Listen to this Sermon
On March 2nd, I was fortunate enough to give the homily to the Mustard Seed Church out of St Margaret’s Church in Leith, Edinburgh, Scotland. Thank you to Andrew Strutzenberg for the invitation, and to the whole church for such a warm reception. May these words also enrich your faith.
Jesus said, “All this I have spoken while still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”
John 14:25-27 from the New International Version
I’m so glad to be here with you all at Mustard Seed. My homily today is titled, Let us Pray. With a title like that I have no choice, but to start with a prayer.
Father, throughout the bible we see people praying. Your Son Jesus invited and called us to pray. You, the Holy Spirit, dwell within us, praying within us, and meeting us when we pray. Enrich the ways we see prayer, where we see prayer, and the ways we pray. Amen
Opening
Today we are going to spend time thinking about prayer. Let us reflect on prayer, on the call to pray. For many of us the first prayer we learned was the Our Father – the Lord’s Prayer. It is an amazing prayer I continue to pray everyday. Yet it is not the only way to pray. Today we can look through the horizons of the Scriptures. Through all the centuries, voices, genres, and moments we can see, we can sense, that God is ever present. That each page of the bible reminds us that God was there. That each page and day of our life can remind us that God is here. That our God welcomes us every time we pray.
With the vastness that Prayer encompasses, How might we summarize prayer? Within the work we are doing with Urban Monastics, we have a short way we describe prayer.
Being purposefully in God’s tender and loving presence where thoughts, emotions, and words can move in both directions.
There are kind of two pieces to this way of understanding prayer. The first is being purposeful, and the second is the ‘thoughts, emotions, and words’.
Let us start with purpose.
Purpose
Prayer invites us to be purposefully in God’s tender and loving presence. Purposefully. Again and again in scripture we see prayer requiring us to be purposeful. This should not be a surprise to us because relationships require us to be purposeful. Another way to think about this, is to be loving. We are purposeful because we are choosing to love. Love will always bring us to a purposeful life. Love is not passive, it is active. It requires us to be attentive, to feel, to see, and to be willing to move our bodies, minds. Love requires us to be open to our understanding shifting.
Prayer is the way that we get to communicate with our God. To Be with our God, to Love our God. Love requires purpose.
Think about this, with time you learn to hear the voice of someone you love in a crowded room. You learn the ways they make you feel safe, seen, and taken care of. Good love helps us see them, and it helps us see ourselves. It expands our horizons, and we do things we didn’t dream of before. There are rhythms and patterns to the ways we move through life with those we love. The same is true for our love with God.
I believe that there is nothing better in life than good love. The love of our God is exceedingly good. In fact, it is good beyond my ability to comprehend. It is an incomprehensible great love. Gods love genuinely asks nothing of us, but holds us gently, holds us tenderly.
Are you familiar with the Fruit of the Spirit in the book of Galatians? The Fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. This fruit is the fullness of our God, and the way that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit love us. Did you hear that God is patient? Kind? Gentle?
We need the help of the Holy Spirit to remind us of all that God has done and spoken. We need the Holy Spirit to prompt us to be purposefully present with God. We need the Holy Spirit to help us be purposeful, to teach us how we can be more purposeful with our God in prayer. God sending the Holy Spirit to dwell within you as His advocate for you is a purposeful act of love. An act of love, that places our feet on a sure foundation, that gives us confidence as we turn back to God in prayer.
Jesus is ever waiting for us to join Him. We join Him when we pray. When we find ourselves…
“Being purposefully in God’s tender and loving presence where thoughts, emotions, and words can move in both directions”
Let us turn to the second half of this description… ‘where thoughts, emotions, and words can move in both directions.’
Thoughts, Emotions, & Words
There is so much to learn in this life. More than we can ever learn. There is just as much to learn outside of ourselves as there is to learn within ourselves. Not one of us was born understanding our thoughts, or emotions. None of us was born ready to speak words. It takes time, effort, and practice to enrich our thoughts, emotions, and words.
Think back with me to how simply we saw the world as children. When we would draw trees they were brown with green leaves or needles. Rocks were colored gray. The sky was blue and the sun was yellow. Okay, maybe in Scotland the sky was gray and the sun was more of an abstract idea.
As we get older we start to understand that different shades and hues of blue have different names. The rocks are no longer simply gray, but rich with textures, colors, and danced over by light and shadow. There are colors that we take for granted today like Orange that was named after the ripened fruit. Until then, oranges were actually yellow and we were less able to see the diversity and richness of our world.
Here we need to take a breath.
If you felt like pursuing God was going to take effort, this will take even more. We need to depend upon and ask the Holy Spirit to help us learn to think, to feel, and to speak. There are new ways to think, emote, and speak that will change the way that we experience the exact same God. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit will not change, but our experience of them will.
The trees, rocks, sky and sun are the same as in our youth, but we experience them differently today. Some of this growth will happen naturally through life and our experience. Yet, over and over again in the bible we are told to Ask God who gives generously and gives good things.
So ask God to help us pray. Ask God to teach us to see our thoughts, our emotions, and our words. May our God help you to be present with your thoughts. May you find yourself ever more able to rest with your emotions. May you be more able to give care, love, and grace to your words. We have a lifetime of prayer to enjoy, and a lifetime to pray.
In all these things we also will experience the thoughts, emotions, and words of our God!
Conclusion
It is a lifetime of pursuing the tender and loving presence of our God through prayer. Here is my encouragement and guidance for you as you begin to experience the thoughts, emotions, and words from our God. Remember the Fruit of the Spirit from earlier?
That is the way our God meets with us. Meets with you. With: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
As Jesus spoke to us with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
Remember that Jesus Said • Peace I leave with you;
Remember that Jesus Said • My peace I give you.
Remember that Jesus Said • I do not give to you as the world gives.
Remember that Jesus Said • Do not let your hearts be troubled.
Remember that Jesus Said • Do not be afraid.
Let us Pray.
Amen.