If I could pray to Saint Martin…Sunday Petition

St. Martin,

How do we preach and give witness to the gospel today?

(Martin)

Good question brother Anthony.  A simple but complex answer would be needed.  But since this is a prayer session I am hoping there are those out there joing in that will have ears to hear.  The preaching of the gospel and giving witness are essentially the same powerful performance.  As we all learned in Sunday School:  the gospel is the power of God unto salvation.

It is the power of God to deliver slaves from Egypt and it is the power of God to deliver a first century Palestinian peasant from the political-economic death grip of the Roman Empire. 

To preach the gospel faithfully in our generation we must recapture the radical subversive message of the Nazarene and his disciples.

The gospel is the proclamation that the kingdom of God has come, is come, and will come.  It is here but not yet.  Our preaching of the gospel must re-focus on the here without neglecting the not yet.  For it is the not yet that informs our here.  I’d suggest that Christians in the West revisit the Hebrew prophets and move beyond the individualizing and gnostic tendencies when they think gospel.

When the gospel is preached the oppressed are liberated…not just in their ‘hearts’ but in their body-politic.

Anything less is to deny the resurrection of the Son of God and the pouring out of the Holy Ghost!