Tag Archives: patience

Time, trust, patience (3rd Sunday after Pentecost, 6/14/2026)

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Readings (Track 1)

As summer fast approaches, our lakes become inviting in a new way. For, what do you need to swim? [Water.] What happens if you don’t have any water? [You don’t swim.] So if God came to me and said “You’re going to be a great swimmer,” a fair question would be “Where’s the water?”

This is more or less the situation Abraham was in at the beginning of today’s text. At the beginning of Abraham’s story God promised “I will make of you a great nation.” He was 75 then, and that was 24 years ago. Since then he and Sarah have had exactly…zero children. To make matters worse, his name would have been a sort of standing joke. God had insisted on changing his name to “Abraham,” which was explained as “father of a multitude of nations.”

How many of us have been praying for something for a long time? St. Paul called Abraham the father of all who believe, and he’s also our father in this sense, that he knows what it is to pray for something for a very long time. And one of the reasons this story’s here is to remind us that God regularly works with time frames that we find uncomfortable, painful, and completely inexplicable.

This is particularly difficult for us in this culture, which demands everything now, if not yesterday. So living as a Christian in this culture means being more than a little counter-cultural, being willing to live sometimes for long stretches in the tension between what we are asking God to do and what God is doing.

Anyhow, back to Abraham. After all this waiting, all this predictable scorn, we might expect someone more than a little anti-social. So it might surprise us a little to watch Abraham receiving the three strangers. On the one hand, he is showing the hospitality that custom demands. The frontier between the town and the steppe demands that sort of hospitality, or else no one lasts very long. On the other hand, it is hospitality beyond what convention required, generous hospitality, extravagant hospitality. Watching Abraham and Sarah swing into action we’re given a glimpse as to why God chose them to start a new and decisive chapter in human history.

The narrator has told us what Abraham doesn’t know: these aren’t any three men, but the Lord God. (The narrative, incidentally, goes back and forth between Abraham relating to three and Abraham relating to one, which has lead Christians to see here an early revelation of the Holy Trinity.) Watching Abraham relate to the Stranger or Strangers, we’re reminded of a theme we meet repeatedly in Scripture: how we relate to other people determines how we relate to God. We human beings are simply not designed so we can run one program for relating to people, and another program (a much better program) for relating to God. We’ve got one program that runs for persons, God & others included, so the Judeo-Christian tradition has always encouraged us to pay careful attention to it. This, by the way, is the pragmatic reason for the command to love our enemies. How we treat our enemies spills over into how we treat those we love.

The meal conversation transitions into a conversation about a son, and Sarah, offstage, cannot contain her laughter. The LORD said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh, and say, ‘Shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am old?’ Is anything too wonderful for the LORD?” “Is anything too wonderful for the LORD?” That’s a question the text puts pretty directly to Abraham and Sarah and us.

It’s easy to answer that question in the abstract. But the important questions are never abstract. That situation, that wound, I’ve been praying about for years, if not decades: is it too difficult for the Lord? It’s so tempting to reduce the tension: God doesn’t care. The situation doesn’t matter. We don’t matter. And any of these moves erode the generosity displayed in our first reading.

You may recall how Scott Peck began his classic The Road Less Traveled. “Life is difficult.”[1] But, Peck observes, since we don’t like difficult, we often opt for work-arounds that end up compounding the difficulty. You may remember the sitcom Cheers. In a frequent story line a difficulty appears, the regulars opt for an avoidance strategy, that strategy consumes increasing amounts of energy and resources until it all comes crashing down, the final scene including tacit agreement to learn nothing from the experience. Sounds rather like last week’s “She’s my sister” episode.

As Christians, life is difficult also because we confess “God is faithful” and “with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day” (2 Pet. 3:8). To live as daughters and sons of Abraham and Sarah is to guard this tension: it’s part of our identity.

Is anything too wonderful for the LORD? The answer for Abraham and Sarah comes the next year and its narrative is included in the Old Testament reading. Sarah —well, Abraham and Sarah, but particularly Sarah— has a son who is named “Isaac,” which simply means “Laughter.” The laughter of Sarah’s incredulity has become the laughter of her joy, the sort of joy we also see when a child’s put in a bathtub or a swimming pool. Yes, this family is going to become a family of excellent swimmers.

Now, having heard again this rather bracing story that moves from desolation and barrenness to joy and fertility and in the process challenges us to more faith, more faithfulness, we could easily stop.

