Gracious Living

“… Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not lose heart.” Why did they need to hear the story we heard this morning? I think for the same reason that you and I need to hear it . . . and will need to hear it again. We need to be reminded that the essence of our Christian faith is not about a set of doctrines to which we give intellectual assent saying, “I believe…” We need to be reminded that our Christian faith is not about the institutions that we humans put together and call ‘church.’ We need to be reminded that our Christian faith, at its very core, is about relationship, and so is the church.

From the very beginning God desires to relate to creation. One of the best things I’ve heard is that God likes stories, which is why he made human beings. I think it’s true. What is more, the record of the Bible, jam-packed with wonderful stories, is one of God’s desire to relate to us. The contemporary Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann, has referred to this as a “transactional relationship,” because there is a constant give-and-take as God reaches out to us and humanity either responds by coming close, or by running the other way.

The record and the call of the prophets, the conscience of Israel, demonstrate the transactional relationship and the tension it embodied. The people test God’s fidelity by their actions, by leaving the keeping of the covenant and God, through the prophets, seeks to woo them back into covenant partnership. Hosea’s prophecy is a vivid reminder of the continual courtship as God’s hesed seeks out the less than faithful Israel with the drama played out on the stage of Hosea’s own relationship with his wife Gomer. However, no prophecy presents the call to relationship in quite the same way as does the reluctant, tormented prophet Jeremiah, whose prophecy we listened to today. It will be in the words of his prophecy that the early Church will find one of the powerful promises for the new relationship of the Christian believer and, indeed of the church, to God.

Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant which I made with their fathers when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant which they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each man teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” [Jeremiah 31:31-34]

God extends the promise of relationship, “I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” The human part of the transaction is to open one’s self to be known and to know the One who seeks relationship heart to heart.

God “kicks it up a notch,” to borrow the language of Emeril, when God speaks Word into flesh in Jesus Christ. In the Christ event humanity is invited into relationship with the Deity in a hitherto unimagined manner. Jesus takes the promise of presence and mediates it to us in his own person. In the teaching, the life, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus we are given a new understanding of God’s will to relationship. We read the Gospel of Luke this morning, but God’s will to relationship is wonderfully articulated in the writings of John, where Jesus speaks of the vine and the branches. “I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing . . . As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you; abide in my love.” [John 15:5, 9] The invitation to “abide,” to enter into relationship at a new level is revolutionary. The essence of faith, religion if you will, is no longer about humanity’s search for God, but a response to God’s search for relationship with humanity and prayer is the essence of that response.

One of the classic definitions of prayer is, “the raising of the mind and heart to God.” My favorite, which some of you should be able to quote by now, is from Theophane the Recluse, the Russian Bishop-saint of the nineteenth century. He defined prayer as “the placing of the mind in the heart before God and resting there.” Our Puritan ancestors had much to say about prayer, because they were people much given to heart religion. Thomas Watson said, “Prayer is the soul’s breathing itself into the bosom of its heavenly Father.” However, I think William Gurnall’s description even more aptly captures the relationship nature of prayer. “Praying,” he writes, “is the same to the new creature as crying is to the natural. The child is not learned by art or example to cry, but instructed by nature; it comes into the world crying. Praying is not a lesson got by forms and rules of art, but flowing from principles of new life itself.”

Prayer, then, is the natural thing for a Christian to do. As it is natural for us to talk to one another, to seek to relate our thoughts, our needs, our desires, and our love, so it is natural to pray. Prayer is our cry. Prayer is our speech. Which is why we shouldn’t worry about how we pray, but we should just get on with praying. When we pray it is just our hearts responding to God’s heart, to God’s expression of love and care for us. God says, “I will be with you.” When we pray, when we work to practice God’s presence in our daily lives by remembering the promise of presence, we’re saying to God, “I know you are with me…and I am with you.”
When Jesus tells the parable about the importunate widow and the unjust judge he isn’t telling us that God is like the judge – that if we bug him enough God will give us what we want. Rather, we are to consider how if an unjust judge, who feared neither God nor man, responds to such persistence, how much more will God, who is both good and just, will respond. As I have said, the essence of our faith is relationship. The basis of relationship is presence. Jesus is telling us that we are to be present to God and, in turn, we’re to discover that God is present to us.

So, how do we do this? Well, Christians have been at it for centuries. It has been distilled into many books on prayer as people have shared their experiences. Two of my favorite little books on experiencing God’s presence were written in seventeenth century France. One was written by a Carmelite friar, Brother Lawrence. He wasn’t a learned man; in fact he was actually illiterate. His book was written by someone based on letters dictated by Brother Lawrence. The book is still in print, it’s called The Practice of the Presence of God and it is a profoundly wonderful piece. Brother Lawrence wants us to know that the meaning of life can be grasped and that at the root of it is the relationship of the human person to God. The arena for this revelation isn’t some rarified place, it’s daily life. We can discover God present to us as we do the most mundane things as clean the house, do the dishes, or go about our jobs. He says that the best approach to prayer is simply to be attentive to God. Think about it, how often during the day do we just take a moment to remember that God is here with us? Brother Lawrence’s ‘practice’ is one that speaks volumes.

The other book was written by a learned Jesuit, Jean-Pierre de Caussade, and has the daunting title, Self-Abandonment to Divine Providence. I find both books challenging and helpful. I’ve gone back to them again and again and, like in the Bible; I find something new every time. What I love about de Caussade is his practicality. He isn’t interested in talking about exalted states of ecstasy or exaggerated paths to perfection. Rather, he argues that the experience of living every moment with God is available to us right here and right now because of God’s grace. What it involves is our giving ourselves over to God’s providence, to doing God’s will as it is made known to us, and remaining connected to God. He says that each passing moment is like the veil of God and so when we look at each moment of our day in faith it is like God is revealed to us there in them. This led him to speak of “the sacrament of the present moment” and he argues that the Christian life is a moment by moment exercise in cooperation with God. The approach to prayer that de Caussade recommends is one in which we simply wait on God, we look for (which is what discernment) means for God’s presence, and then we cooperate through our actions.

Both Brother Lawrence and Father de Caussade would have, probably to their horror, found that they had a lot in common with the Puritans. However, we have to remember that the idea of the Sacred Heart of Christ, the concept of God’s affective will for humanity, so dear to Roman Catholics, really finds its earliest articulation in the writings of Puritan preachers Thomas Goodwin, Richard Baxter, and John Bunyan. Our Puritan forebears were looking for heart religion as they struggled to get to the heart of faith and they found it in the covenant. What is a covenant, but an expression of relationship? How is the covenant to be lived out? We first live it out by depending on God’s grace and seeking God’s presence through prayer. We also live it out by living our lives and finding God there. The Puritans said, repeatedly, that one should seek God in home and workshop as fervently as one sought God in the meeting house. It was good advice then, and it still works.

Prayer is something that we do privately and publicly. When we gather here in this meeting house we’re the church par excellence. We’re doing the essence of Christianity; we’re expressing our relationship to God as we relate to one another in this public expression of who we are, “followers of Jesus Christ.” This is basic to our understanding of what it means to be church as defined by the Cambridge Platform of 1648: