 Dr. Allen Criter's roots in Elkhart County go very deep. He was born here in Goshen. His father invested his career on the faculty of Goshen College and in its administration. Dr. Criter spent four years in his late childhood in Japan. I wonder if that already didn't start setting a pattern that would characterize the rest of his life. Observing God's mission in the world and returning to his roots in this county. Dr. Criter, who we know in the AMBS community as Allen, planned to do doctoral studies in the 16th century radical reformation period at Princeton University after he graduated from Goshen College. But the early death of his mentor threw him into a vocational quandary. He traveled to Germany during this time of discernment and then to Scotland where he discovered his deep kinship with the United Kingdom. He returned to the U.S. to study at Harvard University in 1964 pursuing a Ph.D. now in the history of the English reformation. Allen and Eleanor Graeber-Noss were married in 1965 and they moved to the U.K. in 1966 so that Allen could work on his dissertation. They lived at the London Mennonite Center. And over the course of the next 15 years Allen's life shifted back and forth between two poles, teaching at Goshen College and providing leadership at the London Mennonite Center. Together Allen and Eleanor served as the Center's warden and director from 1974 to 1991. And through the years of their patient ministry, the Anabaptist network of communities and leaders emerged in the U.K. Allen's missional influence in that context which had a decidedly Anabaptist emphasis developed through his university teaching and his scholarly writing, his speaking on the biblical witness of peace and his engagement with a wide variety of people, those who professed faith and those who did not. And that work shaped the twin expressions of Allen's vocation, one as a missional leader and the other as a teacher-scholar. The craters have taught in a number of schools and churches around the world since the 1970s. And they have developed a public style of presentation that blends both of their voices and the particular qualities of their personalities in very winsome ways. From 1995 to 2000 Allen was director of the Center for the Study of Christianity and Culture at Regent Park College of Oxford University. He taught on the AMBS faculty from 2004 to 2009 and in 2014 he was named Professor Emeritus of Church History and Mission. His most recently published book is called The Patient Firmant of the Early Church, The Improbable Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire. Patience is something that Allen has pursued in terms of his scholarship and in terms of his life for decades. I think Allen and Eleanor are exemplars of leadership that patiently nurtures a vital community of witness through the deep relationships of trust and care that develop in an intentional community that focuses on worship. Through relationships with a diverse network of people from whom they learned the myriad ways in which God is reconciling the world. And through writing carefully and reasonably and persuasively accounts of Christianity from an Anabaptist perspective, writing that invites and teaches often beguiles, nourishes and challenges everyone. I'm delighted to welcome Dr. Allen Crider as our 2016 commencement speaker and I invite you to join me in welcoming him here. Thank you and thank you for welcoming me as well. Dean Slau, President Schenck, faculty members, members of the graduating class, guests, friends, greetings in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. I apologize for my voice and I will do my best to give you what I have to say and I believe that I can do it. But in case I can't, if I falter, somebody with a good voice is ready to take my place and that is our colleague David Miller. So I am concerned, David, that you are not needed but if you are we will welcome you. We've just heard a text from Hebrews and it reminds us that we're surrounded by a cloud of witnesses and invites us to look to Jesus who pioneers our faith and who makes it perfect. And then the text calls us to do something. Let us run the race that is set before us with patience. Run a race with patience? What a peculiar way to run a race. A rather limping way of racing I would imagine. I want this afternoon to talk about the way that we're going to run that race. I want to talk about patience. And I want to talk about it because I believe that patience is very important. Important for us as Christians. But before I get to patience, I want to talk a bit about impatience. I'm impressed as I look around the churches, both within congregations and within denominations, that there is a lot of impatience about. And I'm struck as I look at myself and as I look at people that I love and people I don't know very well, that there are personal struggles with impatience. A theologian I've been reading recently, Christopher Smith, observes that he and his friends find that impatience does violence to him, self, and to them. And he puts it like this, violence to our own beings as we push ourselves to go faster and faster. Violence to other humans as we lash out when we are not doing as we wish. Violence toward creation as whole as our impatient need for speed demands a massive consumption of electrical or petroleum energy. We're shaped by a culture of immediacy. We're surrounded by an impatient background hum that makes