single persons, people
of all races and families
of every kind.
Sunday
Service:
Holy Eucharist
at 9:30 am
Child care is available
Church of Our
Saviour
191 Flanagan Way (Rt 153) Secaucus, NJ 07094
Tel: 201-863-1449
Fax: 201-863-1474
Mark A. Lewis,
Vicar
MLewis@secaucus.org
Dorothy Fowlkes
Pastoral Associate
This page revised 29
Oct 00
http://www.secaucus.org/
oursaviour
The Church of
Our Saviour
in the Town of Secaucus, New Jersey
Home | Welcome | News | Sunday | Bulletin | Sermons
Bookshop | Stewardship | Justice | Community | Links
Objects in
Prayer are Closer Than They Appear
Reflections on the
lessons for the 20th Sunday after Pentecost
By The Rev. Mark A. Lewis, Vicar
Isaiah 59:9-19 / Psalm13
Hebrews 5:12--6:1, 9-12 / Mark
10:46-52
Most of the time -- and it should be all of the time -- when I try to write something to say to you about the lessons each week I remember some basic advice one of my teachers in seminary gave me about preaching. "When you finish," he said, "ask yourself three questions: Am I talking to everyone in the room and not just some of the people? Exactly where is the good news in this? And -- finally -- so what? . . .What difference does any of this make? But, most importantly, before you start writing remind yourself that less is more."
The last advice is especially clear in today's gospel. The crux of the scene between Jesus and Blind Bartimaeus -- to me -- is not the healing miracle, but the pithy, simple plea that transforms a blind beggar, a public nuisance, into an effective and faithful follower of Jesus. Not many words at all. Bartimaeus does not have time for lengthy speeches. He just says "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me." It's this summary of the faith that pulls Bartimaeus off the sidelines and sets him back on the road again.
Christians have been fascinated by this prayer of Bartimaeus from very early on. The early Christian hermits who set up huts in the Syrian desert in the early second century sought the kind of direct connection with God that they believed that the people who knew Jesus enjoyed. And they latched onto just this simple prayer of Bartimaeus.
Language and circumstances changed it a bit. But not much. In its most popular form today it's called "The Jesus Prayer" and it forms a backbone of the prayer culture of the Greek and Russian Orthodox traditions. In English, most commonly, it goes "Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner."
In that form, it first appears in writing as a discipline for contemplative prayer by the year 300. And over the next thousand years it appears in devotional writings all over the east. The Latin church in the west very quickly started complicating prayer and making it wordier and fancier. But one strand of the Orthodox tradition has always clung to this plain outcry to God.
By the 1200s, the monks at the monastery of Mount Athos in Greece were training themselves to use the short prayer as a breathing exercise. As they worked or read or they taught themselves to whisper the four phrases of the prayer breathing in and breathing out in every waking hour. The idea was to take seriously an injunction from the Letter to the Thessalonians "pray constantly". They wanted literally to breathe prayer into everything they would do. And, as they did that, they began to develop a theological rationale for the practice.
Here's an example of such a reflection from St. Gregory: "It [constant prayer] is not a matter of repeating phrases mechanically, but of sustaining ourselves with prayer as with food or water or air. It is striving for a communion with God, which leads us to say that 'It is not I who live, but Christ who lives in me". We are called to a deification of our totality -- body-soul-spirit -- and the invocation of this prayer brings us toward a vision wherein the light we see by is transfigured into the Light of God."
Since I'm thinking of Russia today, I want to mention a spiritual classic from that tradition that touches on this way of prayer. The Way of the Pilgrim is a very old Russian fable that we have in English today from a couple of 18th century written versions. In the story, the "Pilgrim," a Russian peasant, attends a Sunday liturgy in his village church where he hears the Thessalonians passage I mentioned before: "pray constantly". All of a sudden, it seems important to him. He feels a terrible urge to learn how to do just exactly that. And he goes on a search throughout Russia to find someone who can teach him how to pray ceaselessly and still pay attention to his everyday duties and activities. He goes from teacher to teacher -- many of who tell him many valuable things about prayer. But no one can teach him how to pray constantly and still survive in the real world.
Eventually, Pilgrim finds a holy man, in Russian a starets, who has maintained the ancient tradition of the Jesus Prayer, the prayer traditionally reaching back to Blind Bartimaeus. Gradually, Pilgrim works his way up from just a few repetitions of the prayer until he is saying it under his breath and in the background of his mind all the time. He realizes that his life has been transformed and he goes back to the starets to thank him and tell him about it. When Pilgrim tells the starets that the prayer has taken over his whole life, the holy man responded: "Now all your waking moments call upon God without counting. You have resigned yourself and your path to God's will. Expect help."
I don't think I will ever be on the same search that Pilgrim went on. And I'll probably not turn every moment and every breath of my life into that particular prayer. I confess that the practice seems kind of boring to me right now, even senseless in the context of my life. Too much regimentation and routine. But that doesn't mean I don't pray more than I think I do. And I suspect that most of you do, too.
Someone once told me that she thinks I pray by reading the New York Times. She's got a point. It gives shape and discipline to my days. And through it I hear God speaking to me about the world and the human spirit. I think about what I've read there from morning until night. And very often something of God's voice that comes to me out of that exercise resurfaces and comes out in my conversation with others. So, maybe, prayer isn't always about kneeling down and saying fancy things. Not even about making every breath into a kind of ceremony.
Constant prayer -- a consecrated life -- will look very different on various people. But maybe it always has the basic elements of Bartimaeus's encounter with Jesus. He was open to God. He expected help from beyond himself. He threw off the cloak that must have been confining him somehow. And he sprang up toward a relationship with truth, love, and justice. That's a life of constant prayer, if you ask me, and it's only our blindness that keeps us from seeing it so.
It's our faith that makes us well. And I hope that Georgiana will grow up and mature from baby food to a mature vision of righteousness just as the Letter to the Hebrews says we all must. But I also pray -- constantly, it seems -- that she will always see simply enough to understand that holiness is much closer to hand than she might think.
-- Mark Lewis
Your comments or questions are welcome MLewis@secaucus.org.
Links to additional "Reflections on Lessons" may be found at the bottom of the Sunday web page.
© 2000 -Church of Our Saviour Home | Welcome | News | Sunday | Bulletin | Sermons
Bookshop | Stewardship | Justice | Community | Links
http://www.secaucus.org/oursaviourWebmaster - DRoberts@Secaucus.org