Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Seventeenth Sunday Ordinary Time




Luke 11:1-13



How many of you know the Lord’s Prayer?
By heart?
There is the traditional language and cadence that we use in the atholic Church, which is so very familiar: “Our Father, who art in heaven.”
And there is the contemporary language: “Our Father in heaven, holy be your name.”
There is controversy over some fine points:
Are we forgiven “sins” or “debts”?
And how does the prayer end? “Lead us not into temptation, and deliver us from evil”?
Or “The kingdom, the power and the glory are yours, now and forever”?
There are a number of versions of this prayer used by Protestants and Catholics in contemporary services and in more traditional worship.
The important thing is that we pray.

But what are we praying?
What are we praying for?
And where did this prayer come from, what does it mean, how are we to use it?
It is clear that prayer is important to Jesus.
We hear of him praying, we hear of him calling his followers to prayer, and we hear the lessons he offers about prayer.
In Luke’s gospel alone, Jesus is at prayer at his baptism; before choosing his 12 disciples; before the first prediction of his passion, at the Transfiguration.
Prayer seems to be important to Jesus.

And prayer was clearly important to Luke – after all, he collected and presented several stories attributed to Jesus right here in a rather small section of his gospel.
Presumably, then, prayer will also be important to us.
Let’s take a closer look.
What we read today begins with “Jesus was praying.”
And when he was finished, one of the disciples asked him to teach them to pray “as John had taught his disciples.”
We learn a couple of things in this.
One, that prayer is something one learns, something that can be taught.
There goes the excuse of “But I don’t know how to pray!”

And we also learn that there are forms of prayer that teachers pass on.
It was usual in Jesus’ time, and still is today, for teachers to instruct their disciples in how to pray and give them a formula.
This is essentially what the disciples were asking for.
Rabbis, teachers, taught their students, their followers, their disciples, how to do things.
In this case, it was John who had taught his disciples how to pray, and the disciples of Jesus asked for the same thing.
They asked to be taught. So Jesus told them, “When you pray, say this.”

Here we get to a potential stumbling block in understanding what we traditionally call “The Lord’s Prayer.”
It wasn’t his prayer, was it?
It isn’t what he prayed.
It was his response to a disciple’s request to be given a formula for praying, to be given some instruction, a method.
How often have we introduced this prayer in worship, saying, “And now, as our savior taught us, we are bold to say”?

So, is it the Lord’s Prayer?
Well, yes. And no.
He didn’t teach us his prayer, but a way to pray, and what to pray for.
He gave it to his disciples as a way to formulate prayer.
There is another point about this prayer that is sometimes missed:
This is a community prayer, not a private prayer.
It is a prayer that first praises God, and then makes three petitions for the ones praying.
The language of “us,” “we,” assumes that the community shares the longing for final coming of the kingdom.

This puts a bit of an eschatological thrust on the prayer.
The people who formed the early church believed with all their hearts and hoped that Jesus was coming back to lift them out of oppression, any day.
They expected that the kingdom would be established in their lifetime, and that they would live with God.
Hence, the community prayed in the way that Jesus instructed them.
Another point: The “daily bread” piece in Luke more accurately reads “day by day give us,” or “continue giving us,” or “each day give us.”
It seems that Luke wasn’t looking to a glorified bread in an eventual kingdom, but sustenance for the day, food for those who were encouraged to take up the cross daily, and who were expected to travel on missionary journeys with only what is needed for the day.
It is as much a request as it is a demand.

In Luke, the one praying asks for God’s forgiveness of sins – not debts – while promising to forgive others their debts.
This may be a reflection of Luke’s concern that possessions not get in the way of community relationships.
It may also be a reminder that God is the only one able to forgive sins, and that we are always in debt one to another.

Ultimately, the importance of the Lord’s Prayer is not only that Jesus gave it to his disciples, but that it was picked up by early Christian worshipers and incorporated into their understanding of how God shall be praised and what is right to ask for. And it is especially important that it has been handed down through generations to bind our community together.

How does Jesus teach his disciples to pray?
Boldly. Courageously. Expectantly.
Praise God. Place your needs before God.
This prayer begins in boldness.
It is a prayer of great courage, both praising God and placing demands upon God’s goodness, God’s justice.
It is the prayer of community.

