{"id":1458,"date":"2016-10-23T11:00:40","date_gmt":"2016-10-23T15:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=1458"},"modified":"2019-09-24T14:21:22","modified_gmt":"2019-09-24T18:21:22","slug":"persistence-in-prayer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2016\/10\/23\/persistence-in-prayer\/","title":{"rendered":"Persistence in Prayer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Click here to listen to the full service<\/a><\/p>\n

Luke 18:9-14<\/a><\/p>\n

Click here to listen to the meditations\u00a0only<\/a><\/p>\n

God be merciful to me, a sinner.\u00a0 I tell you, this man went down to his home justified.<\/em><\/p>\n

Yeats in Poetic Prayer <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0(for confession)<\/em><\/p>\n

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
\nThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;
\nThings fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
\nMere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
\nThe blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
\nThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;
\nThe best lack all conviction, while the worst
\nAre full of passionate intensity.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0(WB Yeats, 1919)<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>Persistence in prayer is difficult, in our age.<\/p>\n

Prayer in Luke<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>We can readily appreciate the stark rigor of Jesus\u2019 Lukan parables.\u00a0 A Samaritan whose kindness illumines the limits of religion\u2026A rich man who builds bigger barns, but whose soul suddenly is required\u2026A figure of a fig tree, fruitless, but spared for yet another year in hope\u2026A marriage feast wherein humility is tested and the poor are fed\u2026Another banquet to which many are invited but few respond, and out to highways and byways the invitation goes\u2026A lost sheep\u2014found!…A lost coin\u2026found!\u00a0 A lost, prodigal son\u2026found!…A truly dishonest steward whose wiliness shines out\u2026A rich man who turns his back on a poor man, and roasts in hell for it\u2026 a persistent widow whose raises her voice to an unjust judge\u2026Talent wasted and invested\u2026A vineyard stolen by tenants\u2026and, today, a publican persistent in prayer.<\/p>\n

What drove Luke, alone, to remember or construct these parables?\u00a0 The lengthening years, without ultimate victory, since the cross?\u00a0 The long decades of living without Jesus?\u00a0 The uncertainties of institution and culture and citizenship and multiple responsibilities?\u00a0 The daily stresses of managing a budget?\u00a0 It is the primitive church that can give an example for us today in our time of anxiety. They waited for Jesus to return.\u00a0 And he delayed.\u00a0 And he delays, still.\u00a0 It is enough to make you lose heart.<\/p>\n

Though with a scornful wonder we see her sore oppressed<\/em><\/p>\n

By schism rent asunder by heresy distressed<\/em><\/p>\n

Yet saints their watch are keeping their cry goes up \u2018howlong\u2019?<\/em><\/p>\n

And soon the night of weeping will be the morn of song.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>Persistence in prayer takes faith, to be in faith.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>The publican\u2014the tax collector\u2014looks hard into the mirror. God be merciful to me\u2014a sinner! <\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>He uses a word that we avoid.\u00a0 Sin is utterly personal.\u00a0 This we understand.\u00a0 The covenantal commands of the decalogue have a personal consequence (Exodus 20). As grace touches ground in Jesus Christ, sin touches sand in personal confessions.\u00a0 We get lost.\u00a0 It is our nature, east of eden.\u00a0 We get lost in sex without love:\u00a0 lust.\u00a0 We get lost in consumption without nourishment:\u00a0 gluttony.\u00a0 We get lost in accumulation without investment:\u00a0 avarice.\u00a0 We get lost in rest without weariness, in happiness without struggle:\u00a0 sloth.\u00a0 We get lost in righteousness without restraint:\u00a0 anger.\u00a0 We get lost in desire without ration or respect:\u00a0 envy.\u00a0 And most regularly, we get lost in integrity without humility:\u00a0 pride.\u00a0 If you have never known lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, anger, envy or pride you are not a sinner, you are outside the cloud of sin, and you need no repentance.\u00a0 (You also may not be quite human).<\/p>\n

It is a long wait. \u00a0And that is just the point.\u00a0 Like the bridesmaids who waited with lamps trimmed, we feel the length of the wait.\u00a0 But we can wait, together.\u00a0 We can offer together a common prayer.\u00a0 We can slowly, stumblingly give ourselves over to persistence in prayer, to the forms of religious practice that bear meaning, to the life of the church, for all its foibles, wherein we learn the grammar of grace, and where through we face down the evils of this age.<\/p>\n

Persistence in prayer is challenging, in our tradition.<\/p>\n

Techne<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Virginia Woolf\u2019s serious joke that \u2018on or about December 1910 human character changed\u2019 was a hundred years premature.\u00a0 Human character changed on or about December 2010, when everyone, it seemed, started carrying a smartphone.\u00a0 For the first time, practically anyone could be found intruded upon, not only at some fixed address at home or at work, but everywhere at all times.\u00a0 Before this everyone could expect, in the course of the day, some time at least in which to be left alone, unobserved, unsustained and unburdened\u00a0 by public or familial roles.\u00a0 That era now came to an end.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0When the smartphone brings messages, alerts, and notifications that invite instant responses\u2014and induces anxiety if those messages fail to arrive\u2014everyone\u2019s sense of time changes, and attention that used to be focused more or less distantly on, say, tomorrow\u2019s mail is concentrated in the present moment\u2026You cannot reduce your engagement with the past and future without diminishing yourself, without becoming \u2018more tenuous\u2019.<\/em><\/p>\n

