Copyright © 2004 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
The mask goes over your nose and mouth and someone tells you to breathe deeply. You do so and the lights and the room and doctors and nurses slip away from your awareness. For the next hour or two or four, you are unconscious while other people do what they wish with you. You are a “patient,” and you are being “patient.” Those words are the same because to be a patient means to practice patience. Patience means to relinquish control of your life to someone else.
Yielding control is at the root of the plant which grows the fourth fruit of the Spirit. Patience is an attitude or virtue which expresses itself in a willingness to let go of time and yield oneself up to circumstances or to the actions of others. You can be patient with events and you can be patient with people. A couple different words we translate as “patience” in the New Testament reflect these different focal points.
“Patience” here in Romans 8:25 is patience in the first sense, patience with circumstances, with what is happening to us. It is perseverance, endurance. Literally the word is “remain behind,” a willingness to keep on going even at the back of the race. I think of Cheryl, a woman in our church in Lincoln, Nebraska. She has a crippling degenerative muscle disease. Yet she would take her crutch under her arm and start out every year on the 10K CROP Walk for World Hunger held in our community. Long after those with healthy bodies had run or walked over the finish line, Cheryl would be there toiling awkwardly along the route, taking maybe twice as long. Yet she would persevere. She would finish. It did not matter to her that she was behind. She would not give up. She just patiently kept on going.
Scripture calls you and I to that kind of patient endurance in all the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Ours is a difficult world. Verse 22 says the whole creation is “groaning” with the pain and struggle we are in. Sickness, war, and natural disasters like the horrible floods in the Caribbean are part of that groaning. It also groans under famines, pollution and economic chaos. Our own mental and social illnesses, depression and family violence, addiction and prejudice, are symptoms of world where all is far from right, a groaning world. Yet we in Christ live in such a world with patient endurance.
Patience with the world is only possible because of the promise of this passage. As the world groans outwardly, says verse 23, we groan inwardly, yet we “have the firstfruits of the Spirit.” What we celebrate today, on Pentecost, is that Jesus Christ has poured out on us the gifts and graces of the Holy Spirit in such a way that we may be patient people.
Persevering patience is possible only when you have hope. Two years ago when our family visited Crete we came upon the Monastery of Arkadi. It’s the most famous site of the 19th century struggle of Crete for independence from the Turks. Built in the sixteenth century, it has thick, fortress-like walls. During the battles for Crete it became a refuge for rebels and a storage place for ammunition. In November of 1866, 600 women and children and 300 rebel soldiers holed up in the monastery and were surrounded by 15,000 Turkish troops. The Cretans held out for a long time, but the Turks finally broke through the walls and made their way to the powder magazine where all the survivors huddled. Seeing that all was lost and hopeless, one of the rebels shot his rifle into the powder and blew up the ammunition. The explosion killed them all and about 1,500 Turks.
It’s hard to endure when hope is gone, so a momentary blaze of glory seems best. Yet Arkadi became a symbol of freedom. The part of the church which was left contained a fresco depicting the resurrection of Christ. It was there in those hopeless deaths that hope for liberty was reborn. Eventually the island was freed from Turkish rule.
It’s by the resurrection of Christ that hope is constantly reborn for every Christian. We can go on enduring in this world because we have hope beyond the world. Verse 23 alludes briefly to the hope he has expounded earlier in the chapter, “we wait eagerly for our adoption.” As Christians we are never hopeless because we are being adopted as the children of God. God will be our Father forever and so we always look forward with hope.
Our adoption by God includes, we’re told in verse 23, “the redemption of our bodies.” God raised His own Son’s body from the dead and He will raise His adopted children as well. We keep going, struggling in the bodies we have, because we hope for the redemption of our bodies. Cheryl could keep on walking, even when everyone else had finished, because she had the hope her body, weak as it was, could make it.
