St. John, Burgess Hill All Saints 31.10.21

Introduction

There’s a culture clash keeping All Saints on Hallowe’en. As the world around parades spiders and witches the Church of Jesus Christ celebrates ‘the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting’. 

As that faith has waned around us pagan New Year’s Eve has revived. When Christianity came here the Celtic Festival of Samhain (pronounced Sow-in) celebrated new year 1 November linked to the start of winter cold associated with the increase of human death. On their New Year’s Eve Celts believed the worlds of the living and dead got blurred with ghosts returning to earth. 

As we keep the Solemnity of All Saints we go beyond that blurring into the actual identification of living and dead, the ‘knitting together of God’s elect in one death-defying communion and fellowship in the mystical body of Christ’ (Collect). 

This morning we celebrate our fellowship beyond death with the saints and faithful departed blurring heaven and earth as expressed in our second reading: ‘the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his people’ (Revelation 21:3). 

Such is our faith, forward looking, death-defying and in solidarity with all those ‘upon another shore, and in a greater light, that multitude which no one can number, whose hope was in Jesus and with whom in the Lord Jesus we are for ever one’.

Sermon

In the end we face one of two alternatives: to have God, and in him everything, or to have nothing but ourselves. Such is Christian faith and it has never changed. The Feast of All Saints and Tuesday’s Commemoration of All Souls are the annual reminder of the call to selflessness foundational to the universe. 

God who gave life to all things including you and I has offered us his life the humble welcoming of which is the remedy for mortality. ‘To all who receive him, who believe in his name, he gives power to become children of God… born… of God’ (John 1:12-13).

All Saints Feast is a reminder of the death defying dignity implied in today’s Gospel of the raising of Lazarus in which Our Lord, having promised to be our life and resurrection, goes on to demonstrate the same by raising his friend from death. 

Those committed to a relationship with God in Christ can never be lost. Death cannot steal them from the One whose glorious resurrection establishes him as our ‘Alpha and Omega, (our) beginning and (our) end’ (Revelation 21:6a). ‘The souls of the righteous’ - right related to God - ‘are in his hands’ we heard in our first reading from the book of Wisdom. ‘In the eyes of the foolish’ that is materialists who deny the supernatural ‘they seemed to have died… but they are at peace… their hope is full of immortality’ (Wisdom 3:1-4). Such is Christian faith, grounded in the risen Lord Jesus, who gives us a purpose for living and a reason for dying.

The Solemnity of All Saints sets our sights upon the Christian distinctive. This isn’t doing good to others - how patronising to see Christians as unique in that realm! Our Christian distinctive, stated in Ephesians 1:10, is the invitation to be part of the aspiration and accomplishment of ‘gathering up all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth’. The gathering of people into the communion of saints is itself part of God’s overarching plan for a wider gathering that brings all things in the cosmos or, as we might say, multiverses, into universal love as shared by the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit with all the saints.

Today’s Feast reminds us we are never ‘in it on our own’ as Christians. Just as the social engagement of St John’s is teamwork - and we always need more hands on deck for outreach - the work we do for others as individuals is part of something beyond us but absolutely beside us. That is the work alongside us of the invisible fellowship of the saints in light towards bringing the universe together in Christ. Each day I invoke the prayers of my own favourites. Our Lady for trust in God. St Francis for joy. St Vincent de Paul for love for the needy. St. John Vianney inspiring me to be  a listening priest. St Therese of Lisieux warming my heart to God. St. John Henry Newman helping me give answers to questions I get about Faith - and so on. 

