In our Scripture this morning, we hear this counsel: 

“The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.” (2 Peter 3:9)

This week, I learned that Biblical Greek has at least two words for patience, the pronunciation of which I will now proceed to butcher for us all. 

The first of them is hupomeno, which means, literally, “to tarry behind,” and more generally, “to endure, or to bear bravely and calmly.” 

It’s the word for the kind of endurance we draw upon in difficult situations or, say, when we encounter a challenge in the world of things. 

So, for example…and I’m just, well, completely making something up on this…say you’re searching online; you find someone the perfect Christmas gift at the right price and there’s a little countdown clock saying that if you order in the next two minutes you’ll get your delivery just in the nick of time; you hit click to buy it.  

And it’s ONLY THEN, that Land’s End – er, sorry…wherever it is you’re ordering from…says that the item won’t be available in that size until Groundhog Day.  

According to the Bible, in such a moment, the best of us will draw on their capacity for hupomeno: the capacity to bear bravely and calmly. 

The second word the Bible offers us is makrothymia – which means, literally, “long-tempered,” (as opposed to “short-tempered”).  

This is the version of patience being described in this morning’s reading, when it says: “The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish…” 

It is the word we use for patience with other people.  

And what I appreciate about that is its recognition that other people require a different sort of patience from us.  

The great Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre wasn’t sure anyone was really up to it.  

“Hell is other people,” he famously wrote, suggesting that our temper toward one another didn’t much matter in the end – that we’re just sort of stuck with one another.  

Scripture is more hopeful, although it emphasizes that the equation can’t work without God.  

On some level, that may seem sort of obvious, at least if you count yourself a believer. 

How can anyone make a go of loving without access to the source of Love Itself?  

Fair enough, and yet Scripture’s point about patience this morning is a slightly different point.  

Because it’s not saying that our patience is the same as God’s—a chip off the old block, as it were.  

It’s reminding us that God is patient with everyone, us included, and that this ought to inspire both some genuine humility in us, as well as more genuine patience with others.  

It’s good advice.  

I remember years ago walking past a coffee shop in New York City – the kind that has a chalkboard outside where someone with amazing handwriting (where do they get all the baristas with amazing handwriting?) had written: “Life is hard.  Remember that ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE is having a hard time.” 

I also remember thinking to myself as I walked by that categorical statements are never, ever true.  

Since then, though, life seems to have taught me otherwise.  

I have known people in all kinds of circumstances, positive and negative, and I have been tremendously blessed myself. 

Sometimes, I have to push myself a bit to count my blessings—or to get more specific than my family, my health, a roof over my head, and our church, but when I do, it doesn’t take me very long to get on a roll. 

I still wouldn’t say that life is easy.  

And after some years being alongside people in all kinds of moments in their lives, wonderful and challenging, heart-filling and heart-breaking, for me, the words on that sign outside the coffee shop ring true. 

Everyone is having a hard time.  

I’d also say that the words of the Bible ring true. 

Life is full of challenges, but people represent a different kind of challenge and require a different kind of patience.  

Spouses know this.  

As someone once said: “A successful marriage requires falling in love many times—always with the same person.” (Mignon McLaughlin)

It challenges us to become long-tempered with one another, remembering, for starters, that we may not be the easiest person to be married to.  

I am an only child, so I can’t tell you if siblings know about that different kind of patience.  

I will say that, having shared so much history, siblings seem to speak a common language – something that is not only of words, but facial expressions, hesitations and silences, old pictures, old scores and previous reconciliations for good or for ill, and so on, all of which seems to teach them how to be one of two things: it teaches them to be either remarkably long-tempered with one another, or impossibly short-tempered with one another, and to go from one to the other and back again, quite often at the drop of a hat.  

Outside the circle of our families, our interactions are shorter, and the difference between surface politeness and actual patience is harder to spot.  

When I was living in Philadelphia, there was a deli I used to go to – one of those places where the lady behind the register was the master of all she surveyed.  

She sat on a little stool surrounded by candy and boxes of cigarettes, but it might as well have been the Iron Throne from “Game of Thrones.” 

She spoke a language I don’t know, so I can’t say what she said, but I can tell you that she screamed it—whether it was at the guy who was working the deli counter, or the kid restocking the Snapple, or on the phone to whomever.  

It was the sort of situation where you’d be standing there uncomfortably with your tuna fish sandwich waiting to pay, not sure if you were supposed to be hearing whatever it was she was saying.  

And she’d wave you over impatiently in mid-rant, ring you up, shouting the whole time, and then she’d look you right in the eye, smile, and coo “Thank yoooooo,” before jumping back into whatever it was.  

It was a situation that left me with so many questions.  

Was the politeness just a put-on…or, in fact, was she secretly just screaming for the show of it, sort of like a drill-sergeant trying to get things done? 

I never knew.  

But I would offer that many of our interactions with others may leave them wondering how sincere we really are.  

To cultivate long-temperedness with our neighbors that they can know and rely on asks more of us than we may quite realize. 

Yet it helps to remember that God’s patience with us is of the kind which sees us as people to be known, even with all our flubs, flaws, and foibles, and not that other kind of patience we find in the Bible, which would treat us as a situation or a thing to be put up with.  

It reminds us also that, as people encounter us, they are not and cannot be entirely sure how we see them—if beneath our surface politeness, we see them as a thing to be endured…handled…managed, or as a person deserving a different kind of patience: our best shot at genuine long-temperedness.  

At Christmas, we celebrate the arrival of Jesus, who comes not to somehow manage our sins, but to love us into what we might become.  

May the season inspire us to seek such patience in ourselves, and lead us to find such love.  

Amen.