Sermon Sunday 6 December 2015
Lessons Malachi 3: 1 – 4 Philippians 1: 3 – 11 St Luke 3: 1 – 6
Prayer of Illumination
Let us pray.
May we be present to Your Presence, sensitive to Your Spirit’s desires, and inspired by visions and dreams. May we encounter You in all our meditations. In Jesus’ Name, we pray. Amen.
A strange, harsh man, awkward, coarse, with a sharp, bitter tongue, cast in the mould of an Old Testament prophet, John the Baptiser, the son of a priest, stood in the wilderness, a lone figure. We are told that in the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when
Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea and Herod was ruler or tetrarch of Galilee, the word of God came to John. Clothed with camel’s hair and a leather belt round his waist, John went throughout the region of the Jordan preaching a message of repentance and promising the forgiveness of sins.
In painting their portrait of the Baptiser, the evangelists, Mark,
Matthew and Luke, draw from the prophecies of Isaiah and Malachi.
John is a messenger, one who cries out in the wilderness, who
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prepares the way, clears the decks, for One who is greater, for One who will baptise with the Holy Spirit and fire. The imagery in the
Bible, including the Gospels, continually calls out for imaginative engagement. We must always be ready to dig more deeply, to penetrate beneath the surface of the stories, in order to find the spiritual nourishment buried within them.
John preached in the region of the Jordan; he baptised many inhabitants of the city of Jerusalem and elsewhere in its river. To us, the name is familiar enough but, for first century Jews, as today, the
River Jordan was no ordinary stream of water. It carried with it powerful connotations of restoration and redemption: it was across the River Jordan the Hebrew people had travelled to reach the
Promised Land. There was no better place to offer the people release from their sins than for John to immerse them in the cool, flowing waters of the Jordan. Baptism in these waters meant healing of the soul, a return to the God of ancient days, the God of Sinai and the Exodus, and a true sense of renewal.
The evangelists tell us that John received the word of God in the wilderness. A place of isolation, remote from the busyness of the
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city, the wilderness exposed the vulnerability of all who ventured there. On a physical level, it was a dangerous place, with its unforgiving terrain and its extremes of temperature, by day and night, with no safe place to shelter. On a spiritual level, the wilderness is similarly dangerous, a place where we are vulnerable to our demons, to memories that would disquiet and disfigure mind and soul, an exposed environment in which there is no safe shelter.
Bringing together the potent symbols of wilderness and the Jordan, the evangelists open up the possibility of bringing healing, renewal and release from the sins, burdens and brokenness which we carry.
Take yourself into that wilderness, that place of danger and, in the darkness of meditation, hear the words of the Baptist standing at the
Jordan. Let yourself be moved by the sight and sound of the flowing river.
It is the real world, not the world of religious escapism, that we encounter John. It was the world of Tiberius, Pilate and Herod, of emperor, governor and tetrarch, with their brilliance and brutality, that John spoke of baptism, repentance and forgiveness. Now, as then, the world is not and never can be a perfect place. It is through
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the muck and mess of everyday life, through our imperfect judgements and ill-judged words that we experience the possibility of encountering the Holy One, the Transcendent in the midst of all that is transitory.
John calls us to repent. In this context, repent means metanoia, ‘to return’. The call to repentance appears on the lips of the Baptist and, in Mark’s Gospel, are the opening words of Jesus in His public ministry. The desire for renewal and restoration, for purity, for oneness, was not unique to John; the Qumran community, the
Essenes, also practised the ritual of immersion. To repent, in
Hebrew, teshuvah, means a return to God, a conversion, a reorientation of one’s entire life. The Franciscan, Richard Rohr, says that we are to move from a calculating mind to a contemplative mind, from the small self to a sense of our oneness with the Sacred. At its best, the Church is a hospital for the sick, offering nourishment for the spiritually hungry.
The inner journey is the journey to encounter Christ within us.
Through solitude, silence, prayer, meditation, contemplation and attentiveness to the heart, we avail ourselves of the Spirit of Christ,
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the Risen Christ within us. In times of hardship, it can be helpful to lean on the faith of others, the faith of the Church. When it is too painful for us to pray, we can use the words of others, the words of the Apostles’ Creed. Sometimes, we become tired of words, tired of repeating words that have no life in them, tired of talking about God; words can become barriers. On our road to conversion, each month, each week, each day, it may be that sitting quietly in a peaceful room, gazing into a garden, calmly, attentively watching the birds, can help deepen within us the sense of stillness. St Augustine tells us to find time to be still in order to see God. The Jesus scholar, the late Marcus
Borg, said that ‘Christianity is about personal transformation….This is
God’s dream, God’s passion.’
On our journey, our pilgrimage, responding to the call to repent of the Baptist and the Christ, what place does prayer have in helping us to change, to become like Christ, to have the mind of Christ? From its
Latin root, the word ‘prayer’ has an association with begging: ‘Please
God, heal this person….find me a partner….help my business thrive.’
Is this what God would want of us, to beg? In our prayers for others, prayers of intercession, why do we telling God about problems in the world: does God not know?
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The rabbi, David Aaron, says that, in Judaism, prayer is l’hispallel. It means that prayer is principally concerned with what is going on inside us. The question should not be, ‘Is God listening to my prayers?’ but, ‘Am I listening to my prayers?’ What impact, if any, are my prayers having on me? Am I changed by them, by the words, by the silences?’ Rabbi Aaron says that, in a sense, if we think we are communicating to God information which God does not already have, prayer becomes ridiculous. God knows your business is falling apart,
God knows you desperately want a partner or that you deeply, deeply love someone who is ill. L’hispallel is not God hearing your prayers but you hearing your prayers.
Within Judaism, l’hispallel means to fill one’s heart with the thoughts, dreams and visions that will change you and, in turn, change the world around you. The point of l’hispallel is not to change God, but to change our heart. Adopting this Jewish concept of prayer in
Christianity, we could say that prayer is thinking the thoughts, dreaming the dreams and imagining the visions that will take us into the heart and mind of Jesus. Through prayer, through l’hispallel, it is ourselves, and our relationship with the Holy, that we are trying to
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change. If we change ourselves, we change everything we can change. In praying for a loved one, with God, we hold them in love.
We unite ourselves with our loved one and, as one, we unite ourselves to the healing Spirit of the Sacred.
Again, to quote Augustine, the saint of Hippo said that the basis of true prayer is that Christ may live in us: ‘Make Your home in me as I make mine in You.’ Augustine said, ‘Whosoever you are, wheresoever you may be praying, He who hears you is within you, hidden within. For He who hears you is not merely by your side….wheresoever you are, wheresoever you may be praying, He who hears you is within you, hidden within.’
These sentiments are echoed by the Welsh mystic and poet, R S
Thomas. In his poem, Emerging, Thomas addresses God about prayer:
I would have knelt long, wrestling with you, wearing you down. Hear my prayer, Lord, hear my prayer. As though you were deaf, myriads of mortals have kept up their shrill cry, explaining your silence by their infirmness.
It begins to appear this is not what prayer is about.
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It is the annihilation of difference, the consciousness of myself in you, and you in me.
John the Baptist said, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.’
We are not to obsess about our misdemeanors, but open our hearts to the Spirit, to the subtle yet all-pervading influence of the Holy One.
Amen.
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