17^th Sunday in Ordinary Time | 7^th Sunday after Pentecost | Proper 12

The Revised Common Lectionary passages for the Lord’s Day are:

First Reading: Hosea 1:2-10
Psalm 85
Second Reading: Colossians 2:6-15 (16-19)
Gospel Reading: Luke 11:1-13

The liturgical color for the day is: Green

“As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.”

Oh, those Colossians!  They needed to come back to their relationship with the living Christ and ask themselves about the vitality of that relationship.  They needed to do that over and over again.

We are so very much the Colossians in our church and our lives!  We can get distracted by many things.  We can get involved in many day-to-day activities that call our attention away from what really matters.  We can get absorbed into success and survival.  In both our lives and our church, we will fluctuate between striving for success and then in our moments of desperation striving to survive.

God calls us neither to success nor survival.  God calls us to keep coming back to our relationship with God and those whom God loves.  The challenge is to emerge from the success and survival race to the resurrected living of a vibrant relationship in Christ.

Paul’s invitation to “continue” matters much.  The distractions are abundant, yet the task is clear—keep coming back to that which matters.  Remember your baptism and wonderful reality that you are in Christ. I believe that is the role of prayer in our lives (see the Gospel lesson from Luke), that we keep coming back to God in our lives as we continue.

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Rev. Dr. Daris Bultena
Chief Imagination Officer
General Presbyter and Stated Clerk