it hard for us to be patient and easy for us to be afraid. The signs of this impatience are everywhere. Rage on the road, angry exchanges on Twitter, instant everything. But you know, if you start talking about patience, people could sort of yawn. Even theologians. I recently had a conversation with a senior European theologian. I told him about my new book, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church. I told him, it's about patience. It's about the spread of the faith through the embodied faith of the believers. It's about catechesis. It's about worship. And he said, that's interesting, especially catechesis and worship. Evidently not patience. Patience is not only uninteresting. It's viewed as something extraordinary that we appeal to in emergencies. The assumption today is that things ought to happen instantaneously. And when they don't, something's wrong. Last week, you probably heard it along with me. U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Jay Johnson apologized to long cues in airports. He said, I must ask you to be patient. Patience is a virtue, but an extraordinary virtue to be exercised when our instant society isn't functioning properly. And those who are caught up in the long line say with exasperation, I've lost patience. This is a shame. I submit to you this afternoon. The early Christians understood patience to be a good thing. They understood it differently than we do. Patience wasn't just for extraordinary circumstances and was most definitely not an excuse for doing nothing and being disengaged with the realities of the world. Patience for them was living normally but distinctively in a way that reflects the character of God as Jesus embodied God's character and taught it. When we shrug our shoulders and say, I've lost patience, we're surrendering to one of those weights and sins that the letter to the Hebrews was protesting against. These weights keep us from running the race properly. But according to Hebrews, patience is the way to run. Now where did I get that idea? Well, obviously from Hebrews 12, but also from sources that most of us Christians know less well. And that is from the cloud of witnesses that surrounds us. The cloud of witnesses. Now, Rebecca informed us that I'm a church historian and in recent years I've been spending a lot of time with the early Christians, especially the Christians in third century North Africa. I've been reading their writings. I've been pondering their lives. I've been studying their art. They're wonderful people. It was a time when there were laws against being Christian. People viewed the Christians as a dubious group and becoming a Christian was certainly not a way to get ahead in society. Nevertheless, people became Christians anyway. Why should we in 2016 spend our precious time in this august commencement service listening to a dubious group from AD 200 because they and we are parts of the cloud of witnesses that is the body of Christ. We and they belong to each other. Further, because they, the early Christians, thought a lot about patients. Patientia, they called it. Not Hupomonias in the New Testament. In Latin it was patientia. And it was of central importance to them. And if I'm right in saying that we as a culture have problems with patients, their interest in patients should be of interest to us. Imagine Christians whose teachers and theologians gave special thought and pastoral attention to patients. Their greatest theologian, Tertullian, wrote the first Christian book on a virtue. Not on prudence, not on fortitude, not on temperance, not on justice. All these classical virtues on patients. Patience, he called his first book on a virtue. Patience. And soon after him their greatest bishop, Cyprian, wrote a second book, The Good of Patience. They wrote about patience because it was important to them. It was according to Tertullian the highest virtue. And God for Tertullian was the exemplar of patience. Other writers called patients the greatest of all virtues. It was the virtue that is peculiarly Christian. And if we today have our struggles with patients, could it be that these third century North Africans can help us? Has their way of reading the Bible and pondering the work of God got something to say to us today? They were convinced that the God that they worshiped, the God that they encountered was patient. Patience is the very nature of God, they stated. At the beginning of the Bible story and the primordial fall, the big issue was impatience. Impatience, that's what Tertullian thought the fall was about. And this fall into impatience had huge effects. Anger, rivalry, hatred, homicide, idolatry, adultery. Nevertheless, across the centuries, the patient God had been working to bring salvation to God's impatient creatures. How? Well, not by forcing the pace, not by compelling God's creatures to be patient and twisting their arms and not by micromanaging them. So they would respond to God at the right moment. No, Tertullian's vision based on his reading of the Old Testament is that God under his providential guidance gives people freedom and God was at work. God, the missional God, was moving to bring about his kingdom. And how did he do it? According to Tertullian and Supreme, God used three means, all of them patient. First of them, generosity. God uses patient generosity. Remember our second reading from Matthew 5. God makes his son rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. For