Pray Without Ceasing: This Lent and Beyond…

It is a commonplace to speak of Lent as a good time to focus on prayer. We say: “I’ll offer more prayers” during Lent, or maybe pick up something about it from the library or the Lenten resource table. Often, we leave it at that. We get our “dose” of prayer, then return to the world as we left it. Yet, is not something more needed?

The Lord’s expectation about his disciples is that we will “pray without ceasing.” In other words, the normative state and condition of the Christian life is to be in silent communion with God the Holy Trinity. Anything less than this is an aberration and a rejection of the Kingdom of God Christ offers. For Jesus, each moment was in communion with the will and love of the Father. We, as “little Christs” (the true meaning of Christian) are to become more and more like Jesus in this and all other regards.

If this standard seems too high, it is because our expectations and the form of Christian life to which we have become accustomed are too low. Many Christians from ancient times through today have come to a state of regular, if not continuous, communion with God. This is done by living out a rule of prayer, one with regular times for learning and focused attention (the Daily Office, in a simple or rich form as found in the Prayer Book, serving as anchor points of intentional prayer) while also developing the tools to grow in the steady, conscious presence of God hour-by-hour.

This latter form of prayer (variously described as recollection, mental prayer, meditatio, mindfulness, &c.) is usually based on some very simple recited phrase, such as the Jesus Prayer (“Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy”), the Trisagion (“Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy Immortal One, Have Mercy”), or a short verse of Scripture (often from the Psalms). Developed as a constant rhythm of mental concentration occupying each moment the mind is not otherwise engaged (and, over time, pervading even those occupied moments by the awareness of God’s presence), recollected prayer allows us to see the truth of our identity as beloved children of God and gives us the ability to serve as agents of God’s grace in the various interactions and choices found each day.

Lent is the season par excellence for developing our life of prayer, moving from the notion that prayer is a “luxury” or an “escape” from daily life to the experience of prayer as something closer to us than our own breath. This often starts with a re-orientation of our schedule by making morning and evening prayer time a priority, and by developing our skills in recollection of God through the day.

When I am asked about how I gauge the health of a parish, most people expect me to point to the budget, a busy church-calendar, the number of ministries, or Sunday attendance. While these all have their place, I have come to feel the single most important sign of spiritual health in a parish is the number of people who say the Daily Office in some form and who are developing deeply recollected lives of prayer. Parishioners who do this are open to the Holy Spirit’s promptings, exhibit Christ-like humility, are less anxious, practice generous stewardship of God’s gifts, are better able to see mission and evangelism opportunities, and are likely to sort out their own agendas from God’s will.

If you seek to know God better this Lent and beyond, start to pray without ceasing. The result will not make you “look” different or require you wear a monastic habit, but it will bring you to the balance, peace, and clarity God seeks for you and for the world.

The tools are at hand; let the adventure begin. With God, all things are possible!

A Collect for Continual Mindfulness of God’s Presence:

Heavenly Father, in you we live and move and have our being: We humbly pray you so to guide and govern us by your Holy Spirit, that in all the cares and occupations of our life we may not forget you, but may remember that we are ever walking in your sight; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

12th Night and the Meaning of Ritual

It is commonly acknowledged that we live in a “de-sacralized” culture; this means that little to nothing in our society is “sacred” or inherently holy or transcendent. As the character Reginald Bunthorn says in Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera Patience:

Patience, you don’t like poetry – well, between you and me, I don’t like poetry. It’s hollow, unsubstantial – unsatisfactory. What’s the use of yearning for Elysian Fields when you know you can’t get ’em, and would only let ’em out on building leases if you had ’em?

In our materialistic, transactionalized era it is very difficult to feel connected to anything bigger than the ego, the individual, the solipsistic “me.” This is particularly true when we look at the patterns of daily and annual life today, especially at Christmas. So much is made “real” by measurement: how much money was spent, how many miles driven, cards sent out, the number of calories consumed, &c. How many people today – within and without the Church – experience time as an immersion in the mystery of God’s creative and redemptive love? We consume events, discarding their empty husks with the weekly garbage collection. Preparing, savoring, steeping, mulling, contemplating are almost meaningless in our pre-packaged, pre-digested, disposable environment.

