As the van rolled down the interstate, Kitty Wells' hillbilly alto rattled the radio speakers; "When you're lookin' at me," she belted out, "you're lookin' at country." In the van were ten of us, all seminary seniors, heading away from our rural South Carolina campus toward the big city of Atlanta, and Kitty Wells had it right: If you were looking at us, you were looking at country.

It was not that we urbanly-challenged folk actually wanted to go to the city; the faculty was forcing us to do so. Terrified that our education in the outlands was forming us into unsophisticated rustics, our professors wanted us to spend a month in the city, grabbing the high-tension wires of urban life. So, we were uprooted from the comforts of home and land and family, dislodged from the pleasures of long, lazy, bucolic afternoons and thrust into the noise and strife of a million strangers where we were, like it or not, to take a crash course called "Urban Ministry."

It did not take long for our worst fears to be confirmed. "Urban Ministry" turned out to be a continuous stream of being shouted at by shopkeepers, rudely scurried off the streets by hostile city drivers, and generally hassled by the urban crush. After only a few days of this, we were, frankly, ready to go back to provincial "Galilee," so much so that we petitioned our professors to allow us to go home. The petition was flatly denied. "We brought you to the city for an experience," they replied, "and you're not leaving until you've had it."

Brought to the city for an experience and forbidden to leave until we'd had it. Since that faculty fiat, I have always had great sympathy for the disciples as they are described in the Gospel of Luke. Luke's picture of them is different from the other gospels. In Luke, the emphasis falls upon the disciples' connection to the city. By contrast, in Mark, part of the good news of the resurrection is that the disciples are told to go back home to Galilee. The women discover the empty tomb, and the angel says, "He has been raised. He is not here. Tell his disciples to meet him in Galilee." Matthew is even better. Jesus himself appears to the women with the comforting call to return to Galilee, "Do not be afraid. Tell my disciples they will see me in Galilee." In regard to Mark and Matthew, as Kitty Wells would have put it in her tremolo twang, "If you're looking for Jesus, you'll look in the country."

But not Luke. "Stay in the city," says the risen Christ, "until you are clothed with power." It is clear that, in Luke, the disciples are not going to be allowed the rural pleasures, but are in for a course in "Urban Ministry." Jesus, who "set his face to go to Jerusalem," now tells his disciples "I brought you to this city for an experience, and you're not leaving until you've had it."

Now, New Testament scholars have made it clear that we are not just talking about geography here, but also theology. For Matthew and Mark, Galilee is, well, the actual Galilee, but a metaphor for something more as well: the place of beginnings. And for Luke, the city is the real city, the Jerusalem of streets and smells and strangers, but it is also a theological symbol.

For Luke, the city is the place the earliest church waited for Pentecost or, to put it more dynamically, it is the place where the church always waits for the Spirit. For Luke, the city is not initially a place where the church flexes its muscle and performs ministry, it is first and foremost the place where the church waits without power to receive its ministry, or, rather, to receive what it cannot produce on its own: the strength and ability to do ministry in the first place. Jesus was tempted in the wilderness, in the bleak and lonely countryside, at the "end of the earth" so to speak, and then, in the power of the Spirit he entered the city to perform his great work of redemption. Now the church, in his name, must be tested in the city, so that in the power of the Spirit, it may continue Jesus' work of redemption to the ends of the earth.

For Luke, the city is, of course, Jerusalem, but it is also every place where Christians keep their eyes open to learn the ways of God in the world, where they discern their identity before asserting it, where they experience the world God loves before trying to transform it, where they learn that God does not empower the church before it is ready for power, God's power. The city is the place where disciples must prepare for the cause of Christ before championing it. The city is not just Jerusalem but Chicago and Atlanta, Middletown and Moscow, Seoul and Sandusky, Nairobi and New York. As a symbol, the "city" can be any place, but Luke knew that it sometimes happens best in the real city.

What is it that the church can see and experience as it waits in the city? For one thing, the church can learn how to pray for justice. In Luke, and only in Luke, Jesus once told his disciples an urban story that turned out to be a lesson about the power of prayer (Luke 18:1-8). According too the story, there was in the city a judge who neither feared God nor respected humanity. He didn't go to church, and he refused to give to the United Way. But there was also a widow in this city who kept knocking on his chamber door and demanding justice. The judge could not care less. Despite the widow's constant lament, he refused to budge, kept the door locked, said he didn't need her vote. But she continued to demand justice until, finally, exhausted by her ceaseless appeal, the judge slapped his forehead and cried, "I'm not a religious man and I'm not a humanitarian either, but this woman is wearing me out. I've got to give her some justice."

Now that is definitely a city story, full of the clamor and conflict of the metropolis. In fact, the meditative monk Thomas Merton would probably have said that this is a typical city story involving recognizable city types like a godless judge and a strident and noisy citizen. The city, according to Merton, was a dramatic symbol of the world without God. Its "ceaseless motion of ... angry people in a ... swirl of frustration," he thought, prevents people from contemplating and, by nature, cuts them off from any real relation to God.1

To this, the Jesus of the Gospel of Luke would have responded, "I love you Thomas Merton, but you listen to that city story and you will discover much about prayer. If you really want to learn to pray you need to listen not only to the meditations in the monastery and the language of quiet contemplation but also to the noisy cries for justice in the city streets. God grants justice to those who noisily cry out day and night."

It is no mistake, then, that Jesus told a city story to make a point about prayer. If one listens to the rhythms and cries of the city, beneath the cacophony one can hear prayer, for at the base of every authentic prayer is a plea for justice -- a hunger for God to set things right. Not only that, but Jesus also knew that capacity of even the godless city to supply, here and there, moments of justice, like a widow's plea finally heard by a begrudging judge, is a sign of answered prayer, a sign of God's Spirit moving in the world to set things right.

