A special MINISTRY OF PRAYER!

I define prayer in the widest possible way – it is reaching out to God with all that is within us, and making room for God to act in our lives. Our focus would become on opening our lives in prayer, and leading others in this community to open their lives in prayer – to foster, teach, lead by example, encourage, and generally be a sign of what happens when we turn from our own way to seek God’s activity in our lives.

This is just a brief summary of what I am talking about. If you are reading this, and you are a member of St. Paul’s or a friend of the congregation, I invite you to share your thoughts, questions, insights, and ideas of what this might mean for us. We need to talk about this!!

What is the Spirit saying to us?

But when it all comes down to it, the only way to get it is make time for it. One must get out the calendar and make plans. Be ruthless about this. Finally, I did this, and on last Friday I drove up to New Clairvaux Monastery in Vina, California (about 20 minutes north of Chico) and had a Day of Prayer. I checked in about 6:30pm and got settled in my room. At 7:35pm, the monks chant Compline and I went and prayed in the Sanctuary while they prayed the Office. After that I went back to my room. I worked on my sermon for a while, read some of the Scriptures, and was quiet before God. I then went to bed.

The next morning I woke up early (I always do) and spent the morning reading Morning Prayer, reading out of the Book of Proverbs, and praying. For part of the time, I was just setting silent in the presence of God. The monastery is very quiet. There were a few other people on retreat there, and occasionally during the day you see the monks or staff working on the grounds. But during the whole day, I probably said less than twenty words. There is a guest kitchen  with simple foods for breakfast and lunch. The suggested donation for the day is $50.00.  You need to change the linens on the bed before you leave, but everything is provided.

It was a wonderful time of being quiet before God, thinking about my life, my ministry at St. Paul’s, about things I need to do, and about some things that I need to stop. This was a truly great time, and I can’t reccomend this highly enough. Call the Guestmaster at New Claivaux Monastery and schedule a time for yourself. It is well worth it.

Blessings, Father David.

A quote from Dallas Willard:

“Abstinence, then, makes way for engagement. If the places in our blood cells designed to carry oxygen are occupied by carbon monoxide, we die for lack of oxygen. If the places in our souls that are to be indwelt by God and his service are occcupied by food, sex, and society, we languish for lack of God and right relation to his creatures. A proper abstinence actually breaks the hold of improper engagements so taht the soul can be properly engaged in and by God.”

I hope that the disciplines of Lent made room for your soul to rejoice and enjoy fellowship with God in the coming days. What a truly remarkable privilege and grace that the Holy God wants to fellowship with us.

Jesus rescued us from death and darkness, and made us alive to God.

Rejoice!!!

On August 27, 2009, law enforcement officers rescued Jaycee Dugard and her two children from captivity in which she had been living for 18 years. Jaycee, a blond blue-eyed eleven year-old was abducted from the streets in her home town in 1991. For eighteen years whe was a captive, living in subjection to her exploiter, and kept for the last few years in a backyard enclosure which was sealed off from society. Law Enforcement became aware of her siuation and set her free.

There are many ways that the Scriptures talk about what Jesus did for us on the cross and through the resurrection. The many different analogies are like different photos of the same event. One of the ideas used is “release from bondage/captivity.” In the life and death of Jesus, Christians believe that they have been released from some kind of captivity. Jaycee’s story illustrates what the Scriptures are talking about.

Humans have been captured. or abducted by an unlawful exploiter. He has kept us in bondage from our true life. In other words, whatever plans Jaycee and her parents had for her life at age eleven were destroyed by this evil man. In the same way, whatever plans God had for we humans was destroyed by the evil in the world that captured and held us. For humans who have not been set free from their captivity, they are unable to live the life that God designed for them. They are kept in a “backyard enclosure,” subjected to evil, and their life has been distorted and compromised. Easter is equivalent to Law Enforcement setting Jaycee free. We used to sing in the church I grew up in, “I’m so glad that Jesus set me free.”  He has broken the captivity in which we were held, released us into new life, and has restored us to relationship with the Father – like in the prodigal son story.

Christians believe that we are set free at our Baptism. (Again, there are many ways to describe what happens at Baptism…) We are released from the bondage and captivity that prevented us from living the life that God intended for us. That is the Good News, the Gospel.