both Tertullian and Cyprian, this passage from the Sermon and the Mount is central because in it, Jesus says something crucial about God. God bountifully gives the goodness of creation and gives it to all. God is multi-dimensionally kind. God's generosity doesn't depend on whether people are virtuous or not, or whether they love God or not, or whether they treat other people well. God is generous to them all and patient with them all. God doesn't manipulate creation to attract people to himself. God is generous to people because God loves people. God sends out his creational blessings in his call and the people who are ready, the right people, respond. Tertullian is convinced God's omnidirectional patient generosity attracts people, attracts people to God. So that's one way that God works. Second, in addition to his patient generosity, God brings about the kingdom by incarnation, the incarnation of Jesus. As Tertullian puts it, God allows himself to become incarnate. But Tertullian makes it clear that incarnation isn't a quick means of getting things done, and it certainly isn't the means of forcing people to believe. How patient the process is. Tertullian goes into great detail to indicate how slowly it all unfolds. So when it happens, he seems to enjoy this, it takes Jesus about 30 years to get his act together. And he doesn't forcibly restrain followers who were leaving him. He eats at anybody's table. He won't get angry at the town that refuses to receive him. He keeps Judas in his company. He could have had legions of angels from heaven to assist him, but he didn't call on them, and he didn't approve of the use of the sword by even one of his disciples. According to Tertullian, when Peter uses sword against Melchus, it is the patience of the Lord that was wounded. In this incident, Jesus actually cursed for all times the works of the sword, and by healing him whom he had not struck, made satisfaction by patience, which is the mother of mercy. Tertullian says, I say nothing about his crucifixion. It was for this that he had come. And he concludes, Jesus shows us that patience is the very nature of God. So God uses generosity. God uses patient incarnation in the third place. To bring about his kingdom, God uses community. Jesus had with him disciples, and he was aware that there was a lot that they needed to learn and unlearn. They were formed by an impatient Palestinian culture, and so, of course, they wanted to control things. They wanted things to happen fast, and they were willing to force people who, from their point of view, were blocking what God was trying to do. So for three years, Jesus lovingly put up with these people who, in his attempt to get across to them, that in his kingdom there's not going to be forcing or retaliation. No eye for an eye or tooth for a tooth here. In his kingdom, there will be indifference to money, there will be justification for the poor, and in his kingdom, the most powerful means for effecting change will be prayer. Tertullian and Cyprian were both aware how much attention Jesus gave to prayer, to petitionary intercessory prayer. They both wrote treatises not only about patience, but also about prayer. Living patiently, praying patiently, where are these things learned? Jesus knew they're learned in community. They're learned in a situation when people can observe their master and observe each other. Jesus was sure that his message of patience wouldn't communicate unless people embody the vision in their relationships. It's necessary for people to experience God's generosity, to tell his story, to listen to his teaching, and then to embody his patient way in their lives. Jesus worked on this with his disciples. In the early churches, leaders worked on this by means of what they called catechesis, teaching, that taught people how to think as Christians, but more taught them how to embody their thinking in reflexive behavior. 50 years after Tertullian, Bishop Cyprian developed his catechetical teaching to a high art. It was a kind of apprenticeship, often three years in length, in which a teacher observed the development of his apprentices, not only the development of their thinking, but especially the development of their habitual behavior. And the heart of North African Christian catechesis was how to become patient, and the central text of their teaching, Matthew 5.43-48, of course. Will the students like God, when they have finished their course, be good to all? Will they make their generosity fall on the just and the unjust? Will they pray for their persecutors? This catechesis, this teaching, isn't a means of reforming people. Not a means of informing people, it's a means of forming people. Patience was not primarily what the Christians thought, but what they in their conversion were being formed to be. They were being formed to be patient followers of Jesus, with patient habits and patient reflexes. I think this was the key to early Christian witness. Not what they said, but what they were. Cyprian commented, we Christians don't speak great things, but we live them. The Christians were marginal to society. They had no power. Their ideas were interesting, but the ideas by themselves were impotent. Impotent, of course, unless they were lived. What gave people the sense that the Christian ideas had power was this. It was that the ideas enabled those who believed them to live differently, to live patiently. And patience, according