The Sixth Sunday After Trinity 27 July
Readings: Genesis 18.20-32; Colossians 2.6-19; Luke 11.1-13
Theme: ‘Your Kingdom Come’.
The first passage offered to us from Genesis recounts an agreement made between Abraham and ‘The Lord’, concerning the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. ‘The Lord’, appearing in the form of the three men by the oaks of Mamre, is unhappy with the ‘goings on’ in Sodom and Gomorrah. Through a divine-human pact, Abraham becomes a ‘deal-maker’ who offers us a faint foretaste of the freely-given-divine salvation that has been won for us by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.
However, reading this passage from Genesis 18.20-32, it would be easy to be forgiven for interpreting it as if we are dealing with just another example of the tall tales that we encounter in the legends of many ancient civilizations. And, in this passage, we do indeed encounter an Ancient-Near-Eastern understanding of the conversation, which is prayer, between God and humanity. But in this extract from Genesis, there is the seed of one crucial difference. This difference is clearly revealed in the second reading from Colossians 2.6-19.
In Colossians, the focus is on the realization of the early church, that in Jesus: ‘all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross’ (Col. 1. 19-20).
So, while the surrounding civilizations of the ancient Israelites were also naturally concerned with such ultimate issues as ‘life’ and ‘death’, ‘punishment’ and ‘salvation’, it is revealed, albeit somewhat faintly in the Old Testament, and more clearly in the New Testament, that God the Father, through his only Son Jesus, ‘will proclaim what has been hidden from the foundation of the world’ (Mt. 13.35).
Therefore, the crucial difference between the natural revelation, given to all civilizations, and the special revelation, only revealed to Christians, is, that in Jesus, God has been fully revealed to us in the flesh, and through him, all life finds its ultimate meaning and purpose: ‘to shine as a light in the world to the glory of God the Father’ (Isaiah 60.1; 2 Corinthians 4.6; ‘The giving of a lighted candle’ in The Rite of Holy Baptism).
The final reading for the Liturgy of the Word, taken from Luke 11.1-13, unveils just how it is that this ultimate meaning and purpose is conveyed to us personally, by revealing Jesus’s instructions to his disciples about prayer.
In prayer, we come to know, in a uniquely personal way, our meaning and purpose. This opens to us the way to receive the grace of our Lord, which enables us to fulfill our divinely given vocations. When this is revealed to us, we are invited to act in a Godly fashion, and are lead intimately by the Holy Spirit, and in turn, are to cooperate with this same Spirit in leading others, out of the bondage of sin into the freedom of grace.
On this path of liberation from the powers of darkness, we embark on a long and arduous journey that leads us out of the ‘formal’ shadows of the mortal ‘elemental spirits of the universe’ (Col. 2.8), and into the ‘substance’ of the immortal life of God, ‘which belongs to Christ’ (Col. 2.17). Our guide during this pilgrim way is the Holy Spirit who appears to us as ‘the cloud by day and the fire by night’ of contemplative prayer (Exodus 13. 21). This same Holy Spirit bequeaths to us a spiritual compass, through the gift of contemplative prayer, on the journey from death to life. This compass allows us to journey beyond the shadows of the elemental forms of the universe, which are the best that human reason alone can achieve by natural means, and to avoid the traps of the materialism and the naturalism, which has become the dominant philosophy of our days. In this avaricious epoch, these lead only to the desires for wealth, power and status, and ultimately to the decadence that we see all around us on the Costa del Sol.
However, when we follow the ‘cloud by day and the fire by night’, we overcome these limitations and allow heaven’s voice to speak to us directly. This direct communication allows us to be a contemplative in all things, and not only in the formal times of prayer that we set aside to pray, in personal and liturgical prayer, for example. Such liberation ends our desires for wealth, power and status and opens us to the desire for the things of heaven, which enables us to be true builders of the kingdom. In this kingdom, our world is transformed into the new garden of Eden, the garden of the resurrected Lord, and like Mary Magdalene, we do well to recognize Jesus as the gardner in this new land. As the gardener, this same Lord is cultivating the garden of the world, through all our efforts, into the heavenly paradise, which is our heavenly inheritance as the adopted children of God.
So, my dear brother and sisters in Christ, in this, the second ‘fifty-year-period’ in the ongoing life of the Anglican Chaplaincy, I pray that the Lord may teach us to pray in this work of gardening so that all that we do may be directed by heaven’s commands towards the building of God’s kingdom. In order for this to happen, let us ask the Lord to purify us, so that in praying that: ‘Your Kingdom Come’, we may cultivate his garden and not simply our own.