Monday, July 29, 2013

Tenth Sunday after Pentecost: "Lord, Teach us to Pray"


Genesis 18:20-32
Psalm138
Colossians 2:6-19
Luke 11:1-13

Lord, teach us to pray.  It is one of the few times that any one of Jesus' disciples ask him something really sensible.  Lord, teach us to pray.  Many of us as children were taught that prayer is fundamentally petitionary asking things of God.  And it is easy to give Jesus teaching a surface reading and see it purely about petitionary prayer; many Christians do.  If you pray hard enough, if you pester God enough, then you will get what you want.  You can manipulate circumstances, you can manipulate God.  Still, the problem with this sort of thinking is that it does not allow for what happens when prayers are not answered as we ask.  In these cases people are left with really only two options: a sense personal failure If I had only prayed hard enough God would have fulfilled my desire, or with simply, a loss of faith altogether.  Rather, as we mature in the faith and in the life of prayer, we come to realize that petitionary prayer is only one aspect of prayer, and not nearly the most important.  Because, at its heart prayer is not about getting God to do or not do this or that.  It is not about our getting God to change but, as C.S. Lewis observes, about allowing God to change us.  And while Jesus responds to his disciples in the language of petition and asking, there is much more than that in his teaching about prayer, if we will only listen.  In answer to the disciples request Jesus makes three distinct responses.  He describes three important aspects of prayer common prayer (maybe he as an Episcopalian after all), persistence in prayer and trust in God.

When you pray say…”  In the first instance Jesus offers his disciples a common prayer. It is a prayer which has, of course, become the bedrock of Christian prayer.  But carefully considered what he offers is something not unlike what is offered in our own Book of Common Prayer traditional prayers to say together  In the first instance, the Lords Prayer is deeply grounded in the tradition the Jewish tradition that is, Jesus and his disciples were Jews after all.  Many of my Jewish friends actually say they would have no problem using it.  It is fundamentally a Jewish prayer.  So, Jesus offers a prayer grounded in the tradition, but also one to memorize and for common use.  One of the questions often asked of Christians in the liturgical churches Episcopalians included is why we read our prayers, why we have prescribed prayers.  The implication being that in using prescribed, written prayers our devotional life lacks genuineness, lacks sincerity.  What hogwash!  Now, detailing the very good reasons for using written, prescribed prayers could take up a whole sermon, indeed a whole book.  But lets briefly consider some chief ones.  Firstly, using set prayer is perhaps the most ancient way of praying, Christian or otherwise.  It is the way our ancestors in the faith prayed.  It is the way the saints of the Church have prayed through the ages; and only a fool would dare to call into question their sincerity or spirituality.  Secondly, prescribed prayers give us words to praise God or pray to God when in our joy or anguish our own words fail us.  This shouldnt be under-rated.  Set prayers lend to us the language of the ages to use as we approach the Lord.  Finally, common prayers are just that, common.  Their use even when used privately take us out of the strictly private sphere.  They bind us together with others; not only in our church building, but across the miles and the ages.  Someone in our study course observed last week how marvelous is the knowledge that in every community throughout the Episcopal Church we are all joined in common prayer and worship Sunday by Sunday the collect is the same, the readings are the same, the forms we use are the same.  The practice of using set, common prayers gives the lie to divisions of time and space.

