by CCW | 2 May 2016 21:00
Rogation Monday is one of the formal days of prayer that bring us to the culmination of the Resurrection in Christ’s Ascension. In other words, these days of Rogation prepare us for the homecoming of the Son to the Father which is about our home with God, that “where I am there ye may be also”, as Jesus says. That homeland of the Spirit is the true meaning of our Christian fellowship. We participate in it now through prayer.
For prayer, too, is about our being with God without whom we cannot be with one another. The Gospel from Luke is about learning to pray; the prayer which shapes all prayer is the Lord’s Prayer. It signals nothing less than the nature of our being with God and with one another. In that sense, it is quite radical in its scope and meaning.
In prayer we are constantly seeking God’s will. “Thy will be done,” we pray, a very different thing from simply asking and getting what we think we want as if God were some sort of grace-dispensing machine, a kind of candy-man giving whatever we demand and want. A good part of prayer is about learning what God’s will is for us and for our lives. It is not some sort of wish fulfillment, fantasy or dream. It is about reality, reality as defined by God, the source and principle of all reality. Part of that reality is about human sinfulness – our pride and folly which stand in the way of God’s will for us and in us.
Prayer, then, is really quite challenging and quite extensive in its scope. It properly refers to everything that we do in the service of God. It reaches into our hearts in order to extend into our minds and our hands. It has everything to do with what we think, speak and do. It challenges us about our fundamental attitude and approach to one another. The Epistle reading from 1st Timothy exhorts us to prayer and connects prayer to faith and belief in God as well as to our lives with one another. The reading ends with Paul signalling strongly the will to pray. “I will that all pray everywhere, lifting up holy hands” he says, adding “without wrath and doubting”. It is not just that we pray but also how we pray in the sense of with what kind of spirit. Words spoken in the air but absent from the honest heart are not true prayer. The honest heart that prays seeks what is best and good for all.
The Gospel not only provides us with Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer but extends to the idea of persevering and being importune in prayer, taking the kingdom of God by storm, as it were. What does this mean? It means that prayer must be about our desiring the will of God strongly and persistently for only then do we break into the heart of God, the heart which wills to be broken into but only through our desiring. “When you pray,” Jesus says, not if and goes on to indicate that we are to be a people who are constantly praying. Prayer here takes on that extended sense of being everything that we do unto God; in short, our lives are to be lives of prayer and service. What happens in the liturgy must govern our actions everywhere else. It is about our being with God, here to be sure but also everywhere else. Prayer is about the radical meaning of our being with God.
Fr. David Curry
Rogation Monday, 2016
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2016/05/02/sermon-for-rogation-monday-3/
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