En el nobmre del Dios quien es nuestro creador, redentor, y santificador.... In the name of God who is our Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier.Amen.
One of the greatest influences in my spiritual life was my Puerto Rican grandmother, Mercedes. Her nickname was Chere, cherished one, and she was that to me. My grandmother didn’t finish the 3rd grade, but she was one of the wisest people I’ve ever known.
You have often heard me recount her wisdom to me: ”If it doesn’t bring you joy, stop doing it.” This has guided my whole life, including my ordained ministry, and it’s why I was led to stay as your rector. I experience true joy being among you as one who serves.
My grandmother’s spirituality was complex, but her connection to God was solid and simple. She was a holy woman, a practitioner of herbal medicine, a victim of abuse, and possessor of the softest skin on the planet.
When I was a child, my grandmother told me that I was a holy woman too, a healer, and she instructed me to remember that as holy ones, we must live with one foot in each realm - the realm of heaven and the realm of earth.
My siblings in Christ, we are all holy people. And as we pray in our Collect, “may we pass through things temporal, but lose not the things eternal”... just a fancier way of saying what my grandmother said.
The Episcopal Church is an Incarnational Church. We focus on the incarnation of God in Jesus and what that means for us. In our baptism, we acknowledge our oneness with Christ who joined his divinity to our humanity. Jesus is the first-born of this reality and has made us the next-born of it.
We are, in our earthly bodies, temples of the heavenly Spirit of God. As we heard in the letter to the Colossians: “For in [Jesus] the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fullness in him…”
What we do with that reality remains our choice. Our Old Testament story from the prophet Hosea illustrates for us what happens when we ignore the heavenly realm and focus on the earthly realm, which tempts us to believe that we have power and privilege. All of the earthly rulers in the OT who believed that fell to the consequences they created: destruction of themselves and the people they were entrusted to lead.
It’s a hard story to read, but one of its main messages is clear: when one community has two opposing factions, the whole community is harmed. Think of our own Civil War. We died on both sides of that war, and the fallout from it lives on in our own divided northern and southern “kingdoms” to this day. We still haven’t healed. We’re still arguing over flags, memorials, and “heritage.”
That’s why it’s so important to remember that while we live in the earthly realm in this moment, we also exist in the heavenly realm eternally - both at the same time. It’s when we approach the earthly realm without consciousness of the heavenly realm that we begin to perceive our neighbors as “other” or worse, as our enemy.
The way we maintain awareness of the eternal realm is through prayer. Prayer is not about asking the great Santa in the sky for what we want. I love the wisdom of Janis Joplin’s parody on prayer: (sing it with me!) “O Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz…” The car, of course, representig any outcome we seek in the earthly realm.
In our gospel story, Jesus encourages us to knock on God’s door and ask for what we need, “Ask and it will be given you… for everyone who asks receives.” Then he tells us what we will receive, and it’s not a Mercedes Benz.
What we do get is so much more than that! We are given the Holy Spirit, consciousness of the heavenly realm in us. That awareness assures us that God is present, guiding, and redeeming - in this moment and for the good of all.
Many of you have experienced this with me in the ancient practice of healing prayer with anointing. I usually offer this kind of prayer when someone comes to me with a medical or mental health issue and asks for prayer.
I have had a healing ministry since my childhood - something my grandmother recognized in me. I didn’t know what it meant or how to use it until a professor in seminary helped me ground this ministry in my faith. What I’ve learned over the years is exactly what Jesus is talking about when he teaches the disciples to pray.
When we pray, we intentionally and consciously enter into the heavenly realm, while remaining firmly in the earthly realm. We don’t escape our humanity, which God declared very good in Genesis (1:31); we magnify it! As Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord and my Spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” (Lk 1:46)
We go into prayer knowing that God already knows what we need and is already at work on it. The earthly outcome we seek may or may not happen, but we are assured that God will not give us a snake or a scorpion.
Prayer, as Jesus taught us, begins with our consciousness of the heavenly realm, which is imminent and intimate. Jesus uses a word that is plural, meaning both Father and Mother, but is also intimate and familiar: like Papa or Mama, which would have shocked his listeners to attention. Papa/Mama, your name, your nature, is holy.
Then he says, "Your kingdom come…" Kingdom is a hard word for us in 21st century America. We rebelled against our last king and established our freedom from earthly kings along about 1776. But kingdom is a word we inherit from our Jewish forebears and it refers to God’s reign over all that is because God created, redeemed, and sustains the whole cosmos and all of us in it.
Give us this day our daily bread… God’s provision, whether in the form of earthly or spiritual nourishment, is for what we need right now. The bread reference points us back to the manna in Exodus, which would spoil at the end of each day, encouraging the Israelites to learn to trust in God’s continued provision.
Every exodus is a process of rebirth, moving us from where we are to where God wants us to be, and that takes time. This is especially hard on our modern sensibilities. We want to make a plan and get it done - but that’s focusing on the temporal.
We are called to "Trust in the Slow Work of God,” as Jesuit priest and paleontologist, Pierre de Chardin wrote in his poem by that name. I’ve linked this poem to this sermon and I highly recommend you read it.
Jesus followed his teaching on prayer with a parable about persistence in prayer. This parable has three main characters: 1) God, 2) the host, and 3) the neighbor. This harkens back to Jesus’ recent teaching on the summary of the law: love God with all your heart, mind, and strength, and your neighbor as yourself.
Dr. Amy Jill Levine, Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University, says the command to love your neighbor as yourself would translate better as: love your neighbor who is a human like you. Think about that and our current treatment of our immigrant neighbors, the poor and people of color among us, or those in any war-torn area of the world. So we must be persistent in prayer not just for ourselves but for the sake of the whole human community.
When we persist in prayer, we remain conscious of our unity in the love of God. This is what Episcopal theologian and racial unity activist, Dr. Catherine Meeks, calls development of our “inner community” where there is no other, no stranger, no enemy.
Prayerful consciousness enables us to be in a state where God’s heavenly realm can manifest through us into the earthly realm. As my grandmother said, we must always live with one foot in each realm.
When it seems like God isn’t present, doesn’t know or care about what we need, or isn’t responding, our prayerful consciousness reminds us that what seems like God taking too long may actually be God working with another soul or souls for their reconciliation. As we heard last week, God’s plan is for the reconciliation of the whole world, even the wicked tyrants.
God is counting on us to be faithful and prayerful, keeping one foot intentionally in each realm, while this larger plan of love is manifested - on earth as it is in heaven. Amen.
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