FIRST READING - Luke 13: 6-9

 Then Jesus told this parable:

  “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none.  So he said to the gardener, ‘See here!  For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none.  Cut it down!  Why should it be wasting the soil?’

 The gardener replied,  ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it.  If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not you can cut it down.’”
 

SECOND READING - “From Dark Wood to White Rose”                Helen Luke

 “In canto XIX, Dante said of Lucifer’s fall:…’he fell anon, unripe, because he would not wait for  light’…That is to say, somewhat startlingly, that the original sin from which the disobedience sprang was haste.  ‘I must have what I want now.’  Haste is born with the ego’s consciousness of time.  When a child begins to hurry after a conscious goal, innocence is left behind.  This has nothing to do with questions of temperament - a quick, impatient person is not necessarily less mature than a slow plodding one (the latter may be ‘hastening’ frantically away from responsibility).  The waiting which Adam and Eve, and Lucifer, refused lies much deeper than this pair of opposites - and the return to it is the life-long task of discriminating patience from cowardice and inertia, creative movement from impatient driving towards a goal.    The frenetic hurry which dominates the lives of people in our society, and particularly all the quick ways to psychic health which are so eagerly pursued, take on an even more ominous significance in the light of Dante’s words.  We are cast out from Eden; and not until our choices are based, not on haste to arrive or to obtain, but on that which has been called by the Chinese the ‘Tao’, by the Japanese ‘Zen’, by the Indians ‘Atman’, by Jung the ‘Self’, by Christians the ‘Will of God’, shall we begin to know the Garden of Dante’s image, tended by the Gardener and growing in the fullness of time to fruition under sun and rain.”
 
 

SERMON

  Trust me on this one.  I have no qualifications to preach a sermon on “patience.”  I honestly believe that there are some fortunate souls who have been gifted with a temperament, or good karma, or a genetic predisposition to move through this life with patience, poise and composure.

  I am not one of them.  Knowing that patience was a part of this Lenten series, I spent some time this week observing my own personal capacity for patience.

  I watched myself roll my eyes when my computer took an interminably long time to download a web site I needed.

  I went to the grocery store on my day off, Tuesday.  I was in a relaxed mood.  I had no appointments, no schedule, no pressure, I happily waited in line at the check-out stand (so far, so good.)  I had a pleasant exchange with the cashier and the woman who was bagging my groceries about daisies and aged cheddar cheese that comes in a wooden box.  I walked happily to the exit, when I was stopped dead in my tracks.  A very elderly woman had planted herself in front of the exit door with a basket of groceries.  She had decided to put on a scarf.
  Knowing that I was about to write a sermon on “patience.”  I paused.  I attempted to remember that this elderly woman wasn’t even aware that she was inconveniencing anyone.  She was clueless that anyone was behind her.

  I resisted the impulse to say, “excuse me,” and ask her to please move her cart.  I simply waited.  While she slowly unfolded her babushka, and then knotted it under her chin.  And then readjusted it in the back.  It seemed to me she took about 15 minutes to get it just right.  Meanwhile, I am making my best effort to breathe, to relax, to simply wait.  I managed to keep silent (but I wouldn’t have wanted anyone to take my blood pressure at that moment when she decided she needed to retie the scarf.)

  Lord, even as I sat down to write the sermon on Friday morning I discovered that one of my kids had taken my paper-cutting scissors from my desk at home.  Thankfully, they were at school, and couldn’t hear my bellowing.

  Trust me on this, patience is not one of the virtues that comes easily to me.

  My only consolation is that I am not alone.  Patience does not come easily to many of you.  Early March is an especially challenging time to have patience about the coming of Spring.  And this blessing, patience, apparently does not come easily to my favorite Methodist minister, Ted Loder (who writes such beautiful prayers.)  In the back of his most recent book is a section called “Personal Prayers.”  I read you one in its entirety, unedited, un-adapted, word-for-word.
 
 

 I’m impatient, Lord,
       and it drives me crazy,
    to say nothing of those around me.
 But you don’t seem to have deadlines, God.
  Who would set them, after all?
   You have eternity.
    I don’t!
  So, forgive me, I want quick miracles,
   quick miracles of healing,
    of reconciling, of changing for good.
      of justice rolling down now,
    and of peace coming to the world, to my heart,
     of water turning into wine,
      grief and joy turning into joy
       within at most a season’s breath.

  Quick miracles, Lord, not slow ones,
   which are your specialty, it seems
    so slow people die in the meantime,
     and children starve, are shot,
    storms and droughts destroy,
     hate and indifference flourish,
      cruelty rules the day,
    my life slips away.
     Life is short!
      I have deadlines!