Notice that we are not hoping for redemption from our bodies. It’s the redemption of our bodies. The ultimate Christian hope is not that we will someday be spirit beings floating in some sort of bodiless bliss. Our faith and hope through the Holy Spirit of Jesus is that God will raise us spirit and body. Our hope is not just for life after death. It is hope for the resurrection of the dead. That’s what we wait for. That’s why we are patient.
Yet we only have that hope because of another patience – not our patience, but God’s patience. Without the patience of God we would remain helpless and hopeless. Hundreds of women and children died in the monastery at Arkadi, and their deaths would have remained hopeless and pointless. Except that the report of what happened galvanized sympathy for Crete throughout Europe. England, France, Italy and Russia, along with Greece, sent aid. In 1898, Crete finally won independence from the Turks. But it couldn’t have happened without help.
We only have hope because of the helping grace and patience of God. Even by the greatest human spirit we cannot rise out of the groaning of our world. It takes a greater Spirit than any of ours to remain hopeful when the world groans. We need the help of the Holy Spirit, the patient Spirit of God.
Over and over, Scripture shows how God is patient with us. Angry with all of humankind God destroyed the world in a flood, but He patiently saved a few, Noah’s family to begin again. The rainbow is an ongoing symbol of God’s patience. God chose the children of Abraham to be His people and over and over put up with their sins and their grumblings. He saved them out of Egypt. He saved them from the Canaanites. He saved them from their own evil kings. At the end of the Old Testament God was still being patient, saving His people from exile in Babylon.
Jesus told many stories which spoke of God’s patience. The weeds are allowed to grow among the wheat. The fig tree is given another year to produce fruit. The father waits for the prodigal son to return home. Over and over, God is shown to have patient love, love that waits for His children to come back. And of course, the ultimate parable of patience is the true story, the acted out drama of Jesus patiently enduring all the shame and suffering of the Cross, all for us.
And the very fact that the world has waited for so long for Jesus to return is only another display of the patience of God. As II Peter 3:9 tells, it’s not that God is slow. It’s that God is patient. He doesn’t want to send anyone to hell. He wishes everyone to have a chance to repent and turn to Him. So He is patient, graciously and lovingly patient with us.
As we remember this weekend those who served and died in World War II, it’s appropriate to think of C. S. Lewis image of from that time of God’s patience. For those who wonder why God’s presence in this world is not more visible, Lewis argued that the coming of Jesus Christ was a kind of secret infiltration behind enemy lines. Our Lord has started a rebellion against the evil forces which rule this world, a resistance movement. Like the Allies who finally invaded Europe in force, Christ will one day come in power and glory. Yet before then He is patient. Lewis wrote, “He wants to give us the chance of joining His side freely.”[1]
So our patience is made possible by God’s patience. We have hope only because He is patient with us. And the proper response to God’s patience is our own patience. Karl Barth said that we should answer “His patience with our patience; giving the right answer to the waiting of his wrath with our waiting for redemption.”[2]
You can see how our patience grows out of the Lord’s patience in the story of Peter. Many of you are familiar with Peter’s impatience. He speaks and acts before he thinks. He gets out of the boat to walk on the water. He wants to put up tents on the mountain of Transfiguration. He cuts off the ear of one of those who come to arrest Jesus. Yet Jesus is over and over and over patient with Peter. Jesus lifted Peter out of the water when he sank. Jesus healed the man Peter wounded. Jesus forgave Peter after he had denied Him three times. The patience of Christ with this man is simply boundless. Perhaps that is how Peter came to write those words I quoted from his second letter about the patience of God. He had received it first hand.
In the end, the Lord’s patience with Peter paid off. How does the Pentecost story we heard this morning begin? What are the disciples doing when the Holy Spirit comes rushing down on them? Exactly what Jesus asked of them in the first chapter of Acts – nothing. They were waiting, exercising patience. They waited for God and it was only when God came to them that they went out into the streets to speak. And you can see all the difference that patience made in Peter. He is no longer bumbling, no longer making mistakes because he’s getting ahead of both himself and the Lord. Instead Peter is now the eloquent spokesman of the disciples. He preached and three thousand people became believers that day.
