March 7, 2010

 

Scripture:         1 Thessalonians 5:16-24

 

Sermon:           “Take Care of Yourself—Spirit”

 

            Turning our hearts and minds now to the word of God, let us read together the scripture lesson for the day.  Turn with me to the Paul’s fist letter to the Thessalonians, chapter 5, where we will read together verses 16 through 24.  You can find that easily on page 278 of the New Testament in the pew Bible.

            This is going to be the final segment of a sermon series about taking care of ourselves.  We’ve been talking in the past few weeks about the inward focus that is a necessary part of following Jesus.  And that’s a good thing to do during Lent.  Take a look inside.  See what’s going on in there.  Come to terms with it.

            In listening to Jesus, we hear him pointing us in this direction.  He says things like, “Take up your own cross and follow me.”  There’s something personal about the cross that you are called to carry.  You have to look inside yourself and figure it out.  And then he says, “Take that big log out of your eye before you attempt to remove a tiny little speck from somebody else’s.”  What he’s saying is that we’ve got to deal with ourselves first.

            Now, all of this inward focus on ourselves can lead us in the wrong direction if we’re not careful.  Sometimes faith gets like that, you know.  Faith becomes all about me.  I’m saved.  I’m blessed.  I’m going to have peace and prosperity, and so forth.  And we end up missing a very crucial point:  We’re called to follow in the footsteps of Jesus.  May I remind you that this pathway winds its way up to a hill outside of Jerusalem to hang on a cross?  Faith in Jesus, following Jesus—it ultimately calls us to see how our lives are a gift to be given to the world.  For that is what Jesus was.

            I am itching to get to that part of the sermon series, to tell you the truth.  What does it mean to follow Jesus by giving your life away?  But, Jesus always asks us to deal with ourselves first.  And that’s what we’re doing for now.  So, let’s look at the third aspect of self-care:  taking care of our spirit.  We’ll again turn to the words of the Apostle Paul as he wrote at the end of his first letter to the church in a town called Thessalonica.  This is the word of the Lord…

 

            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.

            May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.  The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do this.

 

            Out in the desert long ago there was a group of folks dedicate to the spiritual life.  Monks.  They’d escaped from the life we would call normal and lived instead in a secluded community where they could devote themselves to living in the way Christ taught.  Good people.  Dedicated people.  Faithful people.  Spiritual people.

            You know that these monks took it very seriously that the Bible teaches us to pray without ceasing.  And so they did not do anything else.  They just prayed.  All day, every day.  That’s what they did.

            I actually deeply appreciate it when monks do work.  You can get some of the most amazing cheeses from the Trappist monastery down near Bardstown.  Oh, it’s good stuff.  You can get it right there in the Louisville airport.  And if beer is your thing, some monks brew that, too.  The monks of New Skete, up in New York state, have perfected an art of training dogs.  I appreciate the work of monks.

            But, these monks long ago out in the dessert?  They prayed without ceasing.  No work.  And one day, legend has it, one of the dessert Fathers came to their community.  Abba Lucias asked them, “What is your manual work?”  Confidently, the young monks answered him that they do not touch manual work.  Instead, they said that they obeyed the Apostle Paul’s command to pray without ceasing.

            Can you imagine such a life?  Always praying?  Never working?  Never doing anything else?

            Abba Lucias could not quite imagine it, either.  So, he asked them, “Do you ever eat?”  And they paused for a moment.  Finally, they admitted that they did eat.  “Well, who prays for you then?”

            Now, the wise old man was not content with this little demonstration.  So, he asked them, “Do you ever sleep?”  And they all admitted that they did sleep.  “Well, who prays for you when you’re asleep?”

            I would suggest that what Paul has written here is not something we can accomplish.  You cannot literally devote yourself to the act of praying without ceasing.  Not even the brave souls who find a calling in the contemplative life of the monastery have been able to do that.  Paul worked to support himself.  He made tents to earn a living.  And he’s the one who wrote these words.

            So, what does that mean?  Pray without ceasing.

            Well, let’s first talk about what our prayer life does look like.  Shall we?  Are you happy with it?  Is it something that is a part of your daily routine at all?  Or, do you find yourself envious of others who can seemingly focus their minds for long stretches of time to pray and meditate?

            I’ve set out to pray and meditate on many occasions only to find myself consumed with so many other thoughts.  There are nights when I set out to end the day with prayer only to wake up in the morning with the realization that I never even said “Amen” because I’d drifted off to sleep.

            Prayer isn’t easy for most of us.  Let’s just admit that and get it out of the way.  Prayer isn’t easy for most of us.  And it’s frustrating because we don’t know exactly what it is or how to do it.  I’m willing to wager that many of us do not pray consistently because we’ve just never felt all that natural doing it.  Not to mention the fact that we’ve learned mostly how to pray whenever we need something.  It just doesn’t come naturally to most of us.

            Now, when Jesus first spoke the prayer that we recite here every Sunday, the Lord’s Prayer, he was responding to the same kind of discomfort among his own disciples.  They said, “Lord, teach us how to pray.”  They didn’t know.  They didn’t know any better than any of us.  “Teach us how to pray.”  And he did.  Maybe that will give you a little bit of comfort.  The people who knew Jesus in flesh and blood weren’t all that comfortable with prayer, either.

