A Long Obedience in the Same Direction

A Sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on November 27, 2022 by Revd Dr Sam Wells

Advent Carols

A week or two ago I had an appointment at King’s College on the Strand. I thought, ‘It’ll save me time and give me some exercise if I take a Santander bike and dock it outside the main entrance.’ So I did, despite the fact it was starting to rain. When I got there, all the docking stations were full. And the rain started to tip down. Proud of myself for learning to use the app, I searched for docking stations nearby that weren’t full. I thought, ‘Surely someone must want a bike.’ But it was raining. No one fancied getting soaked. By this moment I remembered I’d had the same problem last time I cycled to King’s. Feeling foolish standing in the rain waiting for who knows how long, soon on the app I spotted an empty docking station on Waterloo Bridge. I figured I could drop the bike there and walk back. When I got there, I realised I’d made a mistake: the bike station wasn’t on the bridge, it was on the embankment under the bridge; and there were no steps down. I was now late as well as soaked. Finally, I swallowed my pride, cycled half-way back to St Martin’s, and found a docking station with a couple of empty slots.

I wonder if you’re a patient person. I wonder if you’d have waited in the rain, cycled manically to every nearby station, full or not, or had the sense not to take the bike in the first place. I wonder what waiting means to you and if you’ve been waiting for something for a very long time. I want to reflect tonight on the paradox of waiting and the complexity of patience. I’m going to offer two examples of patience that convey the problem I’m describing.

Let’s start with Samuel Beckett’s 1955 two-act play Waiting for Godot. Two men, Vladimir and Estragon, are waiting next to a tree for another man named Godot. They’re not sure if they’ve previously met Godot, or if he will arrive; but they continue waiting. The two characters remain stationary throughout the play. A couple of other characters briefly pass by and talk to them. The two main characters return to the topics they’ve covered before, and sometimes repeat the same lines. Near the end of Act I, a boy appears and says he’s a messenger for Godot. In Act II, Vladimir and Estragon continue to wait by the same tree, but the tree has grown several leaves, so it seems time has passed. The boy returns and says Godot will not be coming today. Vladimir and Estragon consider suicide, but they have no rope. The curtain falls.

If you remove the last syllable of the title, you can read the story as a savage critique of Christianity. The tree represents Christ’s cross; the two characters aren’t sure if they’ve had a full revelation of God or not, but they’re ready for God to come and settle everything. Like members of a millennial sect, Vladimir and Estragon’s existence is entirely focused on anticipating that God will appear. But their patience will never be rewarded: they’re waiting for someone who’s never coming, and doesn’t exist. Samuel Beckett is parodying not just Christianity, but any search for meaning that assumes we’re just about to discover our purpose in life. For Beckett, we’re more like the ancient Greek figure Sisyphus, who’s given the absurd task of pushing an impossibly heavy rock up a hill. Sisyphus can never complete his task. He just keeps trying for the rest of his life. The joke’s on us if we try to find purpose or wait for revelation. It’s not coming.

What drives you crazy when you’re watching the play is how passive Vladimir and Estragon are. Surely if Christ were coming, as traditional Christin conviction holds, he wouldn’t want us to idle our days in circular conversations and fruitless debate. The parable of the foolish bridesmaids and the parable of the talents are both about putting our energies to work, even if the time is short. But then we have the parable of the wheat and the weeds, which is all about patience – all about waiting for the harvest, a common metaphor for the moment of Christ’s return.

Let’s turn to another classic treatment of patience – the character of Agnes Wickford in Charles Dickens’ 1850 novel, David Copperfield. This is a rather different portrayal of patience. The young David moves to Canterbury to go to Dr Strong’s school. David lives in the home of Mr Wickfield. Mr Wickfield’s house is kept by his young daughter Agnes, who is the embodiment of patience and wisdom. Agnes’ mother died when she was a baby, and Mr Wickfield depends utterly on Agnes – the more so as he turns increasingly to drink. Mr Wickfield leaves his business commitments to the slimy Uriah Heep, and Agnes, evidently devoted to David, has to listen to David’s accounts of his dalliances with various women while enduring the advances of the ghastly Uriah. When Uriah’s finally kicked out, Agnes starts a school for girls to support her father. Meanwhile she’s so saintly she even nurses David’s fragile wife Dora in her dying days. David’s fully aware of how perfect Agnes is, but it’s not till the end of this enormous novel that it dawns on him that she’s the person he should marry, realising late in the day that she’s always been his ‘solace and resource.’

