Tag: patience

Urgency: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on May 11, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is John 10:22-30.

I have been told many times throughout my life (as I am sure you have been, too) that patience is a virtue. My track record with that is mixed at best. 

Especially in springtime. Most years when I was growing up, right about this time, when the May afternoons become warm and breezy and filled with the scent of mown grass and flowers, I felt anything but patient—because the promise of summer felt so close, so tantalizing! Everything felt possible. Patience? Who needs it? That was something for boring old grown ups—I wanted freedom and sunshine and ice cream cones that dripped on the sidewalk and those long, campfire-scented nights when we listened to the old stories and sang the old songs. I was impatient, impatient for all of it. 

And then a bit later, like some of our graduating teens whom we are celebrating today, you start to feel a new form of impatience for “real life” in the world beyond childhood, when you get to make your own decisions and mistakes and discoveries. The May of senior year of high school is sort of an icon of impatience, though usually a joyful one.

But frankly, as I have become more and more like those boring old grown ups, I’ve discovered that the whole patience thing never magically materialized with age. There are still so many things that I want–eagerly and anxiously–things I do not want to wait around for forever. Because as you go along through life, you realize the preciousness of time, the preciousness of experiencing everything you can, while you can. 

And you also notice the deep needs and challenges and pain of the world around you, too, and you start wonder whether “patience is a virtue” might’ve been something coined by those who simply want the rest of us to be quiet and give up our dreams and our collective agency. In our own lives and in our common life in this world, more often than not what I really find myself wondering is not how to be more patient, but what, on earth, we are waiting for? Let’s go!

I love life too much, I love the world and the people in it too much to wait on truly being alive in it. So I think today, I think now, I think in all truth I am interested in the virtue of urgency. The virtue of loving, compassionate urgency. 

Some of the personal circumstances of my life are surely shaping that feeling, but to be honest, I think I am still and always have been that kid who is eager for freedom and sunshine and sweetness, and I think most all of us are, deep down, in our own ways. The problem, the fundamental problem, is not that we are impatient—it is that we are too willing to wait. We are too willing to forestall what is truly important. We put off waking up and seeing the beauty and the goodness that we were created to be and called to build in the name of God. 

So yes, I want to seek the virtue of urgency. Urgency to do something real that contributes to God’s kingdom. Urgency to love without discrimination. Urgency to listen and respond to the people around me, like Jesus did. Urgency to stand up to what is wrong and dishonest and harmful. Urgency to be the sort of person who is unashamed of the Cross of Christ and who is unabashedly confident in the promise of his Resurrected Life. 

And I think that is what Jesus wants from all of us, really. Now, I know that patience is named as a fruit of the Holy Spirit in Scripture, and there are indeed times when we must slow down and seek the capacity to endure, to persist, to trust in God when we can’t see the road ahead. 

But more often than not, I think Jesus wants us to get a little more urgent in our discipleship: in our living and our loving. A little wilder, a little bit more free. A little bit less like a boring old grown up and more like what we once were and still are—an open heart, running down summer sidewalks, licking ice cream cones and chasing stars. 

Note this morning’s Gospel passage. Jesus is walking in the temple, a very serious grown up sort of place. He is approached by some Jewish leaders, and they have an urgent, rather insolent question for him. “How long will you keep us in suspense,” they ask. A better translation of the Greek is, how long will you keep wasting our time? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.

And you can’t really blame them. They have good reason to be impatient. They are not just longing for summer freedom, they are longing for true freedom—from oppression and suffering and exploitation. They are impatient for hope. And I think we all know what that feels like, we who have had too much of disappointment. 

But as is so often the case,  it’s Jesus’ reply that I find so compelling. You might think he’d say, now, now, my brothers, wait and see. Patience is a virtue. You’re just gonna have to be quiet and hold tight and buckle down til your salvation comes. 

But that’s not what Jesus says. He is, instead, equally insolent, equally blunt. I have told you. You want a Messiah? You want salvation and liberation? I have told you all about it, and you do not believe. I’m waiting on you, my brothers and sisters!

