Sameness breeds boredom. Boredom screams a lack of life. People cannot bear to be bored, so they die in the hands of boring things, or run from them as if the Devil himself were sucking the life from them.

     Systems can be boring, and jobs can, and people, and family relationships, and particular decades, and geographical locations, and even our range of thought.

      The church can be boring. That is the crime of the century. At the heart of our message is the conviction that the Day of the Lord has come. What could ever be boring after that?

      The text isn’t about Jesus, but about Jesus as a sign of the Day of the Lord. If we see him, we see it. The miracles are not about Jesus’ magical powers but about the Day of the Lord. The miracles are what happen when life at last ceases to be boring.

The teachings are not just more things to keep your nose clean, but are a fitness program to get you ready to live an unboring life in the Day of the Lord.

       The basic transformation in people of faith was from boringly predictable to open-ended. Anything can happen. It is like rain after drought. You don’t speculate, or preach or posture. You just get yourselves out there in any configuration necessary to receive the water.

      So if it really is not boring, but the Day of the Lord is here with all its amazing variety and stimulation then it is HIGH TIME.

It is high time to stop looking in the Bible as if it has all the answers. It is the Day of the Lord. Life has the answers.

It is high time to imagine that many ways of living contain avenues of grace. It is not just found in the upright, the squeaky-clean and the careful.

It is high time to reject systems that keep people from their God-given gifts of leadership and participation. No more all-male priesthoods, or boards room reserved for wealth, or only the young, or never the young, or only women’s voices, or the straight, or the white or the black, or the gay.

It is high time to shame those who will not help themselves to stand. This is their only time in the Day of Lord. To fall, swoon and languish is to waste everything.

It is high time to push the edges, to try new things, to stand up to criticism and silence it when your motivation is deep and true.

    It is easy to live without ever realizing the power of our root conviction. Thousands do. The Day of the Lord then remains a myth, a pipe-dream, or an illusion. All that is left for us is a frantic scramble away from creeping and undefeatable boredom.

That is to die by inches. It is high time we staunched such a drip of such a slow cultural suicide.

Am so grateful I was taught to preach from a lectionary. That is the offering of four scripture passages each week, all year long. It is a recipe for rich fare. To preach from the New Testament alone is to make the story smaller than it is. It can lead us to feel that we are members in an exclusive club. The world may be fraught with storms and rage, but we are safe in the arms of Jesus.

To miss the Old Testament is to short-circuit the thought and faith of the New Testament writers. They saw and understood the story of Jesus only from its Old Testament origins. He is the Promised One, the Messianic Figure, the Davidic King, the one who ushers in the Day of the Lord. He is he sign of God’s judgment and mercy. He is the One who leads the people to the Promised Land. Without the Old Testament anchorage and perspective, we are dealing with an alien Savior from somewhere out in space, or from the rococo figments of our own imagination.

The Old Testament takes us out into real life. The trials and troubles of home and village and empire are all over its pages. Human feelings run wild there. Songs of praise and lament greet our ears. Our hearts are set trembling by the mercy of God and by God’s silent distance. The simple life-truths are found there: It doesn’t add up. We do have to wait. Sometimes we lose everything. There is no answer that will go deep enough, and that there is rescue, sure, total, and unexpected from a grace that is beyond our telling.

These days, people avoid the churches because the message is too small for their real lives, and too artificial for their real experiences. A good dose of prophetic truth, costly social witness, rueful lament, and uncontrollable praise will go a long way towards linking life with its eternal qualities. We owe this to ourselves and others. It is our true heritage. The Old Testament holds the key as it always has.

It is not our meeting.

All the big decisions are made in many other places.

There is more to life than economics and government.

It is prudent to stay out of the line of fire.

Those in authority are pledged to act under the law.

It is foolish to invite trouble into the heart of a tightly-packed, populous city.

We are animals with animal natures.

No one likes to be told what to do.

We never learn for long enough.

Young people are too young to command the streets.

The media are self-serving.

Nobody saw us as we really are.

This is no place for the thrill-seeker or the simply curious.

It is so easy to get in over your head.

The money could have been better used, but would not have been.

Poverty, crime, injustice, and unanswered human rights will not be solved by chanting, or shouting or acting-out, if at all.

The cycles of time and nature are still in play and will take us other places.

The response of faith is about prudent awareness.

As the G 20 gathering looms over our city like a rising wind before a coming storm, our people are taking shelter. Some in escape, others in a change of scene, still others in a forced and artificial sense of normalcy. We depend on our wits and our planning. We stand behind law enforcement officers and security perimeters. We hope that the best of human nature will display itself in kindness, reason and cool-headedness. We believe in our ability to dream big, act fairly and put our best visions into action. The cost of success is enormous. The cost of failure is unthinkable.

What say you of our chances? What fabric is in us to do the right thing? Have we become too hard or too soft? Is our culture blind to the simple calls for justice and sharing and the universal gifts of earth seas and sky? Are we past the tipping-point? Hurt and harm are in the neighbourhood. Those too angry to show reason and too broken to show health are at the fences. Violence and pain curse aloud above the sounds of traffic. These voices are with us all the while but dare to cry out all the more when the stakes are so high and the power so concentrated.

Of all the players, high or low born, is there one whose presence has not been rightly measured? Do we dare acknowledge the Holy, the Power of the Universe, the Will of the Sacred, the Movement of the Spheres, of the Times, of the Heart as it works its weaving?

Do we leave room for surprise, for that strange and unexpected voice or that odd and unforeseen turn? Who knows whose heart will be warmed and whose spine stiffened? Who knows what sadness will bring goodness, and what bluster and bombast will come to nothing but a clearer path in another direction?

The ancients knew full well that this Sacred World comes uninvited and unbidden to all and every gathering, and looks there for eyes to see, ears to hear and lips to speak. This is the place of true shelter and the one great hope for the world that underlies all drives for success and overcomes all fears of failure.