Holy Patience

Patience is not a virtue that comes easily to us. We come with short fuses. We are personally invested in our work and our play and we want to see the results of our efforts.

But when things start to fall apart, instead of taking the long view – we begin to lose hope, we begin to get angry or jaded, and often we behave in ways that are far from holy.

 

Sometimes I try to imagine what it must have been like to be one of the first disciples of Jesus.

The time of his execution and resurrection must have been such a confusing, heartbreaking, joyful, frustrating rollercoaster of a time.

To be heading triumphantly into Jerusalem one minute… burying your leader the next… and then sticking your fingers through the holes in his risen body?

How would you even process?

I picture them in a kind of existential shock… going through the motions… not really sure what’s real and what’s not…

 

Maybe that’s why during those forty days that Jesus spends with the disciples after the resurrection we don’t have public appearances or healings or those great miracles.

No, He eats with them.

They fish.

He walks with them and teaches them.

Everything is on hold. Jesus simply ministers to their souls.

For forty days, we have no more than a handful of stories and they are all personal and intimate encounters.

 

I think the question must always be looming: what comes next?

A return to normalcy?

Revenge against the institutions that executed their leader?

A new movement? A revolution?

I can imagine the adrenaline running through their systems, the excitement that would fuel them to act and capitalize on the resurrection.

The question keeps coming:  Jesus… are you ready to kick the Romans out of Israel?  Are you going to return the nation to its glory?

They want their hearts desire and they want it NOW.

 

And Jesus keeps reminding them about the Kingdom of God and telling them to wait.

 

Be patient.  That is fruit of the spirit I find harder than most.  It is often translated as longsuffering. It is the gift of being able to endure in spite of the circumstances that have come against you. It is a hopeful fortitude that reminds us that there is light at the end of the tunnel… that if we trust and wait, the outcome we are praying for will come to pass.

 

The hardest part about patience is that we don’t know how long we are going to have to wait.

 

The disciples keep asking:  Lord, are we there yet?   Jesus, is it time?

And for forty days, Jesus tells them to wait. To be patient.

“In God’s time…” Jesus replies.

 

Biblically speaking, the number 40 has far more significance as a symbol than a literal number.

For forty days and nights it rained on Noah and the ark.

For forty years the Israelites wandered in the wilderness.

For forty days, Jesus was tempted at the start of his ministry.

Over and over, that number comes to us.

The number forty in the Bible symbolizes a time of testing, a time of trial.  It symbolizes the amount of time it takes us to be ready for whatever comes next.

It has nothing to do with the revolution of the earth around the sun and everything to do with the turning of our hearts towards God.

The ancient Greeks had two words to use to describe time:  first, Kairos – which meant the right time or an indeterminate amount of time in which something significant happens.

Chronos, on the other hand, describes sequential time and is where we get the word chronological.

The biblical flood.  The desert wandering. The time of testing of Nineveh.  All of these happen not in chronological time, but in Kairos time.  In God’s time.

In fact, every time I see the number “forty” in the scriptures, I am reminded to think about God’s time and not a literal figure.

 

And when you look at verse 6 and 7 of our scripture in the original Greek, this distinction is there, plain as day.

The disciples are asking about whether or not it is time (houtos ho chronos), but Jesus responds that it is not for them to know the times or seasons (chronos ē kairos) that God has set.

 

For forty days, Jesus ate with them, cooked them breakfast, walked with them…

For forty days… for the time it took to get them ready, to reorient them, to turn them in a new direction… Jesus was simply present.

“Be patient,” he said.

 

Barclay’s commentary says that patience is the grace of a person who could revenge a wrong but doesn’t.

Patience is seeking an opening, waiting for the anger to pass, and finding a way forward. Patience is remembering that this inconvenience, this obstacle, will not last forever.

If patience is the grace of a person who could revenge a wrong but doesn’t… then Jesus is trying to shift the thinking of those disciples during these forty days.  He is trying to help them realize that the Kingdom of God is not about a military revolution against the Romans, but about a transformation of the world that is bigger that one nation.

 

Because, sometimes patience is coming to understand that your heart’s desire is not God’s desire and getting on board with God’s preferred future.

It takes time for that kind of shift in thinking.  They need to wait.  They need to practice patience.  They need to be slow with their anger and not let it consume them.

When we find ourselves in situations of great frustration and anger, I think patience is taking just a moment to breathe and to pray. Patience is asking for God to come into this situation and remind us of the things that are truly important in the moment, and to let that anger move out of the way, if necessary.

