A sermon by the Rev. Dr. Susan Dolan-Henderson, Associate Professor of Christian Ethics and Moral Theology, delivered in Christ Chapel

Waiting. We do it all the time. On the whole, we do not like waiting. I know that when I visit the doctor, there is usually so much waiting involved -- I bring four books and two articles and whatever else I can find. We do not seem to be doing anything while we are waiting, yet it is so stressful! We can really see this at the airport; it's how we get what is now called airport rage. We have to go to the airport two hours early just in case. We have to wait through security and take off half our clothes. We are held up while the shoes of the 85 year-old grandparents next to us have been checked to make sure they don't have plastique hidden in their orthopedic shoes. Then, having gotten there so early, sit for a long time waiting for the plane. If anyone has seen the airport show on A&E, it's obvious that too much waiting can change an ordinarily reasonable person into a screaming hysteric. My favorite is when someone pulling a steamer trunk tries to convince the attendant that they can get that thing into an overhead bin. I was on a plane once when some guy in a suit knocked the attendant into the seats in anger as he tried to squeeze a roller suitcase the size of a "VW" down the aisle!

There are other kinds of waiting besides waiting that leads to anger. There is the stressful waiting we do at hospitals; sometimes a waiting without hope. My father was dying of cancer when I was at seminary. During his last Christmas with us, he was in pain because he had this chemo-treatment pump on his liver. The cancer was growing so there was no need to try the pump any longer. So, when he was in the O.R. having it out; my mother, my sisters, my brother-in-law who happens to be a surgeon, and I were sitting in the waiting room. There were too many medical people in the family not to already have known the outcome: that my father's time would be short. And as we were waiting to hear this, it was so oppressive and fatiguing that all of us had stretched out on the uncomfortable furniture and slept that kind of halting sleep that occurs when you are trying to keep yourself awake. A weird sleep of anxiety, of nothingness.

Advent is a time of waiting; a two-fold waiting for Christians. We wait with Israel, mourning in exile, waiting for the messiah and the kingdom. For us, that waiting is fulfilled at Christmas with the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus brought the kingdom -- but he inaugurated the kingdom. The kingdom is not fully present - the bible has it as a proleptic event. It starts in the present but goes on and has a future. It will not fully be here until Jesus comes again. Yes. There it is. The Second-Coming that many "modern" Christians want to avoid. But it's there in the readings of Advent: the thief in the night, etc. We say it in the Eucharistic prayers. We are reminded that while we are to work for the kingdom each and everyday, we are to live our lives as if Jesus could come at any minute. We want to be found doing the work he said to do. The Christian must remember that only God can bring the kingdom. As we are running to God, we find God running to us. To believe that we bring the kingdom is to refuse the pain of waiting; trivially like the airport antics. It leads to forgetting that no matter how we work for justice, human sin is still a reality, a reality that only God can heal. It leads to fighting, anger and especially arrogance. Failure to see God as the one who does the final work also leads to the stress of the wait without hope. The great theologian, Walter Rauschenbusch, was founder of the social gospel movement in the early part of this century. He believed in the total goodness of humankind. We didn't need a God to bring us the kingdom; we could do it. Original sin: he rejected it. Human love was all we needed for progress. Then something happened that he never expected -- World War I. The killing was more brutal than anything that had come before. The reality of sin hit him full on. We would not be able to bring the kingdom in. It broke him. When he died, some said that it was the disappointment that killed him.

Our readings for today describe something important about our waiting. John is in prison, waiting like the wait in the hospital, waiting for the inevitable loss. He had criticized the rulers and the rich. He had called people to repent. He foretold about Jesus. But alone in that cell, his anxiety was growing. Jesus was not who he had envisioned the messiah to be. He was not a military ruler. He didn't have a winnowing hook, burning sinners with unquenchable fire. So he sends his disciples to ask -- are you the one, or was I wrong? And Jesus sends him the message of the true kingdom: it's begun! 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. Then Jesus sends a slight rebuke. "And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me." Both Jesus the man and his works are the point and John must accept that Jesus is a different kind of messiah, but the messiah nonetheless. The rest of Jesus' statements about John are not so much a criticism but a fact. John won't live to see Jesus' mission completed, so he will enter the kingdom later than others.

Where in Matthew we have the waiting and arrival of the messiah for the first time for Jesus' return, in James we have the waiting of the Church. Like us, they are in the in-between time, a dangerous liminal state, the time of Jesus coming and his coming again. They are waiting, like us, for Jesus to finally bring the kingdom and all its fullness. They are wearing out a little, and they are close to Jesus' first coming. How worn are we as we wait for the promise thousands of years later? They are in an angry, anxious waiting. There is hopelessness among some, but they are more like a group of people trapped in an airport with each other. Their moral behavior is crumbling. They are turning on each other. If they had them, I suppose they would be tossing suitcases at one another; fighting and judging. Others may be passively sitting there enduring the wait; not with courage, but with sloth.