For those of us who have come to experience life through the lens of the Liturgical Year, though, things are quite different. We prepare and savor as part and parcel of daily and annual life; and, what we enter into is not the old pagan cycle of time repeating itself endlessly, leading nowhere. We are gradually re-shaped into pilgrims on a sacred journey, where each foot-fall and each rest-stop has deep potential and actual value. The hidden meaning of Creation, our true nature, and the presence of God hidden from view by our own blindness are all revealed in extraordinary, beautiful ways. For those whose calendar revolves around the Sun of the World rather than the Son of the Father, this seems little more than a fairy-tale. Yet, years ago I began to realize it was the secular account of Time and its meaning that was the fairy-tale, or (more precisely) the lie.

A case in point is 12th Night. For the world, Christmas is now over and it is the season to pay off bills and purchase plastic bins to hold more of the stuff accumulated during December. In the Church Calendar, though, these final hours of Christmastide have great meaning: the quiet and innerness of the Nativity in Bethlehem is about to undergo a great change. The hiddenness of God’s coming in Christ (like “rain on fleece,” to use a superb expression from St. Cyril of Jerusalem) was not the point of the Incarnation; it was a beautiful and necessary stage. However, the Christ-child is more than Mary’s son, more than the Shepherds’ delight. He is the Light of the Nations and Savior of the World. The Magi who are about to arrive, the Baptism Christ is about to undergo, and the miracle at Cana about to be worked are all testimonies to this fact about Christ – a fact no less true in our “multicultural” world of today than it was in the polyglot and polytheistic world of Pax Augustus.

Tomorrow we will celebrate this Manifestation of Christ to the world in sacrament, song, pageant, feasting and fireworks. Then, we will spend some time “unpacking” its meaning for the coming weeks. All the while, we will be connecting the particulars of our individual journeys into both the specific part of the Church Year and (through it) the Great Story of Salvation in Christ. Instead of looking out on a world emptied of meaning and content, we will steep in a rich stew of meaning, purpose, and context.

Tonight, “12th Night,” our family will sing and listen to Christmas carols one more time, a couple of favorite Christmas stories will be read, we will enjoy some final Christmastide treats (including some incredibly good eggnog) and lovingly pack away the Christmas ornaments, taking down the tree. New greens for the season leading to Candlemas will be put up; Epiphany decorations will be put out, and Epiphany music played tomorrow. Another joyous step in our own transformation will have been experienced, and new gifts given and received. Instead of a bleak January, we begin a new season of sacred meaning and purpose, conveyed to us by the rituals and patterns we have inherited from those before us. It is testimony once again of the value of the sacred tradition over which we are set as stewards. It is something at once so fragile and so strong… much like the Christ-child Himself… that calls us to live lives of faithful discipleship in a de-sacralized world. For us, a star shines in the night; a light burns fiercely, guiding the way into Truth.

Too Close to Christ

Yesterday was the (transferred) feast of the Holy Innocents. This day commemorates the massacre of the young boys in Bethlehem recorded in the Gospel according to Matthew (2: 16-18). A recent National Geographic article noted that there is no “independent” source authenticating this event, and discounted the possibility of it ever happening. The article was something of a “rehabilitation piece” for king Herod, lauding him for his achievements in statecraft and architectural splendor. Yet, the character of his life and what we know him to have done as part of his quest to maintain and expand his power is quite harmonious with the hideous act of violence recorded in the Gospel.

The Innocents were just that. They were children too young to know Christ, too young to know sin, too young to fight back. They were victims who looked enough like Christ to be killed. They ushered in a new era: the era of Christian martyrdom. Even though they did not consciously die as martyrs, they have been accorded this honor by the Church from very early on.

We hear much about the suffering inflicted on people in the name of religion, and it is surely a sad history. Yet, how much more suffering has been inflicted on innocent people in the name of power: state power, the power of personalities, the power of institutions (including religious), systems, and ideologies? Our Lord came to expose the futility and hopelessness at the core of this naked obsession with power. His Incarnation in Bethlehem as a result of an Emperor’s decree, his status as a refugee, and his ultimate suffering at the hands of the earthly power structures (both civil and religious, note) are a testimony to what at heart is wrong with the world “as it is.”