Contemplating God alongside the saints is a welcome school of selflessness. Anglican teacher, Eric Mascall expresses this well in his book ‘Grace & Glory’: ‘It is by becoming progressively more self-forgetful, and not by becoming more self-analytic, that our love of God grows in strength and depth. And perhaps the most effective way of imitating the saints is the indirect way of thanking God for the fact that they have served Him so much better than we. For in the Body of Christ we are not simply concerned with achieving our individual perfection but with making our own small contribution to the perfection of the whole body. And in its organic union with the holiness of our fellow-members and, above all, with the supreme and spotless holiness of Christ who is the Body’s Head, our own feeble essays in holiness are clothed with a glory and stamped with a value of which in isolation they would be utterly incapable’. Mascall goes on to quote Thomas Merton on the challenge to self-forgetfulness behind today’s Feast, a quotation which will be followed by a short time of reflection on the word of God. ‘The saints are glad to be saints, not because their sanctity makes them admirable to others, but because the gift of sainthood makes it possible for them to admire everybody else’. 

St John, Burgess Hill Trinity Sunday 30.5.21

Shortly after I was ordained priest I had a crisis of faith. I went back to where I had trained. It was a chance to work out what should happen next since I hardly believed in the reality of God anymore. While there I was taken under the wing of Fr. Daniel, one of the Mirfield monks. He gave me this advice: ‘Maybe, John, it is not God who's gone but your vision of him. Why not pray an honest prayer, like, ‘God, if you're there, show yourself. Give me a vision of yourself that's to your dimensions and not mine’. With nothing to lose I prayed Fr. Daniel’s prayer over two cliff-hanging days. Then God answered. He chose a leaf on a tree in the monastery garden. I was walking along with no particular thought in my head when my eyes fell on the leaf and it was as if it spoke to me. ‘He made you’, the leaf seemed to say. I was bowled over. As I moved forward I saw the great Crucifix that stands in the garden. ‘I made you. I love you’, the figure of Jesus seemed to say. ‘Father, Son...what about the Holy Spirit?’, my mind was spinning. The Father was saying ‘I made you’, the Son ‘I love you’. Could it be that the Spirit was saying ‘I want to fill you’? A group of monks prayed for me to be filled afresh with the Holy Spirit and from that day forward God has seemed closer to me in people and nature as well as in church. 

This experience has helped me understand what it means to pray ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen’. It was as if my vision of God had grown too ‘samey’ and needed to get ‘different’ and only God could do that, the living God who speaks to anyone prepared to lend an ear to him. In reminding me ‘I made you’ God used a leaf to speak to me – a leaf out of his book of nature!

God is different from us and yet the same as us. We humans are individual persons but God is three persons in one God which goes beyond reason. That is the great thing about God - his frontiers are beyond ours so he can invite us into new territories by what he chooses to reveal to us. The supreme territory is the life of the resurrection. Because of its core historical events, in Christianity talk of God is inseparable from a vision of him beyond this world. Austin Farrer makes this plain in one of his sermons: ‘You can equivocate for ever on God's very existence... but a God who reverses nature, a God who undoes death, that those in whom the likeness of his glory has faintly and fitfully shone may be drawn everlastingly into the heart of light, and know him as he is: this is a God indeed, a God almighty, a God to be trusted, loved and adored’. The Bible says ‘God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them’ and the gift of reason is seen as the mark of that image within us. By reason we can evaluate the goodness, truth and beauty around us as pointing to God as being more of the same. Yet there are things our minds cannot grasp like suffering and death, people who forgive one another and the immensity of space. Such realities reveal themselves to us as being bigger than our minds or beyond reason.

God has sameness to us and difference from us. Since God is one in himself and one with us in Jesus Christ we can experience his sameness. He is our loving source and ending, our Father. We are the children he loves and wants to be with him for ever. God’s sameness appeals to us as reasonable beings. Since God is revealed in history as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three persons in one God, he is gloriously different from us, with space and power to bring all other persons into communion with himself. This space and power was revealed upon earth in a human life of 33 years. God’s space, power and holiness is so different from ours it needed bringing to focus, so we could see it, through God becoming a human being in the person of Jesus. ‘As a magnifying glass concentrates the rays of the sun into a little burning knot of heat that can set fire to a dry leaf or a piece of paper, so the mystery of Christ in the Gospel concentrates the rays of God’s light and fire to a point that sets fire to the spirit of man’. So wrote the great Christian mystic and writer Thomas Merton.

