Thine is the Kingdom
As
some of you know, I just spent a week with my extended family. We
all came together to celebrate my father’s retirement and had a great
big party for him. He turned 70 in April and had said that at age
70 he thought he would officially retire, so it was time to make good
on that promise.
My dad is someone who takes great comfort in routines. He is one
of those people you can sort of set your clock by. He runs a
routine that begins in the early morning. And if he doesn’t keep
to it, he gets ornery. My dad likes to do the same things over
and over. One of the things we’ve done over and over as long as I
can remember is to be in his hometown of Rockland, Maine, every August
at the time of the Maine Lobster Festival. And dad insists that
we all look over the photographs in the local newspaper to pick our
favorite competitor for the Maine Sea Goddess contest. Sooooo,
this year was no exception. We all, daughters, sons, in-laws,
grandchildren, etc., took our turns examining the photos of pretty
local maidens and wrote our initials beside the one we thought should
be crowned Sea Goddess for 2007.
But that wasn’t the end of it. We also had to go, en masse, to the crowning event – the coronation itself.
So there we were, sitting outside on a beautiful August night while the
esteemed judges and festival officials were introduced. Next came
King Neptune and his court. A local man dressed as the old Man of
the Sea and a nest of little children dressed as lobsters, crabs, clams
and fish escorted him to his throne and then gathered round his
feet. His main attendant, the great pirate Blackbeard, also came
and sat beside King Neptune.
Young men from the Coast Guard and Navy were assigned to escort the sea
goddess contestants, and an honor guard officially opened the ceremony,
bringing the flag up to the stage. All stood for the pledge of
allegiance. Even Blackbeard doffed his hat and put his hand over
his heart for the pledge, as did the little crustaceans surrounding
King Neptune, dutifully placing their claws on their hearts.
And then everyone sat, ooops, except me. I kept standing because
a woman was singing the Lord’s Prayer. I didn’t realize I was
doing something wrong until my 7 year old niece Clarissa pulled at my
skirt – “Why are you standing?” she asked. I looked around, I was
the only one standing in a sea of seated bodies. “Because I’m
praying,” I said to Clarissa, vaguely embarrassed. But, it saved
me having to push my body up again, because next thing I knew everyone
was rising to sing the National Anthem. Phew! I was in with
the crowd again.
It is a confusing business these days, knowing when to stand, when to
sit. When to laugh, when to cry, when to speak, when to keep
quiet, when to act, when to refrain. The times are confusing and
there is an overload of contradictory information and
expectations. Like Blackbeard the pirate flamboyantly doffing his
hat for the pledge of allegiance – which seemed to me a bit like
mockery, but was actually his way of signally respect. Or
everyone sitting down and chatting during the singing of the Lord’s
Prayer. Or the Sea Goddess being crowned during a medley of songs
from Walt Disney movies.
Rituals that used to convey some meaning have become hopelessly
confused with other things, and nothing quite fits or makes sense
anymore. It seems a bit like Babel, the confusion of tongues, the
inability to communicate, has set upon us.
These are hard times to be the church. The church, at least our ancient
branch of it, has a language all its own. But people no longer know the
sound of that language. A friend of mine visited a Christian
church for a funeral recently and told me that he was hopelessly
confused by stained glass windows that depicted a car, a woodpecker and
a flower. What this had to do with the Christian story, he
couldn’t figure out. And then there was the screen upon which the
words were projected, and the comfortable theater-style seating that
lulled everyone with the familiar sense of being at home watching
T.V. How this was going to aid in the conversion of our hearts
and minds to the Kingdom of God he couldn’t see.
When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, what are we doing? Are we having
a nice comfy chat or are we engaged in reaching for something that
transcends this world?
Jesus told his disciples to start prayer with a shock of
transcendence. He urged them to lift their attention to the
higher realms of heaven and not get lost in the daily carnival show of
pleasure, wealth, power and self-esteem. When you pray, he said,
begin with this – Our Father in Heaven. Begin by reaching beyond
yourselves. Honor what is greater than you are – honor this
God. Our Father in Heaven, Hallowed be thy Name.
And then pray for your own transformation and the transformation of all
who dwell on Earth. Thy will be done, Thy Kingdom Come, on Earth
as it is in Heaven.
We lift our hearts and minds to what is greater than we are, we humble
ourselves in the admission that there is a God and that God is much
greater. We pray for our own transformation that we might do the
will of God and know the Kingdom of God, which is very different from
the kingdom of this world.
That first day of the Lobster Festival the organizers boasted – “We’ve
eaten 2 tons of lobsters today!!!” So imagine bringing that to
God and boasting – hey, we’ve eaten 2 tons of lobsters. Or even,
I won the Sea Goddess competition. Or even, I graduated magna cum
laude. Or even I got voted Mr. Or Ms. Personality or ... or
what. The Earth is a place of rivalries. Everyone seems to
be competing with everyone else, for what? Attention, money, prizes,
whatever. But the Kingdom of God is not like that at all.
Here’s the greatest achievement of a person seeking the Kingdom of
God. What if you realized that God had forgiven you everything
and you sought to imitate Christ in this? Imagine actually
putting into practice the most basic teaching of Christ. Imagine
clearing the slate and forgiving every single day. What would
happen if I forgave all my debts, resentments, and residual hard
feelings? Imagine not holding onto a single negative account
against anybody. Imagine judgment and criticism having no power
over you – no power to capture your thinking about other people, no
power to make you afraid of others judging you. There actually
are people who have practiced this and no matter what tough cards life
dealt to them, they forgave and forgave and forgave, every day, every
moment, every time they felt offended or insulted or taken for granted
or hurt, they forgave, for years and decades and on and on. I
forgive, I am forgiven by God. I am free. One day, after
practicing for years and years and year, I just knew it was true.
Last year when I was teaching a class on the Baptismal covenant to
children, one of the moms was visiting the class and she suddenly burst
out: Do you kids have any idea what a different world we would live in
if people actually took these vows seriously and practiced them every
day? It was a great moment. That’s the beginning, put them
into practice, day after day after day. Of course we will fail,
that is why it is practice. We try, we fail, we try again, and
again, and again. We practice and practice and practice.
Forgiveness is like that. We don’t do it perfectly, but we keep
practicing, we keep working on it. And here is a secret. We
become what we practice. When we practice judging others, we
become judgmental. When we criticize, we become critical.
When we practice forgiveness, we become forgiving. It may feel
phony at first, but if you are sincere in this practice, it will change
your life like nothing else ever has. Not immediately, but
slowly, over the long haul. The best thing about this though is
that it is real, it is a real change of mind and heart, a real
conversion. And it really works. Practice what Christ
teaches about forgiveness, sincerely, over time, and you will be
transformed, changed, converted.
But don’t take my word for it. I’m a mess and that’s obvious.
I just ask you to give it a try the next time you notice that you are
really stuck in some bad feeling towards someone else. That’s the
same for all of us. That’s the place to put the Gospel to the
test. The Lord’s Prayer is waiting to be lived.
And here is another secret – no matter how small the step we take, no
matter how fraught with failure, when we are sincere, we have help from
heaven. We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses,
invisible to our eyes, but just waiting to help us, if we will take the
first step, if we will leap for transcendence, if we will just reach
out for God’s help sincerely.
For Thine is the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory, forever.
Amen.
Edie Bird
19 August 2007
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