  I am not a patient person.
   I have only so much time to strive,
    to accomplish what I gave to do,
     to right some wrongs, to make amends,

    to create some beauty, help the poor,
     welcome the outcast gays,
      clear the ghettos, repair the city,
    only so much time -- I’m not God, you know.
   Maybe that’s the dis-ease
    for which impatience is the symptom,
     I’m not God and I forget it
      act compulsively as though I know
       what needs doing and when,
        as though I am you.
         a faithless confusion,
           I realize.
   But, damn it, God, I don’t have eternity.

  Or do I?
   I suppose that’s really what this prayer
   comes up to:
    Do I have eternity?
   To be convinced a little that I do,
    that you do have it with me, for me,
     would be miracle enough, I do believe,
    for then I would likely be a more patient man,
     and that, says Paul,
      is the first degree of love,
       and the world and I both
        could use a great
          many more degrees of that.

  So, God, this is what I ask,
   that you would pull off in me
    this one miracle quick enough
     to finish in my short remaining years.
  Perhaps you’ve begun, I hope,
   by giving me pause to rest in this prayer,
    which is to rest in you.
     Thank you.  Amen.
 

  You’ve got to love a Methodist prayer that is so impatient it says, “Damn it, God, I don’t have eternity!”

  But even if you don’t believe in a personal eternity, you still have to wrestle with the religious questions:

   “Do I have enough time to rest?”
   “Do I have enough time to meditate and pray?”
   “Do I have enough time to worship, to listen,
    to pay attention?”

  “Rest.”  That is a challenging practice for all of us who are the inheritors of the Puritan tradition; a tradition which emphasizes effort, goals, hard work, and intensive labor.

  We are suspicious of this concept, “rest.”  We are not sure that patience is a virtue.  We look at the shadow side of patience and see passivity, inertia, paralysis and postponement.  As Ambrose Bierce caustically remarked, “patience is a noun, describing a minor form of despair.”  Patience can be a refuge for the cowardly, the irrational, the careless, the unfocused.  When someone advises me to “be patient,” it usually means I won’t be getting what I want, anytime soon.  “Patience” can summon up images of frustrating delays, plodding progress, postponement, and mold (slowly growing in the interior walls of our sanctuary.)

  Helen Luke, the author of the second reading this morning, maintains that we will need a lifetime to learn to discriminate, to know the difference between the creative movement of patience and the cowardice, irresponsibility, and inertia that can lead us astray.  But as long as we are looking with a discriminating eye at patience, we need to also admit the darker side of our own impatience.

  We might prefer to describe ourselves as “highly motivated,” as “active participants,” or as “always ready to jump into the fray.”  What’s so wrong about preferring a quick tempo, and genuine efficiency, and maintaining high standards at all times?

  As Helen Luke points out.  It was the incapacity to wait that was, scripturally, the original sin.  Haste also has a shadow.  Haste can be a virulent form of egotism, hiding a deep distrust in anything other than yourself and your own agenda.  Our preference to be in a hurry (and to leave the grocery store now, and not in two more minutes) reveals a franticness, a compulsion, a driven part of our nature.  It can easily erupt in violent feelings (or speech, or actions) because it arises out of deep threat and fear.  The crisis, that our fears provoke, needs to be settled right now with an immediate need to move to safe ground.

 “Who is it who dares to interrupt my schedule?” (Even if I don’t happen to have a schedule!)  And in the underlying annoyance of our refusal to wait, is the voice that says, “Hey, I’m way too important (and my time is far too valuable) to be stuck in a traffic jam…I’m way too important to have my work schedule interrupted by having to take my car in to be serviced”…or as Ted Loder tries to explain to God, “ I have deadlines to meet!”  Dead…lines…, lines drawn in the sands of time that remind us of death, that remind us that we don’t have all the time in the world.

  So what does our religious tradition ask to do with the limited amount of time that is currently in our possession?  The saints and scripture concur:  We need to learn to rest; we need to breathe …to pray…to trust something larger than our own hard work and effort.

  “Not my will, but thine, Oh Lord,”  is the prayer that opens up the space for rest and patience.

  Luke describes this more leisurely, trusting, grasp of time in a lesser known parable about a fig tree.  This fig tree (like its more famous sister fig tree) has been absolutely barren.  No fruit…No yield…No success.  But in this story, Jesus speaks of a gardener who argues with the landowner.  Even though three years of effort and work in the vineyard have resulted in absolutely nothing, the gardener asks for mercy and patience and breathing space.  The gardener says, “Let’s give it one more year.  I’ll fertilize and loosen the earth around it and take care of it.  There is a chance that this fig tree will have a good outcome, even though there is no sign right now, we should be especially hopeful.  We won’t give it forever.   But we will give it a whole year - and then see if it yields a good harvest.  Don’t give up too hastily.  Don’t limit the tree unnecessarily.”

