First Congregational Church of Montague Trinitarian
Rev. Barbara Turner Delisle
A Gift of the Kin-dom
Do not be afraid, little flock…for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kin-dom. Don’t you just love to give gifts? Especially if you can find just the right gift…just the right color shirt that accentuates your father’s eyes, or just the right color ear rings for your mom’s birthday, just the right toy that brings gales of laughter and delight from your two year old grandchild. It is so much fun to give just the right gift after searching long and hard or even moreso when you just happen upon it out of the blue! And you just say a prayer of praise right on the spot…thank you Jesus for this great gift!
Because we trouble so often long and hard over what is the right gift to give or what is the right thing to do it can be hard for us to remember our faith. In the RSV Bible version of the reading from Hebrews it goes like this…Faith is the substance of things hoped for….the substance of things hoped for….What is this substance we are talking about?
It is hard to live from moment to moment trusting that you are going to be okay. When the bank statement says 42 dollars and 84 cents and you know you have a mortgage payment of 734 dollars due in two days, it is hard not to panic. When you don’t have a job and you have a tooth that is aching, it is hard to remember that all will be provided for you. What is this all that is going to be provided? What is this substance of things hoped for?
I think we have to remember that what the bible promises is not based in materialism. What we are being promised is not that all our material worldly needs will be met. The promise is far greater than a roof over our head and food on the table…which means it is really great because those are the basics. But then there are so many people who live without even those basics and perhaps even without a dream of having them.
I promised that I would share more from the Aramaic Lord’s prayer each week this summer so let me just bring in the next line and we’ll see how one supports the other…
The next line in the prayer is “Give us this day our daily bread.” In Aramaic it sounds like this…”Hawvlan lachma d’sunqanan yaomana.” This line can actually help glide us through the murky waters of confusion.
Information drawn from books by Neil Douglas Klotz, The Hidden Gospel (1999) and Prayers of the Cosmos(1990)
Also from Richard Carlson in Feasting on the Word (2010)
