This is a preliminary note because the second reading is so frequently quoted by the Fundamentalist Christians, I would like to make a small comment on it.

"All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching". I am sure if you have listened to any tele-evangelist you will have heard that dozens of times. That is their battle-cry. Unfortunately they do not look at the texts particularly carefully. Whoever wrote this thing, and it was most likely not Paul but one of Paul's later disciples, was not talking about the Second Letter to Timothy, he was talking about the Hebrew Bible, above all, the Pentateuch, the first five books, and the books of the Prophets. It is very important to notice that. And secondly, even more important is the adjective that is used: Scripture is "useful". It does not say that is essential or even necessary, it just says that it is useful for "reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness...". If scripture is useful then, a fortiori, every other religious institution is useful as well...has the same kind of validity, if you will. It is really important to keep that in mind so that we do not absolutize or divinize anything.

The first and third readings talk about prayer: here it is a kind of magical thing, with Moses having his hands held up, and the Israelites winning as long as he was in this supplicatory gesture. And then, of course, there is this little story from the Gospel of Luke, about persistence in prayer. And it is the prayer’s petition that I would like to talk about: prayer as asking God for stuff.

It is important, first of all, to distinguish from those moments of terror that we all have: "Oh my God, I am going to hit that other car! Oh my God, I forgot to turn off the stove!". These terror-reflexes in which we say, "Oh my God, I need...etc., etc.,"...what does God do with that? I am guilty of that reflex and I do not know how God responds. He probably just says, "Oh well, there is Trojcak at it again," and probably does not pay too much attention. And I think that an awful lot of our praying, unfortunately, is reducible to that. The reflex that comes out of terror and fear, I believe, can be turned into prayer, but only if it has been transmuted, and only if it has been contained within a much larger issue, which is what we also get from the New Testament. Namely if we take the Lord's Prayer as a paradigm, as the petition in which every other petition makes sense, the panic-reflex takes on some kind of shape and then I think we are all right. And, of course, the leading petition of the Lord's Prayer is "Your Kingdom come".

In another place in the New Testament, Jesus is described as saying, "Seek first the Kingdom of God and everything else is going to fall into place". What I am getting at is this: the absolutely foundational petition has to be that desire, that passionate searching for the Kingdom of God, and every other petition makes sense only in so far as it is grounded in that petition. And that is why I think that the terror-reflex needs close examination.

So, what are we talking about when we talk about the Kingdom? What are we asking for in praying "Thy Kingdom come"? Well, there is a big clue in this passage in Luke: "Will not God grant justice?". In other words, the absolutely foundational petition is for genuine equity between us human beings. So it is the prayer for the constitution of the human family, "Your Kingdom come" is put here in terms of justice. What does that mean, concretely? Well, it means a whole lot of things. For me, most of the time, I think it means (or ought to mean, whether I am aware of this or not), that I need to be made conscious of the absence of justice in my life and in the world. And that more often than not means that there are all kinds of people, vast ranges of people, I do not even think about, people who do not have justice.

The U.N. report on poverty released this week pointed out that 1.2 billion people, 25% of the people on this planet, live on less than one U.S. dollar per day. I am not aware of that. In fact, I would much prefer not to be aware of that, even if somebody points it out to me! But, concretely, this is what is entailed in seeking the Kingdom of God! "May those people become real to me", however that happens, and I do not know, concretely, how it is to happen. Every once in awhile I get a glimpse, as does everybody else. I’m asking, not that I see the poor as objects of my pity or my charity - that waxy word which can mean all kinds of unchristian things. Rather, let me be aware of them as my co-human beings, with as much title to this earth, and my attention, and the goods of this earth as everybody else. This is really hard for us because we grow out of a religious past of a highly individualistic, interiorized, and privatized notion of what religion is supposed to be about.

And then, of course, we live in an age where self-help is de rigueur. "This is what I need, above all. I need to be helped...Let me get cured-up and then I will go and help somebody else." I want to question that priority. And I want to do it, finally, by simply pointing to the instance of the miracles of healing in the Gospels.

So you have lepers. You have this woman haemorrhaging for twelve years. You have all kinds of people who are diseased. The common element with all of the healing miracles is that, in the Jewish view of things, to be diseased, to be leprous, disabled, crippled, blind, or lame, was to be ritually impure and, therefore, to stand outside the community. It was to be disconnected from everybody else, necessarily. So, for Jesus to cure one of these people meant what? It meant that the restoration of their physical integrity was simultaneously a restoration of them to the human family. You absolutely do not have one without the other. They are simultaneous. To be cured means precisely to be restored to other human beings; to have access and have other people have access to you. That is the cure. That is the meaning of the cure. And that, I propose, is the meaning of every time that we pray "Let your Kingdom come". That is what we are praying for: "Let me know myself as connectable, as needing to be connected to everybody else".

You see, if that is the overriding context, and it surely is as far as Jesus was concerned (if the New Testament means anything at all, it means that), then all of our panic attacks and stress reactions in which we say, "Oh God, oh God, I cannot stand it anymore," can begin to make sense. All of that can begin to be legitimate forms of prayer. But that is why it is so important that we know what we are doing when we say, "Your Kingdom come. This is what I want. This is what I want to want, above all". That is the fundamental, foundational petition: "This is what I want to want because, in fact, it is not what I want".