In response to his disciples request Jesus tells a little parable about persistence in prayer.  On the surface, as I mentioned earlier, the moral of story seems to be that if you pester God enough you will get what you want.  Yet, I am not really sure how helpful this reading of the parable is.  When I was a child I prayed for all sorts of things.  I prayed often and with the trusting innocence of youth, and my requests still did not come to pass.  Nevertheless, this doesnt mean the parable has no meaning for us.  It seems more helpful to think of this parable as speaking to the disciplined nature of prayer, the regular persistence that the life of prayer requires; and ironically it challenges us with the question, Do I only pray when I need something, do I only pray when I feel like it, or instead do I practice a regular, disciplined prayer life?  Being persistent in prayer means sometimes praying when we really dont want to thats where common prayer is so helpful, by the way.  It means that we show up, as it were, and we realize that it has little do with how we feel.  We come as we are, make ourselves available to Gods presence, and let God do the rest.  Regular, persistent prayer frees us from the need to feel spiritual or particularly together, because the commitment is to presence, not necessarily to feeling a particular way.  Moreover, it frees us from the pressure that prayer has to leave with a certain feeling, that it should uplift or feed us whatever, that means.  I usually leave Morning or Evening Prayer not feeling particularly different, but how I feel is in some sense immaterial.  The effect of prayer is not instant or immediate,  it is rather cumulative and over time, as the words we pray and the silences into which we enter slowly work within us to transform us and draw us to God.  I suppose prayer is less like ibuprofen and more like penicillin.  You have a headache, you take a some ibuprofen and its gone in a bit.  Penicillin works more slowly, you have to take it at regular, prescribed times and you have to take the whole dose, even if the symptoms seem to get better.

Finally, Jesus highlights the fundamental necessity of trust in the life of prayer; trust that God is present and near to us; trust that God hears us and responds to us; trust that he loves and cares for us even better than we care for ourselves and for those entrusted to our care.  Part of trusting God means letting go of that feeling so many of us carry around that the only one we can really trust, the only one we can really depend on is ourselves.  In short, trusting God means letting go of control.  And interestingly enough, while Jesus still makes his point in the language of petition And I tell you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you (Luke 11:9), the truth is that trust in God almost dispenses with petition.  Trusting God means that no matter what may happen, we understand God as the ever-real and ever-present reality of our lives, and of the entire world.  Trusting God means we know he already desires for us as one of our collects says more than we can ask or imagine.  Certainly, things may not turn out in a particular instance as we would have liked, or had hoped, or even expected, but why should we think that makes God untrustworthy?  It hardly signifies a betrayal of trust on Gods part.  Our friends and partners may not always do what we ask of them, but wed never thinking of ceasing to trust them, and it is that trust which grounds and strengthens the relationship.  So, it is not that dissimilar with God.  The life of prayer is not about getting things out of God, but about deepening in a trusting relationship with the God who loves and cares for us even better than the best of parents.

Weve tried this morning to look at our prayer as something beyond simply petition, and we can see that when Jesus disciple ask him to teach them to pray, he certainly points them beyond a prayer of asking.  Nevertheless, as he ends this discourse there he does focus on one particulary petition: If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him. (Luke 11:13)  Here he points us to the perfect prayer of petition, and promises the answer God will always give.  God will always give his Holy Spirit to those who ask.  In the midst of all our asking, of all our petitions, what more could we want more but the Spirit who binds us together in prayer, worship and a common life; the Spirit who encourages us and keeps us faithful, persistent in the life to which he have been called; the Spirit who comforts us and allows us to keep trusting?  The life of prayer is really the life of the Spirit in us, voicing our own deepest desires for union with God and with one another, and working within us to make that union really fruitful.  Lord, teach us to pray.  Three suggestions: pray in union with each other whether together or apart, pray regularly and persistently, trust God more than you trust your own devices and desires; and do it all knowing that God the Spirit is already at work within you to bring all your prayer to fruition according to the will of a gracious a loving God.

Ninth Sunday after Pentecost: Engaging with the Real


Genesis 18:1-10a
Psalm 15
Colossians 1:15-28
Luke 10:38-42
 
William Temple, perhaps the greatest of the 20th century Archbishops of Canterbury is quoted as describing Christianity as “the most materialistic of all religions”.  He is most certainly correct.  Our absolute and uncompromising belief in the incarnation is proof enough of that, but also, by extension, our abiding concern for human life and welfare.  Christianity’s proclamation of the kingdom of God is not a hope expressed for some other-worldly, other-time existence, but rather is intimately concerned with the affairs of this world, meeting the material needs of real human beings and, more recently, the preservation of the earth’s ecological balance and well-being.  As we observed in our study course last week, the great faith events and stories of Christianity happen within human history.  It is this world that God entered in the flesh-and-blood person of Jesus of Nazareth, and it is in this world and through its history and peoples that God continues to speak and reveal his will and purposes. 

