic has simply stopped for no apparent reason. The longer he sat, the more annoyed he became. The air conditioning was on full blast – and he was getting hot.
Ever notice? Impatience is fueled by a lack of control. Try as we might, we don’t run our own schedules. We are unable to direct the lives of people we love, no matter how hard we try. Life does not allow us to get what we want, even if we work so hard to attain it. And sometimes the fish aren’t biting.
All of this is a continuing reminder that human life has limits. Ability is not infinite. Everything has a shelf life. There are plenty of people who don’t have the strength that they once did. Some cannot think as clearly as they used to. Tongues get twisted even in the most eloquent of elocutionists. Bones break. Spirits sag. Gravity takes over. Even in those with transplants or implants, no human body is completely made of steel or rubber; if it were, it would still rust and lose its bounce.
We are fragile. We are limited. We have only so much time and energy. These are the truths that reveal that we are mortals. We try so hard to outrun our frailty, fake our strength, or extend our expiration date. The truth is, in the most ultimate sense, God will have to finish what we cannot. And that’s OK. This is the beginning of wisdom.
Both of our scripture texts tackle the problem of patience by taking a long view. By looking at the problems of here and now through the sweep of eternity.
In the fifth chapter of the letter of James, James has just offered a bracing critique of how those-who-have blunder those-who-have-not. It’s a recurring human scheme. Take from the poor to feather the beds of the rich. Brother James doesn’t hold back. He turns to those who exploit the poor and gives an old-fashioned, “Woe to you” prophetic speech. “Your gold and silver will rust. Your fancy clothes will be unthreaded. You have given cheap wages to your workers and kept the excess only for yourself. But God is going to come.”
Then James turns from the rich toward the poor, particularly the poor within his own congregation. And he says, “Be patient, therefore, my beloved, until the coming of the Lord.”
Now, some would say, “Brother James, you’re telling the downtrodden to stay in their place.” Kind of sounds like what the eight white ministers said to Martin Luther King, Jr., when he was jailed during the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1963. They put it in the newspaper, “Just cool it, King. Don’t get yourself worked up. These things will work out over time.” Dr. King fired back, “Justice delayed is justice denied.” We serve a God of justice, a God who will not wait while a few exploit the many.
See, there’s a way to be patient in all faithfulness. It’s not to throw up the hands and say there’s nothing we can do. Rather, Gospel Patience requires us to keep going on, to keep working for God’s dominion, to keep our eyes on the prize and work for the blessings that God intends for all the people. As Brother James says in his letter, “You fulfill the Law of God if you love your neighbor as yourself. But if you show partiality, you commit sin.” Patience should always be an expression of love.
We can hear it in the word that Brother James uses. His word for “patience” is not the general word for tolerance or endurance. It’s the word “makrothumeo.” Makro means “long” or “distant.” Thumeo is a word for “passion.” The sense is we’re in this for the long haul. We’re not going to give up. We are building slowly for an eternity if that’s what it takes. We want the fire in our hearts to keep burning and never go out.
No surprise that for Brother James, this kind of patience is a word about human relationships. This is really the payoff pitch. He’s telling us to take a long view of one another. An eternal view of one another. A patient, long-passion view.
In one of my
favorite movies, Paul Newman plays a ne’er-do-well named Sully. Deep into his
sixties, he never grew up. He rents an upstairs room from Miss Beryl, his
eighth-grade English teacher. Every week, he bets on the racetrack, hoping he
might hit the jackpot. Near the end of the film, Miss Beryl says, “Do you still
bet on that horse race of yours?” Sully says, “What, the trifecta?”
Miss Beryl says, “But you still bet on it.” “Well,
sure,” says Sully, “I mean, the odds have gotta kick in sooner or later.”
Miss Beryl says, “Fine. That’s exactly the way I feel about you.”[1]
Think about the long relationships you’ve seen. The enduring relationships you’ve known. No doubts, they’ve had their bumps. There have been twists and turns in the road. There have been starts and stops and stalls – just like driving down I-81 in construction season. Patience of the Spirit does not pay attention to the distractions on the journey. Rather, it sees the journey. It looks ahead toward the destination, even if that destination takes a good long while. Patience, true patience, never lets go. Never gives up. The odds gotta kick in sooner or later.
With that in mind, we have that other text for today. It comes from the last chapter of the last book to get written down to be included for the New Testament. This is a letter from a preacher named Peter, and his message is simple: “God is eternal.” From God’s perspective, a thousand human years are like a single day. What takes forever for the likes of us is like the blink of God’s eye. Eternity is so immense. It goes on and on.
“But don’t get distracted,” says Preacher Peter. The Lord is going to come and transform everything. It’s going to happen.
OK, some would say, but why is it taking so long? Why is God so slow? Peter says, “God is not slow. No, no, no. God is patient – patient with all of you. Makrothumeo. God is giving you plenty of time to come to your senses, to return to your first love, to pick up the plow and start planting the garden of righteousness.” It’s going to take a while. Settle in for a long journey and keep going.
Eternal patience is unsettling in a world obsessed with hurry, and control, and rushing around, and instant gratification. But this is how God inclines toward us, with utmost patience. God’s patience is our opportunity to grow up, to mature and endure.
Some years ago, I was curious to learn of a monastery in the mountains of eastern France. It’s called the Grande Chartreuse. The monks live in seclusion. Nobody speaks unless they are chanting the psalms in the chapel. A filmmaker discovered them and thought this would make a great documentary. So he wrote a letter to the abbot, asking, “Can I tell your story on film? Just me, no crew. Single camera. Unobtrusive.” After a while, the abbot responded to say, “We’ll get back to you on that.”
Sixteen years later, the film maker received another letter. “We’re ready for you now, if you still wish to come.” So he packed up his camera, spent six months in a spare room in the enclosure, devoted another two and a half years to finish the documentary.[2]
I was intrigued to hear this, so I ordered the DVD and showed it to one of our groups. It was a two-hour film. We lasted about twenty-five, maybe thirty minutes. What did you think? Nobody said anything. Maybe they thought I was out of my mind. One crusty old bird, a man named Ed, spoke up. “It’s like watching paint dry.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “But the film is a parable. Think how patient God is with all of us. Makrothumeo. Be patient, beloved. Be patient, for God has “long passion” toward you and me.
There’s a rich writing by
the French Jesuit, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. I don’t know if it’s a poem or a
prayer. De Chardin was a paleontologist (talk about taking a long view of things!).
And he was a mystic, which means he took God very seriously. I’m going to read
what he wrote and then we will move on. He speaks to all of us:
Above all,
trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.
And yet it is
the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think
it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could
say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.[3]
[1] Nobody’s Fool (1994). https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110684/
[2] Philip Groning, Into Great
Silence (2004), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_Great_Silence
[3] Pierre
Teilhard de Chardin, SJ, excerpted from Hearts on Fire
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