This sermon was preached live at Islington United Church on July 26, 2026, as part of the summer sermon series “Consider the Birds”.
Scripture Readings:
Ecclesiastes 7:8-14
Better is the end of a thing than its beginning;
the patient in spirit are better than the proud in spirit.9Do not be quick to anger,
for anger lodges in the bosom of fools.
Do not say, “Why were the former days better than these?”
For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.Wisdom is as good as an inheritance,
an advantage to those who see the sun.For the protection of wisdom is like the protection of money,
and the advantage of knowledge is that wisdom gives life to the one who possesses it.Consider the work of God;
who can make straight what he has made crooked?In the day of prosperity, be joyful, and in the day of adversity, consider: God has made the one as well as the other, so that mortals may not find out anything that comes after them
2 Peter 3:1-9
3 This is now, beloved, the second letter I am writing to you; in them I am trying to arouse your sincere intention by reminding you 2 that you should remember the words spoken in the past by the holy prophets and the commandment of the Lord and Savior spoken through your apostles. 3 First of all you must understand this, that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and indulging their own lusts 4 and saying, “Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since our ancestors died,[a] all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation!” 5 They deliberately ignore this fact, that by the word of God heavens existed long ago and an earth was formed out of water and by means of water, 6 through which the world of that time was deluged with water and perished. 7 But by the same word the present heavens and earth have been reserved for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of the godless.
8 But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day. 9 The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you,[b] not wanting any to perish but all to come to repentance.
Listen to the Sermon (begins at 22:20)
Sermon Transcript: “Waiting Well”
The author of Ecclesiastes says “the patient in spirit are better than the proud in spirit”.
I’ll be honest with you. When Rev. Maya shared that the theme for worship today would revolve around “Patience”, and she told me that the bird was going to be the “Heron”, I really had my doubts that I was the right person to be doing the sermon today.
I don’t consider myself to be a very patient person.
I don’t like waiting in long lines… and I despise sitting in Toronto traffic. Perhaps some of you can relate. [I am judging by the chuckles that perhaps some of you can relate!]
My husband and I are the kind of people who, when we go on any kind of road trip, especially if it’s on a Saturday or a long weekend… we leave super early in the morning so that we avoid any traffic. For example, a couple of weeks ago on Canada Day we drove up to the family cottage. And because it was Canada Day we really wanted to beat the traffic. So we left at 7:30 in the morning, and we decided we were just going to make one stop: the Barrie On Route (some of you might be familiar with that stop off of Highway 400) to grab a coffee and a small bite to eat.
So when we got there, I walked inside to the Tim Hortons… and immediately saw the line, which was enormous.
I took one look at it, immediately turned around, walked right back outside, and told my husband there was no way I was going to wait in the line. Now the drive-thru looked to be less busy, so we thought we’d try the drive-thru.
Big mistake. As soon we turned the corner - into the drive thru lane, I saw that the line was in fact, much longer, than the line inside… but it was too late. We were trapped in by the barriers and there were already cars behind us.
So because of my impatience, we ended up having to wait in an even longer line. And I wish I could tell you that I learned a great spiritual lesson about patience that day… but honestly I struggled for almost the entire time we sat in the car and waited in that drive-thru.
Now I’d venture to guess that I’m probably not the only person here who does not like waiting for things.
Whether it’s waiting in a long line, waiting in traffic, waiting to be seen by a doctor, waiting for test results or a phone call, waiting for life to unfold the way we hoped it would... waiting has a way of bringing out some difficult feelings in us.
The world of today seems to promise instant everything. Fast food drive-thrus. Same-day Amazon deliveries. High-speed internet. Now, some of you might remember a time when this wasn’t the case… but many of us have become accustomed to this kind of high-speed life… we are promised instant gratification. And when we don’t get it, we become restless.
But I wonder if this sort of way in which our modern society has manifested itself… simply reveals something that has always been true about us.
Maybe the technology is new…
But the impatience of human beings is not.
Waiting has always been difficult for us.
It has a way of exposing us.
It reveals how much we like to be in control. How much we want things to happen on our timeline, and in our own way.
Our discomfort with waiting reveals how uncomfortable we are with uncertainty.
And waiting reveals how quickly we can lose faith that anything is happening at all.
And that’s exactly where our Scripture readings meet us this morning.
In the passage we heard from 2 Peter, the author is writing to a community of early believers. Now obviously this community of folks weren’t impatient because they were waiting in long lines or sitting in traffic. They were waiting for something far more significant. They were waiting for Christ to return. Many of the folks in this community believed that the second coming of Christ would happen within their lifetime. And when Christ returned, all things would be made right. Suffering would stop. Victims of injustice would be comforted. Selfish rulers and corrupt systems would be overthrown.
But years passed.