to Tertullian, was exceedingly attractive. It's time to jump from Africa in the third century to Goshen today. And across these many miles and 1700 years, patience has ceased to be central to the life and thought of Christians. An interesting thought that I had recently that indicates this shift. When you think of patience today, what Bible character do you think of? Job? Patience of Job? Hmm. From the fourth century onwards, that was obvious. And Gregory the Great wrote a huge, huge treatment of all the aspects of the patience of Job. But if you ask Christians before Constantine what biblical character would come to mind? It was Jesus. The patience of Jesus. And note the difference. With Job, patience is a virtue that shows the capacity to withstand exceptional suffering. But with Jesus, patience is the way that Christians live their ordinary lives and seek God's kingdom and His justice following their master. I'm going to give you a historical generalization that as all historical generalizations is not fully true. But that is that when Christians have had power they've not been interested in patience. When Christians have had economic, cultural, political, even religious power they've not been interested in patience. But today people are increasingly aware that impatience is a big problem for us. Indeed, I've come to think that impatience is one of the primary weights and sins of our time. It's striking to me that Christians are starting to write about patience again. Did you see the recent sojourners? It was the April sojourners. There was one big word, the cover. Patience. Christians are rediscovering patience. Why? Rediscovering it now. Why? Is it accident? Is it providence? Is it the inspiration of the Holy Spirit? Perhaps it's because Christians are realizing that we're in a world in which we do have lots of control. Our health care, our finances, our travel, our public safety, our communication, how much more we can control everything than Tertullian could and how much faster everything happens. And yet we're realizing that there is so much we cannot control and we're coming to realize that our struggle for control is somehow changing us. The issues that face us are colossal and they seem to be moving in worrisome directions. We don't choose to be impatient. In our being impatient, we're simply thinking and behaving in ways that are culturally conventional, obvious. We're surrounded by impulses and we respond to them impulsively and as we watch TV or go on the web, these responses become normal. Impatience is our societal norm. So in our world, do we want to find patience? And if so, how do we do it? How can we Christians realize in our lives the book of Hebrews' vision of running the race that is set before us with patience? Early Christians thought that patience is the way to live. They saw it as the character of God and the life of Jesus. They thought that God's character is patient and that patience is how God prefers to work. Their thinking has challenged me. Where are they right? And if so, so what? I believe that God wants those of you who are graduating who will become pastors, spiritual directors, peace workers, church planters, scholars, missionaries. God wants you to be patient Christians and to minister to other people in such a way that they become patient Christians. Christians whose character and reflexes are patient. How can this happen? In three ways. You will become patient first of these. As you following the book of Hebrews, look to Jesus. He, according to the letter to the Hebrews, is the author and perfecter of our faith and he's still perfecting things and perfecting people. It's Jesus who shows us how to live patiently and how to work for patient change. In this as in so many other areas, Jesus is the key. He really is. He shows us the Father. And as a friend of mine in Wales recently wrote me, his situation in Wales is terrible. People are just leaving the Christian faith. He says, when we seriously live according to the pattern of the gospel, outsiders who never come to church take notice. It's the living that calls people, not the words. How do we live according to the pattern of the gospel? Well, as AMBS knows, we immerse ourselves in the gospel. In all four of them. We watch Jesus at work. We get his full agenda. We're grateful as he offers us his grace and his friendship. We pray and when we do these things, we learn to live without fear and because Jesus has taught us to trust in God, we'll live in ways that are distinctive. We'll work in our jobs and devote ourselves to the huge and urgent issues that God cares about. Climate change, welfare of prisoners, racial equality, the curse of poverty, proliferation of nuclear weapons, salvation for all people. Yes. And above all, when we're attentive to Jesus, we realize that he again and again calls his disciples to pray. Jesus gives astonishing emphasis to prayer and often to prayer that is petitionary and intercessory. I was recently looking at Luke 11 and 18 and he keeps urging his disciples, pray, Father, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth. Be persistent, ask, search, knock, be important, bang on the door, keep praying and don't lose. Don't let that unjust judge win. The prayer that Jesus teaches us is a prayer of resistance, not a prayer of resignation to injustice but resistance to injustice. Grant me justice against my opponent. I tell you, Jesus says, that judge