“God and the Length of Days”
The perils of impatience
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, September 11, 2005
Text: 1 Peter 3:13-22
This past summer I had an opportunity to deal with something that has bothered me since childhood. Technically, it is called acrophobia, and it produces a sense of vertigo, and is commonly known as the fear of heights. Now, I have suffered from this ever since I remember. I look back on one particular time when I was taken to a lighthouse in Bermuda on a school trip. It was a lighthouse in Southampton, and from that beautiful lighthouse, you could look over onto the south shore of Bermuda. The lighthouse stood in the middle of a series of steps that worked in concentric circles, right up to the top, and because it was an old lighthouse, it didn't have any railings on the steps. So I, along with all my classmates, boldly charged up these steps to get to the very top to look at the magnificent view.
No sooner, though, had I arrived at the top and peered over the railings than I started to get this terrible acrophobia. Then, I had to look at the prospect of going back down those stairs! Well, I was so terrified that I decided the only way that I was going to be able to descend from those lofty heights was on my backside. I went down all the flights of stairs on my bottom, one at a time, until I got to the very end. Can you imagine how cool a 10-year-old feels doing that in front of all his classmates?! Any pretense of being the brag boy in the class disappeared immediately!
I thought I had got over this as I got older: I can conquer this fear of heights, I thought - until I went to the battlefield at Gettysberg a few summers ago with Marial. I climbed the stairs to look out onto the battlefield from a great height. Again, I got to the top all right, but looked down on all the ridges below and was paralyzed with fear. Do you know what it feels like to have your wife hold your little hand to help you down every single step until you got to the bottom - at a battlefield, of all places?! My manhood evaporated before my very eyes! Marial remembers that moment quite often - It is a terrible thing to deal with.
So, this summer, I thought, I am going to conquer my fears once and for all. And so, I went onto the Capilano suspension bridge in Vancouver. As I started across the bridge above the mighty gorge, I saw a sign that said, “Please, No Jumping or Swinging on the Bridge” - as if I was going to do that! Unfortunately, a 12-year-old boy had not read the sign, and when I got to the very middle of the bridge, at which point it curves and is at its lowest, he started to bounce and swing. I felt like a 140-year-old man as I climbed to the very end and got to the other side!
The prospect of returning was daunting. However, when I got to the other side, I found something else - there were a lot of other little suspension bridges between the trees. I have to conquer this, I thought, and so I started to walk upon these, when I saw a young man at work on behalf of whoever oversees the Capilano suspension bridge. I realized that all the different bridges were tied to big trees, so I said to the young man, “Do you think that this tree will be able to hold me?” The young man looked at me with amusement. He said, “Sir, that tree has been around for 800 years. I think it can hold someone even of your size.” Size was not the issue for me at that moment. Then, he told me something surprising. He said, “Trees actually get stronger as they experience stress.” Let me tell you, that word “stress” was a word of hope for me! He continued, “This tree that we're tied to right now is only halfway through its life. It is now 200 feet tall. It will eventually grow to 300 feet, and it will last about 1,500 years.”
I looked in awe at the tree, and it gave me courage. I thought, “Who am I in this particular moment, at this particular time to be worried, when this tree is 800 years old?” Somehow, I walked boldly and bravely back across the Capilano suspension bridge, and I reached the other side - and then took a great deal of medication!
I was delighted to have made it, but it gave me a renewed sense of time. I was reminded that our sense of time as human beings becomes very easily and very quickly distorted with the ebb and flow of eras. With the movements of creation, our lifespan is but short and so, often distorted in the way that we perceive it. I was thinking of that this summer as there were great changes taking place on the Gaza strip with the withdrawal of the settlers from the occupied land, and I thought, might we not look back on this event in 100 years' time and see what enormous change this has wrought? Maybe when we look at the devastation of the people of New Orleans, and the desire to rebuild the city, will time not, in fact, give us a greater perspective on the meaning of what is occurring? Maybe, through the lens of time, we will see that there are lessons that can be learned from this, so it doesn't happen again. Somehow, our perspective, our sense of time needs to change.