Here we find a portrayal of patience rather different from that of Waiting for Godot. Vladimir and Estragon’s patience is ridiculous, even absurd. It’s also extraordinarily passive. By contrast Agnes remains busy. And this despite the fact that she’s so devoted to David she doesn’t make other marriage plans even when he weds Dora. Charles Dickens’ inability to portray women as fully fledged characters is notorious, and you’d be justified in considering Agnes a doormat. But the point is she offers a much more positive vision of patience than Vladimir and Estragon. The object of her waiting is genuine, if apparently out of reach; and while she’s waiting, she cares for her father and then establishes a school, so she’s not passive about it.

Here we have two versions of patience. One is bleak, passive and absurd; the other is faithful, active and ultimately rewarded. But this is the question. Is Agnes’ example the only way to embody patience? Does patience have to be downtrodden, longsuffering, totally selfless, almost impossibly perfect and in the end gratingly angelic?

I don’t believe so. I believe we’ve had a recent example in our community of a person who embodies a truer kind of patience. Three weeks ago, Bryan Stevenson spoke to 700 people in this church and half as many again online about his 40 years working as a lawyer seeking the release of African American prisoners who have committed no crime, but through compromised evidence, skewed juries and slanted detection find themselves on death row. There’s nothing passive about Bryan’s pursuit of justice. He spoke of the need to be proximate to the issues and the people, and told stories of how in profound human encounter he came to understand the circumstances and plight of the people whose dignity he upholds. He described the urgency of changing the narrative around mass incarceration of African Americans, and of how the US has gone from moderate rates of imprisonment 30 years ago to the biggest prison population in the world today. He insisted on the importance of sustaining hope; he and his Equal Justice Initiative have achieved the release of 140 death-row detainees, which is obviously a drop in the ocean, but is nonetheless a trajectory others can follow. And he concluded by acknowledging the call to bear in one’s body the scars incurred by doing work that’s always going to evoke enmity, resistance and even violent opposition.

Bryan’s witness recalled for me a phrase adopted by Eugene Peterson, the translator of the Message Bible, but originally coined by Friedrich Nietzsche, who spoke of patience as a ‘long obedience in the same direction.’ (Beyond Good and Evil — Ch 5 para 186) Bryan is not an absurd fool like Vladimir and Estragon; neither is he a faithful doormat like Agnes Wickfield; yet he has a patience that outlasts any of them. Bryan’s is a long obedience in the same direction. That started when at 15 he reflected with his grandmother on how to respond to his grandfather’s murder – whether to take to violent retaliation or begin a journey of revolutionary patience. That journey took him to college and then to Harvard, to the most prestigious law school in the country. That journey took him to an internship in Atlanta, where he learned about the number of men on death row and finally to Montgomery, Alabama, where he founded the Equal Justice Initiative. Thirty years later that journey led him to establish the Legacy Museum, which tells the story of how slavery was replaced with segregation, entailing the lynching of thousands of African Americans, and how, when the civil rights movement ended segregation, it was simply replaced with mass incarceration – yet another way to keep African Americans from breathing. And Bryan also established the remarkable National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which honours the 4000 people lynched between 1877 and 1950. He’s a long way from reaching peace and justice. But his is a long obedience in the same direction.

Josh Bowron, a HeartEdge associate based in Charlotte, North Carolina, has a memorable phrase about patience. Aware of negative resonances like Vladimir and Estragon and the doormat faithfulness of Agnes Wickfield, and thinking of the witness of those such as Bryan Stevenson, he says, patience isn’t about passivity or frenzied distraction: it’s about ‘being impatient about one thing for a long time.’ That’s Advent patience. Not idle waiting. Not absurdly sacrificial selflessness. But being impatient about one thing for a long time. That’s what a long obedience in the same direction truly is.

And as you reflect on what that long obedience and that impatience about one thing for a long time means for you, consider this. All patience is modelled on God’s patience. Fundamentally it’s God who has a long obedience in the same direction. God doesn’t wait idly, but instead in Jesus is proximate with us, tells us a different story, gives us reason to hope, and finally bears in his own body the scars of his commitment to us. Jesus is God’s long obedience in the same direction. God’s patience is exactly this: God is impatient – passionately impatient, crazily impatient, devotedly impatient – about one thing for a long time. That thing is us.