Life is mostly about perseverance. That is, life lived with a purpose in mind. This may not sound exciting but it is true. Yes, purposeful life is about hanging in for the long term, toughing it out, dogged persistence. If perseverance is a key ingredient of everyday living it is an essential element in the spiritual quest.

As believers the first thing in which we need to persevere is our conviction that the sacred is in our midst. This came more easily, I would say, for previous generations, because their social environment supported this worldview. Such was certainly the case for all the social environments which gave rise to the books of the Bible.

But we believers do not live in such an environment. We must daily persevere in our conviction that our world and the world of God`s activity are one. They mingle like the light and darkness in each of us. Theologian Diarmid O`Murchu states, "As many of the great faiths suggest (but poorly implement) spirituality is about enlightenment and liberation. The spiritual journey is about opening up new horizons of love and understanding, not by ignoring or bypassing the darkness and pain of life, but precisely through experiencing and integrating them. Our spiritual journey is above all else a journney into the mystery of belonging where all is one..." ( Quantum Theology, Crossroad Books, New York, 1999, p. 77).

We must always keep in mind that the one dimensional materialistic picture of reality that is presented to us by the dominant ethos of our day is, in fact, a distorted picture of the true nature of who we are and what our lives are about. It is not that our present social environment is necessarily hostile to things spiritual but it does push "the other dimension" so essential to our self-understanding to the sidelines of private experience and public discourse.

In a prayer near the end of Jesus` life, as recorded in John`s gospel, Jesus prays, "They (his followers) do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world " ( John 17:16) and within the same prayer he pleads, " Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you; and these know that you sent me.." (John 17:25). For John "the world" is this one dimensional world which is not evil but is mislead. And yet despite this warning, the present world is seen as a good place where God choses to be present and active: " God so loved the world, that he sent his only Son.."

Now Jesus was one of those unusual people who had this powerful sense of connectedness to God in the very midst of his daily life. He had the capacity to hold both worlds together. Theologian Marcus Borg refers to Jesus as a spirit person. He points out that spirit persons are known cross-culturally,

"They are people who have vivid and frequent subjective experiences of another level or dimension of reality...What all persons who have these experiences share is a strong sense of there being more to reality than the tangible world of ordinary experience. They have a compelling sense of having experienced something "real". They feel strongly that they know something they didn`t know before. Their experiences are noetic, involving not simply a feeling of ecstacy, but a knowing. What such persons know is the sacred. Spirit persons are people who experience the sacred frequently and vividly." ( Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, Harper San Francisco, 1995, p32 ff)

Every now and then someone with a powerful experience of the sacred arises. Borg points out that most often religious traditions do not speak of the sacred abstractly, they name it- as Yahweh, Brahmin, Atman, Allah, The Tao, Great Spirit, God .. "This is not to suppose that the all these names ( and the concepts associated with them) mean the same thing. But it is to suppose that the impulse to name something as sacred flows out of the experience of the sacred" ( P33).

The reason the church keeps a calendar of saints is to acknowledge that such persons have been - and we can assume continue to be- among us. We are all capable of being spirit persons and we do recognize that to some degree in one another. For most people, it seems, these moments of intense experience, of seeing behind the veil, are few and far between. But just the same the mundane nature of daily existence simply cannot satisfy the human heart completely. We long for more. Like sunflowers we naturally bent in the direct of light.

Furthermore, whenever a spirit person comes along the world is shaken. And whenever the world is shaken people react in fear and often hostility. I believe that this is so because most of us seek security as much or more than we seek the light. Our inner self is the battlefield where these two often opposing desires vie for our allegiance. Because the world of our immediate experience is more accessible to us we usually turn to it first. In our culture security is more easily found than enlightenment. Once we feel secure we don`t want anything to come along and change it. We don`t want the stock market to crash, taxes to skyrocket, neighbourhoods to change, friends to move away, or church furniture to be moved. Once we have found a set of circumstances which offer us security we want to keep them- sometimes despite the fact that the same circumstances do not bring security to others.

Jesus, as a Spirit Person, challenged his world. He was able to look at his world through the lens of the sacred and see clearly its false claims and distortions. Even though he loved and affirmed his own spiritual tradition as a Jew he challenged its institutions in ways which caused panic and consternation among leaders especially.

