"The Patience of Job"

Is patience a virtue? Well, certainly, it’s a virtue if we define it as that measure of self-control we need when we are faced with annoying and frustrating situations, and when we’re tempted to lash out at the nearest person to us, -- and we refrain from doing it. That kind of patience is certainly a virtue, something that we need. And perhaps need more of than we already have. Something we know, at times, at least, that we lack.

But let me ask the question again -- Is patience a virtue? Is it always a virtue to be patient? Aren’t there some things in life that should, by their very nature of, drive us nuts? Some things that should stir us up, that well-up inside us, and not just inside us(!) that we should "let it all out," express it, whatever it is, however we do it? Isn’t there a time to be what we might call "impatient"?

How should Tubby Smith, the Kentucky basketball coach, have reacted last week during the loss against Western Kentucky? Should he have just sat there, quietly, twiddling his thumbs? Well, he can show with his thumbs, I think, how impatient he is. Certainly with his eyes at times. Should he have just let it go? Or was something happening in UK’s dismal play that demanded some kind of "impatient" reaction?

Or what about the impatience expressed by a young woman, who had just graduated from high school, when she wrote these words: She said,

"I’ve heard mention in books and movies and the like of the impatience of youth. I never understood it though. People tell kids not to be in a hurry to grow up and I never used to be. I was pretty content to be just where I was. No more, no less and certainly no where else. Finally, though, I’m coming to understand what the phrase means -- at least to me. I want -- I almost need -- change and soon. I have a job I could do without. A home that is dotted with happiness, but which is becoming more uncomfortable with each passing week. While I understand in each of these situations the need to wait, I keep feeling pent up, eager, impatient. I want things to happen. I want all the pieces of my life to start falling into place."

Anything wrong with that? A teenager leaving home. A young person leaving home, wanting their own life to begin, impatient for it all to start and go on its way? Surely there’s nothing particularly wrong with that!

Or what about impatience in the face of something a little stronger, -- in the face of evil? Should we be patient in the present situation with the terrorist threat? Or when we hear, for example, statistics like this: 500,000 children in Brazil, 400,000 children in India, 200-850,000 children in Thailand, 100,000 children in Taiwan, 200,000 children in Nepal, and according to UNICEF estimates, somewhere between 100-300,000 children in North America involved in the sex trade. That’s over two million children around the world. Should we just sit back when we hear this? I know we hear horrendous statistics all the time. But patience in the face of those things which are truly vile? Truly evil? Truly horrible? Is that a virtue?

Or what about going back a few years, to another tragedy that struck our world. This time, not just five or six thousand people dying, but somewhere around a million. Only seven years ago it was, in Rwanda, one million people -- it boggles the mind -- died in the midst of genocide in a situation known to the United Nations, in a situation known to our government, known to the governments of the Western World, in which, for one political reason or another, we did nothing.

In an interview not that long ago on British television, Anthony Barnett, who was the United States representative at the Rwanda desk of the United Nations, spoke these words. He said,

"What really haunts me, what really troubles me, looking back to that time, what I find so horrifying, so disturbing is that I," and he does not blame anybody else in this, he speaks of this himself, "is that I could have been so complacent and so cavalier about genocide. There was genocide unfolding before our very eyes and yet we’re acting as if nothing’s different."

But something was different. And at times some things really are different and they demand some kind of a reaction from us -- whether it's because of evil or injustice or inappropriate behavior, or whether it’s simply because of the changing circumstances of our lives. There are things that happen in life that surely should make us shout and should make scream and move us and shake us, making us impatient enough to break out of our complacency, out of our indifference, out of our feeling of powerlessness, so that we actually do something.

Jesus clearly was impatient like this from time to time. We know of two incidents at least that were recorded in the pages of Scripture. Unfortunately, for people like me, both of them were directed at the religious folk, those who were paid, in part, for what they did. Jesus turns to the scribes and the Pharisees on occasion, tired of their hypocrisy. And he says to them, "Woe, woe to you, you white-washed sepulchers!"

And then of course, if you remember, he comes into the temple, gets upset with those who are buying and selling in the courts of the temple. Upset not first of all with them, surely, but with those who ran the temple, the religious leaders who made a great deal of money out of the religious trade that went on there -- the buying and the selling of all the animals, all the sacrifices for worship. He lost his patience. He got mad and what was inside of him came to the outside.

That kind of madness, that kind of impatience, too, was what happened finally to a mother by the name of Candace Lightner. You may remember her story too. Her daughter was killed in a car crash, killed by a driver who had been arrested four times previously for driving under the influence of alcohol. But he was still on the road and he still had a license. And in her anger, in her madness, she created MADD -- Mothers Against Drunk Drivers.

Though, undoubtedly, what she began to find out, if she didn’t know it already, is that if in fact you really want to change things -- while you’re madness, while your impatience may be the "starting gun" that gets you going -- along the way, if you’re going to change those things which are ingrained in society, those ways of acting which lead to one injustice or another, then you’re going to need the very patience which to begin with you don’t have! You’re going to need it, and lots of it. Not only the kind of patience which makes you polite with those with whom you work, but that kind of patience which keeps a goal in view and which will not quit until you get there.

Patience as perseverance. This was the kind of patience which William Wilberforce had 200 years ago as he sought to undo the institution of slavery throughout the length and the breadth of the British Empire; to do so as part of his service to the living God. He was a committed Christian, but this is what he was up against. His opponents spoke to him in the early days like this, saying, "Abolition would instantly annihilate a trade which annually employed upward of 5,500 sailors, upward of 160 ships and whose exports amount to 800,000 pounds sterling and would undoubtedly bring the West India trade to decay, whose exports and imports amount to upwards of 6 million pounds sterling and which give employment in upwards of 160,000 tons of additional shipping and sailors in proportion."