As Christians we are invited into this process of renewal and redemption in the here and now, and whenever we take flights of other-worldly fantasies the Church’s own traditions – honestly encountered – bring us right back down to earth.  We are saved not as disembodied spirits, but redeemed body and soul.  Even our sacraments are material, carnal, one might say; one can’t get any more “materialistic” than eating flesh and drinking blood.  No wonder the Roman authorities in our early days accused of cannibalism.  Yet, the problem is that the otherworldly, the esoteric, the “spiritual” – in the worst sense of the word – is so much more interesting.  Moreover, because these do not represent palpable realities, we can make them into whatever we like.  This is perhaps, my greatest concern with much of what passes for spirituality in our post-modern world; it lives in an other-worldly reality of angels, rainbows and emanations, glossing over some the most difficult and challenging aspects of real day-to-day living.  In short it, is escapist, unfaithful to this world and to human experience.  This is not, however, a new phenomena and it is in part of what the writer of the letter to the Colossians is addressing. 

The city of Colossae was located in ancient Phrygia, part of the Roman territory of Asia Minor and near the great road from Ephesus to the Euphrates River.  It sat near the town of Honaz in modern-day Turkey.  Colossae had a flourishing wool and textile trade, as well as a religiously and culturally diverse population of native Phrygians, Greeks and Jews.  The writer of the letter to the Colossians – traditionally believed to have been St Paul, although his authorship is doubted by many biblical scholars – is concerned about the religious situation of the Church there.  One commentator writes that “the purpose of the letter was to bolster the faith of the community” in the midst of division.  There seems to have arisen within the Christians of Colossae a faction “not holding fast to the head”, that is Christ, and who were promoting – as we can infer from the letter itself – “a complex syncretism that incorporated features of Judaism, paganism, Christianity, magic, astrology and mystery religion.”  Certainly, “many elements of the Colossian error have been connected with gnosticism, e.g. asceticism, fullness of God, wisdom, knowledge, dualism, negation of things of this world.”  Not only were these beliefs and practices leading many astray, but also causing dangerous divisions and confusion among the faithful in Colossae.

The writer’s response to this all is to remind the Church of the utter supremacy of Christ not only in their lives, but in the created order, in everything.  In the midst of speculation about angels, spirits and secret wisdom, the writer reminds them that God does not hide his truths and purposes from human beings, but rather in the person of Jesus reveals them fully.  He writes, “[Christ] is the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15a)…for in him the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.” (Colossians 1:19)  Here the word image is a translation of the Greek, eikon, meaning true likeness.  In Jesus’ becoming human God hides nothing of who he is.  There is no secret knowledge, no esoteric wisdom, there are no angels that carry messages beyond what already revealed in Jesus to the Church, and through his Spirit which continues to dwell in the Church.  Moreover, that revelation is real, it is down-to-earth, it is fleshly.  The work of Jesus is a flesh-and-blood work, as the writer points out specifically: “he has now reconciled [you to God] in his fleshly body through death to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before [God]. (Colossians 1:22) 