No wonder the disciples are told, "Stay in the city until you receive power." If they keep their eyes open, they will learn about prayer and justice.

One cool September night at Yankee Stadium in New York, a foul ball was hit into the lower left field stands. It was heading right toward a boy of about nine who had obviously come to the game that night hoping for just such a moment. He had a pair of cheap binoculars around his neck and was wearing an oversized Yankees cap and a small Little League glove which had the hardly-broken-in look of a mitt worn by a kid you let play right field in the late innings of hopeless games.

The foul ball was arching directly toward this boy's outstretched hand, but suddenly, a man of about 35 wearing an expensive knit shirt and horn-rimmed glasses reached over the boy, jostling him aside, and caught the ball. In the jostle, the plastic binoculars were broken, and the boy, despite his mother's comfort, was clearly crushed. Everybody in the left field stands had seen this, and, after a second or two of stunned silence, someone shouted, "Give the kid the ball!" Then another cried, "Give the kid the ball!" A couple of rows joined in unison, "Give the kid the ball!"

Horn Rims shook his head and put the ball in his pocket. That inflamed the whole left field crowd, and with one voice they took up the chant, "Give the kid the ball!" It spread to the center field stands, then to right field, until the whole outfield, including people who did not even know the story, were shouting, "Give the kid the ball!" Players began to glance up from the field to the stands to see what was going on.

Horn Rims remained stubbornly firm. Finally, a man got up out of his seat, walked over to Horn Rims and spoke some words patiently and gently to him. Horn Rims hesitated, then reached into his pocket and handed the ball to the kid. "He gave the kid the ball!" someone exclaimed. Then the whole stands thundered, "He gave the kid the ball!" Applause rippled around the stadium.

Then an even more strange thing began to happen. When another foul ball landed in the left field stands, the man who caught it walked over to Horn Rims and gave it to him. Horn Rims, incredulously, thanked him and took it. The next foul ball was caught by a man in a muscle shirt who was sporting a Fu Manchu mustache. He turned and tossed the ball to the kid, who, to everyone's delight and surprise, caught it. More enthusiastic applause from the crowd, who had come that night to see a baseball game but witnessed instead a city parable about justice and grace.2 Stay in the city until you receive power.

The city is a parable not only for prayer; it is also a parable of human community. It is in the city that we learn best that everyone is not just like we are. Indeed, it was in the city that the disciples learned that the community of Jesus Christ is broader than we have imagined. It was in a city called Nain that they learned that the kingdom embraced widows and prostitutes. The man whose name was "Legion" was from a city, and Luke and Matthew both tell the Parable of the Great Banquet, where those who were invited made excuses, and so the host sent the servants out to bring in enough guests for the banquet. Only in Luke, though, are we specifically told that this is a city story about urban people: "Go out into the streets and lanes of the city and bring in the poor and the maimed, the blind and the lame" (Luke 14:15-24).

Parker Palmer has remarked that the church speaks often about "community," but it is often an idealized community. We talk about the "church family" or kononia groups, but what we really mean to describe is a group of people just like us. Such images of community are, thus, idolatrous. That is why the real city -- not the make-believe city -- is the place where the church can best learn about the kingdom community. Palmer offers this definition of community: "Community is that place where the person you least want to live with always lives. And when that person moves away, someone else arises to take his or her place."3

In this sense, then, every place where the church is planted is, in its own way, a "city." There is no village so small, no place so isolated, that there is not at least some taste of the richness, the challenge, and, quite frankly, the grating difficulty, of human differences. It is there in the wild diversity of the "city" -- wherever it may be found -- that the church gains true power, the power that is like Jesus' power, the power that does not protect itself from the stranger, does not seize things from the neighbor, but which lives for the neighbor and welcomes the stranger.

There is a neighborhood grocery store in our fairly affluent town that is visited each morning by the same clearly non-affluent person. We will call her "Ruth," and she is a street person. She enters the grocery about 11 a.m. every day and makes her way through the aisles. There is no polite way to describe what she does: Ruth steals food. Each morning she gathers enough for her lunch, poking pieces of fruit, loaves of bread, wedges of cheese, or a can of meat under her torn and stained coat. She then glides out the door. But she is not very subtle about it. Everyone at the store can see what she does. The stockroom crew know she is taking food; the butcher sees her activity; the checkout clerks are aware of her pilfering; the manager knows what she is about.

Not long ago, this grocery moved several blocks away to a larger building. The week they moved to the new location, the store manager telephoned a downtown pastor. "I don't want to embarrass Ruth," he began, "so would you please find her and tell her where we've moved. I want to be sure she can find us."

There in the city is a parable of mercy. An urban grocery store owner wants to be sure a homeless woman, a woman very much unlike the owner, can nonetheless find food, and for disciples with discerning eyes, there is much to learn here about the power of God in the world. "Stay in the city with your eyes open to the grace of God," the disciples are told, "and you will receive power."

So the church waited in the city, and when it was gathered in one place on Pentecost Day, they did indeed receive power. According to the story, Parthians and Medes, Cretans and Arabs, visitors from Rome, street people and welfare mothers, and kids with Little League gloves all heard the gospel in their own language. And with a power they never imagined, the power of the Spirit of God, they walked boldly into the future proclaiming the grace of Jesus Christ. 1. See the discussion of Merton's anti-city views in Harvey Cox, The Seduction Of The Spirit (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), p. 68. 2. "Metropolitan Diary," The New York Times, June 20, 1984. 3. Parker J. Palmer, The Company Of Strangers (New York: Crossroad, 1981), pp. 124-125.