But the combination of this story and the Gospel suggests a further step. I’ve read the Old Testament lesson as an invitation to learn from Abraham and Sarah: learn from them the wonderful things that God can do, and imitate their faith, their faithfulness. The Gospel reading with the commissioning of the disciples suggests that we go back to the Genesis story and wonder about how we’re called to imitate the three Strangers. Because that’s what Jesus is sending them and us out to do: go to those who’ve had every reason to give up hope with the words of power and deeds of power that will free them to hope and believe. As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. And we proclaim this good news in hope, for not all the sick among us are cured, and, barring Jesus’ return, these bodies too will die. This is part of what it means to be sons and daughters of Abraham. And even as we proclaim the good news, we keep the welcome mat out for the Three Strangers who—often in ways beyond our imagination—continue to show up at our doorstep.

[1] Peck continues: This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult—once we truly understand and accept it—then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.”

Be Patient? Third Sunday of Advent, 12/14/2025

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Readings

A child of my age, I resonate with Ambrose Bierce’s definition of patience, “A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.” So, James’ “Be patient” is not what I want to hear.

Actually, James’ “Be patient” and Jesus’ “And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me” are acknowledgements of problems, and set the agenda for the sermon.

“Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” It’s not an unreasonable question, and not simply because John’s been in prison for some time. Recall what we heard last Sunday from John’s description of the coming one: “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” Jesus doesn’t seem to be doing that.

Jesus responds by describing what he has been doing, the description drawing heavily from multiple texts from Isaiah, including our first reading: “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” The citations from Isaiah aren’t a rhetorical flourish; they’re the argument: Jesus is doing what God promised. Implicit in the response: there is a difference between gathering the wheat and burning the chaff on the one hand and what Jesus has been doing on the other.

Notice that Jesus in his response is doing what he did in the synagogue in Nazareth as recorded by Luke. Reading from Isaiah, he reads up to “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” but omits the following “and the day of vengeance of our God” (Isa 61:1-2; Lk 4:18-19).

Jesus knows that this is both what John does and doesn’t want to hear. Hence “blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.” Of course, it’s not a problem only with John. Luke recalls James and John’s response when a Samaritan village refuses to receive them: “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” (Luk 9:54). And it’s been a problem ever since: Jesus and his followers: enacting  God’s vengeance or God’s compassion and mercy (recalling the ending of James’ argument, cut short by the lectionary)?

So that’s one problem, what “the one who is to come” is doing, is commissioning us to do. It affects even our reading of the Magnificat. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, / and has lifted up the lowly./ He has filled the hungry with good things, / and the rich he has sent away empty.” That should give the mighty and rich pause.[1] But following Jesus’ lead we focus our efforts on the lowly and the hungry, a focus that often demands not a little patience.

“Be patient—James writes—until the coming of the Lord.” James is also dealing with a second problem, the delay in that coming. His contribution to our reflection lies in his choice of wording. As Luke Timothy Johnson observes of the verb makrothymein, in the Greek translation of the Old Testament that verb and its corresponding noun are mostly “used of the attitudes of a superiority to an inferior.” “[B]efore the time of judgment, God shows makrothymia; so should the community also share that outlook” (The Letter of James, 313). Contra Ambrose Bierce, we exercise patience from a position of strength, not weakness.

Now, if the delay in Jesus’ coming was a problem for James in the first century, it’s a problem for us in the twenty-first! In the Great Thanksgiving: “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.” How do I make sense of that delay? Well, in three different ways.

First, were I to push the question, I’d open myself to the same divine response Job got (Job 38-41):

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements– surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone
when the morning stars sang together
and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy? (Job 38:4-7)

And those would be legitimate questions.

The second way is a spin-off from God’s response to Job. We tend to assume that we’re God’s only concern. God spends the last two chapters of the reply to Job celebrating Behemoth (“which I made just as I made you”) and Leviathan (“When it raises itself up the gods are afraid; / at the crashing they are beside themselves.”). We humans are often making a mess of it; the rest of creation, from the hummingbirds to the great whales, are giving exquisite full-throated glory to God.

The third way is more tentative, and takes off from James’ example of the farmer. Some things take time. Crops take months; some things take much longer stretches. Take Yosemite Valley: the time to form those massive blocks of granite, the time for the glaciers to do their thing. So we get the majesty of Half Dome. Or take the Grand Canyon: God introduces what will become the Colorado River: let’s see what that looks like in five or six million years. God is happy to work with long stretches of time.