There is always the inclination to withdraw – to construct answers from the simple desires of our minds, to twist reality to our purposes or use the world and the created order to extract from it the answers we want.  If we do not like some aspects of the faith or of what the Church teaches, we can simply add bits from other places which are more in line with what we want, or  want the world to be.  It is easier to believe in the indecipherable messages of angels or secret knowledge or our own fabrications than to put into action the more difficult, but completely down-to-earth precepts of Jesus – love your neighbor, give to the poor, forgive those who hurt you.  If you do not like some aspect of the world as it is, it is certainly easier simply to pretend that it is otherwise or to ignore the truth, rather than take on the challenge of really changing things according to a more just or truthful paradigm.  We all sometimes want an escape from the harsher realities of the world.  We go to the cinema, we read novels, I go to Disneyland.  But Christianity is the not the place for escape.  It may be the place for comfort, it certainly is the place to be strengthened in hope and vision, but it is not the place for flights from reality; rather the Christian faith, the Church, these are where we learn the absolute importance of reality, of the world, of our flesh-and-blood bodies.  We learn their importance because it is there that God meets us, and it is through creation and in our fellow human beings that God works and reveals his purposes.  As Franciscan Richard Rohr reminds us, “God comes disguised as your life.”

Later in the letter to the Colossians – and we will hear it next week – the writer says to his fellows in Colossae:  “Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions, puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind, and not holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God.” (Colossians 2:18-20)  He pleads for them to engage with reality – the divine truth revealed in the very human person of Jesus, and in whom we find out own authentic humanity.  If I can quite Richard Rohr again, he reminds us that the greatest ally of God is what is.  God wants us involved with reality, whether rejoicing in its goodness or battling its evils.  We do no one any good service, much less the truth of the life and witness of Jesus, by indulging in flights of fantasy or of esoteric knowledge, or by constructing a reality only for ourselves, fenced off from the reality of God and of his Christ in whom has been reconciled all things in heaven and earth.  No, here is the place where we encounter God and in Jesus God has revealed to us who God is among us and what God intends for us.  Coming to terms with the real can be tough, but it is also amazingly liberating.  God is not waiting to trick us, neither need we mistrust the world as it is, or escape from it.  We can trust that God has already made our Lord Jesus “the one in whom all things hold together,…head of the body, the church…the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent” and that reality secures for us freedom from fear or the need to escape from what is, it frees us from having to construct things our way all the time, reminding us that that is right here, right now, as we are that God comes to us, and loves us and works among us.  And that is a very good thing indeed.

Eighth Sunday after Pentecost: "Once Upon a Time...."


Amos 7:1-17
Psalm 82
Colossians 1:1-14
Luke 10:25-37
 
Few things get people involved as much as a story.  The instant one says “Once upon a time” or “Long, long ago” there is a shift in the energy of the room, a shift in people’s attention.  They literally become attentive.  They want to know more.  As the story unfolds images begin to form in people’s minds. They identify with one or more of the story’s characters; they wonder or even decide what they would do if they were placed in similar situations; their own hopes, dreams, or even fears become reflected and perhaps explored within the context of the story.  Stories can be ways of exploring our fantasies and their meanings, illustrating difficult concepts and ideas, or effecting personal transformation at a level deeper than simply conscious thought, since they often address us at the sub-conscious level.  Most probably, it is on account of all this that Jesus told so many stories.  What we call parables are really just stories – stories to illustrate the deep and ultimately unspeakable realities of the Kingdom of God; stories to challenge our assumptions of ourselves, others and the world; stories to effect a transformation of our minds, spirits and bodies.

The parables of Jesus invited-in their contemporary audience by always speaking in terms of the familiar – masters and servants, farmers and sowing, travellers and robbers, hosts and guests, parents and children, mustard seeds, fishers, yeast.  He places his stories within the familiar, the everyday, the ordinary.  They are about situations and experiences which would have been commonplace to those who gathered to hear his message of the Kingdom of God.  The story which has come to be known as the Parable of the Good Samaritan happens on a well-traveled road between Jericho and Jerusalem.  A road on which many of his audience would undoubtedly have traveled themselves.  And as he begins his story, immediately their minds would turn to that Roman road comprised of eighteen long miles of desert and rocky country which connected the town of Jericho and the city of Jerusalem.  They would also recall the robbers and brigands which frequented that territory; the dangers they had themselves faced and the fear they had experienced as they had traveled through it.  And so from the beginning they are able to identify with the story, with the place and the potential dangers, and with the traveller.  Think for a moment of the less salubrious parts of our own town.  If I told you a story which began, “Some time ago on a dark winter’s evening, a woman was driving along 10th Avenue on their way to north Hanford from an event at the Clark Center.  Near 10th and Houston her car breaks down, perhaps it is a flat; she isn’t sure, but at 10 o’clock at night she finds herself stranded in Home Gardens.”  I think that you would begin to see what was going to happen.  Given the information of those familiar surroundings, you would almost instinctively begin to place yourself in her shoes.  Jesus gets people personally involved in his stories from the very beginning, by placing them within the context and experiences of their lives and of the familiar in their lives.

