December 12, 2016
Third Sunday of Advent – Year A
(Isaiah 35:1-6a, 10; Psalm 146; James 5:7-10; Matthew 11:2-11)
11 December 2016 – St. Austin Parish, Austin, TX
Today is Gaudete Sunday. Gaudete is the ancient Latin word for “the day they light the pink candle.” No, seriously, gaudete is a command for all of us to rejoice. In other words, after two weeks of the Church advising us all to wait in joyful hope, it’s time to get excited about the coming of Christmas!
Our first reading and our gospel passage talk about excitement and exciting things. However, our second reading talks about something else: patience. Patience? Is it even possible for us to be patient while we’re excited? We’ll reflect on that today.
O house of Jacob, come! Let us walk in the light of the Lord!
When people come to me for confession, a lot of them confess that their primary sin is not having patience. As I talk with these people, however, it seems that about 70% of the time, what people describe as a “lack of patience” turns out to be a euphemism for a different phenomenon: they have a problem controlling their anger. Well, perhaps anger is too strong a word for it. Maybe it’s annoyance or frustration. (Those sound better than “anger,” don’t they?)
My advice to those people is that anger (or annoyance or frustration) is not a sin. Anger is a God-given gift. God has created us so that we can feel angry. The task of growing in Christian maturity is to recognize all of our emotions as soon as we start to feel them, especially the emotions that scare us: anger, sadness, anxiety, jealousy, arousal, and loneliness, to name a few. Then, once we recognize them, we can ask the Holy Spirit to help us figure out what to do with these emotions.
For example, when I start to notice that I’m angry about something, I need to pray about it. What’s causing my anger? Often, if I take the time to pray with the situation, I discover that my anger is self-induced. If there’s a phenomenon beyond my control – such as witnessing the horrible behavior of service personnel and other customers at a local big-box-store-that-shall-not-be-named I visited when purchasing a new church emergency phone on Tuesday – I can find myself getting angry. But then I realize that I’m embarrassed that I, with two engineering degrees, know less about cell phones than these people making minimum wage. And I’m ashamed that I didn’t follow through on my promise to my brother priests to investigate the problems with our phone before it became a crisis. I realize that I’m actually using my anger to mask my underlying guilt and embarrassment. I stop feeling angry, I ask the Holy Spirit to help me find a way to give myself the same compassion that God gives every day, and I probably stop seething on the inside and try to respect the people who are trying to assist me.
Other times, I recognize that my anger is about a situation that I can remedy, if I have the guts to talk calmly with the other people who have contributed to creating the situation. Of course, I need to pray to the Holy Spirit in these cases, too, so I don’t say something stupid and make things worse!
There are other times when I realize that the effort and risks necessary to remedy the situation are not worth it. In those cases, I ask the Holy Spirit to help me to let go of my anger. There’s a catch here: lots of us say we’re going to “let go” of our anger, but then we subconsciously decide to hold onto it anyway. That’s called resentment: swallowing poison and waiting for someone else to die. It doesn’t work!
I have to admit that I don’t have a perfect track record, but I discover that the more I pray about my emotions, the more I understand them to be God-given gifts, not burdens to weigh me down. And the more easily I can get excited and stay excited about all that God has promised us! As a priest and a hospital chaplain, I have had countless opportunities to see God deliver on those promises. I have seen the eyes of the blind be opened, the ears of the deaf be cleared, the lame leap like a stag, and the tongue of the mute sing.
But in the other 30% of cases of people confessing a lack of patience, they’re talking about something more difficult. They’re in truly trying situations that never seem to relent – perhaps they’re caring for a parent with dementia, working in a truly terrible environment that they can’t escape, or caring for a child who’s going through an extended period of fussiness. These people may be able to exhibit patience 23 hours of the day, but there’s always another straw ready to break the camel’s back in that 24th hour.
I think that these are the people to whom James writes when he says, “see how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains.”
It’s hard to have patience, unless you hope that something better is coming to you eventually. The farmer knows that the fruit will eventually grow. When we find ourselves in seemingly hopeless situations, I think the thing to pray for is… trust. Trust in God’s plans for the future. The people who heard John the Baptist preach didn’t necessarily know why they were drawn to him: it wasn’t to see the reeds in the desert, and it certainly wasn’t because of the way he dressed. But there was something compelling in what he said. Our God is a God of the future, calling us forward to new, exciting, unpredictable things!
So, no matter whether our lack of patience is temporary or ongoing, the solution is to pray. But not to pray for patience. We need to pray to the Holy Spirit to understand our anger, our anxiety, our envy, or our loneliness. We need to pray to the Holy Spirit for a renewal of our trust in God, for a renewal of our hope in God’s promises. The farmer waits for the precious fruit, until it receives the rains. If we can remember back to our confirmation classes, patience isn’t technically a virtue. It’s a fruit… a fruit of the Holy Spirit. The more we fill our hearts with the gentle rain of the Holy Spirit, the more the fruit of patience will grow within us.
For about 70% of us, our struggle with patience is temporary. What can we do as we wait for the Lord with excitement and joyful hope? Perhaps we can try to ease the anxieties of the other 30% of people who are truly struggling to find patience, hope, and trust. We can’t necessarily lift their burdens from them, but perhaps we can give them a helping hand. As Isaiah has commanded us:
Strengthen the hands that are feeble,
make firm the knees that are weak,
say to those whose hearts are frightened:
“Be strong, fear not!
Here is your God, … he comes to save you.”