I am standing here, I am standing here, Jesus says.  I am God, standing here asking you to do something, anything other than sit around waiting for God’s Kingdom.  I am asking you to live the Kingdom with me now, to build it with me now! I am God standing here, just as impatient as you are for the healing of the world. That’s why I came and why I am willing to die and to rise again.  I am God standing here with my love and my life and my Spirit poured out for you like an ice cream cone melting in the summer heat, asking you to taste of its sweetness. Asking you to urgently live a life shaped by love and justice rather than patiently waiting for someone else to do it for you. 

Thanks be to our urgently loving God.

And with all due respect to patience is a virtue, I do not want to be patient for the things of Jesus—the things of truth and beauty and goodness in this world—and I don’t think you should be either. If someone comes through our red doors, let them come away saying, wow, those people are not waiting around on the Good News. They’re running with it! They’re doing it! They are living with compassionate urgency and my God, what if all of us did that? How different things could look. 

And if we are going to be the sheep of the Good Shepherd, then let us be the wild unruly sort, the kind who are utterly impatient to run through summer fields and to bless the earth as we stumble along through the flowers. Let us cause a stir for love’s sake. Let us make a bit of a mess for righteousness’ sake. And when people tell us to be quiet and shut up about love and to just be patient for the Kingdom, let’s do what all good sheep do—let’s not listen. Let’s chase it, right now. Let’s help it spring up, right now. Let’s never stop.

And sure, maybe we all start to look like boring old grown ups after a while. And I definitely can’t eat ice cream like I once did. But oh, oh, in here, in my heart, I am still trembling at the promise of springtime. I am still wanting to huddle in close to the firelight and hear the old stories and sing the old songs. I am still wanting to chase the stars and make my own discoveries and for all of us to be free. All of us, together, with Jesus, our Shepherd, leading the way.

So if patience is a virtue, I am still looking for it. Maybe I’ll find it some day.

But in the meantime, you’ll find me out there somewhere, running towards summertime. Running towards love. Running towards the God who is always, always running back towards us. 

It is May. Everything is possible. And we’ve all had enough of waiting. So let’s go. 

Fisherman: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on January 22, 2023 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary text cited is Matthew 14:12-23.

And Jesus said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.”

My grandpa, like any person born and raised in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, loved to go fishing. And in particular he loved to go ice-fishing.

If you are not among the hardy (foolhardy?) souls who have tried this pastime, maybe you can still picture it: a frozen lake in the dead of winter, all sentient life wisely hibernating or hunkered down in a warm place. Except for the intrepid ice-fishers, who drag their shacks and their camp chairs out onto the quiet snow-blown expanse to drill holes in the ice and to sit—in bitter cold and in pensive expectation—waiting for a bite. 

I confess, the few times I went out ice-fishing with my family as a kid, I didn’t get it. I was bored and restless—and cold! I didn’t understand why anyone would willingly do this for fun, especially when you could just get fish at the grocery store. But then, I was a kid who grew up mostly in cities and in California sunshine, and the lake water didn’t run in my veins like it did for my grandpa. The stoic beauty of the ice-fisherman’s reverie was lost on me.

He would sit out on the ice, munching on a sandwich, sipping coffee from a thermos, contemplating the tree line, the sky, maybe his place in the universe; I was never quite sure. Sometimes he’d catch something, often he wouldn’t. He never seemed to mind. And truth be told, I think he liked the ritual of the trip to the lake—its sensations and its silences—just as much, if not more so, than bringing home a catch. 

Now you still aren’t likely to find me out on a frozen lake these days, but as I look back, I have come to appreciate not only the spare beauty my grandpa found in ice-fishing, but also how his going out onto the ice was, in many ways, an encapsulation of who he was in the rest of his life. The quiet and the deliberative spaciousness of ice fishing were the same qualities he evoked most other days, with his family and with his neighbors and friends. 