Yet a good story does not only create an atmosphere of the familiar, but rather uses the familiar to encourage us to see things in a new way, in order to deliver new insight, to encourage us to look beyond the surface of things and there discern some fundamental truths about ourselves and reality.  A good story always carries with it and brings to us something of the unexpected and surprising.  It is there – in the surprising and unexpected elements – that usually lies the great truth of the story.  It is almost as if the familiar elements exist only to give us a sense of comfort so that when the unexpected happens it is doubly surprising.  Think, for example, of familiar stories as if for the first time – it is unexpectedly the wretched servant girl who sleeps among the cinders that marries the prince and ultimately becomes a princess herself; it is the monstrous beast who by the transforming power of human love and dedication is revealed to be a handsome nobleman; it is the youngest and least powerful of the children whose ingenuity saves the entire family from starvation and death; it is the hated and heretical Samaritan, not the religiously observant priest or Levite, who enacts God's compassion and loving care.  It is the unexpected twist in a story which really makes us think, and perhaps even change our minds.  Those who listened for the first time to this story would have hardly expected the Samaritan to be its hero.  As I mentioned two weeks ago, to the Jews of Jerusalem the Samaritans were the “hated people of God”, faithless and perverse.  Jesus’ audience would have expected a religious story to vindicate and demonstrate the virtues of the religious class – the priest or the Levite.  But that is exactly what Jesus’ parable does not do. Instead, by doing the unexpected, it points to its own underlying message and truth; it sets people thinking, it introduces the element of possibility – the possibility that the neighbour is the hated Samaritan and that the truly religiously observant are not the professional men of God, but the one who goes out of himself, out of herself, in compassion.

Good stories always also leave room for the hearer.  Good stories rarely give clear cut interpretations.  In their very telling, good stories ask questions of their hearers, of us.  They always leave room for us to make our own interpretations, for us to struggle with them and hopefully allow our minds and thoughts to be renewed and transformed by them.  Throughout the gospels Jesus only ever specifically interprets one of his parables.  He knows that the really good stories always ask questions of us.  While stories sometimes arise out of a question: “A young lawyer asked Jesus ‘And who is my neighbour?’ ”, they also usually only offer to us the challenge of another question: “Which of these three [the priest, the Levite or the Samaritan], do you think, was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”  “What do you think?”  “How did the story change you?”  “What new viewpoint has it offered you?”  By letting the listener bring to the story his or her own interpretation a storyteller allows the story to become the listener’s own.  The storyteller realizes that ultimately the story is not his or her own, but it belongs to all who listen and to all who by their own experience, intellect and insight interpret it and gather for themselves the story’s riches.  It is in this aspect particularly that stories can transform us and offer the possibility to us of new realities.  For these reasons Jesus sometimes ends his parables, not with an interpretation, but with the simple statement: “Let anyone with ears to hear listen!”  “Listen to the story.  Listen to yourself.  Listen to the effect the story has on you.  Listen how it works to transform and renew you.”

