This is a hard time of year to be patient, isn’t it? How many of you wait to start playing Christmas music until after Thanksgiving? Anyone start earlier? Personally, I wait until the day after Thanksgiving, which is typically when we get our house ready for the season. It’s become my tradition to play Christmas tunes as we begin trimming the tree, of course beginning with that Mariah Carey classic, “All I Want for Christmas is You.”
It’s a hard time of year for patience, because there’s so much to love about the season. The gatherings. The preparations for Christmas Day. The services. It’s especially hard for kids who are excited for Santa’s arrival, all those presents ready to show up under the tree on Christmas morning.
I like to think I’m a fairly patient person. I’m the middle of three boys. As teens, my older brother had figured out where my parents put our unwrapped Christmas presents after their shopping trips. When we’d be walking home from the bus stop, my brother would ask, “Troy, do you want to know what you’re getting for Christmas.” And I said, “No way!” I always loved the surprise of that morning. My brothers may have scoped everything out, but not me. The patience leads to the glory, right?
When you get married, you also marry into the other person’s traditions. Jess’ family has many traditions that I’ve become accustomed to. Florida is often a part of their Christmastime, which my career has made a challenge since y’all expect me to work Christmas Eve. Even though her family is not Presbyterian, Jess’ grandmother attended Faith Presbyterian in Cape Coral, so that’s where we’d go for Christmas Eve service.
The Hauser family has a Swedish heritage, and they’ve used that heritage as a reason (or what I like to call an excuse) for how they handle Christmas Eve. Their claim is that Christmas Eve is when you open all the family presents, leaving Christmas Day for Santa’s presents only.
The last time we were all together for Christmas Eve in Florida was almost two decades ago, but it’s seared in my mind. We’d made our way back from the worship service. We gathered around the tree, and it was a free-for-all. Everyone found their pile of gifts and started tearing into them. I was aghast. The room was a flurry of noise and flying paper. No one knew who was opening what.
If you know anything about me, you know that I like things orderly. What was happening all around me was the furthest thing from orderly I could imagine. So, I just sat there with my pile of presents, waiting. Once the chaos died down, someone asked, “Troy, aren’t you going to open your presents?” So, I opened one, and then set the pile back under the tree. “Those are for Christmas, and Christmas isn’t here yet,” I said.
My willingness to wait paid off. The next day, when it came time to open gifts, I took my time, while everyone got to watch me open presents on Christmas Day…the day you’re supposed to open them. Just like Jesus did. Right? (OK, that last part isn’t true, but I’m still in favor of my way of handling Christmas.)
It’s a hard time of year to be patient, but that’s what this season is all about — the waiting. Christmas isn’t here yet. That begins on the 25th and then stretches for twelve more days. This is Advent. For four Sundays and the weeks in between, Christians observe this season of preparation, a time to get our lives ready for the coming of Christ on Christmas.
It’s Advent, not Christmas, friends. We’re trying to order our lives around God’s story, not our culture’s. And that’s so hard. Even those who wait on the Christmas music until the day after Thanksgiving are surrounded by all the signs of what our culture believes about Christmas. There are the good parts of it — the attention paid to families and friends, the warm gatherings, the gift-giving among them. But there are also the not-so-good parts of it — the crass commercialism, the feel-good stories that sentimentalize away the actual gravity of the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us. And this is why we strive to hold back on Christmas as much as possible and focus on Advent. (The floodgates are about to open next week, friends. There’s only so much we can do. And if you are really excited about Christmas, make sure you’re here at 10 a.m. on the Sunday after Christmas where it will be all Christmas music, all the time!)
So, Advent is all about waiting and patience. It is all about anticipating the coming of Christ to the world, but this anticipation has two streams. The first is the one that gets most of our attention in this season, the birth of Jesus to Mary and Joseph 2000 years ago. The Messiah was born to us all those many years ago, and his birth has changed everything. It’s worth our attention and faith. But the second stream of anticipation is the harder one to grasp since we’re still waiting for it — the return of Jesus.
James wrote this to an early Christian community. “Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord.” They believed and we also believe that, in the fullness of time, Jesus is coming to set all things right. It’s been my experience that this vital part of our faith is easy to list as basic Christian belief but much harder to live with my life oriented towards yearning for Jesus’ return.
Why? Well, the vast majority of us live fairly decent lives. We have warm homes. We can travel from time to time. We have access to the world on small devices we keep in our pockets. We have well-stocked grocery stores. We have laws that protect us from a lot of injustice. Life is pretty good for us.
Except when something takes a bad turn in the world or in our lives, very few of us are impatient for Jesus’ return, right? Frankly, most of us would rather Jesus wait awhile to come again. We have plans, after all — the big trip we’ve been saving for, the teen ready to go to school, the family moving closer to home after years spent far away. For many of us, life can border on wonderful — good enough that we wouldn’t mind the new creation holding off a bit longer.