We hear a lot these days about Jesus as “personal savior,” and it is common to hear the question “Have you been saved?”
But that would have been a foreign notion to the Jewish community, and out of character with Jesus’ teachings.
It is all about community, not you and me individually.
Pray in boldness, my friends.
Stand strong. Lift your head. Raise your voice.
Never mistake that our God is a strong God, ready to hear us.
And pray together, for the community.

That is what Jesus taught.

Fourteenth Sunday Ordinary Time




Luke 10:1-12
July 7, 2013


We are good at placing burdens on our clergy.
One of the most severe is to expect them to be the chief, perhaps the only agents of parish growth.
We await a new pastor, ready to give a list of lapsed people, former parishioners who have strayed, or perhaps even the names of people we might think would fit in with the rest of us.
Then we sit back and expect the new priest, who knows no one, has never lived here before, to get on with it.
That’s what we pay the priest to do. Right?
Consciously or not, our expectations transform our ideal of priests.
We envision them as well-polished sales clerks, adapt at getting customers to buy.
For our part, we make sure that the building looks spick-and-span, the sign welcoming, the doors open and the grass cut.
It is so difficult to avoid imposing on our faith that which we have become used to in our secular lives.
Few things impact us more than marketing.
We are consumers all, bombarded with objects on offer at a price, most of which we neither need nor really desire.
It’s important that we don’t start to think of our priest as the object designed to provide what we believe to be our “spiritual” needs.
Lessons like the one from the gospel today tend to reinforce all this. St. Luke tells of Jesus sending out over 70 disciples into the surrounding villages.
They are to travel light, but are armed with special powers.
When they return, it seems they had great success.
So, we reason, as the disciples, or some of them, became Apostles, and as we think of apostles as clergy, who created bishops and through them priests and deacons, obviously this story is meant to inspire the clergy to do a better job for us.
Jesus created a team to assist him and sent them into the world.
But was that team made up of clergy alone?
We continue to insist that these people were the first clergy.
In this we are both right and wrong.
We are right that among those called and sent were those who would be pastors, preachers, celebrants of the sacraments, those who led emerging Christian communities.
We are wrong if we think that all those called and sent filled that description, or were rather like our full-time, paid, professional clergy.
Those called and sent today, as then, are not merely the ordained, but rather they are the baptized.
Yes, this gospel is about you.
The gospel tells two things about every baptized Christian here today.
The first is that the task of telling the Good News to others is given to us all.
We may achieve that task in many different ways, quietly or spectacularly, verbally or by our loving care for others, but the task of showing Jesus to others is one of the chief reasons why we exist.
That is not an exaggeration.
We have to grasp the idea that each of us has been created, was born, for a purpose, and that purpose is in the mind of God and is more important than any other purpose we may take on.
The second truth the gospel tells us is that we have been “empowered” so to do. That’s an assurance and a challenge.
We tend to absolve our passivity by muttering things like, “I’m an introvert,” “It’s not in my nature,” “I get embarrassed.”
The Gospel assures us  – and Luke later stresses this at the beginning of Acts – that we are all empowered to witness in the world and that empowerment is not the same as natural talent.
Imagine that you find yourself by a sick bed.
Everything in you tells you to cut and run.
You are extremely uncomfortable, don’t know what to say, feeling inadequate and close to panic.
Yet you stay, maybe holding a hand and just sitting there.
That action comforts and cheers the sick person.
You have used not your talent, but the power given to you in baptism and reinforced every time you receive Holy Communion.
Perhaps you are in line at the store; an irate customer is yelling at the sales assistant.
It’s not her fault.
She is close to tears.
When you get to her, your notice her name, speak it to her, smile and offer her silent comfort.
In so doing you use the grace given to you in baptism.
You see, our second problem, apart from consigning the task of witnessing to the clergy, is that we don’t recognize spiritual gifts because we think they must be spectacular.
Yes, the 70 were given the power to cast out evil, but to do so may merely be the offering of goodness and kindness, objective love.
That may sound trite.
Practicing consistent, objective love, particularly toward people we hardly know, or are not like us, or people that repel us by their actions is no trite or easy thing.
 It’s much easier to lump them in a convenient group, label them, espouse an all-embracing cause and keep one’s distance.
Jesus, present among us this morning, continues to call us, send us, and empower us.
We all have a vocation to ministry.
Perhaps this coming week, in our quiet times, when we have the opportunity to reflect, or even to pray, it might be good to consider what task, seemingly beyond of strength or talents, our comfort zone,

 God wants us to take on and embrace, in the strength of the Holy Spirit, who has lived within us, often unrecognized, since the day we were adopted by God in Baptism.