Then decades.
The apostles who established these communities began to die.
The first generation of believers was gone.
And people started asking the kinds of questions that we sometimes ask when God seems to be absent.
Did we misunderstand?
Has God forgotten us?
Is God ever going to do what God promised?
Maybe these questions are familiar to you. Maybe you, yourself, have experienced periods of waiting, where it felt like God had abandoned you.
And even though most of us know that in theory at least, God is here… somewhere… and at some point, something is surely going to reveal itself… those periods of waiting can still feel excruciating.
Now we all know that waiting is just a part of life. We are helpless to do anything about it.
So what if, instead of trying to avoid “the waiting”, we could learn how to wait well.
What would it look like for us to inhabit waiting faithfully?
The author of 2 Peter says that God isn’t slow, but rather is patient with us…
Now we have been considering the birds these past few months, and there is one bird in particular that does the whole “waiting thing” extremely well.
And that bird is the Heron.
The majestic heron spends much of its time in complete stillness. It is a natural fisher, often found on the edge of a pond or marsh. It watches and waits for long periods, remaining alert for fish beneath the surface. Then, when the moment is right, it strikes with remarkable speed and precision.
If you’ve ever watched a heron standing at the edge of a pond, it almost looks as though it isn’t doing anything at all. But that’s not really true.
The heron isn’t idle or wasting time… or passing time until something happens.
It is completely attentive in its stillness. Every sense is awake. Every movement is intentional.
The Heron trusts that what it needs will come, and until then, it remains fully present to the moment it has been given.
And I wonder if there is something in this for us.
Maybe patience or “waiting well” isn’t simply gritting our teeth until life gets better.
Maybe patience isn’t pretending that waiting isn’t hard or frustrating. And maybe patience is not sitting back and doing nothing when we find ourselves in those periods of waiting.
Perhaps patience is learning to remain fully present with what is, while we wait… and in that presence, trusting that the waiting has a purpose.
And this is where some of our spiritual tools can be helpful, such as contemplative prayer or meditation, or meditating on the wisdom of our scriptures.
These are practices where we can cultivate stillness, where we turn off the distractions, whether those are outside distractions dictating how things “should” be… or internal distractions like worries, anxieties, or thoughts about the next thing.
What if we could give ourselves a few moments, to feel our breath, and to become present to what is, right here and right now.
Something interesting happens when we stop trying to resist the moment, when we stop trying to fight periods of waiting, and actually embrace the waiting, even seeing it as an opportunity.
We might start to notice all the things happening beneath the surface.
We may start to notice the birds outside the window.
We may notice the thoughts racing through our minds.
And we may then notice God’s quiet presence helping us settle our minds, our bodies, our emotions.
In periods of waiting, it can feel like nothing is happening… We might even assume that because we can’t yet see the outcome, God must not be doing anything.
But that isn’t usually how God works.
It is in these periods of waiting that God is often doing God’s deepest work beneath the surface… long before we can recognize it… and always on God’s timeline, rather than our own…
So I’ll admit… maybe I did learn something about patience in that Tim Hortons drive-thru experience. I spent the first 10 minutes in that line wishing I was somewhere else… and it was actually my husband who snapped me out of it and said… well we’re in this line now.. There’s nothing we can do about it. So let’s just enjoy it.
Wise words.
And sometimes it is the Spirit speaking through other people that can help give us some perspective.
So in that moment, I took a breath. I stopped resisting the moment. I stopped wishing I was somewhere else.
And in hindsight, we got to where we were going on time… maybe 20 minutes behind schedule… but did it really matter?
I wonder how often we do that with our lives.
We spend so much energy waiting and hoping for the next thing to come… that we fail to notice what God is doing in this moment.
We’re all waiting for something. Whether it’s waiting for clarity, waiting for health to improve, waiting for grief to soften… waiting for prayers to be answered…
And sometimes our waiting is a little more superficial. We’re waiting for the next sunny day, or we’re waiting for the sermon during worship to be over so we can just get to the music… cause isn’t that the best part?
We don’t get to choose whether life asks us to wait, but we do have some choice about how we wait.
The author of 2 Peter reminded the early church that what they interpreted as delay was, in fact, an expression of God’s love… even if they didn’t understand it.
God wasn’t absent or behind schedule, but was rather making space for people to turn toward love.
And it is in this space, where we are not wishing to be somewhere else, that lives can be transformed.
God has not abandoned us.
The image of the Heron, standing quietly at the water’s edge, invites us to become a people that waits faithfully, rather than fearfully.
And so may we become people who wait well.
And may we trust that even when we cannot yet see what is unfolding beneath the surface, God is present and working.
And in that waiting, may God quietly shape us into people of deeper faith, deeper hope, and deeper love.
Amen.