God's Patience is Not God's Absence

A picture of waiting: an empty Adirondack chair © adirondackstreet.com

Romans 8:12-25

Matthew 13:24-30,36-43

One thing about living with small children is that it takes a while to do just about anything. Going to the grocery store? Sure thing. Let’s just put on our shoes and get into the car. No, no, no…not the leopard shoes, the ballerina shoes. "No, Dada," not those ballerina shoes, the black ballerina shoes. Oh wait, we forgot our headband. And now we must go potty. Okay, we’re ready to go. Hold on, “Why are you yelling at your sister? Well who was holding the stick first and where did the stick come from? Okay, I think we both have lost the stick privileges now that everyone is crying.”  

Perhaps you have lived through some version of this in your life, either directly with your own children or with a sibling or nieces and nephews. Part of a parent’s job is simply waiting. Waiting long enough for children to become ready for the task before them. And the thing about waiting, as we learned in the children’s sermon, is that Waiting Is Not Easy![1] All of us -- both adults and children -- want what we want and we want it now.

Our lessons today invite us to think about waiting. In the Gospel, Jesus offers us three brief pictures of the kingdom of God, and in each one someone must wait for a future promise to be fulfilled. The farmer waits for the harvest, resisting the temptation to pull up the weeds too soon. The birds wait for the mustard seed to grow from something almost invisible into a great tree. The woman waits as the leaven quietly and invisibly works through the dough until the entire loaf has risen.

At first glance, these parable seem to be about our patience. But notice that, in every story Jesus tells, the one who waits is not primarily us. It is the farmer. The birds. The baker. Ultimately, it is God who waits.  These parables certainly speak to our impatience, but they are first about God’s character and the strange way God’s kingdom comes into the world. In each image, waiting is not neglect; rather, it is part of the work itself. Wheat ripens through time. Seeds become trees through time. Dough rises through time. So we might say that God’s kingdom is not built despite waiting but through waiting.

If God's kingdom unfolds through patient, organic, growth, then a common question often surfaces. Why does God sometimes seem to wait when the world is suffering? Tragedies happen. Horrific suffering occurs. And we cry out, “Why don’t you do something?”

Today’s parables do not fully answer that question, and I doubt that any of us will receive a complete answer in this life. But the parables do remind us that God’s patience should never be mistaken for God’s absence. God’s movement in the world is often quieter, slower, and more mysterious than we would choose.

Bishop Tom Wright pushes this point ever further with a pair of difficult questions in his commentary on this text:

“Would we really like it if God were to rule the world directly and immediately, so that our every thought and action were weighted and instantly judged, and, if necessary, punished in the scales of his absolute holiness? If the price of God stepping in and stopping a campaign of genocide were that he would also have to rebuke and restrain every other evil impulse, including those we all still know and cherish within ourselves, would we be prepared to pay that price?”[2]

These are unsettling questions. We long for God to eliminate evil and suffering, but we often imagine that evil exists only outside ourselves. If you have been with us over the past three Sundays reading through Paul's letter to the Romans, this precisely the idea that he has been dismantling. Both wheat and weeds are sown into our lives.

God’s patience, therefore, is not only mercy toward the world; it is mercy toward us. We see this patience most clearly in Jesus himself. Again and again throughout the Gospels, he refuses to force faith. He patiently teaches disciples who misunderstand him. He breaks bread with Judas on the night of his betrayal. The God revealed in Jesus Christ is astonishingly patient, not because he is indifferent to evil, but because he desires redemption rather than destruction. Like a loving parent, God is never merely waiting. Even in the silence, he is at work. Seeds are growing beneath the soil. Leaven is spreading through the dough. Wheat is ripening for the harvest. The work of the kingdom often happens long before we can see it. Looking back over our lives, many of us can recognize truths that arrived long before we were ready to receive them. God's grace often precedes our understanding.

God walks beside us through every stage of life: childhood, schooling, relationships, marriage, children, vocation, grief, old age, and death. In every season, we remain God’s children: distracted, distressed, confused, and often convinced we know better. After all, we all know that the black ballerina shoes are the right choice.

Nonetheless, God continues to wait, patiently preparing us to receive the love he has already been offering all along. Sometimes, of course, we lose our patience and shout, “Get in the car and nobody talk to me!” In those moments, we can give thanks that God is the one in charge. And perhaps that is today's good news: God's patience is not God's absence. It is God's love, giving the world and us time to become what we are created to be.

[1] The Elephant and Piggie books, by Mo Willems, are a series of humorous children’s stories about two best friends – Gerald, a cautious and often anxious elephant, and Piggie, his cheerful and impulsive companion. In Waiting Is Not Easy!, Piggie tells Gerald that she has a surprise for him, but he must wait for it. Gerald grows increasingly impatient as the day passes, only to discover at nightfall that Piggie’s long-awaited surprise is the beauty of a star-filled sky.

[2] N. T. Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part 1: Chapters 1–15 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 168