Luke 4:21 ff: I Corinthians 13: 4-7

Between urgency and patience

Dear friends, Draft

Some of you may remember me telling you that before she left Chelsea gave me a map of the BART Or Bay Area Rapid Transit System. There was a reason for that.  Whenever she got frustrated with the pace of the church’s and to a certain degree  my response to issues of homelessness and social justice, I would say to her:”I know you want to take a congregation from Fremont all the way to to Castro street or even the airport, but often you have to realize that it’s great if you get them to south Oakland or even just a few stations over.” She wasn’t too happy with that, but she did get what I was trying to say. Rola and Veronica have expressed similar sentiments. 

Friends, I remember when I first came to Parkview I too was impatient and it the pace of change. But I learned that ministry is a  partnership. You may lead but we people have to want to follow. I can think of many ideas I had  that went nowhere orpetered out. Even recently the idea of the planning group looks like it will not last in the way it was intended but in another form. But that’s okay. We traveled a few stations and changed the scenery as a result. 

The lectionary readings that were paired for today feature Jesus telling the people of His childhood that He was the One Who must make the Old Testament scriptures come true. They were coming true in the now. There is an urgency about Jesus’ words, a great urgency.  Justice was coming. It made sense.  He was Rola’s age now and Chelsea’s then approximately. Who knows how an older Jesus would have put it, maybe the same way. But then we have Paul not speaking to a group of Jewish Galileans, yet to a diverse group of people which most likely included expatriate Jews living in bustling Corinth in Greece. Paul is at his most articulate and poetic. he speaks of love in words that still resonate as people commit themselves to a life together.  Love is patient.  That’s what spoke to me.  but what about love is urgent, is it ever urgent?I do think so. However Paul needed it to be patient as fledgling congregations were restless and chaotic and letters took a few months to get there probably. There was none of the “did you get my text of 1 minute ago?” stuff. 

In a humorous Japanese Netflix anime Andrew introduced me to last week in Florida a young man with pink hair and two antennas in his head named Saiki B is pulled into people’s lives around him because of his superpowers which he must try to control. Young people come to him with urgency, but an urgency he does not share at first. Nevertheless he must rescue people everytime without creating some cosmic event. At other times he isn’t patient. For instance he does not want to go  on a field trip to Okinawa because as he says he can teleport there in three seconds. So Saiki is constantly struggling between compassion and indifference and between urgency and a kind of patience. 

Friends, our lives are lived between urgency and patience.  We can’t wait for some things, but put off other things. We clash with people whose priories are slightly different.  We cannot or will not synch up sometimes. We feel God does not share our urgency and appears less interested in change than we are.  So we face choices about when to accept  the pace of change and when to force it into overdrive. If there is no urgency, there will be no change most likely, if there is no patience, ulcers are the most likely consequence. As a congregation you will experience the tension of urgency and patience. I can see it already. May we all be attuned to God’s timing. Thanks be to God. Amen.