I got into a conversation at Sainsbury’s. The young man at the till didn’t go to Church but I’ll not forget what he said: ‘God’s all powerful but they make him to be a wimping wimp!’ This observation brought back to me a frequent complaint made by the great explorer Laurens Van der Post about the Church’s domestication of God which might be behind non-attendance of folk like my friend at the till. The explorer wrote: ‘One of the strangest ideas ever conceived is the idea that religion is the opium of the people, because religion is a call to battle.. human beings in their rational selves.. shy like frightened horses away from a God who is not the source of opium for people but a reawakening of creation and a transcending of the forces and nuclear energies in the human soul’.

Van der Post was imprisoned by the Japanese during World War Two and lived under the threat of execution. A date was set. The night before he records experiencing a tremendous thunderstorm outside his prison. He saw in this storm a strengthening as if from the awesome truth of a God so different he can raise the dead. The Japanese were not ultimately in control. The storm witnessed a greater than human power which in the end would decide all. He was spared execution. God’s all powerful - may he forgive us for making him ‘a wimping wimp’! 

May God also forgive those of us who put him into words and make him seem neat and tidy. Theology is putting together human words about a reality beyond words. It is necessary because God in Christ, so different from us, has made himself the same as us by taking flesh and bidding us write words about him. Scripture takes precedence over all such words, a library of inspired documents, presenting God as awesome yet accessible in Christ. 

All religions claim some sort of revelation of God. Hindus see many gods expressing affinity or sameness with ordinary life. Muslims see one God above and beyond us whose utter difference from us seems to exclude any sameness. Christians are in the middle with three persons in one God, a God who is personal like ourselves but also beyond us as the ground of our being. 

God for Christians is different from us not just because of what he says about himself through scripture - or to put it inclusively what God says about Godself - but on account of our experience of that difference as believers as I found in the monastery garden and the supermarket and Van der Post discovered in prison.

Engagement with God is a calling forth both of the light of reason and the light of faith which together lift us beyond ourselves into his praise. As the word of God written in the prophet Isaiah states: ‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts (Isaiah 55:8-9).

Christmas 2020 St Richard’s Midnight Mass & Presentation Christmas Day

Christmas 2020 focus of joy and sorrow the world over. 

These two human realities are merged into our celebration tonight/today just as Jupiter and Saturn have been brought into conjunction in the heavens.

In his orchestral suite The Planets Gustav Holst presents Jupiter as jollity and Saturn as bringer of weariness. Compared with the buoyant music for Jupiter, familiar to us as tune for ‘I vow to me my country’ Holst’s music for Saturn is slow and unsettling.

Weather permitting you may have seen the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the night sky this week. It happens every 20 years but this year’s has been their closest approach since 1623 and closest observable since 1226. There is talk of the grandest conjunction being the source of the immense light appearing as a guide ‘when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the King’ (Matthew 2:1,2)

The events of that night bring joy and sorrow to godly focus in such a way as to inflame the faith, hope and love that burn in our hearts tonight/this morning.

Of this focussing Thomas Merton wrote: ‘As a magnifying glass concentrates the rays of the sun into a little burning knot of heat that can set fire to a dry leaf or a piece of paper, so the mystery of Christ in the Gospel concentrates the rays of God's light and fire to a point to set fire to the human spirit’.

The movement of Jupiter and Saturn to conjunction lifts our physical eyes into the sky at night. The conjunction of God and the world in Jesus Christ, true God and true Man, sets fire to our spiritual perception building faith, hope and love in the face of the sorrows of 2020.

We find faith in a God who, having made us and put us at risk in the cosmos, brings knowledge of his love for us and for all things to light by taking flesh from the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Child Jesus builds our faith as ‘he concentrates the rays of God’s light and fire to a point to set fire to the human spirit’. ‘He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it’.

