Lessons from the Farm--March 11, 2022

 

Lessons from the Farm--March 11, 2022

"Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord.  The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains You also must be patient. Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near." [James 5:7-8]

I have never met a lazy farmer. 

That’s not to say there aren’t any in the world—just that it seems, if you are lazy and you happen to be in the business of farming, you either learn pretty quickly that it will take more work than you are willing to do, or you don’t last as a farmer for very long because you just can’t keep it together. There may be lazy farmers out there, but I have to think that they don’t last, or they find something else to make a more regular, less labor-intensive paycheck. As I have heard enough farmers say over the years, you have to love doing it like you couldn’t do anything else with your life, as demanding as it is on your schedule and as precarious as it is to work so hard and still have your profits depend on weather and soil and such.

All of that is to say that when the book we call James gives farmers as an example of patience, it doesn’t mean that being patient is the same as sitting on your hands. Sometimes we think that learning patience is just a nice frilly way of saying, “learning to sit and do nothing,” but that’s not how a farmer practices patience.

Sure, a farmer has to watch and wait for a harvest. Sure, a farmer has to live with seeing small, sometimes imperceptible changes in the seedlings and sprouts day by day as the first leaves poke out of the ground. Certainly, a farmer has to live with the delayed gratification of tilling a field, sowing a crop, protecting it from bugs and pests and disease, and lots more, all through the growing season, all for a harvest that you can only hope for when you are planning. Yes, it requires patience to work at that kind of a life.

But farmers’ days are not spent sitting indoors just peering out at the window looking at the plants. Farmers don’t merely wish to themselves, “Oh, I hope the plants are getting all the food they need—oh, and water, too.” Farmers don’t just work on the day of the harvest—they are working year-round at something, whether to get the field ready, to tend to the crops, or to take care of the other animals and day to day chores on the farm. Farmers might live in anticipation and hope for the harvest when all that hard work pays off, but in the mean-time they work themselves weary day by day as they get to that point. Being patient doesn’t mean twiddling your thumbs—it means you can live in hope and wait until the hope comes to fruition.

That’s what James taps into when he talks about being patient until the coming of the Lord. He doesn’t mean that we Christians can just bide our time, wasting moments and opportunities to share the love of Jesus with people because we are just “being patient.” It means that we trust that in the end, God reigns and the powers of death and evil will not win the day—and it means that in the meantime, which is all the time we have, we keep on doing the work in front of us, even if we can’t see the pay-off yet.

That may be the real key to all of this. Christians practice patience in the sense that we are called to work, to serve, to talk, to listen, to love, and to follow Jesus, regardless of whether it looks like it is “successful” yet or not, because we trust that at the last, God will bring the right “pay-off” or “harvest” out of our work for God’s own good purposes. Farmers don’t till the field because they will eat the freshly tilled soil that night for dinner—they till the field knowing it will make a difference several steps and a good many months down the road when the harvest comes. So even if your tilled field doesn’t look much different than the untiled field that was there the day before, it is worth doing the work of tilling. And even if you can’t see what the crop will look like in the end on the day when you are just planting the seeds, it is worth doing the work of sowing and planting. The pay-off is delayed, but it is worth it. And in the mean-time, there is plenty to keep ourselves occupied with.

Today, there is work to be done for the Kingdom. There are people to share your faith with. There are extra miles to walk with people so that they can see the persistence of Christ-like love. There are humble, even secret, beneath-the-radar kinds of acts of love and compassion to do for people who need them. And there are fences to be mended, too, with the people we have become estranged from. There is surely plenty more to be done, too. And, to be quite honest, even if we do a bang-up job on all of it, it is quite possible that you and I might not get to see the results of it all by day’s end. Maybe not even by the end of the year, or by the end of our lives. But it will have been worth it, because in God’s timing and God’s design, it will come to fruition—it will all be used in the end.

So let’s be farmers ourselves—patient in our ability to live in light of God’s promised future, and still dedicated to doing the work that is laid out for us today until the rains have come and gone and it is time for the harvest.

Lord God, keep us active in the work you have given us to do, and patiently trusting in the work you have promised to do yourself.