 In the passages that follow this parable, Jesus goes on to heal on the Sabbath, saying, “Don’t try to arbitrarily limit the power of God.”  “There is more going on then you currently understand.”  “The kingdom of God is much larger than you can imagine - you see only a mustard seed (and the hard tiny limitations of the present moment). but God sees a huge tree that will someday shelter birds and their nests.  You see only a little ‘yeast’.  But the kingdom of God sees that this small amount of yeast will leaven many loaves of bread.”

  The yield will be greater than we can now see (or even comprehend.)  Our work, our practice is to pay attention; to listen, to rest, to persist, even when circumstances are less than ideal.  (And by the way, circumstances are almost never “ideal”.)

  But we get so busy, so blindly driven in our efforts to direct, to conduct business, to fix, to orchestrate, that we say, “cut down that useless tree” or “throw away that seed” or “please move that grocery cart!”  “You, over there, change now (even better, change yesterday, ‘cause you’re really bothering me today.)”  And then, perhaps worst of all, we become impatient with ourselves.  Demanding, judging, yelling, condemning, and desperately attempting to cut our losses.

  Impatience is not so much a character flaw or a question of innate temperament, it is a spiritual condition, that all of us must confront in some area of our lives.

  And thus we commit ourselves to the spiritual practice of patience:  a choice, a commitment, taken again in a Lenten season when we claim that we are hungry for more abundant life.  A commitment to rest, to reflect, to listen.  Understanding patience to be not just a virtue that we hope someday we’ll win (if we pick the right lottery number,) not a quick miracle (an overnight personality transplant) - but a practice, an essential practice.  A firm practice, like a tree that is planted by a running river which is asked simply to be ready, whose work is to yield its fruit, not when the tree decides (March 4th sounds good to me,) but when the proper season comes.

  Patience is an essential practice because it can teach us about kindness, about not needing to use force or violence.  My therapist told me Tuesday about how his 4-year old son used to help him fold laundry.  The little boy would take a shirt and ball it up in his fist and then put it carefully in the basket.  And then he would grab the next item.  He wanted to help!  And while it took his father three times as long to fold laundry with this young and eager assistant, his Dad couldn’t help but be touched and entranced and delighted and unbelievably amused with the determined (if misdirected and clumsy) efforts of his child.

  I asked my therapist, “Do you think God looks at our clumsy efforts that way…with delight and infinite patience and love?”  To which he replied, “Absolutely!”

  The practice of patience, with ourselves and with others, is just one way we practice loving kindness.  There is an Arabic saying, “Patience is the virtue to rely on, if we have no other virtue to rely on.”  The truth is that I am not yet the person I want to be - “I am not as compassionate, unselfish, devoted, disciplined, peaceful, trusting, generous or obedient as I want to be.”  The very least I can be is “patient,” while the gardening and the creative movement goes on - while the river feeds the root system.”  While the seasons do, what seasons do.

  I can practice waiting; I can practice letting go of my own schedules and demands; I can, as the Tao instructs, “keep walking.”

  The practice of patience is the humble exercise of persistence, of not giving up, and I close with a brief reading by Howard Thurman, a great African-American preacher of the last century.

  “It was above the timberline.  The steady march of the forest had stopped as if some invisible barrier had been erected beyond which no trees dared to move even in single file.  Beyond was barrenness, sheer rocks, snow patches and strong untrammeled winds.  Here and there were short tufts of evergreen bushes that had somehow managed to survive despite the severe pressures under which they had to live.  They were not lush, they lacked the kind of grace of the vegetation below the timberline, but they were alive and hardy.  Upon close investigation, however, it was found that these were not ordinary shrubs.   The formation of the needles, etc., was identical with that of the trees farther down; as a matter of fact, they looked like branches of the other trees.  When one actually examined them, the astounding revelation was that they were branches.  For, hugging the ground, following the shape of the terrain, were trees that could not grow upright, following the pattern of their kind.  Instead, they were growing as vines grow along the ground, and what seemed to be patches of stunted shrubs were rows of branches of growing, developing trees.  What must have been the tortuous frustration and the stubborn battle that had finally resulted in this strange phenomenon!  It is as if the tree had said, “I am destined to reach for the skies and embrace in my arms the wind, the rain, the snow and the sun, singing my song of joy to all the heavens.  But this I cannot do.  I have taken root beyond the timberline, and yet I do not want to die.  I shall make a careful survey of my situation and work out a method, a way of life, that will yield growth and development for me despite the contractions under which I must eke out my days.  In the end I may not look like the other trees, I may not be what all that is within me cries out to be.  But I will not give up.  I will use to the full every resource in me and about me to answer life with life.  In so doing, I shall affirm that this is the kind of universe that sustains, upon demand, the life that is in it.”  “I wonder if I dare to act even as the tree acts.  I wonder!  I wonder!  Do you?”

©The Rev. Dr. Barbara Merritt, 2001