by CCW | 6 May 2013 21:13
Lifting up holy hands. Lifting up your hearts. “Prayer,” as Richard Hooker reminds us, “signifies all the service that we ever do unto God.” Prayer is about the Godward direction of our lives. It is not about the odd nod to God; it is not about the regular irregular presence at Divine Service; it is about a whole life lived towards and with God. Such is the radical message of Rogation Sunday and the days of Rogation. Ora et labora, if you will, pray and work.
In the Resurrection of Christ we are given a new and radical freedom – a freedom in the world because of freedom in Christ; a freedom with one another because of our freedom with God. Prayer is the operative term, especially in the days of Rogation, the days of prayer which remind us emphatically of a life of prayer. We are, I fear, quite dead to this. We have far too small an idea of prayer, if we think about it all. Our churches are failing, to be sure, but the real failure would be to give up on prayer.
If you think of the Church in its parochial realities as a kind of social club then you have missed its raison d’être completely. Community flows out of and belongs entirely to our communion with God and if God cannot be named and honoured in his truth and reality, for instance, as the Creeds and Scripture bear witness, then we are only deceiving ourselves about ourselves. The nameless God of contemporary culture is the non-God of non-religion. It is only through the radical naming of God in Jesus Christ that prayer and praise make any sense whatsoever. We do not make our prayers ‘to whom it may concern.’
Nothing could be more compelling than the lessons about prayer that the Rogation days present us as belonging to the fuller logic of the Resurrection. Prayer is a profoundly humbling reality because in its most fundamental sense it means asking. “Ask and ye shall receive,” Jesus says, a passage which is so easily distorted and misunderstood in our all-too-consumerist society, a society which by definition is functionally atheistic. To pray means to ask, which is to recognize what you do not have. It opens you out not to the demands of your asking – give me, give me, never gets! as it were– but to the profounder realization of God as the author and giver of all good things and by virtue of that we are at his command and he is not at our bidding.
The days of rogation recall us to the reality of our lives in every way. They remind us of who we are in the sight of God. They remind us of the real power of prayer. It is about our freedom in the world precisely because of our being lifted up into the things of God. We have the means to stand and above all to withstand, the means to pray and to pray without ceasing, ever seeking the truth of God for ourselves and for others. It is the precise counter to the rather pathetic and limited idea of going with the flow which, it seems to me, is just another way of saying you are going down the drain!
Lifting up our hands in holy service is part and parcel of lifting up our hearts in praise. Prayer and praise, Word and Sacrament are the governing realities of our lives.
Fr. David Curry
Rogation Monday, 2013
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2013/05/06/sermon-for-rogation-monday/
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