Psalm 136:1-9, 23-26 | Luke 11:9-13
Jeremy Richards
This morning we’re wrapping up our sermon series on “reimagining the love of God” (at least for now…we may have a part 2 coming up). There are a lot of ways “reimagining the love of God” could go, but I chose to focus on reimagining God’s love for us, and how we can encounter that love through spiritual practices.
Our 2021 theme focusing on love moves from love of God to love of self to love of neighbors and enemies, with the assumption that this is the natural flow of love from a Christian perspective. But this past week, in one of my Living School classes, Richard Rohr said that it also goes the other way. That sometimes we start out not with love of God, but love of others, and the brokenness and suffering of the world we live in drives us to God. I was surprised by how profound this seemed to me, because, I think, this is what I see happening most often at Grant Park. Many of us came to Grant Park already committed to justice and service but longing for a deeper relationship with God. Our active lives and our spiritual lives were somewhat out of balance, and we sensed the lack.
This is why, subconsciously I guess, I’ve been stressing spiritual practices and prayer so much. I see you out there doing the work. I see your hearts. And I also see that you need rest and comfort and peace. You need to be fed the bread of life, you need to drink living water. I know because I’ve been there myself. That’s what led me to the Living School. I knew, undeniably, that my life was out of whack. And I don’t know if I would’ve been able to keep doing the work, I don’t know if I would still be a pastor today, if I didn’t develop spiritual practices. It’s been life changing and transformative for me to just begin this journey, and this journey isn’t just for pastors. It’s for everyone. Seriously. That’s why I’m talking so much about it. I want to share it with you. I want you to keep doing the work, to keep serving and advocating for the marginalized, to keep caring for your students, to keep being the best parents and grandparents you can be, to keep volunteering at Grant Park (!). But I also want you to know and experience the love of God, which I firmly believe is offered to you every second of every day.
So we’re exploring spiritual practices in this sermon series. Well…kind of. I have to admit, I haven’t really stayed true to my promise about this series. I said it would be practical, but I recognize that it hasn’t really been practical so far. I haven’t given you any step-by-step directions. Also, I said we would be looking at passages from Matthew 6 and 7, but today I went with Luke’s version of the “ask, seek, and knock” passage instead of Matthew’s because it fit better with my overall theme. Instead of saying I was unprepared or dishonest, I’m going to say I was simply led by the Spirit :).
I’d like to begin this morning with a reading from the 19th century Russian work The Way of a Pilgrim It starts like this…(read first 3 paragraphs of The Way of a Pilgrim).
So, basically, the pilgrim’s experience and your experience have been the same so far. You both heard a bunch of sermons about the importance of prayer, but no one told you how to pray, which, if we’re honest, is one of, if not the, biggest obstacles to prayer. After being a Christian my whole life, I had to enter a 2 year program to learn how to pray, because it’s not exactly intuitive…at least for me. And because churches need to do a better job of teaching people how to pray.
Maybe a 2 year program seems like a big commitment, but it’s nothing compared to the pilgrim’s decision. He decides to dedicate his life to this quest to understand what ceaseless prayer is and how to practice it. He travels all around Russia, Siberia, and Ukraine, with virtually no possessions and no worldly security trying to find an answer. You could say he asks, seeks, and knocks, but no one can give him a satisfactory answer. Until, one evening, after 5 days of walking, an old monk catches up to him on the road. The monk offers to let him stay at the hermitage where he lives, which is close by. But the pilgrim says, “My peace does not depend on a place to stay but on spiritual direction. I am not looking for food, as I have enough bread in my knapsack.” I first heard about this story from one of my teachers at the Living School, James Finley, and he started laughing when he got to this part. It’s so typical that we search and search, but when the answer comes to us, we’re suddenly uninterested and unmotivated.
