I’ve struggled with the sermon this week. Struggled more than usual, that is!
It’s not because I’m exhausted after the rigors of the 1-Up weekend! On the contrary – spending time those young people was a real blessing.
And it’s not because the rest of the week’s been especially busy either.
The problem I’ve had is knowing where to start, what to say, and where to end. None of which are minor considerations in the preparation of a sermon!
Today we come to the last of a series sermons based on Henri Nouwen’s book “Reaching Out”, a book in which he describes three movements of the spiritual life. Three ways in which the Spirit acts within us to bring change.
We thought about the movement from loneliness to solitude. How our essential aloneness can be turned from a negative into a positive if we learn to build times of silence and reflection into our day, Times that bring us healing and perspective.
Then we thought about the movement from hostility to hospitality. How we need to overcome our natural reserve and cultivate an hospitable attitude to life which allows the stranger, in time, to become a friend.
And today, we’re looking at Nouwen’s third and final movement – which he calls the movement from Illusion to Prayer. And it’s here, at the final fence, that I’ve pulled up short.
You see, the first two movements are essentially practical – there are things you can do in response to them. You can consciously set time aside for solitude; you can cultivate an attitude of hospitality.
But this last movement is much closer to us than that – it’s much more about who we are than what we do: and it’s often those personal, half-understood things that are hardest for us to put words to.
When I’m visiting couples who are getting married, one of the questions I often ask them what it is that they love about each other. And you’d be surprised at how many folk are completely stumped by that. It’s so close to them that they’ve never really thought about it, or tried to articulate it.
It’s the same with Nouwen’s idea of moving from illusion to prayer. What he’s asking us to do is reflect not on our practice, but on our whole disposition to life. And it’s his argument that though this movement comes third on his list, it’s actually the foundational one for the spiritual life.
Without a firm grounding in prayer, the solitude we create will be tend to be vacuous, and the hospitality we try to show to the stranger will tend to become onerous.
“Solitude and hospitality can only bear lasting fruit when they are embedded in a broader, deeper and higher reality from which they receive their vitality” he says.
For Nouwen, that reality is prayer. Prayer is the soil in which a spiritual life begins to grow – the loam into which the roots of our lives burrow down; growing strong and gaining nourishment.
Maturity, says Nouwen, means no longer seeing prayer as one of the many things we might choose do with our time, but as the fundamental disposition of our lives.
And the problem is, he’s right.
If there is a God out there – and if there isn’t, why are we wasting a perfectly good Sunday morning stuck in here? – if there IS a God, then getting our lives in tune with him is the most important work we can be about.
But that means unmasking some of the illusions we live by: and who wants to do that?
I don’t want to do that. I love my illusions. They’re there at my side when I wake in the morning, and they whisper sweet nothings into my ears as I go to sleep. They’re as close to me as my own skin and bone.
At the risk of turning the pulpit into a confessional let me share a few of my favourites, just to see if they ring any bells with you.
Number 1 Illusion – I can do this all by myself. I’m capable, I’m educated, I’ve got a half-decent set of genes which makes me a reasonably well-adjusted person. I don’t really need to invoke God much. I can get on with most of this under my own steam,
Number 2 Illusion – My life’s my own. It’s my time and my money and it’s entirely up to me how I choose to spend them. Apart from my nearest and dearest and the folk who pay my wages, I’m not really accountable to anyone.
Number 3 Illusion – I’m indispensible. If I didn’t do things, they wouldn’t get done and the world, quite possibly, would stop turning.
Number 4 Illusion – I’m immortal. I refuse to contemplate the possibility of my death except on those occasions when I find myself in an aircraft several thousand feet above the ground. On those occasions I shall allow myself a brief prayer and admission of mortality but on landing I shall breathe a sigh of relief and push such ideas back into the furthest recesses of my mind.
I could go on. And you, no doubt, could add a few of your own.
And the thing is, most of the time we get by quite nicely with our illusions. But for every single one of us, there will come a time when something happens that shakes our world and reveals them for what they are. And if that hasn’t happened to you yet, it will do
We thought we were omnicompetent, and then we meet a situation in life we just can’t deal with. We placed all our hope in that person and then they cynically betray our trust. We forget how vulnerable we are, and then sickness or death visits our homes and turns everything upside down.
On a global scale, misguided men hijack aeroplanes and fly them into skyscrapers, shattering our illusions of invulnerability. We stare, slack jawed, at the place where our confidence used to stand.
No-one’s described the futility of our illusions of permanence better than Shelly in his poem Ozymandias: he writes:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
These little lives we lead, however grand, have no more permanence about them than a house that’s built on sand. We need a firmer foundation to build on, and that is exactly what prayer provides us with.
Prayer, properly understood, grounds us in God; because prayer is the discipline of reaching out to God in all times and places – worshipping, thanking, confessing and asking; deferring to him in all things – seeking him in all things. Setting aside our illusions and laying hands on his reality.
The 19th century mystic Theophan the Recluse says “Make yourself a rule always to be with the Lord, keeping your mind in your heart and do not let your thoughts wander; as often as they stray, turn them back again and keep them at home in the closet of your heart and delight in converse with the Lord”.
This is more than saying your prayers. This is a disposition of prayerfulness. A cultivation of the awareness of God in our daily lives.
Setting aside time for prayer is part of the discipline that helps us grow, but so’s the turning and turning and turning to God in the ordinary things of the day. It doesn’t have to be about developing burdensome regimes; it’s about doing what you’re already doing more prayerfully. The author Brian McLaren calls it ‘faithing your practices”.
My friend Beth used to manage a café in one of the churches I worked with; every morning she’d prepare all the sandwiches for the day and she would pray as she made them - thinking about the people who were going to be coming through the doors that day.
My friend Matt was tasked with the job of auditing the car mileage books for all the ministers in our Presbytery. A boring job if ever there was one! He returned them with a note of thanks for all the pastoral work those books represented, having prayed for each congregation as he inspected them.
Our Celtic forefathers and mothers were past masters at this. They had a prayer for all of the ordinary things of life. As they’d poke the remnants of last night’s fire to get it going again, they’d pray:
“As I stir the embers of my daily fire, I ask you, living God, to stir the embers of my heart into a flame of love for you, for my family, for my neighbour and for my enemy.”
When they splashed their faces in cold water each morning, they’d say “Let me awaken to you, Father, Son and Holy Spirit”.
Simple prayers that faith our everyday practices. Maybe that’s the place to start, if this is all new to us.
What could you pray before you lift the phone, or send that email, or answer the door? How does God see the person you’re about to engage with?
What could you pray as you do the ironing, or write a memo, or drive the combine, or change a nappy, or drop the kids off to their class.
As you walk the dog, or go to the gym, or hit the shops, what prayers could you carry with you in your heart?
It’s these little things, these turnings, that help move us on from our illusions about how life is and root us more firmly in God’s deeper reality.
We realise that we can’t do it ourselves; that we’re not our own; that we’re not indispensible and nor are we immortal. But paradoxically we don’t mind, because we know that for all our frailty, we’re grounded in God through Jesus Christ. And when the rains descend and the floods come, our lives will be safe in him.
