First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
12 December 2004
Therefore, Be Patient
"Be patient, therefore, beloved..." Thus begins our appointed reading for the third Sunday of Advent from the Letter of James. But why "Be patient, therefore ..."? "Therefore" is not a beginning word. It's a hinge on which you hang a conclusion: I think, therefore I am. I receive an inheritance, therefore I increase my First Church pledge. "Something, something, something, therefore, beloved, be patient."
It's not a mystery. Sometimes, often in order to press home a thematic point, the Lectionary gives us a passage out of context or makes us start reading it in the middle of its logical development. That's what's happened with today's portion from James. We've come in at the end of his argument. So we need to back up a few verses to locate his premise, to judge for ourselves if patience is really what's called for, and if so, what kind of patience we need to practice.
Because, as you know, there is patience and there is patience. There's the patience you need when a novice waiter gets your order wrong, and then there's the patience with segregation that, in the fifties and sixties, people of color were told that they needed to have, not to demand too much too soon. There's the patience you have to muster for crying babies on airplanes, the drivers of Boston, and spotty cell phone reception. There's the patience of the Red Sox fan (which probably should not count now that it's been rewarded), the patience of the watercolorist who must leave white spaces on the paper, the patience of the reader who does not expect a great book to yield its riches in one sitting, and then there is the patience that a majority of voters seems to have with the current Administration, returning the President to office despite all the evidence that the war is going badly.
There is patience, and then there is patience. So, let's see why James says we should practice it, and what kind of patience he is asking of us. Listen to the verses that immediately precede our passage (5:1-6):
Come now, you rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are about to befall you ... Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust is evidence against you... You have laid up treasure for the last days. Listen! The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have fattened your hearts on a day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the righteous one, who does not resist you."
Now all you luxuriating oppressors are getting away with murder, James says. You defraud your workers, silence the truth-tellers, and greedily devour the world's resources. But, he warns them, your days are numbered. God is paying attention. Jesus and justice are on the way. Things will soon change for God's suffering people. Therefore, he says to his church, be patient.
Patient in the face of innocent suffering? Patient with the unfairness of life in which pure whimsy seems to determine who gets to luxuriate and who gets to work their fingers to the bone? Well, that'd be OK if it were only for a week, or maybe a month, but millennia have passed since James wrote his letter. Since then the ranks of the oppressors have not exactly shrunk. Their days are numbered all right—I think we can now number them in the millions. Yet we still read James in Advent, still receive his instruction to be patient, still profess that it is sensible to wait for the Lord like the farmer waits trustingly for the annual rains, even 'though both the farmer and we know from bitter experience that there are years when the rains do not come at all, and there is drought and ruin, and that there are years when there is too much rain, and there is flood and ruin.
While the wicked prosper, are we to be patient forever, consoling ourselves with the conviction that they'll get their just desserts in the end? If so, it's no wonder that Christians have been accused of pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by passivity and (as the old hymns says) of "weak resignation to the evils we deplore." Once it became clear that the triumphant return of Judge Jesus was going to be delayed, and delayed for a long time, shouldn't we have jettisoned all these patience texts and replaced them with "Get-to-work and fix things!" texts in big bold type? What place does any sort of patience have in light of the massive injustice James decries?
The truth is that I'm not really sure. But a powerful memory came to me while I was thinking about this question, the memory of the first time I saw poverty. I was 19 years old. I'd been sent by my religious order to Mexico City to teach English to the daughters of the wealthy at a private school that the order had established on the exclusive end of the Paseo de la Reforma, one of the Federal District's main drags. There were several women there who cleaned the school building and teachers' residence. They appeared at our gate at six every morning, Monday through Friday, and departed through the same gate every afternoon at four, right before the skies opened up and rained down the brief daily torrents that are typical in sub-tropical climates. The women were sweet and quiet and worked very hard and they always left the school gleaming. I remember thinking that this was the cleanest place I'd ever lived in, a lot cleaner than my dorm room back in Boston.
The school was located in the most glamorous part of the city, and so I assumed that the cleaning women did not live near us. I assumed that every day when they said good-bye with the soft politeness of Mexico, they got on a bus and returned to simpler homes in working class neighborhoods like the one my mother grew up in in Dorchester, with corner stores and local bars and a priest who knew your family. I did not know that there were no such neighborhoods there, and I did not know what the long high wall adjacent to our school was hiding.
Eventually I found out that behind the wall was what is called a barranca, a half-acre-or-so of littered open field dotted with cardboard shacks in front of which people cooked over open fires into which children routinely fell and were scarred for life, and where every Friday night most of what the women earned got spent by their despairing men on cheap, fast intoxicants. I also learned that in every rich neighborhood there were similar walls hiding similar barrancas. I learned that in Mexico City the typical distance between subhuman misery and superhuman luxury was the 8-inch width of a cinderblock.
