But then, why should that be a surprise? After all, the words of the Lord's Prayer did not appear mysteriously in the clouds like some heavenly sky-writing. This was not written in the stars or blazed across the inky darkness of the night by some divinely sent meteorites. No, the Lord's Prayer emerged from the human voice of Jesus from Nazareth. The words of this prayer passed through the lips of an undeniably real person to our Heavenly Father. Why is that important? Because obviously the Son of God would not have gone through all the trouble and pain to become like us if, as a matter of fact, the earthiness of life were unimportant!

Jesus prayed for the kingdom to come to this world and he prayed for God's will to be done on this earth. Creation matters. It is for that very reason that this most famous of prayers, but really all of our prayers, must be intimately connected to what happens in this world. That's important since many people think that prayer is the complete opposite of action.

The Lord's Prayer does not allow us to be idle. We are not allowed to separate the life of prayer from the life of action in this world. We are not allowed to keep all things heavenly in one compartment and all things earthly in a separate place. The kingdom of God has come to this world, for the sake of this world, and so the will of God which animates that kingdom needs to be seen in this world.

Our Gospel makes it clear , the way that the kingdom comes to this earth and the manner in which the kingdom is present in this world can be quite surprising, outrageous and audacious. The kingdom of God was the single most prominent feature in the teaching and preaching of Jesus. Jesus' very first words in the gospels of Mark and Matthew declare that the kingdom of God was at hand. Following that Jesus laced his parables with references to the kingdom, mentioning it well over 100 times in the gospels.

Jesus made clear that the kingdom of God was going to save and rescue this world precisely by virtue of its being so very different from the powerful, flashy, showy political kingdoms which otherwise capture our attention. The kingdom of God, Jesus said, looks small, even tiny. It looks foolish. In fact, the kingdom can even disappear completely. Like a seed it gets buried in the soil. It takes 750 mustard seeds to equal one gram. Drop one of those into the dirt and you won't even be able to see it. The same is true of yeast in dough: once it's mixed into the water, flour, and oil, the yeast disappears. Yet these tiny things have great effects.

So also with the kingdom: it's not what you expect in terms of political clout. The kingdom of God is not about gleaming capital cities studded with marble colonnades and soaring executive mansions. It's not about some fierce army plowing under opposition by sheer might of its power. Compared to all of that, God's kingdom looks as insignificant as a grain of mustard or a packet of yeast. But the kingdom can change hearts and lives. It can change the world. It has changed the world.

The kingdom is here but it's modest. It's hidden. It's quiet. In fact, those who discover the kingdom sometimes tend to stumble upon it almost by accident. The kingdom is a great treasure, but you're not going to find this valuable commodity posted on the big board on Wall Street or for sale on Ebay. No, you're going to stumble on it in some remote field. The person who owns the field won't even know it's there, but once you find it your joy will be so massive that you'll do whatever it takes to buy that field.

All of this is surprising. We are so accustomed to these images in Jesus' parables that they typically don't strike us as absurd or paradoxical. But they are. Think of it: the kingdom is a seed scarcely visible to the naked eye and which disappears completely in dirt. The kingdom is yeast which a woman kneads into dough. In Jesus' day so-called "woman's work" was disdained such that Jesus was being quite provocative by making a woman the parabolic agent of working the kingdom into this world.

And has it ever struck you that the man who finds the treasure in the field is a little devious? Jesus says that this man finds some treasure in a field that does not belong to him. He then covers up this treasure again so the owner won't know it's there and then, without saying a word, he buys this field from the unsuspecting owner. It's a little sneaky! Suppose you were at a garage sale looking over some old purses like those alligator ones from the 50s. Suppose you discovered that inside was a bunch of money. What would you do? Wouldn't you feel a guilty if you silently purchased it for $3 without telling the owner that she had missed ?!

Tiny seeds, invisible yeast, woman's work, a slightly underhanded purchase: had it been left up to us, this is not how we would have described the single most powerful, meaningful, and joyful reality in the universe! But it is how Jesus described it. This is the kingdom Jesus bequeathed to us. It is the kingdom he asked us to pray for and the kingdom in which we asked us to live out the will of God on earth every day.

It is also the kingdom into which we need to call others. We may not pray for God's kingdom and will in this world unless we are willing to follow up our prayers by living a kingdom lifestyle ourselves. If we pray for God's heaven on earth, then we need to be very, very deliberate in how we live. We want to do and say things that will make the kingdom so attractive to others that they, too, will want to enter it.

If we take our cues from the Gospel then it is clear that both our kingdom living and our kingdom proclamation will be more about quiet acts of loving faithfulness than about headline-grabbing, bullhorn tactics. In the vestry retreat, I lead a meditation on the spirituality of gentleness. We cannot present the gospel of a suffering servant like Jesus by being arrogant finger-wagers or even pulpit thumpers. We cannot give the world the good news of grace if we mostly position ourselves as stern bearers of bad news and judgment. The kingdom of God represents the most powerful force the world has ever known. But we've got to let the kingdom grow and leaven in its own quiet, humble ways if people's hearts are really going to be changed.

It is interesting that in the parables of the treasure and pearl, it is only after the people run across these valuables that they become changed people who sell all they have. That may be one of the Bible's many hints that we cannot force people into the kingdom by first requiring them to follow a prescribed list of good deeds. Once you find the gospel, you have all the joy you need to motivate you to live a changed life. Until then, however, you won't find much motivation to follow the will of God on earth nor will the church's acting as the world's morality police bully people into the kingdom.

And so as bearers of God's kingdom, we keep plugging away at activities which may look silly or meaningless to the world but which we believe contain the very seed of a new creation. We keep coming to church and singing our hymns, reciting our old formulas and creeds. People like myself keep cracking open an ancient book called the Bible, looking to find within it truths that are anything-but ancient. We keep gathering at sick beds and death beds and whisper our prayers for the Spirit of the resurrection to be with us in life and in death. We keep drizzling water onto squirming infants and popping wafers into our mouths in the earnest faith that through the Spirit, Baptism and Communion don't just mean something, they mean everything.

And we keep working for Jesus in this mixed-up, backward world of ours. We quietly carry out our jobs and raise our kids and tend our relationships in the belief that God has designs for all those things and it's our job to follow them. We keep pointing people to an old rugged cross, having the boldness to suggest that the man who died on that cross is now the Lord of the galaxies. We see a deeper, richer reality over and beneath the limited scope of yesterday's or today's news. We see the kingdom of God and we see it growing. We see that somehow in the death and resurrection of Jesus, the whole universe turned the corner from darkness into light--we see that this holy light now bathes everything in its bright goodness.

But maybe as with Jesus, so with us, our best chance will come only after the world spends some time watching our cross-shaped lives of dedicated service. As it happened for Jesus' disciples, so with us perhaps the day will come when those around us will come up to us and say, "We see something in you. Could you teach us how to pray so that we, too, can have some of the treasure that you've already got?" If that happens, then we not only pray "Your kingdom come," we see it coming. We see that indeed, it's already here. And that is what happens after we say "Amen!"