Last week we joined Jesus’ disciples (via Luke’s account in Acts) as they awaited the first Christian Pentecost, 50 days after the first Easter. The many prayers offered by these faithful men and women were answered in a powerful public and personal experience, an amazing ability to speak to the hearts and minds of listeners from many different nations, and the conversion of 3,000 people! Our own interactions with the Holy Spirit may be less dramatic, but we hope that we, like the early disciples, may be effective witnesses in our speech and (perhaps particularly) in our actions.

This week we spoke of ways in which we “divide time” as we look forward or backward in our own lives - and even as we consider the structure of our days or weeks. Many Jews of Jesus’ time (and during many centuries before Jesus’ time) divided time into the present (the NOW) and the restoration of David’s kingdom, with “the Day of the Lord” as the line between these two portions of time. As we consider current events in the Middle East, we note that many Christians and Jews continue to hope for a literal restoration. In Jewish apocryphal (not-included-in-the-canon-of-the-Bible) writing preceding the time of Christ, the restored kingdom was often described in terms of unimaginable abundance - even a single grape would yield a cor (220 liters) of wine!

If we don’t know what the kingdom will look like, how are we to pray for it? Paul speaks to this dilemma in Romans 8:26, assuring us that God’s Holy Spirit intercedes for us in our not knowing how to pray! In our ongoing anticipation of God’s glory and of God’s “kingdom come” (whatever form it takes), we can ALREADY rejoice in our identity as adopted children of God. When Paul wrote Romans 8, formal adoption involved a child’s being thrice sold (in a symbolic weighing of copper) by the relinquishing father and twice bought back by him. After the third “sale,” the child was considered to be completely under the authority of the adoptive father. Perhaps our Christian lives include a similar back and forth between earthly life and kingdom life. Perhaps we are to seek that precious balance between claiming what is NOT YET ours, as did one son in a certain story recorded in Luke 15, and missing out on (thinking that the Father doesn’t want us to have) the abundance that is ALREADY ours.