The women who made our floors shine did not come by bus from across town. They ducked through a small opening in the wall of Hell next door. And I found this out because three Saturday mornings after I arrived, I was told to take some of our rich girls and go teach catechism to the poor girls of the barranca. This we did weekly, ducking through that hole in the wall, sitting near those smoky fires, drilling scarred children on God, the Virgin Mary and the sacraments. And every Saturday afternoon when I got back to the residence, I would stand for 15 minutes under a hot shower, which was never hot or long enough to get the stench off my skin and the crawling feeling off my neck.
I hated that I could stand under hot water in a gleaming bathroom cleaned by women who had no running water, hot or cold, but you could not have gotten me out of that shower for love or money. And I used to cry myself to sleep at night over what I had seen, and I wondered what I was doing there, and where God was. And it was stunning to realize that this horror was what a great part of the world was like, and that it had been like this forever and would probably not be changing any time soon. And I wanted desperately to go home, to New England, where it was possible not to know these things, and a lot easier to believe in God.
The sisters saw my distress and gave me the option of going home. Instead I kept going back week after week to the barranca with my satchel of catechisms. I don't know why. Nothing changed. I can't even say that I made any friends there. The next time I'm in Mexico City no nice-looking, well-dressed man is going to come running up to me to say, "You're Mary Luti, aren't you? I remember you! Oh, thank you, for when I was a boy you gave me hope and changed my life, and now I run a successful multinational!" All I did was to keep leaving the residence, and to keep going through the hole in the wall. I also kept hating every minute of it. I kept right on showering afterwards, and I kept right on crying every night over what I had seen, wondering what I was doing there and where God was. Every week, the same.
"Be patient, therefore, beloved..."
Friends, there's no question in my mind that Christians are called collectively and personally to bold action in the world. But we are also called first, last and always to a peculiar form of patience that does not much resemble action, but that looks at times a lot like futility and helplessness. What we are called to, and what all our action needs to arise from and return to, is a form of patience that is a persevering practice of being as human as it is humanly possibly to be.
While oppressors prosper and the poor die; while people are routinely sent to kill each other in war; while relationships break and jobs disappoint; while our children elude parental shaping and go their own way into the world; while politics defraud, and leaders falter on clay feet; while all our choices limit us, and our futures take on a life of their own, and there is no way now we could start again; while our health slips out of our control, and God seems so indifferent to it all, the calling of every believer is at least to take up the discipline of un-protecting ourselves, of daily sending the hearts that we normally try so hard to keep away from the fire of pain and disappointment right straight through any opening that we can locate in the human wall, and to make any sort of human contact that we can make with the ones we find there, anything at all.
The day of the Lord's coming for which we wait and prepare is not only some great cataclysmic future event, but it is also every moment in which we become, by God's grace supporting our practice, a little more able actually to see and feel and hear other human beings (and ourselves!) who live behind high walls. It is every time that we not flee from the spectacle. The Lord's return is also in our return, the continuous turning that we call conversion, which is nothing more nor less than a willingness to keep returning perseveringly to the sights and sounds of human life, in all its overwhelming joy and pain, even if all that our returning produces are the seemingly ineffectual and confused tears of a shocked heart that flow down uncontrollably under a wasteful steaming shower. For all tears shed in the presence of human pain are a form of dogged human hope—if we really see, we feel. If we really feel, we cry. If we really cry, we are connected. If we are really connected, we are saved.
In this regard I think of a story I read once about a cameraman who was on assignment in Azerbadjan to record the war for his network. At one point he came upon a pile of bodies, some scalped, and all in grotesque shapes locked in by rigor mortis. He put down his camera and began to weep uncontrollably. Then he refused to take any more pictures. To film any more would have been an act of hopelessness. He would not have really been seeing, despite the sophistication of his lenses. But his tears showed hope—in humanity, and in himself. He would not permit inhumanity to be an object outside himself. He took it in. And they showed hope in God, because it is God who will one day heal the wounds of grief and absence and anger and bewilderment and desire from which his and all our poor tears flow.
And isn't this what we are saying in our Advent observance? That there is a God who comes near enough to us to do that? A God whom we know in Jesus, who was born of Mary in a kind of barranca, out of sight behind one of the world's high walls. Isn't this what the church proclaims during Advent—that his nearness to us in true human flesh will make of all of us also true human flesh, real human beings, and therefore, beloved, capable of the most copious tears, capable finally of candor, commitment, patience, and the joy that comes from indomitable hope?
© 2004, J Mary Luti