You may have heard about the "Slow Food" movement, which started in Italy as a protest against fast food. In the slow food movement, people celebrate the simple acts of cooking and eating in long, lingering ways.  There is also a "Slow Church" movement, which asks Christians to move away from worrying about bringing in the latest entertainments and technologies to churches simply in order to get more "numbers" of people, but instead asks people to focus on what it means to be disciples of Jesus to each other in even the most mundane parts of life, and to celebrate that everdayness of Christianity.

 

Our parish theme this year asks us to focus on this kind of slow, maybe sometimes mundane, movement of discipleship. Sometimes our encounters with Jesus are ecstatic wonderments, but sometimes (maybe most of the time?) our encounters with Jesus in the everyday are far less obvious, to the point that it can be difficult to see Him.

 

Our scriptures today point to this kind of slow, everyday, mundane faith.

 

In Philippians 1:1-11, Paul begins his letter with a general greeting and a statement of joy that their church exists. But the highlight of the passage, to me, is when he says that he has every confidence "that the one who began a good work in you will continue to complete it." Paul does not think God's work is done, and his specific words do not even specifically indicate that God's good work in the Philippians is noticeable NOW. But he does believe, with all his faith, that God will keep working a good work.

 

This is a "slow everyday encounter" with Jesus" at work. Sometimes it is hard to see any movement or change in a person's spiritual life - even in my own! Sometimes I feel like I pray and pray for some kind of change of heart in me and it is hard to see that God is at work. I think, too, about St. Monica and how hard she prayed for St. Augustine's conversion. And Augustine's conversion was not overnight - he took many small steps in the direction of Christianity before he converted. Paul's letter here calls us to have great faith in the fact that God will - WILL - complete the work he has begun in us.

 

The gospel reading (Luke 14:1-6) describes one of many places where Jesus asks a question about what it means to keep the Sabbath. Among some Jews of his day, healing a person on the Sabbath was against the law - but Jesus means to ask the crowd a few difficult questions about whether they wouldn't, in fact, heal their own children on the Sabbath if there were an emergency?

 

But here is a "slow everyday encounter" once again - for what I am most struck by is the fact that no one has an answer for Jesus. It is like they are struck dumb, even though they've been watching and waiting for Jesus to do something crazy and blasphemous like this. I'd like to think - in faith - that this crowd observing Jesus is maybe being slowly converted, slowly coming to realize who Jesus is and what the point of the Sabbath is.

 

In this year of Encountering Christ Everyday, let us be reminded of the Slow Life, and hold fast to the same conviction that Paul has, which is that God is continuing a good work in us, each and every day.

 

- Jana M. Bennett