Stories are important.  Good stories, like the ones Jesus told, take us down the road of the truly familiar, then offer us an unexpected, and sometimes not readily acceptable, twist by which the story carries for us the possibility of transformation and renewal.  But this possibility is only made manifest when we take the story as our own.  When we allow it to speak to us at the deepest level, when we engage in it personally, and take the risk of asking the questions of the story that make sense in our lives and situations.  The same story may carry different messages for different people.  That is as it should be.  Stories are not scientific proofs of anything.  They are at their core works of the imagination.  In the week to come take this parable of the Good Samaritan (or any of Jesus’ parables) and read it quietly every day.  Let its riches speak to you and listen to what you respond.  Where are you in the story?  Who are you in the story.  What is the story calling you to do or be?  What does it mean?  Not what have others told you it means.  But what does it mean to you?  Let the power of the story gently work its transforming magic.  Let its questions bubble through you.  Give yourselves ears to hear and to listen.

Friday, July 12, 2013

Seventh Sunday after Pentecost: Now is the Acceptable Time

Isaiah 66:10-14
Psalm 66:1-8
Galatians 6:1-16
Luke 10:1-11, 16-20
 
From the start, in his “home” synagogue at Nazareth, Jesus presents his ministry, as not only urgent, but immediate, when he reads from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah: “ ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’ And he rolled up the scroll,” the evangelist continues, “gave it back to the attendant, and sat down.  The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him.  Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’ ” (Luke 4:18-21)  He is not talking about a distant event, but a present imminent reality; a prophecy fulfilled and a new world order begun, a new kingdom already in the process of unfolding.  Its reality is proven by the healings which he performs in Capernaum immediately upon leaving Nazareth, and throughout the region.  They are signs that God is in the world and putting the world back together.

Towards the end of the 9th chapter  of the Gospel (beginnign with 51st verse), this sense of urgency and immediacy is heightened, sharpened; and as Jesus turns his face towards Jerusalem there is a shift in the themes and emphases of his ministry.  The issues becomes those of discipleship and costs, and the urgency of the moment demands there be no half-measures.  We began to see this last Sunday, when Jesus reminded his disciples of the precarious, nomadic existence which his own commitment to live out the truth of God’s kingdom had cost him: “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Luke 9:58b); thus hinting that it will be the same for them.  Moreover, he points out that following him means making the kingdom a priority above all else, including the demands of family – perhaps the most important social determiner in the ancient near-east.  Luke records it like this: “To [one] he said, ‘Follow me.’  But he said, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’  But Jesus said to him, ‘Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.’  Another said, ‘I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.’  Jesus said to him, ‘No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.’ ” (Luke 9:59-62)  For Jesus and for those who want to follow him the immediacy of the Kingdom undermines the established social norms, and demands priority.  Nothing else will do.  The day of justice is today, and as Paul reminds the church at Corinth, “See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation.” (2 Corinthians 6:2b) 

And so we listen today as Jesus sends out his disciples – 70 of them in pairs – to proclaim and live out that present reality, the present state of things, that the kingdom of God has come near, very near indeed.  Consequently, that means that it must take priority, and that they must carry out their lives and work in the context of that priority by trusting in God – “carry no purse, no bag, no sandals” and by not delaying in going where they’re going, even for social pleasantries,– “greet no one on the road”.  First and foremost they must be harbingers of God’s peace: “Whatever house you enter, first say, ‘Peace to this house!’ And if anyone is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person; but if not, it will return to you.” (Luke 10:5-6)  Everywhere they the go they are to “cure the sick who are there, and say to [the people], ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’ ” (Luke 10:9)  And what is to be their reaction to those who will not listen, who reject the Good News of God’s kingdom of justice, freedom and peace?  They are to wipe their town’s dust from their feet and get on with their mission – there’s no time for dilly-dallying, for long-drawn out discussions or endless arguments of persuasion.  The kingdom of God is here regardless, whether people accept its truth or not.  For those who want to follow Christ, living its reality is an urgent task; it is the immediate duty and hence must take precedence.

