Busy. Busy. Busy. We’re all so busy… being busy… planning and doing, getting and keeping, fussing and fixing. Our busy selves tell us that if God wanted us to have time for him, he would have made 48-hour days and 14-day weeks. But chances are we’d still fill up the extra time with more and more busy-work. And that doesn’t mean we’re a bunch of over-worked Martha’s…single-handedly struggling to serve a house full of family and friends. In fact, I suspect that some of the busiest people we know are busy plugging away at their TV remotes and their IPods…only stirring from the couch to go to bed, to the bathroom or the refrigerator.

My mother-in-law is one of my heroes. For thirty years she has been the principle care-giver for my brother-in-law John, who has quadriplegic cerebral palsy. That means thirty years of therapy and specialists, thirty years of lifting and shifting, thirty years of wiping butts and blowing noses, thirty years of bathing and shaving, thirty years of struggle and heartbreak … but most of all… thirty years of love. And that’s not just giving love. As she tells it, Good Samaritans spring up all the time from so many unexpected places. She is constantly surprised by love.

In this week’s gospel, Jesus treats his disciples to a harsh dose of reality.  Jesus is telling us that to be an open, active Christian means to be set among wolves. They have vicious teeth and claws, but we are armed with the grace of all-mighty God. It’s as true now as it was then. And the perils are not limited to the media reports of mass-martyrdom in the Middle East. In America today, routinely Christians now suffer the mini-martyrdom of the slight, the smear, the mocking smirk. Increasingly our culture tells us that it’s just not cool to be Christian.

If you ever needed convincing that Christ’s love is not just syrupy sentiment, this gospel gives you more than enough proof. On his journey to the cross, Christ is demanding of himself and demanding of us. He’s very clear about what he expects from us: Following him… being a Christian… is not just something we fit into our schedule. It is our schedule. Loving him is not an aspect of our life. It is our life.

As miracles go, casting out demons is probably my least favorite. The blind seeing, the deaf hearing, the lame walking: they are all familiar, even conceptually comfortable, miracles. Raising the dead, while obviously a much higher order of miracle, is still relatively easy to visualize. Conceivably a faith healer could cure psychosomatically induced blindness or deafness. But death is a completely different matter. Only the author of life can command death. Jesus uses his power over life and death to proclaim his divinity and foretell his Resurrection and ours. But what’s all this exorcism business about?

I can remember as a kid what a great comfort it was to live on the same street as a legendary neighborhood ne’er-do-well. Whatever my transgressions, they always paled in comparison to the misadventures of that wild kid down the block. And this convenient reference point always made it much easier to inflate my self-worth and go on to claim at least partial immunity for my own comparatively minor misdemeanors. Over the years, most of us have retained and even improved on this sort of self-serving, peripheral vision.

This week we are back into the bread and butter basics of the gospel. We have celebrated the Resurrection and its aftermath. The Ascension, Pentecost and Trinity Sunday are receding in the rear-view mirror. With this week’s gospel, we return to the familiar round of Christ’s sermons, parables and miracles. And therein lies both an opportunity and a danger.

Jesus may really have gone too far this time. He’s been reaching out to tax collectors, prostitutes, lepers, even Samaritans. But in this week’s gospel, it looks like Christ is stretching the limits of tolerance… well beyond the breaking point. At the urging of the elders, he responds to an urgent call for help from one of his country’s hated occupiers… a Roman centurion.

Like their view of the world, the art of the Middle Ages was flat. The Bayeux Tapestry, the windows of Notre Dame, the early Giotto’s… they are lovely. But they are flat. Their renderings have height and width, but they lack depth. The Medieval mind’s eye could not convey to the hand the three dimensional reality of the world around it. With the Renaissance came the rediscovery of classical perspective. And the beauty of Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael exploded.

This week our Easter joy climaxes in the glory of the Ascension and the triumph of Pentecost. The risen Christ has returned to the Father. But we are not abandoned. We are empowered. We are commissioned. We are inspired. And the church of Christ is born… all by the power of the Holy Spirit.