Using the Jesus Prayer 7 min talk and 2 min prayer

‘Acquire inner peace and thousands around you will find salvation.’ Words of Saint Seraphim who lived in Russia  between 1754 and 1833

Here he is show a precious possession of mine, his silver plated icon. Seraphim had a peaceful contentment about him which spread to all who visited him. The Russian Orthodox Saint wrote this about his way of praying, the so-called Jesus Prayer:

‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner": let all your attention and training be in this prayer. Walking, sitting, doing, and standing in church before the divine service, coming in and going out, keep this unceasingly on your lips and in your heart. In calling in this manner on the name of God you will find peace’

The Jesus Prayer is based on the tax collector’s prayer in Luke 18 ‘God be merciful to me, a sinner’. Though always used in the Orthodox Church, it has more recently come into use in private prayer among Christians worldwide. In 2014 I was commissioned by the Bible Reading Fellowship to write a book on it, show ‘Using the Jesus Prayer’. 

The popularity of the Jesus Prayer is partly linked to people wanting to slow their pace of life. 

Because its short and easy to memorise, it can help us wherever we are to put trust in God and receive his consolation. 

Like a mindfulness exercise the Jesus Prayer helps us look above and beyond ourselves. Repeating the prayer as a ‘mantra’ or holy sentence can help us rise above useless thinking and anxiety. Quietly repeating the Jesus Prayer can bring peace of mind and heart and help make us more thoughtful to others.   

When we use the Jesus Prayer we repeat to ourselves ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner’ pausing briefly between each prayer. Saying we are sinners recognises all of us do wrong things sometimes especially when we get too proud of ourselves. Though the Jesus Prayer is said in the singular it is said on behalf of the world we are part of associating with all in trouble, need or sorrow.

You can pray the Jesus Prayer in time with your breath, breathing in or out for the first or second phrase. 

Guides recommend the prayer be neither gabbled nor offered too intensely. 

To help focus the body’s engagement in the exercise some use woollen prayer ropes. show. 

When I awake in the night I take a few deep breaths and slowly repeat the Jesus Prayer to send me back to sleep. 

Other times I feel the thoughts in my mind are like monkeys jumping from branch to branch in a tree. It’s then that I centre myself saying: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner’. The Jesus Prayer is a godsend to quieten a busy mind. 

The Bible says we should pray at all times but its not until I discovered the Jesus Prayer that I found this possible - better many a time to fill my mind and heart with a simple bible based prayer than to allow useless or negative thinking.

I put the power of this prayer down to the unique power of the name of Jesus to scatter negative thoughts.

In a moment we’ll have an opportunity to try out saying the Jesus Prayer ourselves. There are two sorts of use, formal and free. You can sit down and use it for 2 minutes as we shall do shortly, which is the formal use. Or you can use it while walking or running or swimming or whatever which is the free use. 

The beauty of the prayer is its simplicity and conciseness - by the end of this talk you will have memorised it. 

St Seraphim show was once asked why it is that some people have more of the Holy Spirit than others. He gave a two word answer: ‘just determination’.

The Jesus Prayer is a work of grace but it is also an action of determined devotion. It is a constant refrain of eastern orthodoxy that the mental discipline of purposeful repetition is a powerful aid against the distraction of energy away from the love of God: 

Repeating the Jesus Prayer can help you come closer to God if that is what you want. It’s a biblical prayer used down the Christian centuries, key item in the church’s tool kit for prayer. I am glad to commend it.

So - we have an icon of Christ to help us show. 

Let’s do a sort of mindfulness preparation exercise before we go for 2 min prayer.

Settle yourself down in your seat. 

Go down your body in your mind’s eye, your head, your chest, your thighs, your legs, your feet.

Relax your neck muscles by turning slowly to the left - and to the right, to the left and to the right.

Focus your attention on your breathing, and as you breathe in say the words, ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God’ and as you breathe out, ‘have mercy on me, a sinner’. 

Do this gently and you will find that your breathing will slow. 

Think of Christ’s goodness flowing into you and the weary, unhelpful things flowing out of you

Either close your eyes and think of God’s presence within you or look at the Icon of Christ I will hold as a reminder of God’s presence before you.

I am going to say the Jesus Prayer three times. Afterwards I invite you to say it to yourself and to God who is present with us at the same pace for the next two minutes after which I will give the closing blessing.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner 

St Wilfrid, Haywards Heath Christ the King 22.11.20

After a ceremony in Parliament the splendidly robed Lord Chancellor entered a corridor crowded with tourists and spotted his friend Neil Marten MP. ‘Neil’ he shouted and every tourist in the corridor dropped to their knees!

The story captures how intimacy and awe can come together with amusing consequences. 

