Our culture is built for speed. We
often wake up, get a shower, maybe spend a moment in prayer then stumble into
the kitchen. If you have children then you have to get them up and ready for
school. Then we rush off to work and rush home to get dinner ready. After dinner we might have some playtime with
the kids, followed by bath time and then bed time. If there is any time left at
the end of the day it becomes “my time”.
All of these activities are done with an eye on the clock so that time can be
used well and not wasted. What is worse we might think then “our time” or “my
time” being wasted. Yet, is it possible
that being a slave to the clock affects the fruit of the Spirit known as
patience?
Patience has its roots in the
character of God. The Old Testament speaks frequently about God being “slow to
anger”. One of the most repeated
characteristics of God found in Ex. 34:5-7 are echoed throughout the Old
Testament and into the New Testament as well.
Exodus 34:5-7 “Then the Lord came
down in the cloud and stood there with him and proclaimed his name, the Lord. And
he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, “The Lord, the Lord, the
compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and
faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness,
rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the
children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth
generation.”
God’s self-introduction in Exodus
34 also crops up in other passages such as Ps. 103:8; Num. 14:18; Neh. 9:17;
Ps. 86:15; Joel 2:13; Jon 4:2; Nahum 1:3. In the New Testament the words that
God uses for his self-introduction are applied to Jesus. It seems to be the New
Testament’s way of saying here is God. Scripture
rarely portrays God as having a hair-trigger temper. God does not seem to be in
a hurry. He does not coerce us or force
our hand. The cross of Christ is a startling reminder that the Lord of the
universe does not reign with an iron fist. God’s love is does not “insist on
its own way” (1 Cor. 13:4-5).
God is slow to anger, but God does get angry (2 Peter 3:8-9). God bears with
people for a time yet judgment is coming. We (Christians) are called to be patience, not
for the sake of patience but for the sake of another. Paul notes in Roman
15:1-6 that God’s active love is the kind of love that by being patience and
enduring seeks the good of another person. In fact patience is a necessary
element for having peace. Our willingness to be patience breaks the cycle of
vengeance and opens us up to healing and peace. It is through cultivating
patience, and forgiving one another that we have any hope as followers of
Christ to be the community that God has called us to be.
If this is what patience is then why is it that is seems so
hard in our world and culture today. What are some obstacles to patience.
Thanks to some monks in the Middle
ages we all have become very keenly aware of time. Some Benedictine Monks, who
wanted to aid their schedules of prayer and work invited the world’s first
clock. “The mechanical clock,” as Lewis Mumford wrote, “made possible the idea
of regular production, regular working hours and a standardized product.” In short, without the clock, capitalism would
have been quite impossible. The paradox,
the surprise, and the wonder are that the clock was invented by men who wanted
to devote themselves more rigorously to God; it ended as the technology of
greatest use to men who wished to devote themselves to the accumulation of
money. In the eternal struggle between God and Mammon, the clock quite
unpredictably favored the latter.[1]
Until the clock was invented there
was no such thing as a hour. Those of us who glace at our clocks, watches and
cell phones countless times a day to track our hours might do well to remember
that little fact. Our culture is in bondage to the clock. Just try and remember
the last time that you did not wear a watch, constantly check you cell phone
for the time or keep up what time it was in general. We tend to think of time as “my time”. I
control it. I possess it. We spend time, buy time, save time, waste time,
manage time and invest time.
In fact our society views time as
so valuable that there is an expectation to be stingy. How many times have you
heard something like “I apologize for taking up so much of your time?” With
questions like this in our culture it seems as if time is more important than
people. Because we view time as our own to spend interruptions instantly become
intrusions. What does a parent have to
show for their self-worth by being with a child and stacking blocks or changing
diapers? With all these interruptions into “my time” what can we say that was
accomplished? Can we really hope to
become patient people with the all too often assumption that people are unwelcome
intrusions to “our” or “my” time?
With our view of time we have come
up with a new virtue called productivity. Few virtues in our culture are more
exalted. Productivity is the benchmark by which many assess our worth and the
worth of others. We pride ourselves with being people of action.
In fact the more ways that I can
find to spend my time the more valuable that time and I become. This is why we
are a nation of the disposable because we believe that the time saved is more
valuable than people and the stuff we place in landfills. Being patient in our
culture feels like weakness if not death. What could be worse, we wonder, then doing
nothing? This idea has even found its way right into the local Church. Think
about how we talk about worship as productivity. For example some may say “I
did not get anything out of the service today” which translated means “Given
the time that I spent in church today I am disappointed that I do not have more
to show for it”.
Is it possible that our fixation with time savers, productivity
nurtured by jet planes, microwaves and
Pentium chips has spilled over into our spiritual lives? We have no patience
for the long haul. If something is wrong then it must be fixed immediately.
Maturity takes time. Fruit does not grow overnight. Cultivating a life in the
Spirit is slow painstaking work.. As a parent who hopes to instill certain
virtues in my children – does it matter what I have to do to get the desired
result or is the desired result all that matters? Although our culture insists
that the most important thing is to arrive at the destination, many of us have
had experiences that remind us how important the journey can be. God has
provided us with some resources to cultivate this spiritual fruit of patience.
The heart of the Christian story is a God who is patient,
who works slowly and diligently over many generations to create a people who
will, by their very life together, bear witness to that God. A God who takes
his people into the wilderness for 40 years to teach them dependence and trust.
A God who becomes flesh in Jesus and devotes 30 years of life preparing for
ministry. A slow, patient God, rather than a God-in-a-hurry God. There’s
something liberating about remembering that our God entered our world, moved
among us at a walking pace and demonstrated that love of God by being nailed
down for us. In doing so God acted to justify us and free us from the need to
justify ourselves by hurrying here or there, or accomplish this or that.
Time is not to be understood as a scarce commodity which
hangs over our heads and threatens our attempts to make something of ourselves.
Instead, by the grace of God with a view of what God has done in the past and
desires in the future we are free to view time as a gift. We are set free from
the clock to do things like care of the elderly, children and the mentally
handicapped. Those whose productivity in our culture is suspect and have no promise
to help out our status
One resource to help us is the age-old practice of observing
the Sabbath. Such a practice must have seemed strange to Israel’s neighbors. I
mean how can you expect to get ahead in the world if one sets aside an entire
day each week to “do nothing” while the rest of the world rushes by for more
and better? How can the church be about the process of discipleship without the
time to do so? Another long standing tradition that might help is seeing Sunday
at the eighth day of creation. Some early Christian saw Sunday not as the
Sabbath or the first day of the week but as the eighth day of creation. In
light of Easter God has begun something new thus adding a new day of creation.
When we gather for worship we are not simply marking the beginning of another
week, we are gathering to celebrate God’s new definitive act of re-creation
that started with the resurrection of Jesus. The new creation has broken into
the old, the future has broken into the present and it has not left things as
they were.
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