From Archbishop Peter Jensen’s weekly online series on The Essential Jesus …
STEP 1: READING
Read Luke chapter 13, verses 1-35.
STEP 2: REFLECTION
Understanding our time is vital. Jesus introduced the great turning point of history. He forced the issue of repentance: how do you stand with God? Would they trust and follow God’s King when he came amongst them and so receive forgiveness, or would they be stubborn? God is patiently looking for the fruit of repentance. But his patience will not last. How many are going to be saved? Make sure you find the narrow way and enter it! In the meantime Jesus is pressing on to Jerusalem, since that will where he will be killed, it being the nature of that city to kill its prophets. Where is the kingdom? It is here, as a seed is in the ground; in due course it will be like the tree. It is both here and yet to come and we live between those two points. Use the time well.
via Essential Jesus – Online Bible Study #24 Sydneyanglicans.net.
BUT HOW DO YOU KNOW I want to ask of the Archbishop, that God’s “patience will not last.” ? You see it looks to me as though God’s patience HAS lasted – for billions of years. It looks to me as though that temperate and ordered creative patience, beyond the spheres of time, IS God’s Kingdom, the arena in which the universe is ever made new, and you and me too. That’s the ground of my faith, and my hope for our world.
Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts-Schori in an opening address to the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in Anaheim has spoken of
the great Western heresy – that we can be saved as individuals, that any of us alone can be in right relationship with God. It’s caricatured in some quarters by insisting that salvation depends on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus. That individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in the place that only God can occupy, at the center of existence, as the ground of all being. That heresy is one reason for the theme of this Convention. Ubuntu. That word doesn’t have any “I”s in it. The I only emerges as we connect – and that is really what the word means: I am because we are, and I can only become a whole person in relationship with others. There is no “I” without “you,” and in our context, you and I are known only as we reflect the image of the one who created us. Some of you will hear a resonance with Martin Buber’s I and Thou and recognize a harmony. You will not be wrong …
… Jesus’ critical decision to journey toward Jerusalem is about the city of God’s dream, Yerushalayim, the city of peace, the city of shalom, the city of God’s holy mountain, toward which the nations stream. We Christians often think the only important part of the Jerusalem story is Calvary, and, yes, suffering and killing in that place still seem to be the loudest news. But Calvary was a waypoint in the larger arc of God’s dream – it’s on the way to Jerusalem, it is not in Jerusalem. Jesus’ passion was and is for God’s dream of a reconciled creation. We’re meant to be partners in building that reality, throughout all of creation. This crisis is a decision point, one which may involve suffering, but it is our opportunity to choose which direction we’ll go and what we will build. We will fail if we choose business as usual.There will be cross-shaped decisions in our work, but if we look faithfully, there will be resurrection as well.Will the words we use in the coming days reflect the word of God incarnate in our midst? Will our words imitate God’s effective word, speaking shalom to creation? That’s our decision, individually and collectively – that is our opportunity to live Ubuntu. This is our moment of judgment, our crisis. We can make our decisions in hope, and we can speak the love of God to the world through this Church, and we can do it together.
via http://ecusa.anglican.org/documents/070709_PBopeningaddress.pdf
“Discover God’s story afresh in these pages”. Well, maybe, in part, between ANY pages. But I’m among those Anglicans who discover God’s story afresh in his (patently beloved) people. I meet Jesus in Bishop Katharine’s “larger arc of God’s dream”.
I met Jesus in the gospels (I’ve long loved and studied) today – but also in the ordinary people I’ve talked to who long, and love, and laugh, and hurt and sing and pray, and who are worrying about swine flu along the way. I believe I’ll meet the essential Jesus when, by many and divers routes, he’s led us safely “home”. And meanwhile I thank God that, long ago, a small and shambolic representation (like me) of our still learning humanity set their faces to walk to Jerusalem with him. And still do.
The Times, 17 July 2009