(<\/em>Edward Mendelson, NYRB, 6\/23\/16, 34)<\/p>\n

Persistence in prayer is challenging, in our culture.<\/p>\n

Rather than another hour of email, or on our smartphone, perhaps we could walk, alone, quiet, and talk to God.\u00a0 Tell it to God.\u00a0 Pray.\u00a0 Our overcapacity in email is a direct consequence of our under-investment in prayer.<\/p>\n

Prayer in Life:\u00a0 Charles Taylor<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

One advantage of a life of study, the life of the mind, the college years, is the chance to pick out some new theological eye glasses.\u00a0 Prayerfully consider, for example, the thought of Charles Taylor, our Montreal philosopher.\u00a0 Taylor explores background conditions:\u00a0 social imaginaries, moral perspectives, the cultural influences we sometimes take for granted.\u00a0\u00a0 His central emphasis is the exploration of \u2018fullness\u2019: an experience of what counts most in life.\u00a0\u00a0 Taylor views the spiritual shape of the present age through the lenses of the work of Ivan Illich, Charles Peguy, G M Hopkins, and I Berlin.\u00a0 He has no interest in a return to an untroubled harmony, which is utterly unattainable, and is even a kind of culpable weakness.\u00a0 Taylor seeks a new more nuanced map of the ideological terrain all about us. Fullness\u2026<\/p>\n

I prayerfully remember the summer, thinking in prayer of Taylor. When I see my granddaughter Ellie tubing behind a motor boat for the first time, I have the joyful fullness of watching her as a remembrance of her mother, our daughter, Emily skiing on the same lake.\u00a0\u00a0 When our youngest granddaughter, Hannah, wakes up from a nap; or when her brother Charlie, \u2018screwing his courage to the sticking post\u2019 tries tubing himself; or when their cousin Sally cries out wanting her dad, our son, Benjamin; or when Jan comes home as happy as Yogi Bear, her bucket full of blackberries; or when the blue lake and blue sky outside our blue cottage call out the name of the Blue God; then there is fullness, in a summer hue.<\/p>\n

Charles Taylor, a great Canadian, has something he rails against:\u00a0 subtraction (of transcendence) theories.\u00a0 That is, he fights against the late modern urge to bracket out such transcendence. Transcendence in ordinary life, in society, in erotic love, in a new poetic language\u2014Taylor works to make sufficient cultural space for transcendence.\u00a0 That is what we are about at Marsh Chapel, too. \u00a0Taylor affirms not disenchantment but re-enchantment: claims for belief, for God, a sense of the soul and salvation, over against the modern or late modern experience of malaise, ennui, uncertainty, meaninglessness, melancholy, despair.\u00a0\u00a0 Here is his question:\u00a0 \u2018Where in the culture of expressive individualism is the sacred?\u2019\u00a0 To this end, Taylor examines a kind of \u2018diffusive Christianity\u2019, a habit of moving between belief and unbelief, an emphasis on believing not belonging.\u00a0 His work heralds a new age of religious searching, not a decline in religious belief and practice, but a plurality of forms of belief and unbelief, transitory and fragile, existing within a range of cross pressures within the ongoing contest of religiosity and materialism.\u00a0 He criticizes what he calls \u2018excarnation\u2019 (a shift from taking the body seriously, head over other).\u00a0 In all, Taylor is the evangelist for the joy of everyday relationships, conduct, and experiences, his ear tuned to the sacred, his eye searching out the range of the sacred canopy, his mind alive to spirit, his heart given over to a hymnic celebration of our aspiration to wholeness.\u00a0 His work is a hymn to and of persistence in prayer.*<\/p>\n

*(Charles Taylor, as seen by Philip Amerson, Robert Allan Hill, and Michael Morgan (Indiana University) in conversation<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em>We fear, and try to find our security in larger automobiles or drug supplies or stock collections or homes or layers of disconnection, gated communities of the mind and heart.\u00a0 But security comes not through possession, but through relationship.\u00a0 Do you want to be safe and secure?\u00a0 Invest yourself in a lifetime of building and keeping healthy relationships.\u00a0 There is your security, where neither moth nor rust consumes.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>Such persistence in prayer needs new theological eyes, in our era.<\/p>\n

Persistence in Prayer<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Ernest Fremont Tittle was the greatest Methodist preacher of his mid twentieth century generation.\u00a0 Tougher than Sockman, truer than Peale, Tittle preached in Chicago until he died at his desk, writing about Luke:<\/p>\n

