Waiting Is Not the Same as Doing Nothing

I want to tell you a little about what is coming this Sunday, and then I want to tell you why I think this community needs it right now.

This Sunday is week six of our series The Kingdom Worth Everything, and the word is PATIENCE. The readings come from the Book of Wisdom, from Paul’s letter to the Romans, and from Matthew’s Gospel, where Jesus tells the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds: a field where good seed and something else entirely have been growing side by side, and a landowner who refuses to let his servants rip it all up before the harvest.

I am not going to tell you here what I am going to say about that parable on Sunday. I want you to come and hear it fresh, sitting in the room, rather than reading my argument in advance on a screen. What I will say is this: the word PATIENCE, in scripture, rarely means what we assume it means when we hear it in ordinary conversation. It is worth showing up to find out what it actually means.

What I do want to talk about today is why a sermon on patience feels almost unbearable to prepare for, given what this particular week has actually contained.

I need to tell you about three people.

On Monday, July 13, a twenty-five-year-old man named Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero was shot dead by ICE agents in Biddeford, Maine, during a traffic stop on the very block where he lived.

The next day, Tuesday, July 14, a twenty-eight-year-old Mexican national, still unnamed by federal authorities as of this writing, was struck and killed by a semi-truck in St. Augustine, Florida, after running from federal immigration agents through a gas station parking lot.

These two deaths followed the July 7 killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, a man with no criminal record who had lived in this country for more than three decades and was close to obtaining legal work authorization when ICE officers, looking for someone else entirely, shot him during a vehicle stop. This week, a Texas district attorney opened an independent criminal investigation into that killing.

Three deaths connected to immigration enforcement in a single week. After the first two, ICE briefly paused most vehicle stops nationwide. The pause lasted only a matter of days before the President personally overturned it this week, writing that the agency could not give up traffic stops as an enforcement tool.

I do not know how to make that sound smaller or more distant than it is. These were not accidents that happened somewhere else. They happened this week, in this country, to people with names, families, and, in at least one case, a home on the very street where he was killed.

More than eleven hundred Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed by Israeli strikes since a ceasefire took effect last October, according to health officials in Gaza. More than two hundred sixty of them were children. This week alone, strikes killed a nine-year-old and a ten-year-old among others, and one strike on an apartment building killed a man, his wife, and their six-year-old daughter as ceasefire negotiations in Cairo remained stalled.

In Ukraine, the fighting has not paused for a single day. Russian forces launched dozens of attacks across multiple fronts this week alone; a drone strike in Kramatorsk injured six civilians and damaged a grocery store and two passenger vehicles. Ukraine’s European allies pledged more military aid at a summit in Paris, even as the war enters what analysts are calling a new and uncertain phase.

And closer to home, a new report this week found that people detained at an immigration jail in Colorado have contracted tuberculosis, and a separate investigation documented more than four hundred instances of law enforcement misuse of force against civilians nationally.

None of this is background noise. It is simply what is true, this week, for a great many people whose names most of us will never learn.

I will not tell you what the sermon says. But I will tell you why I chose not to skip this word, even in a week like this one.

Patience, in the biblical sense, has never meant passivity. It has never meant waiting quietly for things to get better on their own, or pretending that injustice will simply exhaust itself if the faithful sit still long enough. Whatever patience means in Sunday’s readings, it does not mean that.

Come find out what it does mean. Bring your grief about Gaza and about Ukraine. Bring whatever you are feeling about Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, about the man whose name we do not yet know in St. Augustine, about Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. This community does not ask you to set any of that down at the door. We ask you to bring it to the table.

See you Sunday.

Pax et Bonum,

Right Rev. Greer Godsey, OSFoc

Pastor, Saint Francis Parish and Outreach