Sermon for Rogation Monday
“I will that all men pray everywhere, lifting up holy hands”
Praying everywhere and all the time. That is the radical meaning of prayer. It signifies, as Richard Hooker puts it, “all the service that we ever do unto God.” In short, it is about the Godward direction of our lives. What that means is the challenge. But at the very least it suggests something about the power and nature of prayer. It suggests that prayer belongs to our thinking and our loving and our doing; in other words, our very being.
This opens us out to a broader view of prayer, though one which is deeply embedded in our liturgical tradition of prayer, in liturgical prayer itself. Nothing signals the Godward direction of our lives better than the liturgy, itself a labour, a human work but one which has been infused with the grace of God. Paul’s Letter to Timothy alludes to an aspect of this, namely, the physical gesture of holy hands uplifted in prayer. It suggests the orans position, a visible way of signifying our openness to divine grace and to the ways in which God’s grace shapes our lives through prayer.
The Gospel from Luke reminds us that the heart of all prayer is the Lord’s Prayer. That prayer gathers us into the intimacy of the Son’s love for the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit. It is the prayer which Jesus teaches us to pray – when you pray, not if. Apart from the literal words there is the deeper meaning of that prayer. The story which he tells that accompanies the teaching about the Lord’s Prayer is about persevering in prayer.
What is that about? Simply this, that God wants us to want what he wants for us and through prayer we are engaged in learning to ask what it is that we should be seeking. Knowing and desiring are both part of the dynamic of prayer. The Gospel makes it clear that persevering in “asking, seeking, knocking” results in “receiving, finding,” and in the “opening” to the will of God. Something is required of us. It is our wanting God’s will to “be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
Rogationtide is all about prayer and prayer is all about asking. It means, however, the willingness to learn what to ask for and in what way. It is nothing less than the reality of our lives as lived for God and with God and in God; and all because of the Resurrection. We are gathered into the very motions of the love that is the Trinity.
“I will that all men pray everywhere, lifting up holy hands”
Fr. David Curry
Rogation Monday, 2015
