Fifth Sunday after Pentecost
Vivian Lewin, Spiritual Director in the Diocese of Montreal
“O God our Defender, storms rage around us and cause us to be afraid. Rescue thy people from despair, deliver thy sons and daughters from fear and preserve us from unbelief; through Jesus Christ our Lord.” [from the Collect of the Day]
May I speak in the name of our one God: Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer. Amen
Storms rage around us. Indeed. [You can watch and listen to the service on the Cathedral YouTube channel here; the sermon begins about 20 minutes into the broadcast.] Outside, we were supposed to get up to 70mm of rain, so I went down to the basement to make sure no cardboard boxes resting on the floor. And in our scripture, at least three of the four readings touch in on the theme of storms: King Saul is throwing spears at David right in the palace–really eclipsing the beautiful love story of David and Jonathan. Paul, in our Epistle, reminds of all the tribulations he has suffered. and in Mark, well, high storms, crashing waves. Terror. And in the news! So many events to shake our confidence in the future and offer us occasions of despair and yes, even unbelief.
What do we do?
Well, first, we come together, we leave our dry houses and make this little pilgrimage… or we tune in somehow online, or we find time to watch this service later on YouTube. A service which pulls us beyond ourselves and offers us forms of music and liturgy… which we do together, not in a solitary way… and offer public prayers that have nourished generations before us.
Generations going through storms themselves. Some struggling privately with health, or business, or family, or bereavement, or sanity, or faith itself. Some whose names are carved on the west wall, who died with so many of their fellow Canadians in World War II and were remembered here by their families … who had surely prayed for their safety. For their lives. Cranmer, who constructed our oldest Book of Common prayer, the ancestor of the words we say together today, was burnt alive at the stake in the middle of Oxford. Where was today’s [predicted] downpour then?
Or, as the apostles complain to Jesus in today’s Gospel, “Teacher, don’t you care about us?”
They didn’t always call Jesus Teacher (Rabbi), but here, they do. It’s a teaching moment, isn’t it? One of the things that came to mind were the words of a younger member of this congregation, who said, “I’d like to learn more about how to pray” and also Ignatius saying “God taught me as a pupil is taught.”
Last week more than a dozen people came together to talk about cranking up our prayer ministry and it might have sounded to an outsider as if what we were talking about was a certain list of names. Surely making a list isn’t prayer, is it?
Well, yes and no.
If I ask you to pray for me, or if you ask me to pray for you, isn’t that already a form of prayer? A way of saying “This needs to be brought before the Lord” or “Help me close the gap” or “Help, Lord, I am perishing”.
William James, in his Varieties of Religious Experience, famously interviews many people about how they came to faith, and as a rule it was not when things were going well. God is, after all, scary! Karla Holmes used to say, “Jesus is not my boyfriend.”
Take a look at today’s gospel: They were afraid. Things were sketchy. Jesus was asleep. They wake him up. He calms the storm. He seems irritated. “Oh what little faith you have” he says. Then they are scared.
When I was typing the word scared it came out SACRED. Two letters switched, something my fingers did, and a reminder of what kind of holy fear, awe, springs from being connected with God, up close and personal.
In another life, I would have taken time to look at the Greek word or words. But today I want to talk a little more about how we pray.
In 2,000 years, Christians have prayed in many ways. And those ways fall into roughly two categories. Either emptying the mind, or filing it up. Both are ways to befriend the busy mind, get it past itself, beyond where we’re stuck at. We have said rosaries. The Jesus prayer. Repetitive prayers that fill the mind with a pattern that blots out or at least accompanies our fears and anxieties. We have meditated, in different ways, taking time in silence. Giving the mind a real vacation. That calm that comes after the storm or that can simply quiet it. And, we have made lists.
I want to talk about lists. When I was first a serious, almost mature churchgoer, I was fascinated with the lists, and I made a list of my own. This is a fine tradition, and I stepped into it with both feet. I listed my relatives, my friends, people I knew who needed help, my co-workers, my boss. When I was a teacher I prayed for all my students by name, freaking out the evangelicals who had forgotten to pray for their students.
Every morning I moved down the list. I had no idea whether anything was happening or not. I just kept doing it. Then, one morning, something did happen, and it wasn’t what I thought it might be like.
Have you ever hammered nails into wood? Say, you have a strip of wood to nail onto a plank of wood, and a handful of nails, and a hammer, and you actually know how to do that. So you work your way down the strip , you get a nice rhythm going, it takes about the same number of blows to sink each nail, you are moving right along …and then you come to a place where there’s a knot underneath where the nail’s supposed to go, and the hammer sort of bounces back from your blow, the nail just doesn’t penetrate the wood, it takes a lot more work to get it in. The knot is dense and it resists your nailing into the wood. Well, that’s what happened with one of the names on my list. I was tapping along the different names, tap, tap, tap. And then, with one of them, it just bounced back.
Until that happened, I actually had no idea that my little list and my intention to pray was accomplishing anything. It was the resistance that signaled to me, showed me, proved, really, that all the other little tap tap taps that I had been doing were actually something real.
Now I was lucky to notice that and to have a chance to speak about it. But there’s nothing really unusual about it.
Truly you each have your own prayer practice and there isn’t any one right way. And you don’t need to know how it works to believe in it and for it to be effective. Unbelief, with regards to prayer, means we don’t trust what we’re doing. And the answer to that (which is really a question) is actually to persist, and get God teach you as you do it what you’re doing.
William Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1940s, is well known for saying, ‘When I pray, coincidences happen, and when I don’t, they don’t.
If you’re interested, the weekly prayer list is posted on the Cathedral website, and you are welcome to join in that ministry of prayer.
Now, for sure there are times when prayers don’t get answered the way we expect. Prayer is not a magic bullet, and Jesus came not just to teach, but to suffer with us–not fix our broken world in one instant. This is why we say the Kingdom of God is both among us, and not yet. The fact is that Jesus died–a human death that many of us have seen close up and more or less understand–and then rose from that death into a resurrected life that we both claim, and fail to understand. Even those who were with him when he was on earth discovered that they didn’t understand. So we are in good company!
We approach both scripture and prayer, then, with the most profound reverence. The mystery they offer is beyond our comprehension, and yet this is more and more a reason to spend time with both our Bibles and our forms of prayer… forms that, over the course of time, might change a great deal as the spirit leads. And, I daresay, coincidences will surely happen.
Moreover, we will do that together.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
The readings for today, Sunday June 23, 2024, are 1 Samuel 17:57-18:5, 18:10-16, Psalm 133, 2 Corinthians 6:1-13, Mark 4:35-41