So, we’re impatient for Christmas to get here, but at times we are perfectly fine waiting for Jesus his sweet time to return.
But our patience shouldn’t be grounded in our tolerance for decent lives; rather, our patience should be grounded in our desire for God to have the time to set all things right. Our lives might be generally decent if not downright fabulous, but so much of the world groans under suffering through poverty, violence, and corruption.
So, our patience isn’t solely for us. It’s for the benefit of others. It’s for the whole world. Elsewhere James urges his community to have “endurance,” which is different than patience. Endurance is passive. It can be simply waiting. But the word James uses three times for patience in these four verses is fundamentally different. It is active. It is expectant. It is a purposeful state of mind that steels itself to be forbearing.
James compares patience to the farmer who is waiting for the crop to be ready for harvest. There is so much waiting and patience involved in farming. There’s time for letting the ground go fallow. There’s the time for plowing and preparing the soil. Then seeds are sown. And watered. And watered. And watered. For weeks and months, the seeds turn into plants. Finally, they bud and flower. They put on their fruit. It ripens. And when the fullness of time has come, the harvest is ready. It’s only after all of that that the purpose of all of their labor has borne fruit.
Our patience, then, is to imitate God’s patience, which has run so long as to envelop even us — people born thousands of years later on a totally different side of the world — into this long-running story of salvation.
James offers us this, “As an example of suffering and patience, beloved, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord.” And our readings today turn our attention to one of those prophets, John the Baptist. He’s such a vital part of Jesus’ story, the one God sent to prepare the way for the Messiah. But that didn’t mean his life was easy. Rather, it was rough.
He lived and ministered in the wilderness. While many people came to him to repent and be baptized, many others were angered by him. He called the religious “a brood of vipers.” He spoke the truth to power, and this landed him in prison in a place known as the Machaerus, one of Herod’s fortresses located just east of the Dead Sea.
John’s followers were tending to his needs, and he sent them to ask Jesus a question. “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” This is curiosity on John’s behalf, but I think it’s also coming from a place of hopelessness. He’s God’s prophet, and now he’s landed himself in prison, which is actually an underground pit, a place of despair. It’s so human to have hit this point, isn’t it? Did I stake my life on the right things? Is my suffering worth it? Will it end? Have I wasted my life? Is there any hope? That’s really what John is asking while he waits in the pit for what’s next. Even the strongest of faith can find themselves questioning when things are hard.
Jesus answers John’s despair by quoting from Isaiah 35 and 61. “You tell John,” Jesus says, “The blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” All good things, right? Except Jesus skips over part of the same verse from Isaiah 61. He doesn’t add, “to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners.” Imagine being John in prison, knowing that Jesus has left this part out. I suspect his heart sank. He was waiting for God to liberate him and all of the world, yet Jesus makes it clear that the time is not right for that.
In the not-too-distant future, John’s life will come to an end at the hands of his captors. John had spoken the truth of Herod’s immoral behavior, taking his brother’s wife as his own — the very thing that landed him in the pit. Eventually, the royal court decides they’ve had enough of John. He’s beheaded, his life ended in the brutal hands of the powerful and violent.
“As an example of suffering and patience, beloved, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord,” James tells us. Oh, how I wish that I could offer us an easier path! Imagine church growth if our message was ease and prosperity! But, it’s not. It’s the way of the cross. It’s the way of patient endurance. It’s the way of “not yet” and of praying with fervency, “Come, Lord Jesus!”
Come, Lord Jesus, into the violence of this world where hatred is present over our airwaves and in our streets.
Come, Lord Jesus, into the darkness of mounting bills and broken relationships.
Come, Lord Jesus, into our churches trying to find their footing in a world where the church has moved far from the center of our lives.
Come, Lord Jesus, and give us patience in the waiting and hope in our wondering.
This Advent season where we wait for Christ’s coming at Christmas, where we strive to see his Spirit at work here and now, and yearn for his coming again, I pray that you might find a new way of perceiving the world — to be watchful for the ways Jesus is drawing near to you here and now. Are you yearning for that? Are you sensitive to his presence in your life and his activity in the world around you?
I’d also invite you to seek the presence of Christ in how you love others and in how you receive love. That’s an often-overlooked way that God is at work in the world around us.
Friends, Christmas is coming, but it’s not here yet. Be patient. Not just for the presents — think of the glories of waiting all the way until Christmas morning to unwrap those! (At least that’s what I’ll do.) Be patient because God is at work. Even in the darkest of nights. Even in the most desperate of circumstances. Even if your patience outlasts your life on earth, know that God is at work, and in the fullness of time, the harvest will be ready. It may not be right now, but the day is coming.