We find hope in the Christmas Feast and not just for 2021. If, as the psalmist writes, ‘this is the day that the Lord has made’ so is tomorrow. Tomorrow also is God’s, and ‘tomorrow, and tomorrow unto the last syllable of recorded time’. Many ask where we find hope at this season. Others say the pandemic has underlined the value of religion as keeper of the flame of hope. 

It’s not a matter of where there is life there is hope but where there is hope there is life, life worth living, life with fullness beyond fullness of years. People with hope, especially those caring for others this year against the odds and at risk to themselves, bring to focus what matters ultimately.

We find faith, hope and thirdly love, which is of ultimate significance, kindled tonight/today. As Jupiter and Saturn draw close in the sky, joy and sorrow are united in the humble Crib of Bethlehem - God is made one with us.

To see this we must take the step of receiving and believing invited at the start of John’s Gospel: ‘God in Christ was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God’.

I can set forth arguments for the existence of a God who is love but arguments will only go so far. The story of Jesus in the Gospels is accepted as historical by scholars in a way that is impressive compared to the qualifications they make about the historical claims of non-Christian religions. Even Christ’s resurrection is said by non-believers to have an enigmatic ring of truth. To move from the ring of truth to entering truth, living in faith, hope and love, is a matter of ‘receiving him… believing in Christ’s name… and welcoming power to become children of God.

One of our leading theologians, Rowan Williams, said last week that believers who strive to make rational arguments for the faith in conversation with secularists should have more modest aspirations. Our humble role is to keep a “foot in the door” until a saint comes along. Williams offered the example of Malcolm Muggeridge, a celebrated British journalist and satirist who was attracted to Communism in his youth and later converted to Christianity under the influence of St. Teresa of Calcutta. I quote, ‘it was not argument, but seeing something fleshed out that did it, but Muggeridge wouldn’t have committed without steady engagement over the years with the arguments’.

Christmas 2020 is the focus of joy and sorrow across the world. The conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the sky symbolises the bringing to himself God desires for every human being. Our role as believers in advancing this is advanced as our faith, hope and love are refreshed into overflow tonight/today.  

God bless each one of us as we set forth to our circle the argument for Christ and pray for them to embrace what he brings – belonging for the isolated, purpose for the lost, empowerment for the overwhelmed, forgiveness for sinners and direction for those who’re feeling lost. ‘And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth’.

St Wilfrid’s talk on contemplation 9.12.20

Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Matthew 11:28

Taking up that invitation is what Christianity is all about - the regular putting aside of worldly concerns to contemplate the Lord Jesus Christ and enter his rest.

The task of prayer and contemplation is one of heart and will. The mind with its reason and language can take us to God but only the heart can drink of him – by love he is holden not by thought as a medieval writer puts it.

Contemplation, like prayer as a whole, has few absolute rules other than truthfulness. As C.S.Lewis wrote: The prayer preceding all prayers is “May it be the real I who speaks.  May it be the real Thou that I speak to”. Any yearning for contemplative prayer is inseparable from the openness to God we express in penitence for sin and also the readiness to allow all our images of God to give way before the sense of his Presence, a sort of ‘iconoclasm’.  

Spiritual guidance is important in all of this. Talk to a priest if you want help finding a spiritual director locally

Contemplation links to the whole of life. Thomas Merton wrote his great book Seeds of Contemplation show book which I deeply recommend. He was also a passionate advocate against the Vietnam War, nuclear arms and racism.

Activism and prayer are essential to our Faith, though many recognise it is the neglect of the latter, transcendent element that most weakens the church in our day. It is significant that meditation and medicine are words with the same root – we need healing of spirit as well as healing of body and mind.

The Italian writer, Carlo Carretto, inspired by the spirituality of Charles De Foucauld wrote: The closer you come to God as you ascend the slopes of contemplation, the greater grows your craving to love human beings on the level of action.

Much of what I have said about contemplation refers to prayer of all kinds – we are bound to confess, thank and intercede as well as to contemplate – and some of us are bound to the liturgical office.

