Patience at Christmastime--seriously?!

Advent 3, Year A

Isaiah 35:1-10; James 5:7-10; Matthew 11:2-11; Canticle 15 

Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with you and the Holy Spirit, be honor and glory, now and for ever. Amen.

 

I may be showing my inner orneriness here, but our reading today from James gets on my nerves. “Be patient,” he intones in a preachy way. “Don’t grumble.” “Just suffer quietly.” When I hear this text, I think of my teenage sister getting up in my face and singing, “You better watch out, you better not cry,” every time I got upset about something before Christmas. That was the last thing that this four-year-old wanted to hear in the midst of a tragedy or a temper tantrum. “You better not pout, I’m telling you why … Santa Claus is coming to town.”  

I don’t know about you, but if I’m feeling impatient, it sure doesn’t help to hear some pious Bible verse asking me to be quiet about it.

You children know how hard it is to be patient right before Christmas, don’t you? One year, I couldn’t wait to get an expensive Madame Alexander doll in a pink organza ball gown. Another year, I just knew that I could find the cure for cancer as soon as I got a real, working microscope set. Another year, my hopes rested on that stylish outfit from the fancy catalogue—the one that would make my crush finally notice that I was alive. I was so impatient for these exciting gifts that I would prowl around the house, peeking in closets and under beds, rattling the packages under the tree and trying to lift up the pieces of tape without tearing the wrapping paper. The days seemed so long until Christmas morning, the waiting a torture.

And then, of course, Christmas morning would come in all of its glory, and my impatience would fade into disappointment. It wasn’t long before I put fingernail polish “make up” on the Madame Alexander doll and marred her beautiful face forever. The microscope set showed water bubbles under the slide covers, instead of bacteria. And the boys still wouldn’t talk to me, even when I wore my fancy dress. “Is that all there is?” I would wonder with a sigh, my arms full of toys, and my eyes filled once again with impatience for something new.

“Are you the one,” the imprisoned John asks Jesus, “or are we to wait for another?” His question is full of thinly-veiled impatience. I can imagine the wild and impetuous John the Baptizer in prison, his camel’s hair robe in tatters and his long hair sticking out in all directions. His strident preacher’s voice has turned to dark, silent introspection. His head is down on his shaking knees, and his once-pointing fingers hang limp at his sides. He had set out to bring his people closer to the saving God of the swirling desert sands. He was impatient for the dawning of a better age, an age of freedom from sin and from oppression. And yet, here he is in prison—captive to the whims of a self-absorbed ruler and his greedy courtiers.  Where is cousin Jesus, in whom John has placed so much hope? Why isn’t he doing anything about King Herod? Why doesn’t he use his power now, before it is too late? What is he waiting for?

John knows the well-known words of the prophet Isaiah that we hear today. He can picture the prophecy in all of its glory, so near and yet so far. He can imagine the desert in bloom, the wide and holy highway that will funnel us all safely into God’s loving arms, the burning desert sands turned into pools of cool, clean water, the end of sickness and suffering, the end of despotic government, everlasting joy and singing for the people of Israel. Like us, how John must long for the freedom of God’s reign. He must yearn for the light of God’s countenance to shine in the darkness. Is it enough just to urge him to be patient? How do we find real meaning as we wait in our captivity?

Unlike James with his platitudes, Jesus doesn’t fuss at John’s impatient question. When the imprisoned John sends his followers out to track down Jesus and to ask him what is going on, Jesus doesn’t say, “John, old cousin, get a grip. How dare you question the Son of God!” Jesus doesn’t explain everything, either. He doesn’t give a theology lecture on the problem of evil or on theories of salvation. He doesn’t give John a blueprint of what will happen in the crucifixion and resurrection. Jesus simply lists the healing acts that others have observed in his presence—healing acts just like the ones that John remembers from that image in Isaiah. Jesus is carrying out his ministry one small reversal at a time, and no one will see it until the power of death itself has been reversed.

It’s the same with Mary’s Song. The Magnificat doesn’t take on a preachy attitude. It doesn’t even start with greatness. It doesn’t recite the lofty history of Israel or recount the grand miracle of creation. It begins with one woman’s amazement that God has come to her, a poor Jewish peasant girl from the Galilee. Mary knows that her life has been nothing special. Mary begins with her own experience, with her own experience of transformation from emptiness to fullness of life: from girl to mother, from milking goats and hauling water to speaking with angels, from shivering in the cold to being wrapped in the loving-kindness of God, from lowly peasant to Mother of God.

Slowly, as she speaks, her words shift from her own situation to the experience of her people, from her own transformation to all of the times in Israel’s history that God has lifted oppression, fed the hungry, punished the unjust, or raised up the poor. As Mary shares with her cousin Elizabeth, it’s as if her words get away from her, radiating out across time, gaining power and strength and meaning until the words themselves seem to cause the transformations of which she speaks:

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. He has come to the help of his servant Israel, * for he has remembered his promise of mercy.

          Meaning comes to Mary slowly—in a long history of insignificant people and strange divine acts—and bursts forth in a slow crescendo as she remembers. Just because we don’t realize what is going on until after the transformation occurs, that doesn’t mean that God was not in what we perceive as insignificant beginnings. Mary shows us that real meaning grows out of our own amazement, that it must be discovered in reflection, in talking about our story with others, and that it is true when it grows beyond anything that we can control.

Think about it: When we are impatient for change, doesn’t God come to us in small particularities, like a narrow shaft of light into a dark room? Doesn’t God comfort you in the love of a fellow human being who is as unique and irreplaceable in this world as their own fingerprint? Isn’t God revealed in a certain landscape, when the sun happens to come through the clouds in a certain way that might never happen again were you to visit that place hundreds and hundreds of times? Doesn’t God speak to you in a certain translation of a certain verse of scripture, read at a certain time of day? Doesn’t God come to you when the voices of the choir come together to touch your heart in just a certain way, in just a certain moment? God comes to us in the particular. It is when we share those particular experiences with others, when we incorporate them with our own story and the story of our community, the meaning behind our waiting becomes clearer—and then often blows us away.

          As we wait in our own dark prisons this Advent—prisons of fear, or illness, or dread, or loneliness, or powerlessness, or poverty, or privilege, or even just in our prisons of impatience--it helps to follow Mary’s lead and to let the particular accumulate in our hearts. As I think about my childhood Christmases, all of my curious, impatient snooping for the object of my desire was much more helpful than my sister’s nagging piety. God doesn’t want us to wait in fear. God wants us to be out gathering bits and pieces of light: Shaking the status quo, trying to peel back whatever covers the truth, poking into dark corners, opening closets, rooting for God without ceasing, mapping out the Way. So this Advent, I challenge us to go on a hunt: Gather the heartfelt smile at the food pantry; the bit of childlike wonder; the quick prayer at the Advent wreath; the song on the radio that fills just the right empty hole in your heart; the flash of memory that sustains. Testify to transformation, no matter how slow, no matter how lowly, and offer your testimony up to God and to your neighbor. But be careful, you might just find the Gift that God is hiding for you, and it will shake your world to its foundations.