 

But patience is also putting one foot in front of the other and not being paralyzed in your waiting.    If we spend too much time looking into the past, we will never live into our new future.

And so in the midst of this time of patient waiting, Jesus and the disciples did very normal things.  They went fishing.  They spent time praying and talking and learning.

Making the most of our given situations is a very hard thing to do. We like to sit and stew and wish that things were different. And in doing so, we breed anger and resentment in our hearts.

Patience has to be active.  We will never change or improve or reach our desired outcome if we simply stop what we are doing.

We have to live into the future by doing the things now that will help us reach that desired outcome.  Patience sometimes means living as if that future were a reality today.

A few months ago, I shared with you the situation of Vano Kiboko.  He is the brother of one of our District Superintendents here in Iowa and he believed that his country and its leaders were on the wrong path.  And so he practiced that kind of active patience by publically speaking out against his government and he was imprisoned for his actions.

For 16 months, Vano has been in prisoned.

And he didn’t let anger or resentment fuel him.  He lived with a heart full of grace towards his guards and everyone he met.  He put one foot in front of the other and kept working towards God’s future. He practiced holy patience in the midst of a trying situation.

More than a thousand people were brought to Christ during his time in prison.  He wept with them, baptized them, shared God’s good news with them.

And on May 6, Vano Kiboko was released from prison.

 

We don’t always know what God has in store for us.  We can’t know the times or the seasons, the chronos and Kairos, of God’s plan.

 

But I think our Ascension scripture reminds us that God takes the long view in our lives, too.

The forty days after Easter were a gift to the disciples… time to reorient their lives and help them to be ready for what God had planned next.  Time to prepare their hearts for the power of the Holy Spirit that would come in Kairos time.

 

There are so many things that we are impatient for.  Justice.  Healing.  Peace.  “How long?” we cry out.

But maybe holy patience invites us to live into that future with our actions today.

Holy patience invites us to live with open hearts, always aware of God’s movement and prompting.

Holy patience invites us to be filled with grace, flexible, and willing to let God change us.

Holy patience is a gift… because it is Kairos time… God’s time… enough time to truly get us ready – heart and mind and soul – for the future God has planned.

Moltmann Conversation – Breakout Workshop on the future that is coming towards us

Finding the Future Session:

• Recognizing wisdom in the gathered congregation – tool for genereative listening

• Cataphatic = likes images, sensual concepts; apaphatic = way of negation

• Website – blog Sabbath journey (typepad) http://web.mac.com/terrychapman/A_SABBATH_JOURNEY/BEGIN_HERE_files/Moltmann%20Breakout%20Group%208-26.pdf

• Icarus – Matisse… Sabbath is a way to a safe place in the heart of creation (6 stars/birds) – when we stop to rest, God is there for us. Life is not endless productivity! We don’t have to opt into Pharoah’s plan of endless productivity.

• Gospel of Evacuation (the chasm, the bridge) – future was always important to him in his history

o Moltmann – this gospel draws love away from this life to the hereafter, spreading despair in this life, we only live here half-heartedly – sell off these treasures cheap to heaven – in theory it’s a refusal to live, a religious atheism
o Subjects eschatology to chronos – flattens the big picture – the dance of God in 4 steps (1) creation, 1a) the crisis, 2) covenant, 2a) conversation. 3) incarnation, 3a) gospel/cross 4) resurrection 4a) easter, the beginning

• Cardiography – scientific monitoring of the heart – measure the heartbeat of what is wanting to be born

• The telos, the future that wants to happen is also moving towards us… so he’s not a cartographer, not a map-maker .. this measures the heart, more of noticing our posture as we face the future

• Metaphorical tool to carry over God’s unfolding future into our lives so that we can build a praxis for our congregations

o God as wholly other – the canvas of all that is – the zinsum, the self-restriction = separate and different, but encompassing all (he can still hold all of the omni’s – because within God there is self-withdrawl… kenosis!!?!!) (chora – empty space in the middle of the perichoretic dance) God created us and set us in the place that he had

o In the eschatological moment, God fully dwells back into that space and is all in all – primordial time and space of creation will end when creation becomes the eternal temple for God’s Shekinah. (Moltmann)

o Center of the circles – mandorla (almond) – overlapping of realities – al lot of Christian art is framed in this image, the almond… (heaven and earth, good and evil,)

o Add temporal dimensions – chronos (temporal time) – aeon (eternity – fullness), mandorla = kairos! – the moment that is pregnant with opportunity, the aha!, that of eternity that we experience now – the time and place of transformation!