Now a little advice on the nitty gritty of the prayer of contemplation.

We need a place that is quiet – not too quiet, some say, since a little amount of noise around us helps balance the inner noise we all suffer inside of us!

We need agreement from our family, unless we live alone, for a set time apart from them. 

We need some form of preparation before we sit or kneel to pray. There are various what I call ‘springboards’ to dive off towards the Lord.

We can prepare something to read from scripture or a passage or prayer that has struck us from our spiritual reading – you can’t be a contemplative without living close to scripture and the writings of Christians through the ages.

Some find being before the Reserved Sacrament in Church a helpful aid, or the time immediately after say a quiet weekday Eucharist when they can dwell on Christ in us the hope of glory Colossians 1:27b. Icons, similarly, can serve as a springboard for contemplation.

It is possible to contemplate springing off from natural beauty, even on what I call a ‘prayer walk’ though spiritual writers recommend a constant posture of the body, straight back etc. as a helpful basis for the spiritual exercise involved.  Walking at a constant pace on a known route can serve.

A decision about which means to use as a basis for contemplation is important before you arrive at the place of prayer.  Sometimes, very often, we pick up on where we left off the day before, which is the value of a spiritual journal show.  It helps to pen a couple of lines after your daily prayer to help monitor your work of prayer.

When we finally sit down or kneel there is value in an act of offering of the time to God and an invocation of the Holy Spirit to anoint our contemplation.  Some of us will want to fit self-examination, thanksgiving, intercession and the Office alongside the higher prayer of contemplation into our major daily prayer offering.

Relaxation exercises for the body which help prepare for prayer are well dealt with in Tony De Mello’s writings, especially Sadhana and Praying Body and Soul show.

The choice and use of a  mantra or holy phrase to settle the mind is another feature that may need attending to before we get going in our prayer. I use the Jesus Prayer for this - Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Show book

Then we contemplate. Distractions will assail us. We stick at a set posture and duration, resisting the natural desire to quit or change direction unless there is a clear lead from God to do so.

Michael Ramsey when asked how long he prayed for each day was said to answer ‘a couple of minutes’. He added that it usually took half an hour to get there! In many ways the duration of time and the discipline to stick with it is pivotal to a life of contemplation. God bless us all in our response to the invitation in today’s Gospel: 

Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.

All Saints Festival at St Bartholomew, Brighton 3.11.19

Christianity is about contemplation, communion and change.

As a cyclist I give energy to my bike hub which is transferred through a set of spokes to get the wheels moving.

Today’s Festival of All Saints is a challenge to get more on the move for God through deeper recognition of the hub of prayer and spokes of fellowship in moving us forward on the road to glory.

A few thoughts under these three headings: contemplation, communion and change.

First, contemplation which is as much at the heart of reality and Christianity as it is at the heart of All Saints Feast. St John describes the ultimate purpose of our lives as purification so as to be capable of seeing God in the population of heaven. ‘Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.’ (1 John 3:2-3)

At the hub of reality is God whose Son, as God and man, draws human beings into God’s own self-contemplation, the Father of the Son in the Holy Spirit, catching us into God’s own life so as to be energised. On earth contemplation of God is sporadic, by you and me, people of faith, in the midst of the uncoordinated chaos of life. In heaven saints purified from self-regard gaze in coordination upon the perfect goodness, truth and beauty of God. Through them, through the hub of their contemplation and intercession, God’s power flows into the world. 

Words crack in talking of such things. Because of the incarnation the heavenly hub of contemplation draws mortals into God’s praise and service through, with and in Jesus Christ. Heaven is the depth of earth seen by faith so that our prayer is always  allied to the powerful hub of contemplation we celebrate on All Saints Feast. It’s power is captured by Paul in his second letter to Corinth: ‘All of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.’ (2 Corinthians 3:18)

Contemplation leads to change, to transformation, from the image into the likeness of God, ‘from one degree of glory to another’. Today we are reminded of the thousands beyond this world who possess such likeness and glory and the unclouded vision of God.