That’s the way of patience in the Bible. God is patient with us, making it possible for us to be patient. And we are to be patient not just with the world, not just with the timetable of God, but as God is patient with you and me, we are to be patient with others.
So we turn to the second sort of patience, what is sometimes translated in Scripture as “long-suffering.” We all know the expression that a person has a “short temper.” The patience which is the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22 is literally a “long temper.” Because God has such a long temper with us, we are to be long-tempered with each other. That is when the fruit of patience has really begun to grow.
Cultivating a long temper is often hard for us because our dealings with time are so confused. The alarm clock was invented by Benedictine monks in the twelfth century so that they could arise to pray at the proper hours. Since then clocks have come to rule our lives in such a way that we can hardly find any time to pray, or to be patient with people around us. Most of us schedule every significant activity around the clock. We wake up and go to sleep looking at clocks. We talk to people and write papers and do work glancing at a watch or a clock every few minutes. We leave one activity to rush off to another because the clock is clicking off the minutes. We are constantly aware of time slipping away from us.
In our overwhelming concern with time, we have forgotten who we are as children of God. In the passage in which Peter tells us how patient God is, he points out the reason, quoting Psalm 90, “With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like a day.” God is patient because He has eternity to accomplish His purposes. Though we always forget it, as children of God we have the same advantage. In Jesus Christ, we will live forever. We can afford the time. We can afford to be patient.
It’s not easy. Thursday I went to mentor at the middle school. My student is in the special needs class there. I sat with him at a lunch table with some of his classmates. As the lunch period drew to an end, some of his friends began to talk with me. One girl happily showed me the Winnie the Pooh sweatshirt she was wearing, while another girl began waving her arms in delight as she told me all about her dog Spot. I was entranced by how open and expressive these children could be despite all their difficulties. But the aid sitting with us was anything but entranced. Every minute or so she would look at the clock on the wall and warn the kids that lunch was almost over. They needed to finish eating and be ready to get back to class. I don’t want to judge her too harshly. I’m sure she had heard it all before. I can only guess how difficult it is to corral such a group and help them learn something. Yet I still thought it was a shame that there seemed to be so little room for a bit of patience, a bit of time for those children to talk with someone new about what was important to them.
Writing about the fruit of patience, Evelyn Underhill thought of Peter and how the Lord deliberately chose that man despite knowing how impetuous and unreliable he would turn out to be. She remembers how Jesus took Peter, James and John with Him to Getsemane and asked them to watch and pray. It is Peter He chides for falling asleep during the watch.[3] And Peter goes from there to betray Him. “Yet in spite of all,” she writes, “the long-suffering love and trust of Christ won in the end.”[4] Peter truly becomes a rock, as we saw today, on the day of Pentecost.
Peter to Jesus was a tiresome and unreliable friend, says Underhill. Yet the Lord was patient with Him. She wonders, “Is that the way we handle our tiresome and unreliable friends?”[5] Are we as patient with those around us as the Lord is patient with us?
The fruit of patience with others, the fruit which is the work of the Holy Spirit given to us at Pentecost, grows as we remember the holy and perfect patience which saved us. It grows as we take it as practical reality that our salvation gives us all the time we need. Patience grows in the deep, deep ground of eternity.
Finally, remember that patience means we expect very little personal progress to happen instantly, either for ourselves or others. A saying often attributed to Jesse Jackson became a bumper sticker, “Be patient with me. God is not finished yet.” It’s a word that could become an excuse for failure, but if we apply it not only to ourselves but extend it to others it reminds us that God often takes the long route, the patient road. God is not finished yet with any of us. Let us wait patiently for each other then, as we also wait patiently for that great day when He is finished with us all, when our hope is complete.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2004 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj