By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership
Pentecost Sunday, May 19th, 2013
“ …. And yet, when the Son of Man comes,
will he find faith on earth?" Luke 18:8 (NRSV)
Some of my earliest memories are of a
waiting room. When I was a young boy and
my mother was in her 40’s she developed a blood disorder. She was falsely diagnosed with chronic
Leukemia, as her white blood cells were eating her red blood cells. Because my Dad had to work, I spend many
hours, which seemed like days and months going with her to the doctor’s
office. Those were hard, difficult days,
of not knowing and of waiting, waiting, and more waiting.
Today I still don’t like waiting
rooms. And it’s not just the waiting
that is hard. It’s also the mystery of
the unknown. If you knew when they would
call on you, perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad.
So, once I entered a German waiting room to renew my work visa for
Germany. When I entered the room, there
were a lot of people in the waiting room.
I was somewhat relieved that I was given a card with a number on
it. I thought this was a great
idea. There was a number on my card, and
the number of the person now being served was up on a screen. My number was 47. The number on the screen was 3. I still don’t like waiting rooms.
Waiting can be hard work. This is what the woman in Jesus parable
knows. She’s waiting on a judge to hear
her case. He’s not a very nice
fellow. He’s inconsiderate of her and a
lot of other people. He’d not very fair and
is known as the ‘unjust’ judge. Thus, he
probably plays favorites and who knows when or whether he will consider her case at
all? What’s important for us to see for
now is that this woman is in the waiting room.
She waiting, but she’s still making appeals. She does not rest in her patience, but she
keeps pestering that scoundrel and is determined to keep on bothering him until
he has to listen to her. Her patient
waiting is neither passive, lazy, still or silent, but it’s very loud, determined
and unwavering. She is confident that her
patient pestering will cause even this unjust and apparently deaf judge listen
to her case. She is the not just the
persistent widow, she is the patiently persistent widow, who, even while patiently
waiting, never gives up.
ONLY
BELIEVERS CAN DEVELOP PATIENCE
The most important spiritual lesson
Jesus wants to get across is that God is nothing like this. God will not delay long in helping. God will answer. But the
other question that begs an answering is this: will we do as good in our
waiting or complaining room as this patiently persistent widow? Jesus
is not worried about whether or not God will answer, but Jesus is worried about
whether people will keep praying and keep the faith. “When the Son of Man comes, will he find
faith on the earth?” That’s Jesus
question. The great problem of prayer
is not getting answers. The problem is
not wondering whether prayer works, but it is whether or not the pray-ers are working---or are giving up way too soon. Will people remain patiently engaged in well doing
and in demanding what’s right and just until the answer comes?
Will faith continue on the earth? Jesus wondered. Maybe we are wondering too. As the apostle Paul speaks of ‘clothing’
ourselves with patience, Jesus’ parable reminds us what patience must mean if
it really makes a difference in the way we live and in the final outcome of our
lives. What is most important for us,
in this message about the Christian virtue of patience, is to discover that in
no way is patience to be understood as a passive virtue, but it is a virtue
that is full of energy, vitality and activity.
Patience is a virtue that remains full of a faith that works. Because of this, I’m convinced that only a
believer can develop the virtue of patience.
Only a person who sees and hopes beyond the here and now, which is what
it means to believe, can reclaim this apparently ‘lost art of waiting’; which
keeps working for the good, even while we wait.
Why I call waiting a ‘lost art’ is
something you probably already know. We
live in world where waiting hold little value or appears as a negative. As Rodney Clapp has written: “E-mails and cell phone calls are instant.
Our food is fast. Our cars are too. Pressing a cell phone button or clicking an
e-mail message, we may instantly commune with a friend on the distant West
Coast. But to be bodily present to that
friend, we must “suffer” and endure several hours of travel. And it is suffering, as in ‘long-suffering”
(the older word for patience), a word which Paul uses in another place, it is
this “suffering that produces patience, which produces character,
which in turn produces hope —the kind of hope that will not disappoint”
(Rom. 5:3- 5) (As quoted in The Christian
Century, July 25, 2012, p 45). But if you never have to wait, and you never
decide to suffer long, you will not develop patience, but you will eventually lose
patience. And without some willingness
to suffer, patience can quickly become a lost art.