They are, to enter our second consideration, in communion with us, spokes carrying an overflow of energy from that hub of the contemplation of God to get the world moving heavenwards. ‘You have knit together your elect’ All Saints Collect says, ‘in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of your Son Christ our Lord’.

Just as the power and direction of a bicycle flows to the wheels through spokes so the power and direction of the Holy Spirit energises the world through the communion of saints in heaven and on earth. ‘Therefore with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven we proclaim God’s great and glorious name’. Our contemplation, like that of the saints above, is never on our own. Paul asks in Ephesians that we may ‘have power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth… of … the fullness of God’ (Ephesians 3:18-19). In other words we only see God fully together with others. 

‘A heaven of souls without Christ would not be heaven’ Austin Farrer writes. ‘Could we not say the same about a heaven of Christ without souls? Christ is not only God in man, he is God in mankind; God in one man isolated from all others would not even be God in man, for a man in isolation is not a human possibility’. 

All Saints Festival is a feast of humanity put into its right mind. Against the individualism of the age the Church presents this unvarying challenge: in the last resort there are but two options, to have God in communion with the saints or to have nothing but yourself. 

It’s a troubling thought, isn’t it, that we will need to shelve judgmental thinking to take our place with the Saints. That great Christian thinker Thomas Merton puts this reality of heavenly communion in a hopeful way writing: ‘The saints are glad to be saints, not because their sanctity makes them admirable to others, but because the gift of sainthood makes it possible for them to admire everybody else’.

Contemplation, communion then thirdly change. If the hub of Christianity is contemplation, its spokes are the communion of saints. Through the corporate prayer of saints in heaven and on earth the power and direction of Christ’s Spirit moves wheels - in us, around us, energising, changing the cosmos. 

All Saints Feast is a day of obligation for attendance at the Eucharist because it is in worship we best learn from and find transformation from engaging with the adoration of heaven. As we look to the Lord in this action of taking, blessing, breaking and sharing our lives are taken, blessed and transformed. 

The eucharist like a bicycle draws power and direction from the hub of Christ’s contemplation of the Father. This energy of adoration is conveyed by the spokes of a fellowship meal. It’s consequence is the transformation not just of worshippers offering ‘ourselves, our souls and bodies’. What we are about at All Saints Mass, or at any Mass, is changing the world, looking as written in Revelation 11:15b for ‘the kingdom of the world [to] become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ’.

This morning as we contemplate God in communion with the saints we are changed - and so is the world weighing on each of our hearts. In pleading  this memorial sacrifice of Christ’s death and resurrection we are lifted into the heavenly hub of adoration, in communion with the Church in paradise and on earth, to effect the consecration of all that is to God’s praise and service.

I end with the last paragraph of a sermon on heaven by Austin Farrer: ‘There light spills evermore from the fountain of light; it fills the creatures of God with God as much as they will contain, and yet enlarges their heart and vision to contain the more. There it is all one to serve and to pray, for God invisible is visibly portrayed in the action he inspires. There the flame of deity burns in the candle of mankind, Jesus Christ; and all the saints, united with him, extend his person, diversify his operation, and catch the running fire. That is the Church, the Israel of God, of which we only exist by being the colonies and outposts, far removed and fitfully aware; yet able by faith to annihilate both time and distance, and offer with them the only pleasing sacrifice to God Almighty, Father, Son and Holy Spirit; to him ascribing, as is most justly due, all might, dominion, majesty and power, henceforth and for ever. Amen.’

Trinity 9 (17B) St Peter & St John, Wivelsfield on prayer 29th July 2018

Some words we just heard from the letter to the Ephesians Chapter 3 I pray that you may know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. 

Our life is this prayer and this prayer, this looking to Jesus is our life.

The Lord wants a deeper place in our life and that of our church because Christianity is always about getting more of Jesus Christ into our lives and shedding self-interest. 