As he began his work, they railed against him, saying "You are going to undo the whole economy -- everything that we do is based upon this. There will be massive unemployment. You will shake up everything in our land." And so they tried to steer him off his course, but he would not be steered off his course. He persevered to begin with, just to begin with, for eighteen years. Eighteen years, from the time he got into Parliament and made his first speech until the time the slave trade was outlawed.

But that wasn’t the end. Slavery itself wasn’t outlawed in the colonies until 26 years after the abolition of the trade. Forty-four years in total, from the time he entered Parliament to his death bed in 1833, when the act abolishing slavery was passed. Constantly through that time, doggedly through that time, praying and talking and moving towards his goal with the most remarkable persistence, the most remarkable patience.

It’s surely that kind of patience, that kind of persevering patience, which James, the Apostle, holds up to the early Christian as he writes to them in his letter and refers to Job as the model of endurance, the model of patience. Job’s patience, if you remember from our Scripture reading, and you probably could have turned anywhere in Job to see this, has next to nothing to do with being polite. It is next to nothing to do with being passive. It has next to nothing to do with being in control or being complacent. In fact, in terms of politeness, Job completely lost it. He shouted, he complained, he cried out, against his friends and against God, about the injustice and the unfairness of his situation. How it was completely inexplicable. He cried out about his pain. He did not keep his pain to himself. He cried out about the lack of empathy or understanding shown to him by those who surrounded him, but strangely in all of this, God did not grow impatient with him.

God put up with him and not only put up with him, God allowed through this impatience, a wonderful thing to happen. As Job kept talking, as Job kept ranting and raving to his friends the direction of the conversation began to change. That is, the conversation with them began to become a conversation not with other human beings, but with the ultimate being: a conversation with God. It’s almost imperceptible how it happens, how it moves from "down below" to "up above." Back and forth it goes until finally God is in the picture, through this conversation which never seems to end, in which Job perseveres through all his pain and his suffering until as it were, until all of who he is lies there open on the table. Until the end, he goes on, until somehow he comes face to face with God and comes to know God through this interminable conversation in a way that he had not known God (even though he had been a religious person) -- a way he had not known God before. Face to face with God through his persistence, his impatience, as if for the first time.

Have you ever persisted, endured, spoken impatiently, yet patiently in an enduring way with God like that? Wrestled with God, as Jacob wrestled with God, in such a way that your relationship with God actually changed? Something moved, something began to come through. Some light began to shine that you had not seen in a long, long time.

In thinking of a comparison that might illustrate it, all I could think about was the kind of conversation that a boy and girl might have when they’re starting out in their relationship with each other. Their conversation, to begin with, is hesitant. It’s guarded. They don’t know each other. They’re not quite sure what each other is going to think about what they have to say when they express an opinion. They don’t know whether the other will agree with that opinion or not and they don’t want to offend. They want the relationship to last. But enough differences begin to emerge over time, enough items come up for discussion, enough events face them in which it seems as if they do have different opinions. They are two different individuals and they have a choice to make: their choice is either to bury those differences and to continue the conversation at a superficial level, to sweep those differences under the carpet, OR it is to speak about them. But to speak about them is risky. It may lead to shouting. It may lead to impatience. It may lead to the end of the relationship. But on the other hand the opposite might happen too! It may also lead to something which is permanent and which can never come into existence without it. It may lead to love. A knowledge of each other, a new understanding of each other -- as everything is spilled out there in front of them. If they will continue in that conversation to the end, if they speak to one another, ultimately with patience, though there may be impatience along the way, if they speak to each other ultimately with patience that lasts, they may come to know each other as they could never have done without that.

Have you spoken to God like that? Wrestled with God like that? Long enough in our sound-byte world -- in which it’s okay to have short prayers but not long conversations in which we are molded and shaped -- long enough to know that somehow God is at work through the good and the bad and the indifferent; long enough to get us beyond the nice and beyond the polite to what is ultimately real?

The older brother in Jesus’ story of the prodigal son (Luke 15) never seems to have had that conversation with his father, even though he’s spent all his days with him. Some of you may know the story well. The younger brother goes off, takes his part of the inheritance, squanders it, is in a foreign land, runs out of everything he has, returns home, and his father welcomes him with welcome arms, but the older brother is stunned: how could his moral, upright father do this? But isn’t it more stunning -- that he didn’t know, he didn’t know what his father would do? He did not know his father well enough to know what his father would do?

Sometimes those who have been close to God all their lives do not know the God to whom they are close. It can happen with us. Sometimes, perhaps, because we’re too polite and too patient, we don’t read Job that often, and sometimes we don’t even read the Psalms that often, but there is this strain in Jewish faith, which "takes God on" and through that taking God on, comes to know God.

We quit too soon. Of course we argue with God. Of course there are times when things go wrong and things upset us, and we speak to God. But more often than not, I believe, we quit before we get to the middle, let alone the end of the conversation. Too impatient. And we never, because of that, get to a knowledge of God, a knowledge which digs down deep inside and uncovers who we are and who God is in relationship to us.

Patience. Is it a virtue? It all depends, doesn’t it?

Of course, we need more patience. Patience with each other. Patience to be in control at times when we want to lash out at others. God help us to have such patience as that.

But surely there are times when we need impatience as well, to allow those feelings to arise in us that we have kept down in the face of situations that demand some kind of a reaction.

God can do something with that kind of impatience, especially if it’s linked with the patience of Job or the patience of Wilberforce. That kind of patience which patiently persists, even with God, until the end.

Let’s bow before God in prayer.