o Does time happen in creation, or creation in time? Moltmann – time happens in creation – time is created.

o Biblical God is in time and beyond time (chronos, and aeon)
• Sabbath = a broad place, kairotic Sabbath place – two pillars of sabbath: covenant and creation, from both the chronos and aeon
• See slide 11 for covenant – incarnation (shekinah – assumption… God’s revelation in history) on the chronos side, and creation – resurrection on the aeon side (god as all in all)
• Generative idea of the Sabbath – in stopping, there is a memory of covenant that is renewed
• Early Christians practiced both Sabbath and lord’s day for 200 years – because both were important!

o Trinity same way (but I might disagree here, we need 3 circles)

o Praxis rooted in presence: present – absolute future – mandorla = epiphany of the ordinary = transformational osmosis – moment where the spirit seeps into our lives, from a region of higher concentration to that of lower concentration through a semi-permeable membrane – human soul into all of creation

o EVERYTHING CHANGES in Epiphany

o Within our chronological sphere – field of freedom, field of awareness conscious/intention. NOT Autonomy. Free when we confess the sacred bounds – bounded by love and justice and our covenant relationship. We don’t like bounded freedom, we would rather be unbounded Conscious/Intentional vs. Unconscious/Conventional

o John 3:16: the Aramaic and the Hebrew word for love is rechemet – womb (sounds a lot like zimzum) God created a place in God’s self for love, for creation – move into this space in order to be reborn (the part of freedom that is in the mandorla) so that we are transformed!

o Inconsumation (Rholheizer?) – the place of beginning of longing and restlessness – it is in the torment of the insufficiencies of everything attainable in this life that we come to realize that all symphonies remain unfinished. – we can never satisfy that longing in this life, we need a mourning of that loss (Jephthah’s daughter) – the only hope is God, but it’s an infinite horizon… don’t try to fill it with things, feeling of desolation

o Inconsumation and Kenosis, through transformation we experience discernment – innovation, breakthrough, co-creation – 8th day of the new creation

o When we are far away from the kairotic moment, time seems driven and chaotic, – when we get to the intersection, time seems to stop… crises can move us into these kairotic moments – instant community can form, sometimes we stumble onto kairotic moments but we look for intentionality – how we can move into these places

o We normally operate without going deep into this transformative kairotic moment – we talk-judge-pray-act-talk-….. and we bump up against that sacred/future, but never enter it. we restructure, reengineer, rearrange and are stuck

o Theory U (slide 23) – Shirmer
• On the edge = downloading, operating only from the assumptions from the past, living conventionally and unconsciously
• Open mind
• Open heart
• Open will
• Allow inner knowledge to emerge and act in an instant

o Learn by reflecting on past (downloading)

o OR learn from the future as it emerges (presencing)

o Applying theory U to the mandorla = downloading on the blindspot – moving through open mind (go to the limits), heart (step out of self), will (letting go) to the center. New information, relationships, letting go of it all – trust into the place of transformation…

o out of this place of transformation comes discernment. – new choices based on a new perspective = practice becomes the 8th day – co-creation… so our discernment gives us the power to innovate/participate…

o but this is a journey, so we always need to begin this cycle again

o RESISTANCES
• To the open mind = voice of judgment, we need to suspend these voices
• To the open heart = voice of cynicism, the emotions of disconnection that keep us from going forward, requires commitment to love
• To the open will = voice of fear, fear of letting go of familiar, fear of surrendering into some unknown, requires commitment to courage, letting go of the things that we think are our “selves” to open ourself up to the Self.
• Many obstacles to discernment (crystallizing for Shirmer)
• Need for a holding space – world café, open space, spiritual direction

o Agricultural metaphor for this process in Psalm 126 “those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy. He goes out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with him.” Farmer has to take the grain that could be used for bread now, has to sow for the future, memory of the “harvest” enables the letting go of the “seed”

o Language of our experiences – we tell our stories, “what was that like? – metaphor, to the ineffable – the wordless/place of transformation/sit in silence/cry/joy, to the mystery….
• As people in our congregations tell their stories, tease out the metaphor, help them to stay with that for a while – if they are open to God’s presence, they will move to a place of kairos

o Movement – Brueggemann (slide 44) – OT paradigm Psalm 30 or 73… life, death, resurrection

o Eastern tradition of deification, the impossible/possible, God all in all as the spheres merge

o Kairotic moment of possibility that comes in crisis is very narrow – but through intentional movement of transformation and deliberately letting go creates a wider space for transformation.