Paciencia Y Fe--June 15, 2021

Paciencia Y Fe--June 15, 2021

"And we want each one of you to show the same diligence so as to realize the full assurance of hope to the very end, so that you may not become sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises." [Hebrews 6:11-12]

Patience... and faith.  Faith... and patience.  Or in Spanish, paciencia y fe.  They are two sides of the same coin, maybe, the way of life how the people of God keep on keeping on, especially when it is hard to keep going.

There's a song from Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical In the Heights (now just recently released as a feature-length movie) where the wise voice of Abuela Claudia sings that refrain, one she learned from her own mother in the storytelling:  "Paciencia y fe... paciencia y fe."  Patience and faith.

I remember first hearing that song not long after the musical itself came out (there's a resident Broadway lover in our house, to whom I am married) and being surprised that even my rusty high-school-level Spanish lessons were able to recognize those words and translate them, like a prayer in the middle of all that spectacle and movement.  The woman's song, and her repeated creed, "Patience and faith," comes hard-earned from a lifetime of struggle.  I think that's what makes those words more than a throwaway tagline or an easy slogan.  People who know the importance of "patience and faith" are people who know trouble and weariness--and who have been carried through them time and again.  It never occurred to me, though, until this moment that Abuela Claudia's words might be echoes from this passage from Hebrews, but here are those words again:  faith and patience.  Patience and faith.

We don't know for sure what struggles the first hearers and readers of these words were going through.  It's quite possible they had lived through the upheaval and struggle of an immigrant like Abuela Claudia--certainly many of the early generations of Christians knew what it was like to be forced out of one community and to move somewhere else, whether because of famine or war or pockets of persecution.  It's quite possible those first hearers knew what it was to scrape by in life just to make a living, like Abuela Claudia and her mother before her do in the musical; one of the notable things about early Christianity was just how much it appealed to the poor and enslaved classes of people in the Empire.  It's possible, too, given some hints later on in the book of Hebrews, that those first hearer were living with fears that the Empire or a spontaneous lynch mob might round them up and throw them in jail--or kill them for being troublemakers.  Whatever the struggles they were facing, the writer of Hebrews urges them to follow the examples of those who went before them and who lived by--you guessed it--patience and faith.

What's interesting to me is that even so early on in Christian history you have voices like this one telling the community of Jesus' followers to be prepared for the long haul, rather than just saying, "It'll be fine--Jesus will be back any day now, so we won't have to worry about life's troubles for much longer."  The writer of Hebrews knows we are in for a long-distance run rather than a sprint here, and so there's no magical thinking or merely wishing away the difficulties.  You don't hear our author using faith like a talisman to ward off troubles, and you don't hear him saying, "Well, if you believed hard enough, you wouldn't be suffering like this," or the equally tempting (and equally wrong) statement, "True believers don't have to go through such difficulties--your struggles must be God's punishment for your lack of faith or sin or doubt."  No, our author takes a long view of history, informed by our ancestors in the faith, and knows that sometimes walking the journey laid out before is just unavoidably challenging.  And when that is the case, we are called simply to keep putting one foot in front of the other, one day at a time, even when we can't see our destination... and even when we aren't quite sure how we'll get there.  We walk with faith, and with patience.  Paciencia y fe.

You need both of those together, or else something short circuits.  If all we ever got was the parent-like instruction to be patient, but never a promise that there was something worth being patient for, it would seem like we were being set up, like Sisyphus in the old Greek myths, for labor that never ended and struggles that would never give way to rest.  Patience, after all, is a cousin of endurance, but even a marathon eventually comes to an end when the runners can cross the finish line and be done.   The writer of Hebrews reminds us that as we are following in the footsteps of those who have modeled faith and patience for us, we are headed in the same direction as they were, toward inheriting the promises they strained toward.  We aren't just treading water, in other words--we are going somewhere... somewhere that feels like home.

On the other hand, if all we have is the word "faith" but no context that it will require patience from us, we have a way of cheapening "faith" into sounding like we think God is our genie who will grant our wishes just because we pray for them.  I was in a conversation not long ago where someone said, surely meaning well, that, "If we say we believe in God and just pray for no one to get COVID at our event, then no one will get COVID."  That sounds to my ears less like faith and more like a distortion into wishful thinking.  Faith, after all, is trust in a WHO, rather than a blank check for getting a WHAT you want.  Faith in God knows God to be good and able to do things beyond our ability, but that doesn't mean we get the thing we want to happen just because we prayed for it.  I think the writer of Hebrews would remind us in times like those that faith also involves patience--and sometime that patience means living with things that aren't the way we want them to be yet, whether it's a lingering pandemic, or a struggling economy, or the frustration of waiting to see the results of your hard work and diligence.  We need both.

I suspect that somewhere in your life you need the reminders of both of these today, too.  So take these two gifts as the family inheritance of those who have gone before us and found that, together, they are able to keep us going on days when our strength feels spent and our joy may be flagging.  Take the gift of patience--the ability to wait in peace for God's moving to become clear, and the endurance to keep going when it would be easier to give up.  And take the gift of faith--the capacity to trust in a God whose hand is not always visible to our eyes, and who remains faithful even when we do not see how God will make a way.

Patience and faith, dear ones.  Paciencia y fe.

Lord God, enable us to keep going through the weary places of this day, this season, this life, knowing that you carry us along the way, and that you are bringing us toward your good and promised homecoming.