This is why I say that only a believer
can develop patience. Only the person
who has belief in something beyond the ‘hear in now’ would be willing or able to
take on an amount of suffering for the sake of others or for the sake of
something bigger than themselves. Those
who have no perspective of God, no hope of good winning in the end, and no sense
of justice or answers that are still out-there, and still coming---only people
who have hope, can, in their right mind, be patient. I
wouldn’t expect unbelievers to be very patient.
People who only believe in the now, have to have everything now, because
as far as they are concerned, tomorrow will never come. For unbelievers it’s about now or
never. Only believers will prove their
faith by trusting in the tomorrow of God.
Only believers learn and know how to wait. Only believers are willing to suffer the
moment and be patient until the good finally comes. Jesus is exactly right in his worrying and
wondering: Will there still be faith on the earth? Without ‘faith’ on the earth, there will be
no praying, no waiting, and eventually, because there is no belief in tomorrow,
all human patience will wear out.
PATIENCE
IS SOMETHING WE MUST LEARN
Even as a believer patience is not
automatic. Patience still has to be
learned through the experience of life and it has to be practiced in daily
living. This is the second thing Jesus’
parable teaches us about prayer and patience.
The widow not only believes and has patience to believe her request will
be heard, she also has to keep asking, and asking and asking. Her
patience is a practice. And this practice
of persistence praying is what teaches her and gives her even more patience. She learns by what she does and keeps doing,
and does again and again so that it becomes a part of who she is and a part of
what she does.
Just because you call yourself a
Christian, does not guarantee you are a patient person. Psychology teaches us that the capacity of
having patient is learned very early in life.
When a baby cries and learns that someone will answer and come, that
baby learns to trust. The next time the
baby will wait longer, or the parent will wait a little longer, and finally the
baby learns to trust that someone will always come. But if
that Baby does not learn who that it can trust, nor it learns who it can trust,
then that Baby becomes less and less able to have patient, then as an infant,
and it has learned impatient behavior for all of life. In our world where mothers and fathers are
often more absent than present, where there are more and more outrages of anger,
we prove to be a society is losing its patience because it doesn’t know how or
who it can trust. Learning to have
faith can redeem and heal the pain of mistrust, but it can take years to undo
the damage already done.
This is why it is so important to learn
and to practice patience with each other.
The learning of patience can help to redeem the loss of trust in the
world. Again, as Paul wrote, “suffering
produces patience, patience produces character, which teaches us to hope.” The opposite can also be true: learning to
have hope can give an example of character, and people who seek character want
to learn patience, and when we have learned patience, we are able to suffer
with and for each other and make the world a warmer, more caring, and more
loveable and more live-able place. The
whole point Paul makes is that learning patience is part of a process. Patience is something you must want and if
you really want it, it is something you can learn. When we learn it, it makes us new people with
new opportunities with new results in life.
PATIENCE
IS LEARNED THROUGH PERSISTANCE IN PRAYER
The way to learn patience comes from the
most important truth we discover in Jesus’ parable of the persistent
widow. Because she persistently asks,
she gains patience. Because she
patiently asks, she gains in her persistence too. Through what she does and keeps doing, she
becomes a person who is more likely to be noticed and heard. This daily, persistent, faithful, and
unrelenting asking will get her the hearing she wants, even from an unjust
judge.
If we keep praying, asking and taking
our needs to God, we can do much better than her. God is much more ready to hear us than an
unjust judge. God wants to answer more
than we want to ask. But this is still
not the whole point. What Jesus wants
us his listeners to know is much more than how to persistently pray and get more
things from God, but what Jesus wants us to know is how we can become the kind
of people who persistently and patiently ‘pray
and never lose heart’ (Luke 18:1).
Luke tells us that this is the point
Jesus wants to get across: People who
patiently pray become the kind of people with the very kind of enduring,
patient, long-suffering, and character shaping faith, Jesus is looking for on
the earth. But such a long-suffering, enduring,
character-shaping patience is best learned through a life of constant prayer. “Pray without ceasing”, is what Paul
suggested elsewhere. This is not a
skill learned through saying a prayer now and then, but it is learned through a
constant and consistent life of persistent caring, continual acting, constant
communication, and endless asking, seeking and knocking for the just, right and
best things of life. When we seek the
‘things from above’ this is what results in us learning to be faithful people
who learn to be patient with each other, to be patient without ourselves, and
even more patient with and for God. You
don’t become a patient person without also being a faithfully praying person—a
person who lives for and daily acts upon what is faithful, beautiful, true,
right and just. Persistence in prayer
and patience perseverance go together like hand in glove. You don’t develop one without developing the
other. If you lack in one, you are most
likely insufficient in the other.