There is special need for persistence in prayer when the object sought is the redressing of social wrongs.\u00a0 God will see justice done if the human instruments of his justice to not give way to weariness, impatience, or discouragement, but persevere in prayer and labor for the improvement of world conditions. Here we can learn from the scientist.\u00a0 Medical research is a prayer for the relief of suffering, the abolition of disease, the conservation of life\u2014a prayer in which the scientist perseveres in the face of whatever odds, whatever darkness and delay.\u00a0 More especially we can learn from great religious leader like Luther, Wesley, Wilberforce, Shaftsbury, who year upon year prayed and fought for the causes to which they dedicated their lives.\u00a0 The need for persistence in prayer arises not only from the intransigence of the oppressor, but also from the immaturity and imperfection of the would-be reformer.\u00a0 We have a lot to learn and much in ourselves to overcome before we can be used of God as instruments of his justice.\u00a0 Recognizing this, Gandhi spent hours each day in prayer and meditation, and maintained a weekly day of silence.<\/em><\/p>\n

Persistence in prayer takes practice, for those who seek to resist injustice.<\/p>\n

A Common Prayer<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>We offer a common prayer, a prayer that our warming globe, caught in climate change, will be cooled by cooler heads and calmer hearts and careful minds.<\/p>\n

We offer a common prayer, a prayer that our dangerous world, armed to the teeth with nuclear proliferation, will find peace through deft leadership toward nuclear d\u00e9tente.<\/p>\n

We offer a common prayer, a prayer that our culture, awash in part in hooliganism, will find again the language and the song and the spirit of the better angels of our nature.<\/p>\n

We offer a common prayer, a prayer that our country, fractured by massive inequality between rich children and poor children, will rise up and make education, free education, available to all children, poor and rich.<\/p>\n

We offer a common prayer, a prayer that our nation, fractured by flagrant unjust inequality between rich and poor children, will stand up and make health care, free health care, available to all children, poor and rich.<\/p>\n

We offer a common prayer, a prayer that our schools, colleges and universities, will balance a love of learning with a sense of meaning, a pride in knowledge with a respect for goodness, a drive for discovery with a regard for recovery.<\/p>\n

We offer a common prayer, a prayer that our families, torn apart by abuse and distrust and anger and jealousy and unkindness, will sit at a long Thanksgiving table, this autumn, and share the turkey and pass the potatoes, and slice the pie, and, if grudgingly, show kindness and pity to one another.<\/p>\n

We offer a common prayer, a prayer that our decisions in life about our callings, how we are to use our time and spend our money, how we make a life not just a living, will be illumined by grace and generosity.<\/p>\n

We offer a common prayer, a prayer that our grandfathers and mothers, in their age and infirmity, will receive care and kindness that accords with the warning to honor father and mother that you own days be long upon the earth.<\/p>\n

We offer a common prayer, a prayer that women\u2014our grandmothers, mothers, sisters, daughters, granddaughters, all\u2014granted suffrage less than 100 years ago, will be spared any and all forms of harassment and abuse, verbal or physical, on college campuses, in homes and families, in offices and bars, in life and work, and long having suffered and now having suffrage, will in our time rise up to be honored, revered, and compensated, without reserve, but with justice and mercy.<\/p>\n

We offer a common prayer, finally a prayer not of this world, but of this world as a field of formation for another, not just creation but new creation, not just life but eternal life, not just health but salvation, not just heart but soul, not just earth, but heaven.<\/p>\n

Application in Prayer<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Talk to God walking on the river, in the woods, on the beach, once a day:\u00a0 do not use email and other such modes when a silent prayer will suffice.<\/p>\n

Go to church, once a week, for sermon and music and eucharist, but also to see different others, to feel different neighbors, to place yourself in the community of God\u2019s people.<\/p>\n

Give away 10% of what you earn, to the church you love, to the mission you admire, to the school that taught you, to the place you where help meets hurt.<\/p>\n

Read.\u00a0 Read every sentence, when you read, and think it through.\u00a0 Read your Bible.\u00a0 Read a good newspaper.\u00a0 Read.<\/p>\n

What shall we say?\u00a0 How shall we pray?<\/p>\n

Pray always<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Labor Omnia Vincit<\/p>\n

Do not lose heart<\/p>\n

Work conquers all<\/p>\n

Pray always<\/p>\n

All of us are better when we are loved<\/p>\n

Do not lose heart<\/p>\n

Early to bed and early to bed and early to rise<\/p>\n

Pray always<\/p>\n

A stitch in time<\/p>\n

Do not lose heart<\/p>\n

Waste not want not<\/p>\n

Pray always<\/p>\n

Rome was not built in a day<\/p>\n

Do not lose heart<\/p>\n

Only the devil has no time<\/p>\n

To let things grow<\/p>\n

Pray always<\/p>\n

<\/strong>Persistence in prayer begins with a decision to pray \u2018without ceasing\u2019.<\/p>\n

God be merciful to me, a sinner.\u00a0 I tell you, this man went down to his home justified.<\/em><\/p>\n

– The Reverend Doctor, Robert Allan Hill, Dean.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Click here to listen to the full service Luke 18:9-14 Click here to listen to the meditations\u00a0only God be merciful to me, a sinner.\u00a0 I tell you, this man went down to his home justified. Yeats in Poetic Prayer \u00a0(for confession) Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2679,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[22],"tags":[6],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1458"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2679"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1458"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1926,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1458\/revisions\/1926"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}