Programmatically invoking gradle

Without getting into too much irrelevant detail. I'm creating a run configuration that I want to programmatically invoke a gradle task.

From the documentation http://confluence.jetbrains.com/display/IDEADEV/Run+Configurations I see a reference to  ProgramRunnerUtil.executeConfiguration, but I don't know what the run configuration is supposed to look like.

Can someone give me a push in the right direction? Example code or a more detailed explanation on how to achieve this?