quickly grant justice to him. May it be so. So we look to Jesus for whom intercessory prayer is important and it's important to him because of the second thing. We will become patient as we trust God. God is in control. Jesus was firm about that. At various times in history, one encounters people who really trust God. I'll never forget the time in my early London years in which I met a Roman Catholic Reformation historian who was renowned to believe that God really was Lord of history and as a result that he didn't need to be afraid and we were all scared to our wits' ends about nuclear war and Jack Scarasbrick wasn't. God is in control. We Christians certainly aren't. So we can relax. God plays a long game. He has promised to bring his kingdom the new creation in which enemies, predators and prey will live in peace and God doesn't say how he's going to do this. God's work is complex, unknowable and hard to decipher and God doesn't tell us how he's going to bring the peaceable kingdom. He calls us to live in patience without determining the pace or manipulating the outcomes. He calls us to live our lives in ways that seek God's kingdom and his justice in all that we do and he calls us to pray and just another word here about prayer. Why pray? This is a huge topic but it fits here because it has to do with how God works. Intercessory prayers can change things in the heavenlies and also on earth. There are huge problems that we face in our individual lives that seem intractable and that the world faces that seem not only intractable but colossal and insuperable but you know things happen suddenly after long periods in which nothing seems to be going on tectonic plates shift and things develop towards shalom suddenly in South Africa instead of moving towards race war. We've got a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It's utterly miraculous. Mzi, our brother, spoke to me very movingly about that. Christians were praying in Northern Ireland instead of having a war between Protestants and Catholics. We've got power sharing. These tectonic plates shift. Why? Because I believe God is at work using Christians and others as they follow their vocation, as they resist injustice and in the swirl of possibilities prayer can make beneficent possibilities come forward. How? I think by changing people's ideas by converting them by bringing about strange conjunctures of weather or events by bringing coincidences apparent departures from laws of nature and protecting us in our danger. God has ways forward that we don't anticipate and these are thoroughly out of our control but not out of God's control. God simply tells us to trust God and to pray as God's co-workers for the kingdom. And so, a patient stance for us today is to seek God's kingdom with our gifts and skills and to pray with passion and the kingdom. It is right to ask for the huge, the impossible and the unanticipatable and when we see newness breaking in it is especially right to praise God for it. Thirdly and finally, as you become patient leaders you will help your congregations to become communities in which patience is taught or I call these schools of patience. Of course, every congregation ideally should be a school of patience. Why a school? Because patience has got to be learned and it's jolly hard to learn patience in our culture. Patience must be learned through practice with other people. As pastors, you will teach patients and preach patience and above all live patience and the people will grow in the patience of Christ. Patience is good news. It comforts people to know that since God is in control they don't need to be in control. They can live in ways that are unhurried and unpressured. And this can be furthered by lots of means. One that's very important to me these days is a Saturday morning men's group in which men meet, share a common task and grow in trust. Or by specialist action and prayer groups. These can be schools of patience as they're organizing for specific tasks. Other schools of patience can be groups preparing for baptism in which Christian character, patient character is formed or groups of people who say I recognize I've got problems with impatience. Let's meet together and have a conversation about it. Do audits of impatience and become maybe accountable to each other as we thoughtfully form character for patient living. All these can help the congregation become a school of patience and can help the entire body take risks. Cross boundaries and build relationships and they can help everyone grow in patience. And so I close. With a word of comfort remember that the image of the race that the book of Hebrews uses is one that has to do with process and destination. We don't start the race at the end. We learn to run by running and we learn to be patient by growing in patience. So if parts of our lives are places of real struggle to be patient in of our relationships in our churches are all messed up and impatient well, what's the surprise? And this is the comforting word from Tertullian of all people. At the start of his book on patience Tertullian commented that he was ever suffering from the fever of impatience. Isn't that encouraging? But Tertullian was on a growing curve and I pray for you as you grow in patience not only in the struggle of change but also in the liberation that God will give you. It was Jesus who was the patient one and our destiny is to run with him and to be like him.