2009 Charitable Donation Tax Receipts have now been mailed.  Thank you for your support of St. David’s in 2009!

We’ll sing and vote. We’ll celebrate our ministries. We’ll remember lives past and express gratitude for current leaders.

Eats are provided. The Youth Group and the UCW have teamed up to prepare a delicious lunch.

You are welcome and encouraged to come

Lenten 2010: The Ordinary as Holy

7:00 – 8:30 pm, in the Lounge.

Explore how faith connects and integrates with life, how laundry and spirituality are not separate, how life itself can be a blessing.

Lenten 2010: The Ordinary as Holy

7:00 – 8:30 pm, in the Lounge.

Explore how faith connects and integrates with life, how laundry and spirituality are not separate, how life itself can be a blessing.

Lenten 2010: The Ordinary as Holy

7:00 – 8:30 pm, in the Lounge.

Explore how faith connects and integrates with life, how laundry and spirituality are not separate, how life itself can be a blessing.

Lenten 2010: The Ordinary as Holy

7:00 – 8:30 pm, in the Lounge.

Explore how faith connects and integrates with life, how laundry and spirituality are not separate, how life itself can be a blessing.

Lenten 2010: The Ordinary as Holy

7:00 – 8:30 pm, in the Lounge.

Explore how faith connects and integrates with life, how laundry and spirituality are not separate, how life itself can be a blessing.

Luke 4:1-13
Luke 17:20-22

The Holy in the Ordinary

The kingdom of God is in your midst.

Jesus (Luke 17:21)

Lent is the season when Christians are invited to venture with Jesus into the wilderness.  The wilderness can, of course, represent so many different things: a spaciousness, a time for reflection, a barren and desolate geography and a place of danger: not enough water, not enough food, too many wild beasts and voices of temptation.

Some spiritual giants, the Olympic athletes of the soul, enter the wilderness fully.  They go into retreat, enter silence, fast and pray without ceasing.  With Jesus, they walk into the wilderness, encounter wild beasts, hear the voice of the Tempter, and receive the ministry of angels.  They are the radiant ones who hold up for the rest of us a new way of being.

But most of us aren’t spiritual Olympians.  Most of us live in homes, not monasteries, eat while listening to the radio or as children bang spoons on the table, not in silence.  Most of us reluctantly rise in the morning to an alarm clock that predictably rings too early for our liking and sets us off to school, work, or the chores of the day.  Many of us stumble through our hurried hours, sometimes feeling like a ricocheting pin ball, bounced from one activity to another.

Lent invites even those of us, no, especially those of us who have no time or energy into another way of being. In this forty-day season before Easter, the Spirit leads us with Jesus into open spaces of wilderness.  Jesus headed for the hills after his baptism, when he heard that deep affirmation… “Beloved.  Well pleased.”

Each of us is called to an open space – in the world, in our day, in our mind and heart - where we can pause, breathe for a moment, and remember the word whispered in our heart when we were born, echoed when we were baptized and again at the time of our death: “Beloved.”  Each of us is encouraged to find a way to ground ourselves in the Reality that makes our everyday activities an avenue to grace.  We are invited to go through our day more mindfully than we otherwise might, as it can be so easy to mindlessly move through the routine.  Our Lenten practice this year is to give open-hearted attention to whatever is at hand: picking up after your dog, helping your aging spouse, listening to your child when you have other things that need to get done.

Have you been watching the Olympics?  Did you happen to see Alex Bilodou’s gold medal run?  Janet, the girls and I went to a friend’s house, where we were watching on their sizeable screen the Men’s Freestyle Moguls.  The competitor’s were close.  It seemed after each skier, we kept saying, “They can’t get any faster or better than that!”  Then the next skier would be faster and better and we’d be amazed.  It was Bilodou’s turn, and of course we were cheering for him because he was Canadian but cheering with added enthusiasm because we had seen the biographical sketch and were touched by his close and beautiful relationship with his brother, who suffers from cerebral palsy.  So when he skied a flawless performance, we whooped our approval, and when he won the gold everyone in the room stood and cheered and slapped each other a high-five.  It was as if, in that moment, we were related to Alex; as if we were all connected, which, I guess, we are.  A production as thoroughly secular as the Olympics can help us feel a human connection that verges on the spiritual.