What if the Creator wishes to explore the potential of this creature made “a little lower than God” (Ps 8:5)? David and his harp: it took time for that technology to develop, and it will take centuries more before a Mozart, a Beethoven, or a Copeland can appear. Or to take a different sort of technology, the centuries to develop the scientific traditions that make possible the achievements displayed in the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Literally breath-taking what we can do together in our best moments.

There is, as Scripture and the daily headlines remind us, more than enough cruelty and suffering to have us crying “Come, Lord Jesus.” Job and these other reflections don’t lessen that impulse, but do make me grateful that I’m not the one making the decision on timing.

To sum up this perhaps strange reflection on our readings, Scripture is clear that the mind is important. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Mat 22:37). And sometimes its importance lies in its capacity to recognize its limits. So I am profoundly grateful that Jesus’ blessing in today’s Gospel is not “Blessed is anyone who understands what I’m doing” but “Blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”

[1] Recall the British ban during their rule in India as well as the more recent bans by dictatorships in Argentina and Guatemala. (Source)

Cristo Rey: ¿Y estamos celebrando qué precisamente? (24 de noviembre, 2024)

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Hoy estamos celebrando la fiesta de Cristo Rey. Pero, ¿qué estamos celebrando exactamente?

Nuestro salmo ofrece una respuesta: poder. “Más potente que la voz de muchas aguas, / más potente que los rompientes del mar, / más potente es el Señor en las alturas.” Y, bueno, la cuestión de poder es bien presente en las otras lecturas.

Recordemos el contexto de la primera lectura. En una visión Daniel veía cuatro bestias saliendo de un mar turbulento, cada bestia más espantosa que las previas, y la última bestia luchando contra y venciendo al pueblo de Dios. Entonces la llegada del Anciano, con “un hijo de hombre” recibiendo “el poder, la gloria, y el reino.”

Escuchamos el mismo tema en la Revelación: “Jesucristo… tiene autoridad sobre los reyes de la tierra.”

Y en el Evangelio, Pilato ostentando su poder sobre el preso. Si hubiéramos leído un versículo más, habríamos escuchado la réplica de Pilato: “¿Y qué es la verdad?” En el mundo de Pilato, con suficiente poder, la verdad no importa. Y este es el mundo que nos aguarda afuera.

Bueno. Con inmensa gratitud celebramos el poder de nuestro Dios. Sin este poder no hay salida. Entonces, aprovechemos las oportunidades de fortalecer nuestro sentido de su poder, o en estas lecturas o en nuestras experiencias con la grandeza de su creación.

Sin embargo, si estamos celebrando solamente este poder, tenemos un problema. ¿Por qué tenemos que vivir en la parte de Daniel 7 donde la bestia lucha contra y vence al pueblo de Dios y no en la parte donde el poder, la gloria, y el reino de este hijo de hombre es obvio? ¿Por qué tenemos que vivir en el mundo de Pilato donde Pilato tiene la última palabra?

No tengo la respuesta. En las palabras de Dios por Isaías: “mis ideas no son como las de ustedes” (55:8). Pero en nuestros textos sí hay un indicio. La bestia lucha contra el pueblo de Dios. Y ¿qué sabemos de este pueblo de Dios? En la Revelación: “Cristo nos ama, y nos ha librado de nuestros pecados.” ¿Quiénes somos? Amados, pecadores librados. Entonces, aunque podemos hablar—como hablan muchos de los salmos—de los justos y los malos, debemos hablar también de pecadores recibiendo la libertad que Dios ofrece y de pecadores rechazándola. Jesucristo ama a Pedro…y a Pilato. En la primera carta de Pablo a Timoteo: Dios “quiere que todos se salven y lleguen a conocer la verdad” (2:4). O, como Jesús ben Sirac lo expresa en Eclesiástico, “El hombre se compadece solo de su prójimo, pero el Señor se compadece de todo ser viviente; él reprende, corrige, enseña, y guía como un pastor a su rebaño” (18:13).

Por eso, el poder de Dios es buenas noticias para nosotros los pecadores porque Dios es—primero—Amor, y emplea su poder con paciencia. Paciencia con nosotros, paciencia con nuestros enemigos. Y quizá—quizá—esta es una parte de la respuesta a nuestra pregunta. ¿Por qué seguimos diciendo “Cristo volverá”? También porque Dios es paciente.

Y si Dios es paciente, que nosotros—pecadores recibiendo la libertad que Dios ofrece—seamos pacientes, compasivos, con nuestros prójimos, también con nuestros enemigos. No como una expresión de resignación o de impotencia, sino porque así se comparta nuestro Dios. ¡Viva Cristo Rey!