Patience, young Grasshopper!

I had a classmate at AST who was about 10 years younger than me and who reminded me of my younger brother.  He was rather like a Saint Bernard puppy, full of energy but a little too big.  At times, I would say to him, “Patience young grasshopper!” 

It seems so easy to encourage someone else to be patient, but it’s harder to be patient myself.  I was enthusiastic too, I was going to change the world, make it more honest and loving, and all it would take is my generous heart and a church crazy enough to ask me to step into their pulpit.  I was impatient to get my sleeves rolled up and ready to work.

Together we would solve racism, global warming, homelessness, food insecurity, the exploitation of temporary foreign workers and more.  Look out Canada, here I come!

Luckily for me, I had a wise mentor and a lay supervision team who said to me many a time, “patience, young grasshopper”, as I failed to solve the world’s problems with a snap of my fingers.

Patience, interestingly, is a big part of pineapple farming.  It starts out, unlike apples or cherries, not as one flower, but two hundred flowers.  As they get pollinated, the fruit of all these little flowers meld together. And unlike oranges that go from flower to fruit in a single season, it takes 2 years to go from bloom to pizza topping. Pineapple farmers need lots of patience!

Patience that Jesus talked about, and Paul lived, wasn’t just a flippant platitude that they threw around in abandon.  They lived it every day.  Through trials, prison time, travel, working hard for a living, or walking from place to place not knowing where they would sleep or what they would eat.  They prayed and hoped, they suffered and yet kept on with the big picture in mind. 

And Jesus reminded his disciples as they stared in awe at the beautiful temple, that buildings come and go, countries and nations one moment are stable and the next on the brink of disaster.  We are not to panic in situations like that, but to remember our priority is to love one another, love our neighbors, pray for our enemies and love God.

Destruction of buildings reminds me of a lady in Kiev. The city has lost many of its beautiful buildings due to the war with Russia.  But she talked about living in a subway, doing her part to help the 100 folks sleeping there on cots and bunk beds get along with each other and work together to rebuild.  The small acts of resistance she can do may only be to tuck a blanket under a child’s chin before they sleep, or to help two neighbors stay calm during a disagreement, but she does her part.  The Russians may destroy the buildings, but they cannot destroy the community.  If anything, the attacks are forging a new understanding of what it means to work together patiently for a common purpose.

Jesus also talked about the fragility of nations.  Not unlike the latest political situation in the US.  People speculated about the end of democracy, how the Trump followers would take over states and revamp the elections process in ways that were detrimental to the whole country, not to mention slanting the justice system even more to a narrow agenda.  And I won’t say a word about Alberta politics except to say that there are some who want to stoke the fires of divisiveness and conflict, us versus them fearmongering, entitlement and resentment. 

Then there’s the climate situation.  Catherine Faith MacLean who is the minister in St. Paul’s United Church in Edmonton, talked about going to the World Council of Churches this past summer as a delegate from our denomination.  She told us that youth delegates from around the world addressed the Council specifically and solely about climate justice.  They all expressed the belief that we have already gone past the point of no return with Global Warming, and Rev. MacLean realized that these teens had never known a time in their lives where the threat of climate change wasn’t seen as real and tangible.  Their witness was chilling and challenging.

There was also hope there.  The United Church contingency was sitting right behind the Russian Orthodox representatives who were very careful about what they said but one priest introduced her to his personal friends from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. One could read between the lines of that casual introduction!  The World Council of Churches also were hospitable to the many women clergy, who wore their clerical collars every day, and are commissioning a study on human sexuality.  And although this organization, with members from 352 denominations from more than 120 countries, representing over 580 million Christians worldwide, does not include Roman Catholics, the Pope sends observers to hear the deliberations and conversations.  It was founded in 1948 to build tolerance, peace, justice and respect.  That sounds like a project that needs lots of patience as they identify common ground and continue to learn how to work together.

Patience grows like a pineapple, one blossom at a time.  The Poet Rilke wrote “have patience with everything unresolved in your heart… try to love the questions themselves, as if they were locked rooms. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. Perhaps someday far in the future, you will gradually live your way into the answer.”  Patience, a gift from God, is something we can gradually live into with a little faith, a little kindness, and a little self-control.  May we all find the patience in the face of uncertainty that Jesus and Paul had, and trust that God is still saying with love, “Patience, young grasshopper!”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pineapple#/media/File:Flowering_Pineapple_Sept_4_2011.jpg