Three weeks ago at St Wilfrid’s I solemnly consecrated a vessel containing altar bread that turned out to be empty. Under COVID rules priests are not allowed to breathe over vessels containing the host so they stay covered until Communion. I wrongly assumed the covered ciborium placed on the altar by the warden was filled. What a surprise when I genuflected before it, took off the lid and found it empty. I had to say Jesus’ words ‘This is my body’ again over the bread box so we could share Communion.

Merriment is a hallmark of Christ’s kingdom. Archbishop Ramsey described a characteristic of hell as being the absence of laughter. Where there’s laughter there’s lack of self-importance. One imagines hell as being an array of tragically disconnected self important beings unable to reach out to God or one another.

We kneel not to the Lord Chancellor this morning but to Our Lord on this great Feast of Jesus Christ the Universal King. The Lord Chancellor incidentally is the one who still walks backwards before the Queen having presented her with the text of her Speech at the opening of Parliament. Outward ceremonies can lose their meaning and eventually fall out of use. My story about kneeling recalls a controversial diocesan news in which Bishop Lindsay berated the lack of kneeling in Church nowadays. Lindsay sent good wishes to Fr Ray through me last month recalling how he presided over Ray’s induction all those years back.  Never one for ducking straight speaking the Bishop questioned whether Chichester Diocese was going Methodist in that the only time many kneel is for Communion!

As we get older - Lindsay was nicknamed Boy Bishop as he was consecrated so young - we understand how kneeling can be problematic even when you have a knee replacement! This morning online we have no kneeling unless you want to kneel on the living room carpet for the consecration prayer of the eucharist. No kneeling outwardly but certainly inwardly. 

Our intimacy with God is an awesome intimacy. God is God! 

Who are we to enter God’s presence as we are doing in this eucharist?

As the passage from Ephesians in today’s epistle expresses it: with the eyes of your heart enlightened, may you know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints,and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power. God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand.

This morning we kneel before Christ the King. As the beautiful eucharistic preface states: ‘As king [Christ] claims dominion over all your creatures, that he may bring before your infinite majesty a kingdom of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love and peace’. Truth, life, holiness, grace, justice, love and peace, all these are fully found in God. Through his Son and his Spirit our almighty Father is establishing those qualities upon earth so that the kingdom of this world may become the kingdom of our God and of his Christ Revelation 11:15.

Our Gospel reading reminds us of how care for the hungry and thirsty, the sick and those in prison extends Christ’s rule towards the day when, in the words of the Collect, ‘the whole created order will worship at the feet’ of God’s infinite majesty.

In the Times on Tuesday Melanie Phillips applauded recent judicial decisions protecting the rights of believers to hold the age old belief in marriage as heterosexual. Some of you have been in conversation on Facebook with me about this controversial article. 

G.K.Chesterton remarked that only belonging to the Church sets one free from the degrading slavery of being a child of one’s time. 

As Christians we kneel before God in Christ and not before majority opinion in a post-Christian culture. It isn’t easy and gets little easier in our culture though this is far from China where Crosses are being taken from church roofs.

The Feast of Christ the King is no feast of an idea. It is the feast of a reality we kneel before, the reality of Christ’s kingship - that Jesus is Lord.

Jesus is Lord – three words sum up our Creed.  

Jesus is Lord.  The carpenter born in Nazareth who shows the world the love, truth and power of God – he is Lord. It is his name that brings heaven to earth and earth to heaven. 

Secondly Jesus is Lord.  A human life of 33 years lived at the start of our era continues the same yesterday, today and for ever through the power of an indestructible life (Hebrews 7v16b).  

Thirdly Jesus is Lord which means he is right above all that is or has been or will be.  Jesus is God’s final word to humankind. He is also to be the very last word over all each one of us as we shall contemplate next week on Advent Sunday.   

                                                                                                                  

In Jesus a human being lives over all things in God.  Nothing gives us more hope for the human race than this. Here is the place heaven and earth come together. As Pascal said Jesus Christ is the centre of all, and the goal to which all tends. 

So we kneel before him this morning. 

This Sunday Eucharist is the hour of Jesus, a time given to him by us together that reminds us all our time belongs to him. 

Our daily prayer is submission to him as Lord of our life, as is the private confession to him of ours sins. 

Our reading of the Bible is teacher to put faith in the constancy of God’s word and not in the multitude of human words that make up public opinion. 

The service we give others is a submission to Christ present in all people and things. 

Worship, prayer, bible study, service - these are our kneeling before Christ the King as individual members of his body to be underlined and refreshed this morning. 

Christ is King, Jesus is Lord - and he is our king, our Lord, with the Father and the Holy Spirit to whom be all might, majesty, dominion and power henceforth and for evermore. Amen.