True power comes from God, and thus comes from the Love of the Holy Trinity – not the viciousness of fearful human actors. Only those who live in communion with this Love can live rightly with power, for they know the source and purpose of power. This understanding of power is at the core of the Gospel.

The Holy Innocents were but the first victims in this conflict between earthly power and the Gospel. The world, with its obsession… indeed, addiction… to power, sensed a threat and sought to extinguish this threat from the first moments. The Innocents remind all who would follow Christ that merely being like Christ is enough to earn the hatred of the World. As with the National Geographic article, the World remains enthralled by palaces, pleasures, and power. God has decreed that it is love and mercy that matter, though.

In the midst of our Christmas celebrations we must not forget this basic point of conflict; the battle is ultimately won by God on the Cross, but the Holy Innocents, too, are part of that might struggle. Let us not forget them or the many innocents who suffer to this day because the bear a resemblance to the Truth from Above in their vulnerability, fragility, purity, or gentleness. How much more blessed by God it is to be an innocent than one whose addiction to power has twisted us into the character of a Herod, whose achievements merit no memorial other than crumbling citadels and horrid memories!

We remember this day, O God, the slaughter of the holy innocents of Bethlehem by the order of King Herod. Receive, we beseech thee, into the arms of thy mercy all innocent victims; and by thy great might frustrate the designs of evil tyrants and establish thy rule of justice, love, and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

O almighty God, who out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast ordained strength, and madest infants to glorify thee by their deaths: Mortify and kill all vices in us, and so strengthen us by thy grace, that by the innocency of our lives, and constancy of our faith even unto death, we may glorify thy holy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

A Prayer and a Plan for Our Nation

Almighty God, who hast given us this good land for our
heritage: We humbly beseech thee that we may always prove
ourselves a people mindful of thy favor and glad to do thy will.
Bless our land with honorable industry, sound learning, and
pure manners. Save us from violence, discord, and confusion;
from pride and arrogance, and from every evil way. Defend
our liberties, and fashion into one united people the multitudes
brought hither out of many kindreds and tongues. Endue
with the spirit of wisdom those to whom in thy Name we entrust
the authority of government, that there may be justice and
peace at home, and that, through obedience to thy law, we
may show forth thy praise among the nations of the earth.
In the time of prosperity, fill our hearts with thankfulness,
and in the day of trouble, suffer not our trust in thee to fail;
all which we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

"A Prayer for our Country," BCP p. 820

On the day after our national elections, I offered special prayers and thanksgivings at Morning Prayer, and was drawn to offer the above prayer at the end of the service. This is an old prayer, using old language -- and yet, it is oddly modern and to-the-point today. The election we have just concluded was largely a referendum on what sort of a Union we think we should be. The "Prayer for our Country" reminds us that what many people have said they want to see in a new chapter of American life and history is in many ways simply the living out of the ideals that have always been with us as a nation... but have over recent decades been allowed to atrophy in an atmosphere of toxic partisanship, consumeristic greed, imperialistic swagger, and rampant, selfish individualism. It is this "anti-culture," this diminished view of our ideals that many have said must change.

The Prayer for our Country is not a partisan prayer; neither are the ideals it sets forth. It begins with an admission that we have been given a good land for our heritage. That land comes with a complicated history, one with many sorrows and wrongs, and well as glories and rights. Our awareness of both the great gift we have been given and the history that comes with it requires from us what the prayer states: humility. We are bidden to ask God in our humility to make us a people mindful of the Divine favor and always glad -- not ashamed or grudging or out of obligation, but glad -- to do God's will. 

And what is that will for our nation? The prayer illustrates it, first by positive examples: Honorable industry, sound learning, and pure manners. This is not a choice between personal or societal morality: it is a requirement that we as individuals and as a nation be about both. Then, the prayer tells us what we must not allow: violence, discord, confusion, pride, arrogance, and "every evil way." Ours must be a nation of reasoned, reflective, and respectful governance and discourse -- personally and societally. 