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Sunday 13 C


Image: If You See Me As I Am Being Taken © Jan L. Richardson

Luke 9: 51-62

Elijah and Elisha.

What an epic story.
It’s pure Hollywood!
Mix together “Lord of the Rings,” Harry Potter and Indiana Jones, and this would give just some of the ingredients.
There are wicked kings and queens (they featured a couple of weeks ago), wild-bearded ascetic revolutionaries (that’s Elijah),
wide-eyed acolyte disciples eager to drink from the deep well of the master’s wisdom (that’s Elisha),
sacred, powerful garments (that’s Elijah cloak), incredible scenery (mountains, deserts, huge rushing rivers).
And we have not even considered the special effects.
 And what special effects they are.
George Lucas would be so proud.
Whirlwinds, rivers magically parted,
firestorms beyond our pyrotechnical dreams,.

Fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry – oh, wait – those aren’t from Elijah’s story, they’re from Paul’s Letter to the Galatians.
And what a letter it is
Whatever those Galatians were up to, it certainly wasn’t stamp collecting. And what themes Paul raises: the dangers of replacing slavery of one kind with slavery of another – slavery to self-gratification and self-indulgence.
Let’s look at this in detail.
What a vivid description of Elijah: the whirlwinds, the fire.
 Rather like the disciples in that Samaritan village.
They must have been thinking about Elijah as well.
They ask Jesus if he wants them to summon down fire on the Samaritan village because the townsfolk didn’t receive him.
What an extraordinary episode.
What on earth were those disciples thinking, wishing a fiery immolation on that village?

“Foxes have their holes, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”
“Let the dead bury their own dead.”
“No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God.”
But weren’t we talking about the Galatians?
We seem to have been distracted by Elijah, or was it the Samaritan village?
And that is precisely the point.

In this day and age, distractions abound like mushrooms in a damp, dark basement.
 Far from avoiding them, we appear to seek them out.
The term “multitasking” doesn’t seem to have negative connotations:
In fact, we tend to view the ability to do more than one thing at a time as a virtue.
Texting during a meeting? Sure, why not?
Checking Facebook at a dinner party? Why, yes! Doesn’t everyone?
It persuades the people around us that we have full, busy, important lives.
Most probably we persuade ourselves, too.
We flit from one shiny thing to another, wowed by things that are sleeker, faster, bigger, higher.

And that, also, is precisely the point.
There are so many distractions, diversions.
But each of these conspire to take our minds off the ball.
Faced with a bewildering array of choices, we can easily become unfocused, lose our single-mindedness.

All of the characters that we meet in today’s readings – apart from Jesus – are distracted by something.
The disciples of Jesus are distracted by their mistrust of the Samaritans.
The people that Jesus and the disciples meet on the way are distracted by their material possessions, duties and social conventions.
The Galatians are distracted by all manner of ephemeral, selfish gratifications or petty jealousies.
 Elisha is distracted by the thought that he might not inherit Elijah’s special powers.

Elijah’s conversion experience seems not to have filtered down to Jesus’ disciples.
They – along with the rest of their contemporaries – seem to prefer Elijah in his noisy showman phase.
 When Jesus’ disciples suggest raining down fiery destruction on the Samaritan village, their understanding of God is just as off-target as Elijah’s had been.
Time and again we are shown how the disciples just don’t seem to get it.
We know that eventually they do, but it’s a long journey for them to reach the realization that God’s strength is in weakness,
God’s rule is in servanthood, God’s power is in humility and God’s judgment is in forgiveness.

Before we congratulate ourselves on being smarter and more insightful than those first disciples, let’s just take a moment to consider if we ourselves – and the church in general – get it any more than they did.

More and more people are saying that the church is at a pivotal point in its life.
Some even describe it as a collapse.
Certainly it is a time of wholesale reassessment.

But maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
Perhaps, it is that we are on the brink of a new Great Awakening.
Perhaps it is where we will hear afresh the still, small voice of God, and what his voice is inviting us to do,

and where we will understand much better how to break free of the slavery of distractions.