Talk on St Wilfrid, Haywards Heath Facebook page Wed 18 Nov 2020 930am

 

‘Quick’s dead and Hurry’s in its grave' my Grandma used to say.



I can’t remember the things that caused me to hurry in Grandma’s day, but I know how hurried I am now as I work through e-mails, texts, social media and the demands of work and family.

Like a traffic sign inviting reduction of speed, Grandma’s saying flashes into mind - ‘Quick’s dead and Hurry’s in its grave' - as I maintain the struggle to satisfy the demands before me. Putting brakes on ‘Hurry’ is partly putting brakes on commitments taken on thoughtlessly.

Strategic thinking is one way to slow a hurried lifestyle, but there is a deeper perspective. Grandma's saying is actually against greed. When hurrying, we can be attempting to pack into life – or get out of life – more than we actually need. It may be an unconscious recognition of our mortality. We have greed to seize opportunities and cram them into our finite lifespan.

I write as an opportunist who has been learning to qualify this tendency over the years since I sat at Grandma’s feet. I understand now that people in a hurry are not the flavour of the month when compared to the swan-like, tranquil folk who never give a hint of what is paddling away under the surface of their lives. By just being there, unhurried, they draw attention, as well as friends, as they invite us to waste the time we see as so precious.

If I want to be more calm like them, I have to recognise that seizing creative opportunities needs balancing with the capacity to connect with the unhurried - Better slower together, than faster alone.

The world we live in gives us unprecedented choice that, welcome as that is, brings serious dangers. We access people, leisure or work options at the touch of a screen. Our time gets filled with desirable alternatives we seize upon, hurrying crazily from one activity to another, driven by messages coming in to us at the speed of light.

Human beings are set up to travel much more slowly. It helps that we are becoming more aware of the wiles of the electronic media we are exposed to, with its abundant welcome or unwelcome demands, but there are wider issues. 

The writer G.K.Chesterton mused that ‘One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time’. Chesterton’s witty saying hits the nail on the head about Hurry’s relentless grip once he gets a hold on us.

If one brake to ‘Hurry’ is setting apart a regular peaceable time to recall life goals and prioritise a to-do list – quite a small period – another is to appreciate serendipity.

You can have a strategy to slow down your life, going for quality before quantity in engagement, but serendipity is a better brake. By being open to reining back activities, we are drawn into life’s happy chances, its hour-by-hour surprises. ‘What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare’ wrote the poet.

I am a ‘human being’ not a ‘human doing’.  ‘Just being’ seems alien to part of me, even with those I love. For Grandma there was no ‘just’, her influence was simply that of a warm, personal presence. Encountering her was naturally unhurried, the best sort of serendipity.

Being available to others, without demands, to give your time and ear will always be attractive. Putting the brakes on ‘Hurry’, so our minds appreciate the present moment is a great aspiration, even if it remains in tension with ‘making time’ to fulfil the demands ahead.

The French military have a saying ‘reculer pour mieux sauter’ – ‘coil up to better spring forth’ – which captures the rebalancing involved in braking ‘Hurry’, so life can best speed ahead.

Remembrance Day St Wilfrid’s broadcast 11 November 2020

It’s Armistice Day and the claxon will sound across Haywards Heath at 11 o’clock as many in our town keep a 2 minute silence to recall all those people who died in the World Wars for which poppies on our lapels have been an ongoing visual reminder these last weeks. 

In the early part of the 20th century, the fields of France and Belgium were filled with red poppies. The flowers grew in the same fields where many soldiers lost their lives fighting in World War I.

John McCrae was a Canadian surgeon in the First World War. He was also a poet and produced a famous poem called "In Flanders Fields". The day before he wrote this, one of John's closest friends was killed and buried in a grave decorated with only a simple wooden cross. Wild poppies were already blooming between the crosses that marked the graves of those who were killed in battle. 

"In Flanders Fields" was first published in December, 1915 in England's "Punch" magazine. Within months it became the most popular poem about the First World War. Many people felt the poem symbolised the sacrifices made by all those who participated in World War I. Here it is

In Flanders fields the poppies blow between the crosses, row on row,

that mark our place; and in the sky the larks, still bravely singing, fly

scarce heard amid the guns below. 

We are the Dead. 

Short days ago we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, loved, and were loved, 

and now we lie in Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe: to you from failing hands we throw

the torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die

we shall not sleep, though poppies grow in Flanders fields.

This morning we remember that out of that sadness and the terrible reality of war there grows a longing for peace which is being eloquently expressed across the world today. 