I mention this recent experience because watching with intensity athletes from around the world perform astonishing feats is, for many of us, an exercise of attention.  You can get lost in the moment.  Waiting in suspense to see if a Canadian athlete wins a medal brings our attention into focus.  Our mind is not flitting from one idea to another.  There’s a certain quality of focus that can be translated to the most routine elements of our life.  Except instead of watching a gold medal run, you’re watching the occurrence of an ordinary miracle.

One of Albert Einstein’s quotable sayings is this piece of wisdom:  “You can look at the world one of two ways: either that nothing is a miracle, or that everything is.”

This may well have been what Jesus was getting at in this story from Luke’s Gospel: 

Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed, nor will they say, “Look, here it is!” or “There it is!” For the kingdom of God is in your midst.” (17:20-22)

I can’t say for sure that Jesus was pointing to the living miracle that is all around us, because scholars and people of faith have argued and written extensively on this one passage, and in particular, on that last line, “The kingdom of God is…” what?  The Greek doesn’t make it clear.  It could be, “within you.”  “The kingdom of God is within you,” and, you Pharisees, if you do not discover it “in here”, you won’t discover it “out there.”

Or, it could just as well be translated, “The kingdom of God is in your midst” woven throughout the tapestry of creation.

Or, again, “The kingdom of God is among you,” as in, Jesus represents the kingdom of God, and stands right here among you.

Here is how this line is translated in some of the most popular English translations:

• New International Version – “the kingdom of God is within you.”
• New American Standard Bible – “the kingdom of God is in your midst.”
• The Message – “God’s kingdom is already among you.”
• Amplified Bible – “the kingdom of God is within you [in your hearts] and among you [surrounding you].”
• New Living Translation – “the Kingdom of God is already among you.”
• King James Version – “the kingdom of God is within you.”
• English Standard Version – “the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.”
• Contemporary English Version – “God’s kingdom is here with you.”
• New King James Version – “the kingdom of God is within you.”
• New Century Version – “God’s kingdom is within you.”
• 21st Century King James Version – “the Kingdom of God is within you.”
• American Standard Version – “”the kingdom of God is within you.”
• Young’s Literal Translation – “the reign of God is within you.”
• Darby Translation – “the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.”
• New Life Version – “the holy nation of God is in you.”
• Holman Christian Standard Bible – “the kingdom of God is among you.”
• New International Reader’s Version – “God’s kingdom is among you.”
• Wycliffe New Testament – “the realm of God is within you.”
• Worldwide English – “the kingdom of God is inside you.”
• Today’s New International Version – “the kingdom of God is in your midst.”

Even though a few of these contain footnote references, this is the text that the editors decided was the best translation of the original Greek, “ Basileia tou Theou enton humon estin”. Or, perhaps the Latin, “regnum dei intra vos est.” From the Nag Hammadi texts, the Gospel of Thomas relays Jesus’ words like this, “the Father’s kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people don’t see it.” It’s a bit more verbose, but the meaning is very similar.

I love that the phrase in Greek is left unclear, because I think that’s theologically accurate.  It seems strange to me to ask whether the kingdom of God is “out there” or “in here;” is it not very clearly both?  What good does it do if we have the kingdom of God in us, but can’t for the life of us recognize it in the world?  And what good does it do if the kingdom of God is in the world - emanating from every rock, tree and living creature - but isn’t in us?

Where is the kingdom of God found?  The inner is the outer, the outer, inner; the kingdom of God is within and all around.

We recognize the blending of the inner and outer all the time. “Smile,” the saying goes, “and the world will smile back.”  Or another: “what you give is what you receive.”  Or, as my mother used to say, “How you treat people is how they will treat you.”

So with the kingdom of God:  If you discover that inner realm, the world becomes a place of wonder.  Or, it can be put the other way:  if you discover the kingdom of God in your midst, it leads you to that inner wellspring of peace.

This lent, in our journey with Jesus into the wilderness, we’ll be looking for those open spaces where we can practice the quality of mindfulness.  In the next six weeks in particular, we’ll ask ourselves questions of integration:  how we can live in such a way that we remain open to the holy in the ordinary events of life?  How might doing the dishes be an avenue to grace?  How might we find meaning in the trivial?

We’ll practice how to be in the world in such a way that doesn’t leave God on the church pew.  Hopefully, by the end of lent, you’ll be bumping into the sacred even while polishing your shoes or while taking a bath.