Beyond this, the prayer calls upon God to defend the liberties we enjoy. This, too, is a call for the members of our society to take the very fact of liberty seriously, and not to erode it through fear, partisanship, ideology, or any mistaken form patriotism. In times of crisis, this is of particular concern.

Then, we ask God to make the ideal of E pluribus unum a reality, re-affirming the delicate balance between the variety of peoples and unity of a People in ways not unlike the doctrine of the Holy Trinity affirms both God's unity and triplicity at once. What this calls upon each of us to sacrifice is something we would do well to ponder, especially in an era of instant communication and winner-takes-all thinking.

The prayer continues by calling upon God to give us that spirit of wisdom which alone will allow us to transcend our own smallness, asking that spirit be given to our elected leaders, to whom a democratic nation must entrust its governance. But the leadership of our nation has that power only, as the prayer reminds us, so that all may have justice, peace, and the capacity (by being obedient to the precepts God has laid down for humanity) to show forth God's praise to all the nations of the earth. In an extraordinary way, our nation -- though not an officially Christian nation -- is called upon by this prayer to be an evangelical nation. We are to show forth God's praise by embodying God's will for humanity in justice and peace. Again, this is not about partisanship, but about the deepest meaning of patriotism... a concern with the true "fatherland" of the Father, the Kingdom of God which is already among us wherever Christians preach, teach, and live out the Gospel.

The prayer concludes with a form of warning: in times of prosperity we must be thankful rather than complacent or arrogant (that is one of the key issues behind this election, it seems), and "in the day of trouble," our confidence in God must not be allowed to falter. Thus, the prayer ends by asking us the question: are we willing as Christians to make our commitment to our shared civil society part of our discipleship, or are we content to let our nation's shared life reflect only our passions and anxieties?

In earlier Prayer Books, the prayers for the State and Civil Authority were much more in evidence than in the current book. In the aftermath of Vietnam, the 1960's, the Civil Rights movement's early struggles and first victories, Watergate, and a general trend to denigrate Government, we have tended to treat the Ship of State as either a kind of show-boat for ideology or a garbage-scow to be used and abused by whomever is in office at the time. It is neither. It is a vessel on which all of us depend. It demands our prayerful attention and our effective stewardship. All the prayers for our national life in the Book of Common Prayer deserve new attention, as does the repair of our civil society in this new day for America. As Christians, we must begin in prayer, where we will, I believe, find out there is a plan -- not a Democratic or a Republican plan, but a Divine Plan. That plan is based on an enduring belief that, as one of the two mottos on the National Seal states: Annuit coeptis: "He [God] approves our undertakings," when we accept our duty to each other and to our nation with the solemnity and high purpose found in this prayer.

The Weapon of Words about God

O that ye would altogether hold your peace! and it should be your wisdom.

During the last week, we have been making our way through the Book of Job chapter by chapter (with some edits, sadly, in order that we might expedite matters). After the rather surprising opening where God and The Accuser (Satan) converse and a challenge is laid down over the righteous man Job, we enter into the heart of the book: the complex debate over why evil happens and what the human is to do in the face of suffering.

We have heard Job’s opening lament. We have listened to his friends begin their first round of questioning of Job; their at first rather round-about accusations of Job. Surely, he must have sinned against God and is now paying the penalty. Job refuses to acquiesce. He knows, as does the reader, that his sufferings are not a quid-pro-quo; he did not commit a wrong that must be requited. He is righteous, and yet he suffers. One by one, the theological rationales of Job’s day – and, to a great degree, ours – are trotted out. They all seem to boil down to much the same thing: someone sinned and punishment is being meted out. But, we know this is not the case here. We reach, with Job, a great theological dead end.

But the way forward is clear: Job refuses to deny God. He continues to supplicate the God whose protection and blessing has seemed to fail. He comes before God with a complaint, seeking for God to justify His actions. He is preparing to offer one of the great high-points in the book and in the Old Testament generally: the lament in chapter 14, which contains elements looking forward to the Gospel itself. This, in turn, will result in the heat being turned up on Job by his “comforters,” whose only response to the failure of their arguments and theology is to abuse Job and to press their positions even harder. “The experiment must continue,” they almost say.

