Easter III Evensong sermon
St Mary’s Southery 19th April 2015
Lord, teach us to pray
+ In Nomine
I’ve heard some curious – indeed some frankly bizarre comments around the benefice
in recent months about prayer that have prompted this decision to devote an Evensong
sermon to the questions what is prayer, why do we pray and how do we pray?
Lets make this sermon interactive to begin with. When you hear the word prayer what
do you think of?
Invite responses….
OK. All good. Well think for a moment about how we relate best to those closest to us
– husband, wife, lover, child… We trust, there is no constraint - we can be fully open
and express our deepest feelings, longings, we listen, we support and nurture, enjoying
each others company – ‘wasting time’ with each other, laughing together and crying
together, arguing and sometimes struggling to understand. Sharing silence…just ‘being’
together where words are unnecessary… utterly comfortable together in full and
complete relationship…
Well prayer has been described as ‘wasting time with God’. Which I think is a pretty
good description. Just as two lovers delight in spending time together, simply enjoying
each other’s presence, so too in prayer we grown towards that kind of relationship
with God.
Yet for many of us, prayer is hard going. We can’t see or touch God as we can a
lover. Furthermore, our approach to prayer can be determined by what I might
describe as a primitive approach to God. One such definition of prayer runs like this:
the person who prays is the one who thinks that God has arranged matters all wrong, but
who also thinks that he can instruct God how to put them right.
Prayer is not a magic ‘cure all’ or a means of attempting to impose our will on God –
to manipulate God into meeting our perceived needs. Prayer isn’t like internet
shopping…click the mouse and the order is delivered to you door. Of course that
doesn’t mean that we can’t or don’t lay our deepest longings before God but that we
acknowledge God’s sovereignty in knowing us better than we know ourselves. In this,
Jesus shows us the way in his relationship with his Father. In the garden of
Gesthsemane, Jesus was fearful of his impending suffering. He knew was awaiting him.
Every human instinct cried out for deliverance from what was about to happen:
Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me, yet not what I
want, but what you want.
This prayer and Jesus’ two prayers from the cross – My God, my God why have you
forsaken me and Into your hands Lord, I commend my spirit, demonstrate clearly the
depth of relationship between Son and Father. Jesus’ prayers reflect both his complete
abandonment to his Father’s will and his trust in his Father’s loving purposes for all
creation. Submission to God’s will in prayer is really hard – it is so hard – as I said this
morning – to hand over control to God.
Jesus is our model for relationship with God through prayer. Prayer is meeting with
God - ‘just as I am’. Just as a sad clown hides behind a smiling, comic mask, all of us
have our masks too. We use these masks to bolster our self esteem – so we’re the
successful business person, the accomplished musician, the holy priest…we hide our
insecurities, anxieties, fears, lack of self esteem. What a relief then that we have a
God before whom we can throw away the mask and bring all our concerns, all our
failings, all our hopes and all our fears to Him – trusting in his love and infinite mercy.
This isn’t about shopping list prayer – this is about being yourself and resting in God’s
presence. St Augustine prays in his Confessions:
You have made us and drawn us to yourself and our heart is unquiet until it rests in you.
There is something deep within the human spirit that longs to rest on God. To be still
and to know the presence of God. To listen for God’s still small voice…to open
ourselves to the transformative power of God’s Holy Spirit thereby enabling God to
work through us just as he did with Jesus. Julian of Norwich says of prayer:
Prayer is the deliberate and perservering action of the soul. It is true and enduring and
full of grace. Prayer fastens the soul to God and makes it one with his will, through the
deep inward working of the Holy Spirit.
One evening a week, for some time now, Fr Berkeley and Burman have been sharing a
special form of meditative prayer – or prayer of the heart - called the Jesus prayer.
It’s a simple and ancient prayer, involving placing oneself quietly before our Lord and
repeating Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner. The Church Fathers
maintained that this prayer is essential for our spiritual growth. It brings us humbly,
warts and all, to stand in Christ’s presence. This means that the Jesus Prayer – and
other similar forms of mediatiive prayer such as the Rosary - help us to focus our mind
exclusively on God with “no other thought” occupying our mind but the thought of God.
At this moment when our mind is totally concentrated on God, we discover a very
personal and direct relationship with Him.
The Jesus Prayer's power comes from the use of our Lord's Name, Jesus Christ, Son of
God. It is a confession of our faith. We will be beginning a Jesus Prayer group on
Tuesday afternoons in the near future – please speak to Fr Berkeley for more detail.
Through prayer we are united with God. Through corporate prayer we are united with
God and each other. Jesus tells us in Matt 18: 20 that where two or three are gathered
in my name, I am there among them.
The great prayer of the church, where all our praise, thanksgiving, celebration,
contrition and petition is gathered up through Christ to the Father is of course the
Eucharist. Through Jesus’ sacrificial love for us on the Cross and his glorious resurrection
which sets us free to share eternal life as sons and daughters of God, we are united
with Jesus and one another as His Body, as we do as He commanded us to do and
share the great sacrament of His Body and Blood. In this Sacrament we bring
ourselves, our faults and failings, our lack of trust, our doubts and fears into the
presence of Christ and open ourselves to transformation in the power of His Holy
Spirit. Like the disciples on the Emmaus Road, we listen to the word of God and
recognize Jesus in the breaking of the bread and are filled with His Eucharistic
presence. We literally carry “God within us” out into our communities to share with
others.
Through faith and through prayer, Jesus promises that God will gift us with his Holy
Spirit. Asking for the renewal of that gift day by day, draws us ever closer to the God
who loves us and who years for our restless hearts to rest in Him.
Amen.