God's Saving Patience
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the 2nd Sunday of Advent, December 6, 2020 by the Holly Huff, Lay Associate & Postulant for Holy Orders.
Growing up, my family put our Christmas tree up each year at the beginning of December, always to the soundtrack of Handel’s Messiah. The strings would begin the pastoral symphony and the scent of pine needles would fill the living room air as we freed the tree from its plastic bonds and watched the branches slowly float down back to their original shape. We fought over the tangled lights, pulled forgotten ornaments out of storage, and when we heard the tenor sing the opening words from Isaiah, I knew that yes, now we are really getting ready for Christmas.
“Comfort ye, comfort ye my people!” Today’s readings are full of good tidings, good news. Words of comfort and reassurance. We hear some of the more gorgeous promises in scripture actually. God is speaking peace to God’s faithful people and bringing about a “new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home.” “Mercy and truth have met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” The crooked will be straightened out, the rough places smoothed over. All our knots untangled and the dusty bits shiny again. “The glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.” That keeps me warm on cold days.
And though the weather has more or less held out, it feels like it’s been a year of cold days. Advent has come at the right time, as it generally does. Especially this year, yes, we need this season of quiet waiting, gestational unfolding. We need time to sit in the dark and confess our need for God. Though perhaps like me you may feel that we have been doing a lot of waiting around already, actually. Quarantine began back in March, and here we are, nearly 9 months later. Meanwhile, entire human children have been conceived and carried, grown and born. We’ve sat around plenty. We are about at full-term here, people! A season of waiting might seem redundant at this point. How long, O Lord, how long must we wait to see your promises fulfilled?
Into this exhaustion speaks our reading from second Peter. “Do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day. The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance….Beloved, while you are waiting for these things, strive to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish; and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation.”
“Regard the patience of our Lord as salvation.” It feels sometimes that we are the ones who wait, that we are the ones exercising transcendent patience as we wait for God to get God’s act together. As if we were waiting on a late train, eyes flicking over to the clock, foot tapping, while we subtly whistle the Jeopardy theme song. Yes, we think we are the ones waiting, and we do wait on the Lord, but it is first God who is patient with us, God who waits for us. “The Lord is not slow about his promise but is patient with you,” Peter says, “desiring none to perish but all to come to repentance.” “Regard the patience of our Lord as salvation.”
So we are saved by God’s patience. God is already working in us and on us. None of us can save ourselves, much less others, and it hurts us to try. (That is what they call a Messiah complex—no relation to the oratorio.) No, God’s saving patience is at work in us, as the creator and source of our lives who molded us originally continues to shape us, patiently restoring us to the faithful, hopeful, loving people we were made to be.
God does not overrun our souls and coerce us into goodness, however time efficient that would be. The Lord is patiently at work on us, tenderly loving us into loving. The working out of the Spirit is slow, sometimes unseen, but it is trustworthy. The Lord is not absent, but molding us, not slow but waiting for us, sheltering us, slowly shaping us, and directing what Annie Dillard calls “the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom.” Turning inward to God who already dwells at the core of our own soul—turning outward to the Christ we see in the face of each stranger. God’s desire is for all of us to live lives of vibrant abundance, not perishing in the claustrophobic hell of our own self-enclosure.
“The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.” And the Lord is patient with other people, not just ourselves and those we love already, but with the people we have no patience for, who we write off as hopeless, beyond rescue or enlightenment. As St. Athanasius said, it is not worthy of the goodness of God that God’s creatures should perish. The patience of our Lord is salvation—God wants none to perish but all to repent, to turn and join the dance. “The Glory of the Lord will be revealed and all flesh shall see it together,” Isaiah says.
Love plus time. Saving patience. That’s God’s recipe. God made us all and God wants us all back. And so the call to love goes out continually to every human heart.
God is not slow, but it is God who waits for us. There’s a critical shift here, when we understand that we are God’s handiwork. Immersed in an American ethos of self-sufficiency and moral responsibility, too often we mistakenly think it is our job to fix ourselves, to heal ourselves, to put ourselves right, that only then will we deserve to approach God. And of course we don’t succeed and we exhaust ourselves trying.
But it is God’s patience that is our salvation. It is a grace, already given to us. Repentance, too, comes as a grace, as the Spirit leads us to leave behind our old ways like a snake shedding its skin. Our part is one of response to what has been given. We gratefully receive the gift, allowing the Spirit to prepare the way of the Lord, to make room in the heart for the Christ child.
As we move through Advent, we await the birth of Christ, and we await the ultimate fulfillment of God’s promises. “While you are waiting, strive to be found at peace,” Peter says. Entrusting ourselves God’s patience, our waiting becomes hopeful and joyous, free from anxiety,, no longer exhausting, free from foot tapping and clock watching. Another song, less traditional to the season, comes to mind. “She’ll be Coming Round the Mountain when she Comes.” This old railroad song is based on an older spiritual, “When the Chariot Comes.” You’ll know it when you see it. There is no predicting God’s slow unrolling and unfolding of the beautiful blossoming creation—of which each of us is a part. God’s promises will be fulfilled—The mouth of the Lord has spoken it, and the word of our God will stand for ever but cannot be rushed, and God’s world will be fulfilled, slowly, and so we wait in patience.
This is no passive waiting, but an attentive, receptive posture. We are listening. Leaning on every whisper of the word of God. Responding to the cry from the wilderness, the motion of the Spirit blowing through the soul, that airs out the dusty, crusty places and smoothes the rough places in the heart. Love made us, and love remakes us. Like the slow ease of the Christmas tree branches gentling back to their proper shape, ours is a work of allowance. We offer our yes, abandoning our tense attempts at self-sufficiency. Releasing resistance, we surrender to God’s patient tending of a world where righteousness is at home, and at home in each one of us.