And this brings me to the verse from chapter 13 I opened with. In it, Job rails against his comforters-now-tormenters for their waterfall of words that leads only to more misery. Their silence would be a far better argument! But, having begun to speak and claim a knowledge of God that is inferred rather than revealed, they can only pick up speed and infer more and more… eventually needing to crush the suffering victim in order to bring to perfection the beautiful architecture of their theories.

One of the great insights of this book of Scripture is that theology is a realm which requires great humility if it is to be life-giving. Without this humility, words and thoughts about God easily become weapons. In our arrogance and smugness we can use them simply as ways of comforting ourselves by hurting, controlling, crushing, or imprisoning others in our own ignorance and fear. We can even call this spiritual violence “good” because we do it for God. But it remains violence, and it remains little more convincing as an argument than whistling in the graveyard.

The Christian must renounce all forms of arrogance and adopt the way of the Cross as the only way to the Kingdom. This includes the use of theology divorced from the humility of Christ. The theology of Job’s “friends” is deeply flawed precisely because it is no longer really about God at all, but about human fears, power, and rationalization. While Job’s insistence on his own righteousness will ultimately be shown to be an error, his refusal to accept any substitute – no matter how lofty – for the Living God will ultimately be rewarded. And it must be so with us; we, too, must accept nothing less if we are not to become the enemies of the very God we claim to serve.

A Sermon for Last Sunday

Sermon for Proper 15, Year A

From Matthew 15:28
"Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish."

“What you see is what you get.” This phrase is often used to describe something we are about to purchase; a kind of warning that what is seen is all there is; there isn’t any more. Or, the phrase may indicate that what is seen on a computer screen is exactly like the thing that will be printed out or as it will appear on a web site.

However, WYSIWYG has another at least one other meaning: what you think you are going to see, what you have become conditioned to see, is often what you WILL see, and what you WILL get.

I have a friend who is red/green colorblind. Last year, we were out camping and went for a hike on a sunny day in a glorious coastal forest. We came upon a red huckleberry bush, laden with bright read fruit. Both of us are avid berry-eaters. I pointed to the bush and said: “wow, that’s rare – a red huckleberry bush covered in berries.” My friend responded: what berries? I can’t see any.” Of course, to him it was a kind of grayish plant with all sorts of leaves – some pointed, and some round. Because I can distinguish between red and green, I could tell that the pointed leaves where really leaves, and the round ones were actually succulent, sweet-tart red hucks.

Like colorblindness, some people, I think, simply don’t have the right equipment to apprehend spiritual realities. For whatever reason, they simply can’t pick out things that aren’t concrete or physical. Some such people actually are members of the Church: they are attracted to something else about the Gospel, or Christ, or the worship, teachings, practice, or history of the Church.

Unlike colorblindness, which is a genetic condition, we can acquire spiritual blindness by how we have been formed, or by the choices we make. In the Old Testament Lesson today, Joseph’s brothers were blinded by the years of separation and by Joseph’s changed condition; they were also blinded by the sin that had led to them to consider killing Joseph, and then settling for selling him into slavery. This is the blindness of human sin; but Joseph’s words show that God’s purposes are so deep, and his love so vast, that even human sinfulness cannot overcome it. Joseph’s brothers’ blindness was ultimately used by God to bring about for them, their father, their families, and all the peoples of Egypt.

But there is another kind of spiritual blindness, even more entrenched than this; for, indeed, Joseph’s brothers repented for their earlier sin and overcame its effects by God’s grace. This other form of spiritual blindness is based on the belief that we know better than God. Spiritual blindness is most terrible when it produces smugness, arrogance, and self-certainty.

This is what Jesus condemns in the first part of today’s Gospel reading. It is not what we eat with the mouth, but what proceeds from out of our mouths, that defiles us. It is a supreme act of spiritual folly and blindness to think that we can justify ourselves by a code of purity. What God wants is not our religiosity, our capability to blindly follow rules, but a living faith, willing to contend, to risk, to grow, to engage a Living God.