He had his hot-tempered moments, but for the most part he moved through the world with a gentle attentiveness to things and to people: content to be who he was, where he was, patient, not obsessed with the elusive big catch of one sort or another that many of us chase after. Maybe he had always been that way. Or maybe all those years of ice-fishing helped make him that way. I’m not sure, but I do know that it was a part of him.

My grandpa and his ice-fishing have been on my mind this week, of course, because Jesus, in calling the first disciples, finds a handful of fishermen by the Sea of Galilee and invites them, in a clever turn of phrase, to “fish for people” instead. It’s a beloved scene in the Gospels, but oftentimes I think we focus so much on the abruptness of the disciples’ response—how they seem to drop everything and follow Jesus on the spot—that we don’t spend a lot of time pondering what they were doing beforehand: namely, their original vocation as fishermen. I wonder, though, why Jesus singles them out, these men on the shore, among all the other people he might have invited into his circle. 

Was Jesus calling them just because they happened to be there, without regard for their previous life experience? Was he, in effect, asking them to become someone entirely new, or did he see some particular potential in these men with their nets and their boats and their weather-beaten faces?

Given who Jesus is, I like to think he saw something already formed in them after a lifetime of traversing open waters and mending things that are frayed and waiting, day after day, with persistent hope for an unseen harvest from the deep. I like to think he saw something that made these fishermen exactly the right people for the journey that was about to unfold.

Because I believe that who we are and what we have done with our lives, no matter how simple or quiet or humble, matters to God. It matters in the Kingdom of God. 

In the same way that my grandpa’s ice fishing and the rest of his life seemed to mutually inform one another, perhaps these Galilean fishermen already had what Jesus needed them to have as future apostles. Maybe their decision to follow him, as dramatic and abrupt as it seems, was not, in fact, a clean break from their past. It was not a rejection of who they had been, a rinsing off of the smell of fish and mud, but an embrace of what these things had taught them—it was the decision to trust that their lives, their skills, and their gifts might be brought forth in a new way for the purposes of God. 

Maybe Jesus did not call them away from themselves and their original vocation, but deeper into those things. For he did not say follow me and I will make you something other, something better than a fisherman, but follow me, and I will make you fishers of people. In other words, I will make you the fullness of who you already are.

And so those fisherman had the courage to follow him away from the shore because they knew that they had what they needed within them; they were already enough. And if that is so, then perhaps we have what we need, too, perhaps we are already enough for wherever God is calling us to go. Not running away from ourselves but going deeper into ourselves so that we might embody what God created us to be.

And I know all of us, myself included, have parts of ourselves, parts of our story, parts of our personality, parts of our past, that feel worthless, parts we would just as soon leave behind. The embarrassments that enmesh us in a net of shame. The regrets that linger on us like the scent of lake water. The things that prevent us from believing we have anything of value to offer. 

But Jesus is standing there, seeing all of it, knowing all of it, and he is saying, yes, you. I’ve been looking for someone just like you. Follow me. Follow me as you are. Follow me with what you have, no matter how great or small. Fishermen, follow me. Tax collectors, follow me. Saints and sinners, follow me. The mighty and the lowly; the famous and the forgotten; everyone, follow me— for everyone is needed where we’re going. And all that you have been and known and done will be gathered in and it will be made purposeful, it will be made beautiful by my love. It will be more than enough. 

That, in the end, is what I learned from my grandpa and how his quiet, patient days fishing on the ice spilled over into his quiet, patient life: to trust in the sufficiency of who you are; of what you love; of what you know. Trust it to guide you, with God’s help, into what you do not yet know. Trust that God is already at work in the small things of daily life, shaping you for the vast and timeless purposes that only God can truly understand. 

And regardless of whether it is ice-fishing or mending nets on the shore of Galilee or raising your kids or caring for your neighbor or striving for your daily bread, whatever it is that has formed you into who you are today, trust that you are ready to respond when Jesus calls you. You are ready and able, not in spite of your life but because of it, because every life has potential, every one of us shimmers with the possibility of God’s glory, like ice glittering in the sun. 

Follow me, Jesus says, and I will make you fish for people.

So follow him. And let him show you the blessedness of who you can still be. The blessedness of who you already are.