Strengthen Your Hearts

Sermon for The Third Sunday of Advent

St. John's, Georgetown Parish | Washington, DC

James 5: 7-10

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“Are you the one who is to come or are we to wait for another?” Within this question posed to Jesus, there is a great deal that may sound quite familiar to us...

This morning, we enter the third week in this season of watching and waiting. Advent is time set aside to practice hope-filled anticipation... but after a while waiting gets a bit wearisome, doesn’t it? Perhaps then we can relate to this question. Because how often have we too asked in our own lives, “Is this it!?”

We see throughout our lessons today this dilemma of reality falling short of expectations. ....The Prophet Isaiah foretells a time of everlasting joy and gladness—but the present is evidently still one where sorrow and sighing remains. ...Meanwhile, Matthew’s Gospel tells of John seeing evidence of the very events Isaiah once foretold—but he remains in prison, still waiting for God’s kingdom to come in the way he expected. ...And in the epistle of James, we hear the author admonish the people to be patient— because while still waiting for the day of salvation they have grown restless.

This letter of James addresses a tired and waiting-weary community. The early Christian Church had been promised a new world was coming imminently—a world much like the familiar visions Isaiah and other prophets had spoken. But that promise had been long in default, and a spirit of revolt was building.

The situation James confronts is much like the one Martin Luther King, Jr. knew all- too-well. In 1963, a similar spirit of restlessness was rising because justice for Black Americans had been delayed for far-too-long. And in a letter written while he was forced to wait inside a jail cell, Dr. King addressed those who found efforts toward civil rights inconvenient. Comfortably distanced from long-endured and unjust suffering, a group of moderate, white clergy members encouraged Dr. King and other activists to be patient—“just wait,” they suggested. But “This ‘Wait,’” as Dr. King wrote, “almost always means “Never.”

Now, when I first read this call to patient endurance from James, the ‘Letter From a Birmingham Jail’ immediately came to mind. Encouraging those in the moment of sighing and sorrow to just be patience, as the epistle of James does, sounds a lot like a meager attempt to pacify the urgency of the moment from those who are quite happy to delay and deny justice. To the ears of anyone in the depth of suffering and waiting desperately for God’s intervention, “Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord” just doesn’t have a satisfying ring.

I wonder then, just what kind of “patience” does James have in mind here? Is it one that is really mere acceptance? And is this what Advent waiting really looks like in our lives? I suspect there is great knowledge in this very room about these readings. We know a thing or two about this dilemma. The space between the world we dream of and the reality of our lives is often one rife with tension. Encountering this tension is surely inevitable. And just as we see in our readings, these moments have a way of surfacing doubt, uncertainty, and insecurity. It is not easy to hold oneself together in a time of unknown.

There was once a young man with aspirations of being a poet. At the age of nineteen, he was an Austrian military cadet—and he felt profoundly restless. Something stirred inside of him—a longing to write, to create, to bring something new into the world. So, he wrote to a well-respected poet for guidance, and he poured out his many hopes and anxieties. In a letter written in response to this aspiring poet, Rainer Marie Rilke offered this insight:

“Be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue. Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given to you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer, one distant day in the future.”

Patience—in this way it is described by Rilke—is a refining process. Rather than passive acceptance, this kind of waiting looks far more like the urgent spirit of Dr. King. Rather than leaving us powerlessness and despondent, an active patience holds steadfast to a dream, a promise, a hope—to a proclamation.

The experience within an active patience brings real change and transformation. And this is what the season of Advent and the letter from James guide us toward.

Now, make no mistake about it, patience is difficult—and it is often uncomfortable. There will be many incentives to turn away. Whatever the work each of us has been uniquely equipped for—whether that be voter mobilization campaigns, or writing poetry, or service to the sick and dying—the place of tension requires extra diligence. It will surely test your reserves, but it is from within these places of tension that transformation emerges, and something new is brought forth.

So, if we are to resist giving up or being pacified in times of waiting, there is some work before us... “Strengthen your hearts” in the waiting then, as James encourages. This is the work of active patience.

Strengthen your hearts because the world needs the goodness, and beauty, and truth, and love that each of us has been equipped with. Strengthen your hearts because to be faithful in bringing forth a new world requires deep wells of gladness.

This is just what the third week of Advent traditionally represents. We call today “Gaudete Sunday”—meaning to rejoice in the Lord—and we use a rose-colored candle to symbolize this. One common way of simplifying this tradition is to refer to this Sunday with the theme of “joy.” At this halfway point in Advent, it is important to pause and rejoice in what we know is to come. It is important to cultivate gladness— especially in the tension of this middle space.

Gladness strengthens our hearts for the work that is ours to do. Here's the tricky part, though: life’s circumstances will rarely collaborate. The work will rarely ever look the way we expected it to. Sometimes, laboring in the time of waiting might look like what John the Baptizer witnesses—like healing and cleansing, like new life. And in a world desperate for new life, where persons are reduced to the merit of their production, the labor needed to bring forth something new might look like... rest.

This is the kind of paradox that lies at the heart of faith. Faith equips us to hold together what seems incompatible: suffering and gladness, sorrow and hope, labor and rest. And it is this robust quality of active patience James encourages.

In active patience, we fully embrace the circumstances before us, while also trusting there is more at work than we can see and understand.

We cannot control the work of God. We cannot hasten the day of salvation. And yet in faithfully continuing, we live our way—without even noticing it—into understanding that God’s Kingdom has always been near at hand. And God has remained present with us through it all.

So, be patient beloved, and strengthen your hearts toward gladness.

Amen.