December 14, 2025

On what I remember to be a quite sunny and somewhat cool October day just over eight years ago in Little Rock, Arkansas, I stood before Bishop Larry Benfield, at the time the diocesan bishop of Arkansas, as he said to me, my brother, every Christian is called to follow Jesus Christ, serving God the Father, through the power of the Holy Spirit. And later on, as a deacon, you are to assist the bishop and priests in public worship and in the administration of God's Word and sacraments, and you are to carry out other duties assigned to you from time to time.

And as I've mentioned before in our tradition, you do not lose orders as you become differently ordered in your ministry of the church. And so today I am as much a deacon as I am a priest. And it was in such a capacity about an hour and a half ago, those other duties as assigned included being outside with a shovel in hand, clearing off our sidewalk, preparing for you all to be here with us this morning. And I appreciate your efforts to get here.

But I was thinking about that because my experience of journeying towards ordination, the years of discernment that came into play in that process, were brought to mind for me as I read through our readings for this week. You see, I've mentioned this briefly before, but I haven't really shared with you all the fullness of my journey. I grew up in the Southern Baptist Church with a fairly significant dose of Roman Catholic influence as well. But as a high school student in St. Louis, going on a mission journey my sophomore year, I began to have some inkling of a call to ordained ministry, a call that I expressed later on in my high school career, one that was affirmed and lifted up by the congregation I was raised in. I was what they call licensed to preach before I went off to college. And I thought at the time that this was going to be a very clear and easy journey. I would go to college, study religion, go on to seminary. I had it all worked out in my mind.

But very quickly, things went sideways. And I very quickly felt myself disoriented by the tradition I was raised in and the sense that that's not where I belonged. That's not where I was meant to be. And it took about six years before I landed in the Episcopal Church, before I felt that renewed sense of call in the tradition in which I now reside and preside.

But it was in those years of longing, those years of discernment and struggle that I really in a very deep sense began to understand the depth of this sense of waiting that we are invited into in today's scriptures. I was very powerfully captured by John's message to Jesus: Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?

This waiting is not, in a sense, a temporal waiting. Are we to wait next week, next month, next year? Things seem like they're moving. Things seem to be right around the corner. Is it really truly you? But in a greater, more significant sense, this was a cosmic waiting. This was the longing of the people of Israel. This was centuries, millennia old. This deep, deep desire for the Messiah to come, for the world to be set anew again.

John's question is one that I think is very prescient for us today. Not that we have a Messiah in our midst that we are discerning, but this question of when, Christ, are you coming? How long do we have to wait? Where is your presence in this present age?

And it's in that that we have this beautiful reflection from our epistle from St. James. This admonition to be patient. This patience that is not again the kind of short, often truncated patience that we experience in our lives today. But this elongated, deeper, more lived experience of patience. You know, this imagery, this agricultural imagery that St. James uses is one that I think for many of us we've become kind of disconnected from, even though there are some in our own communities who still experience this. This patience for the harvest. This patience for both the early and late rains is often a months long waiting. It's a cultivating. It's a gentle working of the land. A keeping things going. But it's a waiting. A waiting for the right time. The right opportunity.

Years after I had left my Baptist church, worked through the many complexities of my experience of waiting, a lot of fitful starts in different directions that I thought were the right ones and ended up not being so, I finally got to this place of belonging in the Episcopal church that Julie and I joined in Arkansas. And then even after initiating that process of discernment, I was sat down by the bishop and said, look, I'm very proud and happy of you, happy for you to discern this call, and I want to support you. But it's going to be another three years. You've got X, Y, Z things before you, before you can even think about seminary.

And we went through all of those hoops, went through all of those movements, got to the end of that road, got permission from the bishop to go to seminary. And then we sat, Julie and I, with him in his office, and he said, I hate to tell you this, but I've already committed as many people as I can this next class of students going in. So I need you to wait an additional year.

And it all ended up working out well. But it gave me this deep, elongated sense of patience that so often the time of God's choosing is not the time of our own construction, our own desires, our own wishes and whims.

We have this dichotomy in this season of Advent of the alertness that we are called into and the waiting that is so often a part of that process too. That it is to be alert and to wait simultaneously. That's a very... very narrow road to walk. Often one with a lot of frustrations and difficulties. But it's precisely the call that we have in these times and in this season of life.

And I think for many of us, we can find ourselves falling to one side or the other of that. In our desire to be alert, we find ourselves activated, wanting to do constantly, to find places and outlets for that sense of call to action and to alertness. And then for others of us, we are comfortable in that space of waiting, but maybe sometimes complacent waiting. We like the stability of what we have. We like the ease of our lives where they are. We're not quite ready to move. And if God could just hold off on doing anything big for a little while, that would be just fine with us.

But this season, this season calls us out of both of those extremes. Calls us to be alert and patient simultaneously. To frustrate both of those places of default orientation. And that's a challenging road to walk. But it's the road that we are invited into today.

And I want to leave you with one final observation about how these things kind of play out in a practical sense. As I've talked about for pretty much every week for the last several weeks, we are doing this forum hour discussion of Benedictine spirituality and how it shapes and forms us as a Christian community and as individual Christians. And today, we heard an extended quote in the Forum Hour from the great lay Episcopal theologian William Stringfellow. And I invite you, if you have a chance, to go and listen to the recording of that sometime later this week.

But I want to highlight just two elements of what he said that are specifically prescient for us. He said the church is the embassy of the eschaton, which is that fancy word for the end of all things, the coming of the kingdom. That we, as a church, are the embassy of the new kingdom of God. We are the ambassadors of that new kingdom. The church is the image of what the world is in its essential being. That the ideal God has for the world is lived out most authentically when the church is being most authentically what it is meant to be.

To the world as it is then, William Stringfellow goes on to write, the church of Christ is always as it were saying yes and no simultaneously. So very often, so very often we get trapped in the material dichotomies, the political and cultural dichotomies that the world voices upon us. We as the church can so very easily fall short of our call when we slip into those roles, placating one side or the other. But when we are most authentically that ambassadorial presence of the world to come, we frustrate and break down that dichotomy. We simultaneously say yes and no. That we hold together the tension, for example, in this season and in this Sunday, of a call to action and a call to patience, a call to further stay alert and responsive to what Christ is doing even in this moment, yet as we wait for the fullness of the coming of the kingdom, which remains ever on the horizon.

And so, friends, this morning, this morning as we wrestle with these various dichotomies, as we find ourselves precariously balanced in this call of the both-and-ness, of being alert and being patient, I invite us to hear again the call from our author of the epistle of St. James: Be patient, therefore, beloved. Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near. Strengthen your hearts even in this time of waiting, this time of alertness, this time of struggling and finding that balance of doing both of those things.

May our hearts be strengthened. And in that strengthening, may we find the patience and the alertness to ever be the people of God that God calls us to be. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.