Preached at Christ Church, Bulkington
James 5. 7–10; Matthew 11. 2-11
“The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains. You also must be patient.”
Robert Campin, St John the Baptist (c. 1410), hangs in the Cleveland Museum of Art.
A few weeks ago, I had a friend staying who is an early riser, and when I got up to get my first coffee of the day he was already in the kitchen, listening to some panel debate on the Today programme on Radio 4. Various clever panellists were screeching at one another at high pace and high volume—not what I needed before 8 am. The topic was the future of jury trials, which is very important, but the debate felt like performance art rather than an attempt to inform or persuade. Still lacking caffeine and my early morning pipe, I had to fight hard to resist the urge to snap at my friend, who was entirely innocent of just how much that programme annoys me nowadays.
When I was young, and absolutely obsessed with politics, I thought the Today programme was great. Nowadays, it grates with me so much that I have fled to Radio 3 at the start of the day. So many words. So much silly point scoring. So little wisdom. Do either the people who make the programme or the people who appear on it think that the public cares all that much about that shrill squabbling?
Most of us are unhappy with our leaders. And it doesn’t particularly matter what way our politics lean, either. In my experience, the vast majority of people are as disappointed and depressed by the leaders who come from their part of the political spectrum as they are with any of the rest of them. What’s even worse, it’s the same in most other countries, and not just in other Western countries. If you think the mood of cynicism and despondency is bad here or in our near continental neighbours, I suggest spending some time talking politics to people from any part of the complex and divided society that is South Africa. Or you could be in Peru, where the polls say that President Boluarte recently had an approval rating of 2%.
In this country, we have one government elected with a massive majority but the leader can’t even control his own backbenchers and rapidly becomes hated by the public, and then lurch to another government from a different party which retraces exactly the same path. It should be obvious that the problem isn’t with the personal qualities of the individuals or their parties, but is a problem with the system.
Where will we find leaders who knows how to navigate their way out of our present malaise? I have no idea. We’re going to have to wait. For whom or what I don’t know.
Patience is not something that comes easily to me. But this is another area where we have a systemic problem, rather than just a problem with the personalities of some impatient souls like me. The structure of our economy, our entertainment, our news media, allencourage us to be impatient, to expect instant results.
Even beyond that, we are bombarded with words through our screens that distract us so we rarely get the time we need for careful and considered thought. If you think it’s bad in your life, imagine what the life of a senior politician is like, with the smartphone constantly buzzing, with hundreds of comments on your social media account every day, and hundreds more on all the media articles published about you. And then you have to appear on the Today programme. Everything in our culture mitigates against patience. We drown in information, with no time to process it.
When John the Baptist was in prison for criticising the political leaders of his own time, he heard stories about what his cousin Jesus was doing on the outside. He got a message out asking Jesus directly if He was indeed the Messiah, the great leader his people had been waiting for in his time.
Jesus didn’t answer by saying “yes”. Instead, he asked John’s followers to tell him this: “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them”
Talk was cheap then, as it is now. The Palestine of Jesus’ time was as full of preachers trying to use God as a tool for their political agendas as YouTube and TikTok are today. But actions speak louder than words. It was Jesus’ actions that He wanted John to hear about. It was Jesus’ actions that would let John know that he had indeed correctly identified the Messiah.
This was important for John to hear, as he wasn’t going to get a happy ending. Criticising dictators was as bad for people’s health then as it remains today, and John would end up meeting a grizzly fate in gaol. But John got to learn that he was right; that someone truly great had indeed arrived.
There’s an old proverb that runs something like this: “Blessed is the man who plants trees in whose shade he knows he will never sit, but his great-grandchildren shall.” No society can work all that well unless people are willing to take actions on timescales beyond their own lifetimes—to build things and to dream dreams whose full benefit will not be seen until long after they have passed. That is the ultimate form of patience.
We still remember John the Baptist today, two thousand years after what seemed to be a wild and tragic life came to an end, when the emperors and generals and clever political fixers of his time are largely forgotten. For the Messiah he proclaimed was very different from the Messiah people had been expecting. Instead of restoring the old kingdom to power, Jesus proclaimed a kingdom not of this world that has endured as every Empire has risen and fallen. It is the kingdom that the apostles were the first citizens of, and it is a kingdom which you and I are citizens of today – the Church.
But such patience, to work for things that will not come to pass until long after we have left this mortal realm, is very difficult to summon without a vision. Our society has a vision problem. That is why all of our politicians seem to crumble once they take office.
We need a fresh vision, and we’re probably trying to look for it in the wrong place, for that is what people always do. It won’t be from one of those shrill voices that dominate the airwaves and the streaming platforms, but it may be from a strange voice: perhaps one that seeks no personal benefit from its proclamations and which isn’t shaken by every gust of public opinion. In other words, a voice like John’s.
Our epistle reading is from a letter by St James, a man who firmly believed that actions spoke louder than words, and who would also pay the ultimate price for following Christ. His advice to some of the very first Christians is very simple, and applies today. Don’t grumble against one another, but be patient and wait for God to move in God’s time. That is what Advent is about.
At a time when technology is severing us from our humanity, perhaps our most important job is just to be human; just to understand who we are, and to understand that we and all creation are made by a being much greater than ourselves; to understand that we are part of something much greater than ourselves, and in God’s good time, it will flower fully. Do that first, and God will show us the actions He needs us to do for Him in the here and now.
And now glory be to God for whom we wait, the Father, and the Son whom He sent to judge and to rule us, and the Spirit whom He sent to comfort and to guide us, now and unto eternity. Amen.
Top image—View Over the Jordan Valley from Near Qumran, © Gerry Lynch, 16 November 2022.