The monk asks the pilgrim what kind of direction he’s seeking, and the pilgrim tells him about his story and his quest to understand ceaseless prayer. The monk is overjoyed and says, “Thank God, dear brother, for this insatiable desire to understand ceaseless mental prayer.” He volunteers to become the pilgrim’s spiritual director, and to teach him all about ceaseless prayer. At this point, they’ve made it to the hermitage, and the monk invites the pilgrim into his cell. He then teaches him the Jesus prayer, which simply goes, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me!” (or “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner!”) and gives him a copy of the Philokalia, a collection of writings composed between the 4th and 15th century by some of the spiritual masters of the Orthodox Church, most of which are reflections on the Jesus Prayer. The monk tells the pilgrim to study it and it will serve as his guide. The two read from the Philokalia and discuss ceaseless prayer all night.
The monk begins by giving the pilgrim a rosary and telling him to say the Jesus prayer 3,000 times in one day. Once he’s become accustom to that, the monk ups it to 6,000 times a day. After that, the monk doubles it yet again to 12,000 times a day, which requires the pilgrim to get up earlier and go to bed later. But with each step, from 3,000 to 6,000 to 12,000, what begins with difficulty becomes a source of joy and contentment. It also becomes habitual, so that the pilgrim says the prayers without thinking about it. Whether he’s walking, working, sleeping, or even talking to others, he’s constantly saying the prayer, calling on the name of Jesus. The monk tells him, “This is a natural result of discipline and frequent practice, which can be compared to a wheel of a machine that has been given a push and then the machine works by itself.” All that happens in just the first chapter of the book. The pilgrim continues to learn about what he calls “interior prayer,” throughout the book and it’s sequel, The Pilgrim Continues His Way.
Like I said, maybe my sermons have been a bit like the ones the pilgrim gets so sick of early in the book. They talk about the importance of prayer, but they don’t tell you how to pray.
I understand the frustration, but unlike the pilgrim’s spiritual director, I’m not so quick to tell you how to pray, because I don’t think prayer, or the spiritual life in general, can be reduced to a formula, which is something I said on the first Sunday of this sermon series. The anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, which I talked about a couple of weeks ago, seems to be of the same mind. He says there’s no one methodology to achieve some kind of spiritual experience. “No routine leads to love,” he says.
And the modern day Jesuit priest, James Martin, in his new book Learning to Pray: A Guide for Everyone, which I’m going to talk more about later, says, “there are so many ways, so many practices, so much flexibility…there is no one right way to pray.” He goes on to say that how we pray changes over the course of our lives.
So, today, instead of talking about how (like I kinda said I would at the beginning of this series), I’m going to stress the importance of consistency and perseverance in prayer, and I’m going to end with an invitation into the practical side of learning how to pray. So we are going to get around to the how of prayer. But not in this sermon. Sorry.
Jesus makes a bold claim in our scripture reading this morning. He says that everyone who asks receives and everyone who searches finds and for everyone who knocks the door will be opened. He ends by saying that our heavenly Parent will surely give the Holy Spirit to all who ask Them.
What The Way of the Pilgrim illustrates (in quite extreme detail) is that asking, knocking, and searching aren’t one time events. They’re daily, hourly, minutely decisions. In the case of the Jesus prayer, they’re constant. The pilgrim learns to ask, seek, and knock with every inhale and exhale.
Last week we talked about removing the distractions and temptations that threaten to pull us away from our singular focus: the God who is Love, our creator and sustainer. And that led us to the conclusion that the spiritual life is actually more about subtraction than addition. And I think that right’s. The primary problem isn’t that we aren’t doing enough spiritually (though there might be a little bit of that), it’s that we’re doing too much unspiritually. We’ve filled our lives with the very things we talked about last week, and so we don’t have time to ask, seek, or knock. We’re so busy reacting to the world around us, that we hardly have time to stop and call on the name of Jesus. “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me!”
In his phenomenal book, The Sabbath, the Jewish theologian, activist, and mystic Abraham Joshua Heschel draws a distinction between the realm of space, the realm of the material, and the realm of time, and says that we have become obsessed with space. All our lives are aimed at dominating, accumulating, and inhabiting space. But we don’t think much about time. We often fail to see time as something we inhabit, but instead see it as something that simply, inconveniently limits our ability to further inhabit and dominate space. Our workday must end because we ran out of daylight. We aren’t able to achieve all that we want in life because death cuts our conquests short. Time is seen as a barrier, not a space to inhabit.