As persons claiming to be followers of Jesus we set ourselves the task of imitating him and becoming spirit people. And the purpose of the church is to keep us focussed on the world as the place where we will find the divine unfolding forever emerging. ( O`Murchu p. 77)

You know one of the curious things about moving up in the chain of command and power within an institution, especially a large and complex one, is that it becomes harder to change it. One would think that increased power would give increased opportunity. To step out of the mould in which we are placed (or have placed ourselves)is extremely difficult. Very often fatal to one`s career. And yet some do rise to positions of high leadership and still have the courage and insight to challenge the very system they are expected to defend.

As I say this one name comes to mind for me. Archbishop Ted Scott, Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada from 1971 to 1986 was such a person. Tragically, he was killed in a car accident just recently. Ted was, in my view, a spirit person in the style of Jesus Christ. A man of great compassion and at the same time he challenged the respectable security of the Anglican Church - and not just our church but the worldwide church as a Moderator of the World Council of Churches. He strived to get the church to look at the world through the eyes of those at the bottom of the social pyramid- an unusual endeavour for most churches these days - captive as they are to the middle and upper classes and the conservative theologies which support them. His recently published biography Radical Compassion: The Life and Times of Archbishop Ted Scott (Hugh McCullum, ABC Publishing, Toronto, 2004) portrays him as a man of clear convictions who, at the same time, felt great distress for those who feared, opposed, and even hated him.

One of the remarkable things about Jesus is that he does not declare the present world to be evil or unreal; indeed, he sees it as a place radically in need of love to transform it. It is a divine creation gone astray.

So it is not surprizing then that so much of the Bible is about going astray. The Bible uses all kinds of words and examples for this: disobedience, unfaithfulness, idolatry, satan, demons, principalities and powers, etc. Whatever the wording the perception is the same: we easily lose track of the sacred and become seduced by the securities and charms of the present world.

That is the explanation I would give for the Old Testament story this morning from the prophet Hosea. Hosea, another Spirit Person standing in the Hebrew prophetic tradition, uses the highly offensive and controversial theme of prostitution to dramatize how far Israel has moved away from a true understanding of its relationship with God. He choses a prostitute, probably a temple prostitute, as his wife. Among ancient religions sacred prostitution was common- joining onself with a temple prostitute was a kind of sacramental act, a gesture of communion with the spiritual realm. These temple prostitutes were both male and female. ( as an aside, many of the biblical admonitions against homosexual activity were concerned about this practise, which were condemned as idolatry. Many scholars make this point in reply to those who claim that homosexual relations are so clearly proscribed by the bible. They would say that the bible was not addressing the issue of committed same sex relationships at all but the issue of false worship)

For the Hebrew people, the idea that one could draw close to God by sexual relations with a temple prostitute was absolutely outrageous. So Hosea`s gesture was a radical way of confronting people with their own loss of direction.

And Jesus, likewise, in the prayer he taught his disciples, was striving to give them a means of keeping their lives on the right track. Every petition of his prayer underlines a specific aspect of growing as a spirit person and the story of the persistent neighbour caps the story off with the call to perseverance. The seekerhad to keep pounding on the neighbour`s door in order to get the needed loaf of bread. So we need to persevere.

I say this because this prayer, which we call the Lord`s Prayer, is only one form of prayer among many. It does not purport to be the perfect prayer, or the only prayer, but it is a prayer which enshrines the key values of our tradition by which we will develop as spirit persons. These are:

1. Remembering that the God whom we address is accessible and trustworthy. Like a faithful parent. Father



2. 2. Remembering that world belongs to God, God is in it, and God wants to transform it.



3. Remembering that right relationships at all levels is the foundation of true religion.



4. Remembering that the path of the Spirit Person is a difficult one, requiring determination and perseverance.

Growth as a spirit person is the blessing which we will receive if we persevere in this prayer. And that is the essential context and meaning of that promise which many of us find so puzzling, "Ask and it will be given to you; search and you will find, knock and the door will be opened for you" Luke 11:9. It is puzzling because we can all think of things for we asked for and did not receive, searches undertaking that lead nowhere and doors we knocked upon which did not open. Could it be that the reason for our disappointment is that we sought things which ultimately had nothing to do with our growth (or that of another)as a spirit person?

You see what God has in mind for us is the Big Picture. Whereas, what we usually have in mind usually is not. God wants us first and foremost to enter into the experience of the sacred because in that reality the needs we will identify will be very different.

It seems to me that Jesus` promise is directly related to the petitions of the Jesus Prayer. That is, they are words of assurance that if we persevere in keeping the focus of lives grounded in these 4 key elements we will grow in the Spirit and Likeness of Jesus who is the image of God.

It is our path to enlightenment and liberation. It is the path of a Spirit Person.