Nowhere is this more clearly articulated than in our passage from 1 Peter this morning. Peter is dealing with a context of devastation, where a city has not been flooded, but burned. Rome has been brought down by a terrible fire, and Nero, who was the emperor, will not take any responsibility for what has taken place. So, he decides to find a scapegoat, and the natural scapegoat for this terrible devastation of Rome is a new group of people, called Christians. Already, they are looked upon with suspicion, because they have a close association with Jews, another pariah people, but in this particular case, Nero feels it would be easy to identify the emergence of this new group, this new religion, with the terrible devastation of Rome, and to bring the two together, and blame the Christians.
So, the Christians were tortured. They were banished from the city. Many of them lost their homes and their livelihoods, and were persecuted. In the midst of all this terrible devastation, Peter (or whoever penned 1 Peter) writes to the Christians to give them a word of encouragement; to give them a perspective of faith; and to give them a different understanding of time. He says to them, “Look, remember what happened in the Old Testament? Remember the story of Noah? Noah was telling everyone that there would be a flood, but nobody listened, and Noah built a ship, and everyone laughed at him. But Noah was unperturbed; he was following God's will, and even though, over time, it seems that he had lost his mind, when the flood eventually came and the waters rose and took lives, Noah and his family were saved, as well as the animals that were upon the ark.”
All of this is a symbol of being obedient to God in times of trouble, and understanding that God can still work his purposes out over time. Thus, in this great passage, Peter uses an interesting phrase: He says to those Christians who were anxious because of the devastation around them, “Remember divine long-suffering.” In other words, remember divine patience: Even though through our own perspective, through the immediacy of our desire to have everything sorted out and to understand it, God is still carrying out his purposes; God is still very much at work. What Peter is saying here is also first of all an indictment of our impatience. I love a phrase by Steven Cole: “God's word often refers to the Christian experience as a walk, seldom a run, and never a mad dash, but the way that we often treat life, and the way in which we often treat our faith, is as if it is a mad dash.”
It all has to be sorted out, and we have to understand everything before our very eyes, but that very impatience can be the source of some terrible sins: I mean what, for example, is corporate fraud if it is not in fact an impatience, a desire to reach beyond the bounds of the normal processes of business, to go beyond the normal accounting methods or the laws that require a particular way of investing or living, and simply try to seize unlawfully what it is you want through fraud? If that is not impatience, I don't know what is!
Impatience is trying to get what is not rightfully yours by any means. What is lust? What is rape, if it is not a desire for sexual pleasure by the imposition of power over someone else without building a relationship, without having meaningful love in the encounter? I mean, is it not going around what is really needed, a building of a relationship culminating in intimacy, but rather charging ahead and simply seizing the end without following the process.
What is gambling? Is it is not impatience? Is it not the desire to accumulate or to have something quickly, by chance, rather than by hard work and diligence, rather than by earning it? Is not gambling full of impatience, which says I want to grasp something now, but I don't want to have to go through the means to achieve it? Even the way that we look at God can be impatient. Even our doubt can be a form of impatience: God, why are you not solving all these problems that are around the world and just waving your magic wand and instantaneously dealing with it? This reminds us, though, of a salient fact: In the Second Book of Peter, in Chapter III, “Do not forget this one thing, dear friends, with the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.”
My friends, our perspective of time is sometimes severely distorted, and when it is distorted, we become impatient, and when we become impatient, we fall from grace, So, what is the lesson for us?
Here is the second point: There is an indication of divine patience here. God is more patient than we are. I have thought about this a great deal, because at the very centre of the biblical message is the belief that God does have a plan; God does have a purpose. My friends, you would not be here this morning, and people would not be listening on the radio or the Web, if deep in their hearts they didn't believe that to be true. God has a divine purpose. We see this in the story of Abraham and Sarah, who waited and waited and waited in order that they may have a child, then had a child whose name was Isaac, and Israel became a nation. It happened with Noah, when everyone was laughing at him, and they said, “Noah, you are full of it, you are never going to achieve your goals! Why are you wasting your time building an ark,” and God came in the midst of it and saved, because of the work of Noah.