But, Heschel says, the God of Judaism, who is the God of Christianity, is much more interested in the realm of time than the realm of space. Heschel says that the Hebrew Bible, what we call the Old Testament, “sees the world in the dimension of time. It pays more attention to generations, to events, than to countries, to things.” He points out that in the creation story the only thing that is called holy, “a word which more than any other is representative of the mystery and majesty of the divine,” is not a thing but a day, a moment in time, the Sabbath. He calls the Sabbaths Judaism’s “great cathedrals” that exist not in the realm of space but in the realm of time.
The spiritual life is dependent on a certain kind of subtraction: the subtraction of unhealthy and detrimental allegiances to the material world. To get Old Testament, it requires the removal of idols, those things that attempt to dethrone God and rule over our lives in God’s place.
But when we subtract these things, there is a space created — not a space in the material world, but a space in time. Maybe not a cathedral, but maybe a humble chapel. Spiritual practices are a means by which we create a space within our hearts and souls, but also within our days, where we can invite God in. After all, we’re not the only ones knocking. “Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking,” Jesus says in Revelation, “if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.” The spiritual life, prayer, is simply opening the door to the God who pursues us relentlessly.
In one of his teachings for the Living School, James Finley gave this example. He said, say you decide you want to spend an hour with God watching the sunset. When 6 pm rolls around, you go into your room which has big windows facing west, and you can see the sun descending toward the mountains. You sit down against the wall and you say, “I’m going to spend this next hour with God.” Well, the thing is, God’s been with you for every sunset you’ve ever experienced. This is just the day you responded. This is the day you decided to be with God.
Prayer, spiritual practices, whatever we call them, aren’t ways that we earn God’s love. It’s not like if we pray enough God will say, “Ok, you paid your dues. Now I’ll throw you a bone.” No they’re just the way we turn to the God who has already turned to us, who has never not been turned to us. God is always, always present. Remember that quote from Jacob Boehme from a couple months back (of course you don’t!). He said that though Divine Love offers itself to all people, all the time, often it can “find no place in them.” The point of this sermon series is not to say do more so you can earn God’s love. I’m saying do less so you can experience God’s love, which has already been and is always being given to you.
But this does take intention. It requires asking, seeking, and knocking. It requires us to sit down and watch the sunset with God. We must create a cathedral — or a chapel or a closet or something — within our hearts and within our days where we go to seek the Divine.
But the cool thing, if we look back at The Way of a Pilgrim, is that what starts with intention and work and maybe a certain degree of difficulty can eventually become a habitual, life-giving practice. It can become second nature. I was just watching a teaching from James Finley this week and he said, “Little by little all life will become my practice.”
That’s not to say that there won’t be dry spells, seasons that feel like spiritual famine, not feast. It happens to everyone: we show up for the encounter, but it feels like nothing’s happening. One of the greatest mystics of all, John of the Cross, experienced this himself and called it “the dark night of the soul.” So did Mother Teresa. God seemed to them utterly silent. But, in the words of the Old Testament scholar and AME pastor Renita Weems, “…just because God is silent doesn’t mean that God is absent.”
It’s during these times that we must listen to the pilgrim’s spiritual director’s words, “If you will persevere for some time then, without any doubt, the path to the heart will be opened to you.” They tell us at the Living School, “Be faithful to your practice and your practice will be faithful to you.”
This brings us back to the practice, though. How do we pray? Here’s my invitation: I would like to do a book study on James Martin’s new book Learning to Pray. It’s hard to cover such a huge topic as prayer, and to give step-by-step instructions in one sermon, or even in a couple of sermons. It’s really something we need to do together, in dialogue, like the pilgrim and his spiritual director. This book is super accessible, really entertaining, and it’s all about the how-tos. I could be wrong, because sometimes I think I’ve got my finger on the church’s pulse, when, in fact, I don’t, but, like I said at the beginning, I think this would be so applicable to so many of us at Grant Park. And even if it isn’t super relevant, I think everyone can benefit from deepening their prayer life.
So, if you’re interested in this book study and developing a life of prayer, let me know and we’ll finally get around to the practical stuff I promised you 4 weeks ago.
Amen.