Our passage today has to be put into context of the whole letter. James has always been the red-haired stepchild of the letters, basically because of Luther's comment that because of its emphasis on works, it was the "Epistle of straw". At times Luther wanted it out of the canon, or at least shuffle it to the back. That made sense for Luther's time. It makes a different kind of sense for Christians outside that one period. For even a strong sense of faith without works for salvation can include an important emphasis as works as the fruit of faith.

The letter is mostly moral advice and not doctrinal. We do not see the preoccupation with false teachers that other New Testament texts have, but some basic beliefs are assumed to be developing. James is eschatological; he talks about endurance (which we'll come back to) while waiting for the Lord. "Lord" or kurios is just beginning to be a referent to Jesus rather than God as the Trinitarian language is developing. James is writing to people in our situation; waiting for the Lord's return when the kingdom will finally come in its fullness. He does caution against doubt at the beginning of the letter and mentions forsaking the truth, but the rest of the letter is moral exhortation.

James, in our reading, as well as throughout the letter, is concerned that the Christians he is writing to are weakening in the apprehension of waiting for the Lord. As their behavior comes apart, James focuses on a community ethos rather than individual behavior. Christians are to live a particular identity within the world, rather than withdraw from it. But this can be difficult. James wants wholeness in their behavior. He uses phrases such as, "not only this, but also that". One must keep the whole law and not just pick choose. Again, there is a messianic ring here -- for perfection of Torah is linked to the fullness of the messianic kingdom. He wants solidarity among them, but he is seeing signs of envy and selfishness.

What is James concerned about? He is concerned about members of the group judging one another. They have inner-desires, which is making them concerned with their own needs. But the "judging he wants them to avoid is not a general judging of others; it has specific content. It concerns judging people on the basis of their status and riches, and an inner envy to be one of the rich. James comes at this hard. Wanting riches and striving for status are contrary to being doers of the word. The faith that fails is specific in 2:14. He asks, "What is faith without works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks food and one of you says to them, 'Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill', and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?" This is dead faith. It means nothing. James is clear throughout the letter that God has a preferential option for the poor -- take that right wing capitalists who believe that it is Christian to let the poor sink or swim, and if they sink its their own fault. There can be no partiality or favoritism for the rich, and this impinges directly on true faith in Christ. So he asks, "My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism, really believe in our glorious Lord, Jesus Christ?" It is, of course a rhetorical question -- the answer is no.

Finally, in our passage, James knows that this behavior is from a lack of patience during suffering. The waiting for relief - it is not a suffering from persecution here -- the reference to Job is meant to refer to ordinary human afflictions, whether it is anger and fatigue at the airport or the passive waiting for loss when hope seems gone. He uses the OT metaphor for the farmer waiting for the early and late rain, both required in the climate for the crops. The rain is usually a gift from God -- in Hosea, it is the image of the coming of God which requires faithful waiting. The lack of patience is shown by grumbling and complaining, knifing each other in the back, which goes on in every community, even today.
We should live as if the Lord is near -- the real judge is standing at the door! We all should live as if Jesus will be back any minute. We want him to find us doing good. Not out of fear, but as lovers who want our beloved to be proud. It is also hope. When Jesus returns, our pain and strife with each other will be over. Meanwhile, we do not want Jesus to find us grumbling against one another. That is not what he wanted for His Church.

James does something with the Greek in our reading. I won't give a Greek lesson. When he tells Christians to be patient in waiting, he changes from the usual word, hupomonein to makrothymein. The first word is fundamentally passive, meaning simply waiting or endurance in a passive sense. This passivity leads to the two kinds of waiting from before: the angry waiting of fighting and pushing at the airport -- the slothful waiting of listlessness. Makrothymein means the active adoption of an attitude of "forbearance" and "putting up with" another. In the LXX, it is used in connection with God's attitude toward humans. God demonstrates makrothymein us, so we should as a community, share the same attitude. We need more than passive tolerance. We need active patience and long-suffering with one another, so we don't judge each other, back bite, or simply give up on one another.

How easy it would be, with all the trouble in the Church and even at times right here, it would be, to lose patience, to refuse long-suffering, give up through inertia, maybe drift away and out or judge one another harshly, grumble and back-bite against each other. This spring it will be 20 years since I graduated from seminary and although I usually like a good fight, drifting away is very tempting. Like our Christians in James, I tire of the same old supposedly prophetic stances, tat are really the same so called newness I heard about in seminary. It's discouraging to me, but James tells us that this discouragement is not an option. We must have active patience with one another, forget grumbling about our theological opponents, and endure what we oppose. This takes work. May we be doing this hard work when the Lord knocks on our door and all strife ceases. May he find us faithful to his desire for the Church to be one and endure those times of anger, inertia and doubt. May we live in hope, not because of what we can do, but because of what only God can do.