“Lord, teach us to pray,” the disciples asked of Jesus, according to Luke’s Gospel. And in response, Jesus gave them what we now know as the Lord’s Prayer, perhaps the most beloved and enduring prayer in our tradition. From foxholes to hospitals to bedtime rituals to Episcopal liturgies of every kind, we pray and we sing “thy kingdom come.”
And we continue to ask God how to pray. The longing to know and be known in prayer is so deeply embedded in our human nature that we keep searching for a deeper union with God. Which is good and right. Our many and varied questions about prayer resemble, in a way, the disciples’ persistent question about the kingdom of heaven. Just when they thought they understood, Jesus tossed a parable in their midst and turned everyone’s expectations upside down. Thy kingdom come, huh? Just be sure that you understand that the kingdom God has in mind is singularly lacking in big armies and lavish palaces and prosperity Gospel. God’s kingdom more like a very small seed, like a baker-woman, like a farmer, like a merchant or a fisherman.
That is, God’s kingdom is found among very ordinary things. The things Jesus-followers lived among daily. And still do. Our gardens, our friendships, our music and painting and hikes and bike rides. If we’re not fishing or buying and selling things, we’re still making thoughtful choices about what we value the most. For good and for ill, COVID taught us all something about the blessing of living each moment with an awareness of our mortality: we have to account for what is worth keeping, what we should sell all for, and what we should simply let go of.
Here’s what I’d like to offer to you as a prayerful practice of the kingdom of heaven. Let go of your worry and your fear. Be willing to give everything else for freedom from anxiety. Leaven your days with compassion, and trust that even very small acts of kindness grow great trees of community.
The last few months have been challenging for us at Trinity. We have had to let go of the dream of housing San Jose State students here, and our Bishop has reassigned Deacon Kathey Crowe. Our beloved music director Derek Silbermann will be leaving us within two months. We have excellent new people lining up to serve with us—including a new deacon coming in December, so stay tuned for good news—but that doesn’t mean we don’t feel the losses very personally. We’re all still getting used to whatever the new normal may be post-COVID, knowing that our church may never look the same as it did before. But even more confusing, it seems like our church may not even look the same from month to month!
In the midst of so much change—which we can plan for but never really predict or control—my question for myself and for all of us is this: what can each of us do right now that will makes our community more whole? What kind of love and comfort can we offer to the person nearest us who is feeling sad, including your dean? Because care for each other is what church is for. It’s what the kingdom of heaven is like. The kingdom of heaven is like any one of us, when we let our own vulnerability and sorrow lead us into greater compassion for one another.
We have nothing to lose, because, well…who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or pandemic, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Will changes in staff or programs or languages or budget? No. In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us, St. Paul tells us.
Nearly every sentence in today’s reading from Romans restates the promise that God has not abandoned us, and is in fact working—across the past, present, and future—on our behalf. On all of our behalf. Note that in these verses, Paul uses the concept of predestination not in reference to some minority class of elected human beings, but rather in reference to God’s original intent for the salvation of all humanity. The journey of Christian holiness stretches from conception to eternity, according to the plan which Paul outlined in Romans. We are called, we are justified, and we are glorified.
And here’s the really good news. To the extent that we are becoming a holy people—a people who live compassionately, courageously and generously—it is because of Christ who intercedes for us. Christ Jesus died, was raised, and is at the right hand of God. But Jesus was not content with just a good seat in the kingdom. Because he had walked among us and knew us in our vulnerability, he made vulnerability itself holy. We can be weak, we can be wrong, we can ask for help. Because our goodness comes from the goodness of God, not from any one of us individually getting our theology or our behavior right. In our worst days just as much as our best ones, God continues to work in us through the Spirit that Christ sent us. Every time we let go of our fears, embrace our calling, and let the Spirit pray through us, we are walking the way of disciples. That’s equally true whether we think we know the way, or not.
The Lord’s Prayer notwithstanding, we mostly do not know how to pray as we ought. Neither do we know how to do as we ought. We do not even know how to want what we ought. But be at peace anyway, my friends. The Spirit is always interceding for us, with sighs too deep for words. Check in with our faithful zoom Morning Prayer community, and you’ll understand what I mean. Last Friday we were praying for two people on Trinity’s prayer list who were in the midst of medical procedures at the very time of our prayers. One of them got back to me a few hours later with a stream of funny memes—if you know Natalie Lias you know what I mean—but the other texted his father right in the midst of our prayers, to let him know he was fine. Coincidence of timing, surely. And yet… it was more than a son that was healed in the midst of our prayers. It was a worried father as well. The kingdom of heaven is like a parent sheltering their loved ones in branches of love, leavening their whole family with prayer.
The Spirit will teach us to recognize the kingdom of heaven, already present in our own kitchens and backyards and even our churches and zoom rooms. The Spirit will guide us to find the treasures of prayer, new and old, that strengthen us to live bravely and compassionately during hard times. The Spirit will grow faith in us like a tenacious mustard tree, capable of sheltering others in its shade. The times they are a changin’, yes. But we will get through this… together. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