            But, there’s something fundamental that we miss when prayer isn’t part of who we are and what we do.  Are you able to pray like you want to?  Or, do you find yourself trying to use some fancy language and cleaned up vocabulary because, well, you’re addressing the Almighty King?  Do you think that God hasn’t heard all the other words you’ve ever spoken?  Goodness.

            There’s a good Baptist minister over in Virginia that helps to train pastors, Glenn Hinson.  He tells his students, “You know that you’re in trouble when the prayers that offer in public far outnumber the prayers that you offer in private.”  Do your public prayers outweigh your private ones?  Saying grace at the dinner table.  Praying in church.  You don’t have to be in the ministry for this to be true, you know.

            Prayer centers us.  And rightly understood, prayer is simply conversation with God because you realize that you are in God’s presence.

            Now, this business of praying without ceasing might sound like an event in the Olympics as far as any of us are concerned.  But, maybe there is something to it as we examine taking care of ourselves spiritually.  No, you cannot get down on your knees for every second of your life.  What if that is not exactly what Paul was suggesting?

            If you could begin to understand a deep spiritual reality that you are continuously in God’s presence, maybe it would start to come clear.  I know we say that all the time.  We teach it to our children.  God is everywhere.  We say it.  But, rarely do we connect to it.  If we could maintain this understanding, that nowhere can I go where God is not right there with me, nowhere can I go that God is not listening intently to what I say, then every word and every thought would then be prayer.  Wouldn’t it?

            Perhaps what Paul means, pray without ceasing, is start centering yourself in the knowledge that you are intimately connected with God.  At all times.  When we can do that we find that our lives take on this posture that leans on God.

            Maybe the key for us, especially for us who admittedly struggle with prayer, is to stop trying to do, stop trying to pray, and start trying to let God’s presence simply overwhelm us.  Nothing can I do.  No place can I go.  No thought can enter my mind.  Nothing can happen that is not then a part of my prayer to God.  We are always together.  I just have to realize that.

            This is the difference from trying to become more spiritual and realizing that you already are spiritual.  Your prayer life flows out of that.  It is not something you just create.

            Now, who is this God that you are always, intimately connected with?  Who is it that greets your first breath of the day and watches as your eyes close at night?  What is this God like and what is this God all about?

            In taking care of our spirits there is a trusted guide for understanding who this God is and how this God acts in the world.  We call it the Bible, of course.  It’s been handed down to us by our spiritual ancestors who discovered that the stories within it point towards the truth of who God is.

            You know it only does us any good for showing us the nature of God if we actually read it and know what it says.  I say that not so much as an admonishment for those who don’t read much scripture.  I say that because there are a whole lot of ideas about God and so many ways that God is presented to us that have little if anything in common with the God portrayed in scripture.

            Here are some examples.  A quick list of things we hear all the time that are not in the Bible.  “God helps those who help themselves.”  (Benjamin Franklin coined that one.)  “Nothing happens outside of God’s will.”  “Everything happens for a reason.”  And these are some of the things we offer to one another in the midst of grief and despair.  It is no wonder that we don’t know this God who is always, intimately present with us.  What does the Bible say?  What is in there?

            “God never gives you more than you can handle.”  I don’t even know where to start with that one.  I’ll start with you can’t find it in the Bible.  But, it paints this image of God doling out all of the stuff that you’re going through in your life like some kind of sadistic scientist trying to find where your breaking point is.  You will get overwhelmed sometime and it’s not because God is heaping all of this stuff on top of you.  Or that God is in control of everything and you should just accept what’s happening.

            Without knowing this God from scripture, we’ll end wanting to run as far away as we can from the God we think we’re supposed to believe in.  Personally speaking, and you’ve got your own set of difficulties that you are trying to understand, but personally speaking, if this God has placed upon me the burden of grief from the time when some of my deepest relationships were severed by a tragic car accident, all for some reason that I’m going to find out in some unknown future date?  Frankly, I’m not worshiping that God.  I don’t want anything to do with that.  And when you try to fit the difficulties of your own life into that framework of understanding God, it will not surprise me at all to see you running away some day, too.

            But, you can’t get away.  God will go to that place with you, too.  The God you would want to run away from given all of the incorrect messages we get is not the God portrayed by scripture.  And that God will follow you every step that you try to go out of an inescapable and intimate love.

            Knowing what is actually in these books matters.

            We need to begin moving our way towards the table.  I feel like there is so much more to talk about.  There always is.  But, we have been invited to a meal.  So, if there was just one more thing I could suggest to someone to take care of their spirit it would have to do with taking some time to rest, renew, recharge.  The Bible would call that Sabbath.  A Sabbath rest.  They used to build this into their week, you know.  God’s people understood how vital it was to health and wholeness to just stop for a while.  Just stop.  Put it all down and simply be.

            And the gospels several times tell these stories where Jesus would just disappear off by himself in order to get away from everything pressing in on him.  He’d get exhausted, you know.  And he’d rest.

            Do you ever find that you are wearing yourself out to the point where the things should matter the most to you have become the things that you think are distracting you?  You ever get to the point where you are no longer dreaming and getting excited about the work you do, but you’re just trying to get through the week?  The day?

            Take care of yourself.  Step away.  Do what our spiritual ancestors used to insist upon.  But, take care of yourself.  You’re much too important to God, much too important to what God is trying to do with your life not to be in the best condition possible.

 

Rev. David James Brown

Park Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)