The second part of today’s Gospel lesson is disturbing to many. Jesus seems to be cruel to this Canaanite woman. Yet, St. Matthew is carefully making a point. The pious, officially “religious” people in the previous verses reject Jesus because he rejects the automatic, almost vending-machine way of relating to God through outward observance. St. Matthew then places a story about a foreign woman (a doubly-difficult position in the culture of her day) who actually contends with Jesus as she seeks the healing of her daughter.

The Canaanite woman verbally wrestles with Jesus, not unlike Jacob wrestling with the Angel. In the end, she prevails and comes away with the blessing she sought. Jesus’ actions show that is precisely this sort of living, open-eyed and engaged faith – not the mechanical and ritualized faith of the Pharisees – that His God and Father wants.

And so we are bidden to ask ourselves a question today: what form of spiritual blindness do we suffer? Has a form of sinfulness, anger, or envy blinded us to the value and purpose of others in our life? Or, have we become complacent in our faith, looking at God as a sort of spiritual vending-machine fulfilling all our wants and needs because that’s His job?

In any case, the way we have come to see God, the expectations we bring, will help determine what we see when we raise our eyes at Communion this day: just some flat bread and some sweet wine with perhaps a little history and a good deal of sentiment attached, or the real presence of Christ Jesus, inviting us to contend with Him, so that we may join her in hearing the words said to her: “Great is your faith; let it be done for you as you wish.”

What you see is what you get. What do you see today?

Job's Lament

After this Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth. Job said: 
‘Let the day perish on which I was born,
and the night that said,
“A man-child is conceived.”

How I would be lying down and quiet;
I would be asleep; then I would be at rest. There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary are at rest. 
There the prisoners are at ease together;
they do not hear the voice of the taskmaster. 
The small and the great are there,
and the slaves are free from their masters.

Why is light given to one who cannot see the way, whom God has fenced in?

These verses from Chapter 3 of Job form part of what is one of the greatest laments in Scripture. Challenged to “curse God and die” by his wife, Job determines rather to curse the day of his birth, his coming into conscious, sentient existence instead. Though not a cursing of God, this is obliquely a condemnation of God’s allowing for an entrance into the suffering and pain of life.

This chapter might be titled “The Lament for Humanity in the World as it has Come to Be.” It is a stark assessment of a world ruled by death, a world where suffering and want seem to be everywhere, and where power is substituted for truth in human relations. Job’s lament is an implicit critique of this earthly order; an order which God seems to do nothing to stop.

Out of the silence Job and his friends have known for seven days there breaks forth a keening and burning threnody of existential honesty. Which of us remembers agreeing to enter into this life? Who can say that they have never wondered why we came into being, especially as we see the suffering of innocents whose only apparent fault was being born into a particular time and place? Job’s song of regret brings up images of human agony covering the field: from the tragedy of a stillborn child to the cruelty of human politics and power. He laments the fact of such a world and his participation in it. He gives voice to what so many of us are afraid to say because the watered-down, unreal, and exterior faith we practice is unequal to the challenge. But the Hebrews were not so squeamish; they were willing to bring all of the heart’s offerings to the altar of God. Perhaps this is why so many of us today find some of the Psalms a great challenge. Like this lament, the Psalms can speak with an honesty and a directness we dare not.

Yet, we cannot proceed into the heart of this book – or the heart of the Christian faith – if we are willing only to stay on the surface, or in the comforts of a faith too shallow to accommodate the depth of our own life and experience. Job points the way into the mystery of God and humanity by first giving voice to what we often feel but cannot say. Perhaps it is the tension between our mind’s capability to wander amongst the stars yet to be so fragile that a single broken blood vessel in our body can bring our death. Or, it could be the inherent unfairness of the world into which we were born, the wrong of the suffering we see inflicted by humans or by fate. We can ignore it all if we choose, but in order to be fully human, we must respond. It may begin with recoiling in revulsion or anger; but it must proceed past that. This is the invitation of the Book of Job. The lament we read today is the necessary first step, the clearing of the throat in a tense room, the opening chords in a long song. We must have the courage to listen and to accept where Job’s words are our words; without doing so, we will never have the courage to journey on in this most challenging book to its profound, life-changing conclusions.