Yesterday in the Common of Holy Women, Holy Men we remembered David Pendleton Oakerhater.  You can read something about his life and ministry as a Deacon of and to the Cheyenne here. I found his story to be compelling and hopeful.

Aside from who he was personally and historically, I was most captured by the collect we prayed as we remembered him. I believe it has (and probably always has had) particular importance to people who ‘live and move and have their being’ in an environment where Christianity and discipleship to Jesus Christ is the exception and not the rule.  Here’s the text of the prayer.

O God of unsearchable wisdom and infinite mercy, who chose a captive warrior, David Oakerhater, to be your servant, and sent him to be a missionary to his own people and to exercise the office of a deacon among them: Liberate us, who commemorate him today, from bondage to self, and empower us for service to you and to the neighbors you have given us; through Jesus Christ, the captain of our salvation; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God for ever and ever.

There are two parts of this prayer that I believe are most applicable to God’s people (THE CHURCH) as we seek to be faithful to God’s Mission in the world here and now.

The first is this portion

O God of unsearchable wisdom and infinite mercy, who chose a captive warrior,

I want to claim that if we take our lives of discipleship with any seriousness at all we will find ourselves as ‘captive warriors’ for the Gospel we proclaim.  Jesus is all about captivating hearts and sending their owners out with the zeal of a ‘warrior’. The imagery of Paul’s ‘putting on the whole armor of God’ (Romans 13:12, Ephesians 6:11 and Ephesians 6:13) lets us know that doing what we are called to do is likely to be a struggle.

We like Paul and Oakerhater have captive hearts beating within us and it is the life of God in our hearts that inspires the courage to do the loving battle of witness and evangelism (dang, I sound downright Evangelical in that sentence).  Like Ignatius of Loyola and Francis of Assisi before him, warriors have a way of being converted into deep lovers of God and the peace that passes all understanding.

God is choosing us in this age to do what Oakerhater did, namely to

be a missionary to his own people.

We are smack dab in the middle of a mission field.  If you doubt that for a minute, just take a look at this webpage from the Pew Forum on Religion. Did you look? Yup that’s right the states of New England–Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Vermont occupy all but one of the bottom slots in the Poll (Alaska!).

If you feel like you’re fighting against the tide New Englanders it’s because you are! So then it seems to me that we don’t have much choice when it comes to being ‘On Mission’.  That’s where we is….

The second part of the prayer that ought to speak to us as well, as an express desire of our captive hearts, is this;

Liberate us, who commemorate him today, from bondage to self, and empower us for service to you and to the neighbors you have given us;

Apparently, according to this prayer, we are to view the neighbors around us, who don’t care much for religion, not as the enemy but as gifts.  More remarkably it says that we are to pray to be ‘empowered to serve’ them, not to beat them up or make them feel bad about their irrelgiosity.

This seems like tough work to me.

Dadgum!

Can’t we just choose something else to do?

It seems to me that the answer is a resounding and simple, NO. We cannot shrink from this task because it is too difficult for us. Because it is too difficult it would seem that the only choice available to us as ‘captive warriors’ is to join our efforts and hearts to the desires of God and the power of the Trinity to be faithful witnesses to God’s love and longing for each person in this disjointed and altogether too scary world.

At the end of the day, we have the ability and commission to say in the face of despair, disappointment and disillusionment that someone cares and that someone is Jesus. And that here, at this time, Jesus looks like this little community huddled around a nondescript table, sharing the simplest of meals in the unwavering hope that the Kingdom is among us and is dying to be born across the stage of the whole Creation (paraphrase Romans 8:19) by our simply being in this world.

May God make it so!