I want to look this morning at six aspects of prayer, of looking to Jesus: listening, friendship, warfare, benevolence, recollection, and lastly empowerment. 

Prayer, looking unto Jesus, is listening.  You can’t look to Jesus unless you give ear to him, unless you attend to him.  Our whole life depends on right listening – to other people and to ourselves at times – but chiefly to Jesus.

Through prayer we hear from God.  We catch his inspirations for our life and for the world.

How do we look to Jesus in listening?

A discipline of time offered to attend directly to God. 

Michael Ramsey’s quote – he prayed for 2 minutes but took 30 minutes to get there.

Scripture is a means of looking to Jesus through listening to his Word. The Word of is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.  Hebrews 4:12

There is great power in imaginative listening to scripture as in, for example,  eg. the reading through of a scripture passage and using your imagination to enter into it. Take today’s Gospel from Chapter John 6 which we’ll be following through on Sundays over the next month. Imagine you’re in the crowd, seeing Jesus satisfy your hunger, moving deeper to your inner hunger for God, preparing for the eucharist and so on. Why not take away today’s reading and dwell upon it, or open your bible and resolve to meditate upon the whole of John 6 to help the Lord speak to you over the coming month.

Yet another way is to let the words of scripture become more personal by changing the case of the pronoun in the passage. Take that Ephesians passage and make it into a This is the Word of the Lord about John or whoever you are. May God grant that John may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in John’s heart through faith, as John is rooted and grounded in love. This sort of exercise is about experiencing what we already possess as Christians, seeing ourselves as God sees us in his word. You read through prayerfully until God touches your Spirit and then hold yourself at that point once such a prayerful impulse has been given to you.

Prayer, looking to Jesus is secondly about friendship.  We seek our friend’s attention and he seeks ours.

When friends meet they light up and so it is with Jesus and ourselves as we come before him in contemplation.

When did you last sit in quiet before the Lord?  What is it that keeps you from doing so? Could you imagine Jesus your friend doing you any harm?

Contemplative prayer has been described as ‘spiritual radiotherapy’. St Augustine once said that the whole purpose of life is the healing of the heart’s eye through which God is seen. 

Heart surgery of the Holy Spirit: the melting of coldness within cf heavenly microwave

Once again you could use the same Ephesians 3 passage as a way into quiet adoration if you read it through slowly and rest in the words so to speak.

A major barrier to contemplation is the way our minds get so distracted which hinders our hearts from contemplation. This is where the repeating of short words that engage and focus the mind can be helpful as in the Orthodox Jesus prayer. This involves repeating again and again the gospel prayer Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me a sinner. The value of the Jesus Prayer mentioned on is commended all through the Christian tradition as in the writings of early Christian writer, Hesychius of Jerusalem who captures something of the positive, joyful goodness that seems to flow from this discipline even if such graces are inevitably sporadic. The sun, passing over the earth, produces daylight; the holy and worshipful Name of the Lord Jesus, constantly shining in the mind, produces a measureless number of sun-like thoughts. 

Please don’t hesitate to talk to me or Fr Christopher if you want guidance on the Jesus Prayer or indeed any other of the forms of prayer. Not that we’re experts - our expertise is primarily to know that when it comes to prayer we’re all on the bottom rung of the ladder!

Looking to Jesus in prayer is about building friendship, about lighting one another up so that in the words of Nehemiah (8v10) the joy of the Lord [becomes] our strength. 

Looking to Jesus is thirdly warfare against the deadening spiritual impact of the world, the flesh and the devil. Prayer is warfare because Jesus calls us to a fullness of humanity that involves our shedding constraints, shaking off what Hebrews calls the weight and the sin that clings so closely (12v1b).

He who is in you, St John says, is greater than he that is in the world.  1 John 5:4

In prayer we see ourselves in a true light and take action against the dark forces that impel us. Self-examination has been described as being like going under water.  You experience an upthrust, an opposition.