Peter knew better than anyone else that God works out his purposes. He saw it in none other than in his Lord, Jesus Christ. For himself, in his own life, he was eager, he wanted Jesus to solve everything before his very eyes, but he was forced to be patient and to wait, to wait through the trial, to wait through the crucifixion, to wait through the empty tomb, to await his resurrection. That is why he says to the people of Rome, “Look, it is that in which you have to place your trust. Just like God did for Noah, Jesus has come, and Jesus has saved, and Jesus will save, even though right now there are dark days of persecution.”
The problem that we often have, though, my friends, is that we think that we have to hold onto all our old fears. We have to hold onto all our old sins. We have to hold on, rather than let go in faith that God has a sense of time. Sometimes we just get hold of those things no matter what. We have got to grasp them, we are human.
There is a wonderful story about two Buddhist monks. One day, there was a terrible thunderstorm, and the river started to swell so badly that one could not easily get to the other side because of the rising water. So, a young Japanese woman in a kimono comes up to one of the monks, and she says, “Is there any way someone can help me get to the other side?”
One of the monks says, “I will help you.” He picks her up, places her on his shoulders, walks across the rushing torrent and puts her down on the other side, safely.
When they got back to the monastery that evening, the other monk was annoyed with him for doing this, and he said, “I have a bone to pick with you. Don't you know that, as a Buddhist monk, you are not supposed to talk to a woman, let alone touch her and pick her up? Don't you know you're not supposed to do that or you can be tempted?”
The monk who carried the woman looked back at him and said, “When I picked up that woman I carried her across the water, I put her down on the other side and I left her there, but you, you are still carrying her around in your mind.”
My friends, we are like that with our impatience. We don't let it go! We carry it around with us! When things are not going according to our plan or when there is devastation around us, we begin to question our God, rather than taking that impatience and putting it down, and remembering that there is a sovereign will. The Bible is clear: God is patient and long-suffering. God understands, but don't misunderstand his patience for passivity. God is still at work. One theologian put it this way, “Our catalogue of sins is inexhaustible, but they do not exhaust the patience of God.”
So, what then should we do? What should our attitude be towards one another, and the world and God? It seems to me, thirdly, that we need to experience that patience in our own lives. I listened to an interview this week with Bishop Morton, a leading figure in the church in New Orleans. His entire church is in ruins, but he was most deeply concerned for his members, and his first priority was for the people of New Orleans. Then he made a fascinating comment: “We have to be patient, because God and the church are up to the building of lives.” It is not an instantaneous thing. It is not a sudden thing. He called on people to pray for patience as God's will unfolds, as the waters subside, and as people, like in the days of Noah, will be saved. I thought, what faith, what faith in the midst of devastation!
That is the kind of patience and the kind of divine attitude that we should exercise in our lives. I read a story not long ago of a Grade One schoolteacher, who on the first day of school, was taking the children outside in a terrible rain. The children had to put on their galoshes, so she helped put on 32 pairs of boots on these little Grade One children. When she got to the final one, the little girl said, “But Miss, these aren't my boots.” So she took the boots off all 32 children, to find the right ones. Then the little girl continued, “No, Miss, they are my sister's, and she loaned them to me this morning.” The teacher put the galoshes gently back on the little girl and the rest of the class, and led the 32 outside in the rain.
Patience! Patience! Notice how God's loving kindness treats us? That is how we should treat others. There is a wonderful poem by Raymond Edman:
In every life,
There's a pause that is better than onward rush,
Better than hewing or mightiest doing;
Tis the standing still at Sovereign will.
There is a hush that is better than ardent speech
Better than sighing or wilderness crying;
Tis the being still at Sovereign will.
The pause and the hush sing a double song
In unison low and for all time long,
O human soul, God's working plan
Goes on, nor needs the aid of man!
Stand still and see
Be still, and know!
My friends, God's long suffering, God's patience, God's breath can get me across the Capilano suspension bridge, and can take all of us to the Promised Land of his kingdom. Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.