There is another sign mentioned in the poem besides that of the poppy. It’s that of the cross which is placed over graves to remind people of the sacrifice of Jesus and his victory over death.

During the First World War a British Soldier fought in one of the trenches in the Somme surviving those 4 years of conflict to return to his native Yorkshire. 

He took with him a spent brass shell case from the trench of the Somme. In his spare time he took that case and moulded it into a crucifix, an image of the Cross of Jesus.

Years later I was to meet his daughter who gave me the same crucifix when I visited her in her old age in Doncaster.

Here it is - a very special cross given me thirty five years ago by a miner's widow.

A cross made from a shell to show God's love. 

A cross made from a weapon of destruction to hold Jesus our crucified Saviour.

I keep it on my desk to remind me of Jesus as the One who can turn the raw material of our lives, with all its pain and sorrow, into a thing of beauty, just as the brass shell became this crucifix.

Through the cross of Jesus we know God has overcome the worst things in the world that can ever come against us – sin, fear, doubt, disease, even death – all these powers are overcome.

Jesus, the Son of God, has been through the darkest valley so I know that there is nothing God and I together cannot overcome in this world or the next.

On Armistice Day at St Wilfrid’s we voice for our town and its dear dead a prayer engraved on the west wall of Westminster Abbey: God grant to the living grace, to the departed rest, to the church and the world peace and concord and to us sinners eternal life. Amen.

All Souls Day Presentation, Haywards Heath 2.11.20 John 5:19-29

It is a privilege to celebrate this Requiem in the Church up the road from Haywards Heath Cemetery on Western Road. On 2 November resting places of dear dead are visited across the Christian world. Our Cemetery will be no exception as with others I walk round to pray for those I love but see no longer including those whose burials I’ve officiated at over 20 years working based in the town and its surrounds. With scenic wooded surrounds it is a beautiful well maintained civic amenity consecrated by the Bishop of Chichester in 1917 after growth of our town led to St Wilfrid’s cemetery being filled. 

Christianity cemeteries are dormitories where our dear dead sleep as they await the second coming of our Saviour. This is brought out in today’s Gospel from John 5:19-29 which I invite you to join me in looking at once again in detail.

The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live. (John 5:25)

Our Lord is speaking here and now to us and all disciples. As disciples we open our hearts to his presence in word and sacrament and gain life, life in its fullness. That life comes to us here and now, as his free gift, and it sustains a spiritual resurrection only mortal sin can quench.

Moving on in today’s Gospel from the first to the last verses, from John Chapter 5 verse 25 on to verses 28 and 29:  The hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice: and shall come forth, they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life: and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation.

Our Lord is speaking now of what is to come, of the physical resurrection, where his work as Saviour will be completed by his work as Judge. 

Human beings will experience two judgements, first an individual judgement at the moment of death and second the general judgement which completes the first. At this Last Judgement on the day of Christ’s Return our individual destinies will be woven into those of all people and of the cosmos itself.

Hope in the face of that judgement is built on both the first and middle verses of today’s Gospel. 

If, in the deadness of your soul, you’ve heard the voice of the Son of God you’ve experienced a coming to life in your soul and you don’t need to fear death and judgement. There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1). 

Then, reading the middle two verses of the Gospel, as the Father hath life in himself, so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself: and hath given him authority to execute judgement also, because he is the Son of Man. You might think God would see his Son’s suitability to judge the world in his being his Son, the Son of God but, no, in a phrase quite astonishing we’re told it’s his being Son of Man that fits him for that task. The Son is equipped to preside at the Last Judgement not because of his divinity but on account of his humanity. 

You and I won’t be judged by the unthinkable standard of God but by the standard of humanity seen in Jesus Christ. Hence two beautiful verses that leap out from the awesome text of the Dies Irae recited for centuries at Requiem Eucharist:

Think, kind Jesus, my salvation caused thy wondrous incarnation:

leave me not to reprobation.

Faint and weary thou hast sought me: on the Cross of suffering bought me:

shall such grace be vainly brought me?

On All Souls Day such thinking with our purple vestments sober us to face up to the enormity of death and judgement. The Epistle and Gospel remind us of grace, that death and favourable judgement for Christians have passed already which is the greatest good news. What could be better news than that we celebrate today? 

The only meaningful thing in life is what conquers death, and not what but Who!

Let the saintly Bishop John Austin Baker have the last word: I rest on God, who will assuredly not allow me to find the meaning of life in his love and forgiveness, to be wholly dependent on him for the gift of myself, and then destroy that meaning, revoke that gift. He who holds me in existence now can and will hold me in it still, through and beyond the dissolution of my mortal frame. For this is the essence of love, to affirm the right of the beloved to exist. And what God affirms, nothing and no-one can contradict.