Alice Walker’s now classic book, The Colour Purple, describes this kind of awareness.  The character’s name is Shug, and she has no right to be content with life, let alone sense the sacred in the world.  She has been abused, discriminated against, tragically disappointed.  She has every right to be bitter and resentful and angry.  But instead, somehow, she came through repeated ordeals strong and wise, even able to see the world robed in light.

Here’s the thing, say Shug.  The thing I believe.  God is inside you and inside everybody else.  You come into the world with God.  But only them that search for it inside find it.  And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don’t know what you looking for.  Trouble do it for most folks, I think.  Sorrow…

(Celie interjects)

Shug a most beautiful something, let me tell you.  She frown a little, look out across the yard, lean back in her chair, look like a big rose.

She say, “My first step (towards God) was trees.  Then air.  Then birds.  Then other people.  But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it came to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all.  I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed.  And I laughed and I cried and I run all around the house.  I knew just what it was.  In fact, when it happen, you can’t miss it.

I think it would be fair to say that Shug discovered the kingdom of God within and around her.  “When it happen, you just can’t miss it.”  The sacred has an unmistakable taste to it.

“Trouble do it for most folks…sorrow.”  This motherless child, who knew sorrow on top of sorrow, allowed her heart to be broken open wide enough to let the light of God shine through.  I don’t know why we suffer or why every day is woven together with both pleasure and pain.  But I do know that suffering can take us deep.  By paying attention to all things, even sorrow, it’s possible to open ourselves to that which our heart most sincerely yearns and perhaps, with Jesus, we begin to sense that the kingdom of God is within/all around us, and with Einstein, we might be able to see how everything qualifies as a miracle.

Sorrow itself is a shadowy place, there’s no way around it.  We may feel like we’re groping in the dark, knocking our shins against low wooden tables, but eventually our eyes adjust, and we can make out the little pieces of light that help us become oriented again.  Eventually, we’re open enough that the light can find us.

But all this takes time, and who has time?  We’re moving at warp speed and expect God to keep up with our schedule.  Paying attention requires a certain degree of meandering, slowing to the speed of life when we want to break the sound barrier.  We’ve got to move quickly so we can stay in control and keep all the balls in the air and avoid collisions and crashes, trouble and sorrow.  Who has time, anyway, to be mindful?

I guess we might as well ask, “Who has time for the kingdom of God?”

To keep awake, to show up for life, to discover the holy in the most ordinary part of our day, requires subversive action.  Lily Tomlin observed, “For fast-acting relief, slow down.”  Not to give away the store, but this is exactly why the participants in the Lenten series this year will be asked to name twenty things they savour.  You can do that activity as well.  List twenty things you savour.  Whatever comes to mind.  Include anything that brings you more fully alive.

When we savour something, gratitude and wonder are within easy reach.  When we savour, we slow down and our body seems to wake-up.  It’s simply a reminder that, really, our life is full of blessing.  We can inch, gradually, from the things we savour – a fabulous meal at a first-rate restaurant – to something more common – cooking smores over a fire on the beach with family and friends – to something more common still – the wonder of eating a piece of warm toast with melted butter.  Or, from savouring the moment of watching a Canadian win a gold medal, to watching our child play soccer in the rain, to watching a baby take it’s first steps, to watching an adult help her aging mother across the street with tender care.

You may remember a scene from Thorton Wilder’s play, Our Town. Emily Webb, who has died, is told she can go back to earth to relive one day.  She chooses her 12^th birthday.  She’s hardly finished chewing her bacon at breakfast when she turns to the Stage Manager, who has arranged her return and says, I can’t go on…It goes so fast.  We don’t have time to look at one another. She breaks into sobbing.  The lights dim on the left hand side of the stage.  Mrs. Webb, her mother, disappears.  Emily goes on:

I didn’t realize…So all that was going on and we never noticed.  Take me back – up the hill – to my grave.  But first – wait!  One more look.  Good-bye, good-bye world.  Good-bye Grover’s Corner – Mama and Papa.  Good-bye to clocks ticking – and Mama’s flowers.  And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths –and sleeping and waking up.  Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.

This Lent, even in the routines of laundry and driving in traffic, we’re invited to realize this miracle called life.  It doesn’t excuse us from trouble or monotony, but it does allow us to sense the gift of it all.  And with the character Shug, we may one day realize that God is in us and in everyone; we may be woken by that unmistakable feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all.

And the kingdom of God is within, and all around, and among us still.

Thank God.    Amen.