Sermon Advent 3, 2023
This week we missed some of the sermon on video, but the text from which the sermon was given follows below.
The point: the task for the time after repentance, as we look for God in our lives, is to engage a life of prayer that engages all our passion and comes through the hurt and broken open character of our lives to establish us in God.
Advent 3 Sermon, 2023: Prayed Christianity
The Rev. Robert Fruehwirth, St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church, Hillsborough NC
1. APOCALYPSE AND REPENTANCE
This Advent we have been on a most curious journey. We have been preparing our lives for God to come. The Church said that the first step in the preparation is apocalypse, a revelation of God’s closeness, a closeness has the side effect of making all that is not of God fall apart.
In week two, John called us to repentance. This repentance, I said, is not primarily about the stamping out of vice and intending virtue; it is the discovery of God’s great desire for us and an echoing desire for God in us and then giving ourselves over to that.
2. AFTER REPENTANCE
We are now in Advent week three. We’ve let John the Baptist push our heads under the waters of chaos and death so that we could emerge into this world, stepping like our Israelite foremothers out of the Jordan into the promised land.
And as we stand there, dripping with water, our feet getting hot on the sun-baked rocks, the question is: Now what? Now what do we do?
We have renounced the old, embraced a hope in the new — great! — but we actually have no idea what that new is. So we stand there, and shift about, getting self-conscious. We might think that John, who baptized us, is now going to show us the New Way. Maybe he’s the Messiah? It’s a reasonable hope.
The Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask John, “Who are you?” He confessed… “I am not the Messiah.” And they asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?” He said, “I am not.” “Are you the prophet?” He answered, “No.” Then they said to him, “Who are you? Let us have an answer for those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?” He said, “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’” … “I baptize with water. Among you stands one whom you do not know, the one who is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandal.”
Among us is the one who will give us the New Way, but we do not yet know him. And this leads us to our third Advent practice: waiting in unknowing, and prayer.
3. WAITING and PRAYER
There seems to be a necessity, imposed by God and needed by us, of a great pause, an emptiness, between the renunciation of the Old and receiving the New. I don’t entirely understand this, but the Saints bear witness to it. Our lives need to be held open, aching for a God we do not yet know and whom we cannot find on our own.
My thought this morning is that our task in this Advent time, following apocalypse and repentance, is to learn how to pray, and to pray for real — not like when we were ten, not in rote prayers or self-gratifying piety or soothing aesthetics, but the kind of prayer that comes from having our adult lives broken open — apocalypse — and being hungry and full of desperate need for a God whom we do not yet know.
St. Paul, himself waiting for the second coming of Christ, said:
Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise the words of prophets, but test everything; hold fast to what is good; abstain from every form of evil.
Here are clear directions: Rejoice always in hope. Pray without ceasing. Give thanks. Do not quench the spirit. Love the words of the prophets and test everything by them, discerning what is good and what is evil.
4. Prayed Christianity
For centuries women and men have tried to answer the call to pray without ceasing.
This is not a matter of constantly having prayers. It’s not about always being in church and more about becoming a burning bush. As a story has it from the ancient Christians:
Abba Lot went to Abba Joseph and said to him, “Abba, as far as I can I say my little [prayer] office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?” Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, “If you will, you can become all flame.”
I have invented a new term for this life seeking transformation into flame through what is broken. A Google Search revealed exactly zero hits for this new term. I call the life we are called to, dripping wet from conversion and repentance, our old lives having fallen apart, waiting in desire for One we do not know, “Prayed Christianity.”
Prayed Christianity means having hearts broken open by the wrongness of the world, and the wrongness we find in ourselves.
Prayed Christianity means hearts alive with the spirit of God, not quenching that flame, but letting it burn. This will hurt as it purifies and it will also transfigure.
Prayed Christianity means constant discernment about what is good or evil based on the revelation of God in the prophets and in Jesus and in the teaching and life of the Church. We don’t despise these ideas, but let them drop like plumb lines through our confused lives.
Prayed Christianity means finding our life and heart and love in relationship with God.
5. Practical Teaching
And of course, sisters and brothers, we need practical teaching on this.
I remember a priest telling me, as I entered parish ministry with vast idealism, that the actual task was to just get people to pray — regularly, consistently, so that there lives could be changed from the inside out. Prayed Christianity is the goal. Today’s Sunday Forum today offers practical guidance about this. I hope you will come, or watch the video of it once it is posted online.
For now, let me just say there are 3 requirements:
Having your souls and lives broken open is the first requirement. Life does this for most us. The problem is that we don’t learn to seek God through this pain or bring our hearts to God. We hide it away.
The second is having enough basic minimal sanity in your life so that you can actually give your attention to something that is not you and wait on it to show its life to you — so that you can wait for God and not be in control.
The third requirement is setting time aside consistently for this attentive loving, time that is just for God.
Without these three, nothing can happen. Sine qua non. What happens in that time set apart is a sharing with God what is happening in your life (yes, talking to God), then listening deeply to scripture, and sitting in silence as an act of love and desire for God and sometimes, deep rest — sometimes, communion.
6. Conclusion
I will end with a quote from T.S. Eliot whose heart was broken open by modernist ennui, an agonizing marriage, and World War II, and who became an Anglican of profound prayer and self-sacrifice. These are the final lines of his last masterpiece, the Four Quartets.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always -
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.