This may not be easy for us to hear.  If we are honest we prefer delay to urgency, while treating “niceness” as a cardinal virtue.  We believe that somehow enough discussion, will keep us from having to make all sorts of decisions; and we are so afraid to offend that we compromise truth, justice and any number of principles which the Christian life demands.  We like the idea of the kingdom – certainly – but don’t mind its indefinite deferral while we get to run the world according to our affections, priorities and values (at least if are in that small subset of the human race who gets to call the shots, or who get the shots called for them).  Nevertheless, the urgency of the Kingdom, and its reality constantly beckons.  It is there throughout the Bible – both in the Hebrew Scriptures as proclaimed through the words of the prophets, and in the New Testament witness to the life and death of Jesus.  It is there in the teachings of the Church, it is there in our baptismal covenenat.  We can ignore it, but at least we should be honest that we are ignoring it, that we value a whole lots of things above its full revelation, that we are choosing to act in ways contrary to its demands.

Now, I do take the point that the Gospel of Luke was written at time in which the early Christians still believed in Jesus’ imminent return, and so there was for the Early Church a heightened sense of urgency, and that certainly the evangelist’s writing was colored by this reality, a reality which feels very distant and a little less than real some 2,000 years later.  Nevertheless, I’m not sure that sort of sophistry gets off the hook completely, if at all.  The urgent immediacy in the Gospel of Luke – and really in all the Gospels – challenges us at least to think in some ways along the lines of urgency ourselves when it comes to living and building the kingdom of God.  It challenges us to face the many little ways that we put off God’s kingdom, prefering rather comfort, family, convention, “business as usual”.  It challenges us to consider the ways in which we may sacrifice the truth for the polite, justice for stability.  And,  because our own lives and livelihoods are little compromised by the very real and definite injustices in our world, the call of the kingdom, in part, is to see the world and its structures from the perspective of the the lowest, the poorest, the most vulnerable.  Issues of poverty and hunger can be delayed for those who have enough food and resources.  Issues of civil rights can be delayed for those who have free right of use to all the benefits and “perks’ of their society.  Issues of healthcare and well-being, can be delayed by those who have ready and available access to medical attention.  Jesus, as revealed in the Gospel, most emphatically says “no” to this sort of delay and the Kingdom call says “no” also.  The time for action cannot be delayed, because the kingdom is a present reality and either one is working for it now, one is a part of it now, or one is not.  “See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation.” (2 Corinthians 6:2b)   

And yet we do delay, even sometimes work against the Kingdom’s fullest revelation; and the result is that it makes us seem hyprocritical, at best, liars, at worst, in the eyes of society in general.  What is at the core of this dynamic of delay?  In Jesus Was and Episcopalian (the book our study course is currently reading), the author an and explanantion.
 
Maybe it’s because many Christians are out of touch with Jesus’ central message, and have grown out of touch with core Christian virtues….Not knowing the Bible very well, perhaps we’ve lost touch with the main thrust of the Gospel message and tried to accommodate and compromise a message that really doesn’t work well when watered down.  Many of our churches have become more willing to buy into the American civil religion of manifest destiny, patriotism and “family values” than take seriously the hard words of the Gospel.
 
Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom’s immediacy at the synangogue in Nazareth, and his sending out of the 70 to live and urgently proclaim the Kingdom’s presence call us to action.  They task us with the absolute imperative to move into the kingdom life ourselves.  The entire Gospel of Christ ought to make us ask ourselves, “What am I urgent about?”  “What gets priority in my world when it comes to immediate action?”  “Why do I delay?”  “No matter what I say, what really are my priorities – the kingdom or my world.”  Jesus sent out his disciples two by two.  He did not send them out to be polite, or tell peple about himself, he did not even send them out to make more disciples.  He sent them out to do one thing, to tell people by their lives and actions that God’s kingdom was a present reality.  And 2,000 years makes no difference.  He sends you out today and every day.  The kingdom of God is near and there is no time for delay.  It is urgent and immediate.  By what we do here, do you think Hanford knows it?  Do you know it?