But let’s make one more thing very
clear. When we say that patience is
learned through a life a prayer, we are not simply talking about saying elaborate,
well-crafted prayers. This persistent
widow teaches us that the ‘prayer’ is, as Jesus said elsewhere, all about
seeking, knocking, and asking; but not just asking alone. Words have power, but action can speak as
loud as words; and achieve more than words.
Some of us are verbal people; who pray often with our lips and live what
we speak. Others of us are less verbal,
who live what we believe and are less able to articulate it in words. When Jesus described a life of prayer as
seeking, asking, and knocking; he implied that prayer is only one-third words,
and two-thirds action. Even in prayer,
the activity of what we do and keep on doing in our lives, speaks much louder
than the things we say in words. The
kind of prayer that changes things and changes us might also be understood as
much or even more as action, than just words.
The development, the learning and the practice
of patience with others, with God and with ourselves will mean that we do more
than say we want to be more patient or that we pray for more patience. We learn patience through how we live and
through the habits we have we the virtues we practice daily. Again, the ‘persistence’ in this widow is
what Jesus says it means to have faith.
Her faith was not proven merely by her asking, but by her persistent
asking and also by the rightness of her asking, her living, and fairness and
justice in her case. Even the unjust
judge could not forever resist a person who proves who they are by getting up
and doing it every day, every week, and every moment of their lives. A patiently persistent person, who is doing,
living, and speaking what is right, still has great power, even in a world
where power is constantly questioned.
Recently I came across a interesting website. The website known as “Virtue.com”, claims to
“provide a [free] service for the most universal desire: the desire to be a
better person.” I read on: “To fulfill
this desire, you can use the state-of-the-art personal development system
designed by Benjamin Franklin. Eventually, with persistence and dedication, you
can develop and maintain balance in your life and attain your aspirations and
achieve your goals.”
With this introduction, it went on to explain
what this ‘virtue’ website is based upon:
“In his twenties, Benjamin Franklin
identified the thirteen virtues in life by which he chose to live. He designed
a pragmatic method to assist him in practicing them and making them “habits of
the heart", all throughout his long life. Franklin believed that by living this
virtue-filled program for self-improvement he would be able to reach his goals
and to achieve health, wealth, wisdom and good reputation. He featured a
specific virtue each week and designed a method of rigorous self-control,
registering every fault committed against the virtues. As a result, he became one of the most
prolific people in American history and influential and beloved Founding
Fathers of the United States of America.
He was a leading author and printer, a satirist, a political theorist, a
politician, a scientist, and inventor, a civic activist, a statesman and a
diplomat. He did all this in one lifetime!”
In his own words, Benjamin Franklin's
virtues had persistence and patience written in everyone though he never used those
words: His list included things like, Temperance — Eat not to dullness; drink
not to elevation. Silence — Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid
trifling conversation. Order — Let all your things have their
places; let each part of your business have its time. Resolution
— Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve. Frugality
— Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself, i.e., waste
nothing. Industry — Lose no time; be
always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions. Sincerity
— Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak
accordingly. Justice — Wrong none by doing injuries or omitting the benefits
that are your duty. Moderation —
Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve. Tranquillity
— Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable. Chastity
and Humility
— Imitate Jesus and Socrates.” When
considering his list of virtues, one does not have to guess how did Ben
Franklin became Ben Franklin, in a world of much lesser people. Neither do we have to guess how did the
Persistent Widow got the attention of the unjust judge? They have something very important in common. The results realized in their lives were anything
but automatic. In the matter of gaining virtue,
Franklin became who he became the same way the widow got her hearing: They
patiently persisted in practicing what and who they wanted until they no longer
had to practice them. They became what and
who they persistently tried to be.
It’s the same way with practicing patience. Being patient in our very short and
sometimes difficult lives can be hard. Patience
is never automatic, but we can and must learn patience. Patience
is learned out of a life of faith and trust.
Out of a life of faith and faithfulness, our gains more trust, less worry, more peace, less
rush, and of course, we then become more
patient with others, with ourselves, and also with God. Amen.
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