There is a power at work totally opposed to self-knowledge.  Satan is fearful of both our knowing God and our knowing ourselves.  He wants us to live in ignorance so that we can comply with his schemes! 

Did you know any Anglican Communicant can find a spiritual director through their clergy or by a phone call directly to Diocesan Church House? It's also possible to approach your priest for one-to-one confidential help in knowing the assurance of God’s forgiveness. We have a saying about use of this ministry of confession among Anglicans: ‘all may, none must, some should’. Sometimes making a sacramental confession can refresh your prayer - ‘Square with God and he will square with you’.

Prayer is warfare. There is a power at work opposed to self-knowledge and we need courage to battle against it, holding to faith God always has our best interests at heart in the costly business of facing up to ourselves, warts and all.

Looking to Jesus fourthly is benevolence, the capacity to enter the good will of God for all people, especially in intercessory prayer.

Christianity is not merely a doctrine or a system of beliefs Thomas Merton wrote, it is Christ living in us and uniting people to one another in His own life and unity.  For Merton a hermit monk there is only one true flight from the world; it is not an escape from conflict, anguish and suffering, but … flight from disunity and separation to unity and peace in the love of other [people].

The prayer of intercession is true to the invitation to benevolence in Galatians where St Paul invites his readers to bear one another’s’ burdens and so fulfil the law of Christ.  6:2)

We look to Jesus to be with us as we intercede.  He lifts us up into His Perfect Offering.  In intercession we come before the Lord with people and needs on our heart to entrust them to him with confidence.

Here’s one suggested method used by Dorothy Kerin:

 By an act of the will place yourself in the presence of Our Lord.

With an act of faith ask him to empty you of self and of all desire save that his will may  be done and that it may illuminate your heart and mind.

Then gather to mind all those you are to intercede for and hold them silently up to him. 

Make no special request but just rest with them in him. 

Desire nothing but that Our Lord may be glorified in them.

In this simple way of approach Our Lord makes known his will and gives himself to us and to those for whom we intercede – in quietness.

Through intercessory prayer, in the words of Professor Hallesly we couple the powers of heaven to our helplessness…the powers which can awaken those who sleep in sin and raise up the dead … that can capture strongholds and make the impossible possible.

Fifthly looking to Jesus is prayer of recollection, prayer that takes stock of your life and celebrates what God has done and is doing and, looks forwards to what God is going to do in us and through us.

The value of prayer journaling. Tis grace both led me safe thus far … and grace will lead me home.

A good exercise is to look back over your life and recollect with Jesus the five biggest spiritual milestones along the way, your five most powerful desires, your five worst fears.

Recollection is about such reminiscing or calling to mind. 

It is also about ‘collecting again’ or recovering control of oneself. Through looking to God we gain self-possession. 

Attention to God, mindfulness of Jesus is at the heart of the Christian life.

The recollected woman or man inhabits her or his words, is able to be present to Jesus at all times so that Jesus can be in them and show through them.

The Name of Jesus present in human heart, communicates to it the power of deification … shining through the heart, the light of the Name of Jesus illuminates all the universe.  Bulgakov

Prayer, looking to Jesus is lastly empowerment.  You will receive power he said, when the Holy Spirit comes Acts 1v8.

Well he has come, at baptism and confirmation, the birth of our Christian commitment and in the  receiving of Holy Communion - but we need to invite him by praying regularly for the Holy Spirit. 

Prayer is an empowerment especially by the gifts of the Holy Spirit. As we pray we can at times feel God’s touch upon our heart, see some sort of vision or be led to some particular scripture verse as we look to Jesus. This is charismatic prayer, literally graced or given prayer in which our looking to Jesus and waiting before him is answered by a heavenly gift.

Looking to Jesus in prayer then is listening, friendship, warfare, benevolence, recollection and empowerment. 

May the Lord turn our eyes more and more upon himself so that our earthly pursuits may lose some of their enticement as we see more of him as we seek him in prayer. I pray that you may know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. So be it!