But think about this. Once Jaycee was set free, her problems weren’t over. In fact, in someways they have just begun. She has to learn how to live in the real world that she has not lived in for eighteen years. She has to reconnect with her birth family, she has to learn to associate with her parents as an adult women, she has to learn to act on her own, and be responsible for herself, and learn to parent her two children in the outside world. And she must do all of this while the legal processes and court trials are going on.  There will be other people who will want to exploit her in different ways. The media will want her story, and the curious will seek to know her, and in the midst of all of that she will have to go through all of the psychological re-adjustment, and learn to live as a free women, both internally and externally.

Christians are just like the story. Once we are set free by the life and death of Jesus, we must learn to live as free people in God’s Kingdom. There is lots of adjustment, both internally and externally in our lives as we learn to walk in new ways. Disicpleship, or apprenticeship, is learning to live after we have been set free.

I’m so glad that Jesus set me free. Glory, Hallelujah, Jesus set me free.

Here is the schedule of Lenten activities:

Today            6:00pm          Ash Wednesday Eucharist  

3/21/10       9:00am           First Sunday of Lent

3/23/10       5:30pm          Evening Prayer

3/24/10       6:00pm          Soup Supper/Lenten Teaching

Each week of Lent we will celebrate the Eucharist on Sunday, will have Evening Prayer on Tuesday, and Soup Supper on Wednesday. This will take us through March 24, 2010.  March 28th is the start of Holy Week, and I will post the schedule for Holy Week later.

The three traditional practices of Lent are Prayer, Fasting, and Almsgiving. In the Anglican tradition there is no set way to carry out these practices. Your Lenten practices are between you and God. I would say that there is a wealth of tradition which can guide you in your Lenten Journey.

Lent is widely thought of as a time of “giving something up.”  The practice of denying yourself something can indeed be beneficial if it is done in the right way. It is training for your will/spirit in exercising control over your thoughts, feelings, and body. We modern people are often enslaved to our thoughts, feelings, and bodies, so any training in self-control is good.

But just giving something up is not helpful if you don”t fill that space in your life with something else. I fast regularly on Fridays. I can testify to the positive effects in my spiritual life. But the going without food is only the very basic thing. Whenever I fill hungry on Fridays, I pray and turn my thoughts to God. For 3000 years God’s people have been fasting (giving things up, whether food, pleasures, experiences, etc). Jesus did not say, “If you fast….,” rather he said, “When you fast….” !

If you are his apprentice - learning to do what he did – you will learn to fast. How you do it is up to you and Jesus. If you need any help figuring this out, please call me or email me.

Father David

These words from Metropolitan Anthony, a famous Orthodox Priest and Bishop, clarify what is meant:

“the ascetic endeavor, which can be summed up in the words of the Lord Jesus Christ: “Renounce yourself, take up your cross and follow Me”. To recognize one’s own nonentity and discover the secret of the Kingdom is not enough: the King of Love must be enthroned in our mind and heart, take undivided possession of our will and make of our very bodies the Temples of the Holy Ghost. This small particle of the Cosmos, which is our soul and body must be conquered, freed by a lifelong struggle from enslavement to the world and to the devil, freed as if it were an occupied country and restored to its legitimate King. “Render unto Cesar that which is Cesar’s and to God that which is God’s’: the coins of the earthly kings bear their mark, Man bears the imprint of God’s Image. He belongs to Him solely and totally; and nothing, no effort, no sacrifice is too great to render to God what is His. This is the very basis of an ascetic understanding of life.”

We are now entering the season of Lent. This is the time to take up our cross, deny our old way of life, and learn to follow Jesus.

David

“Thus God permits there to be a world such as we live in, where the wills of human beings are often set on what is evil, wrong, or foolish and where even good and wise inclinations are frequently defeated by other components of the persons involved: the “sin in our members,” social influences, mistaken ideas, overwhelming feelings, or disconnections and ruptures in the depths of the soul. The outcome may be a whole person (or even a whole society) intently focused on accomplishing evil, or it may be a person (or society) baffled and torn by the chaos and evil it finds within itself – as is the “modern liberal” person and society of today.

Renovation of the Heart. Page 147

It is a great mystery as to why God chose to create this world in the way that He did. Consider, in all of the universe as we know it, the planet earth may be the only place in all of creation where God allows creatures to say “No” to His rule. And we say it a lot. At the most, we can surmise that God created us for free, loving response to His love. And God does not appear ready to overwhelm, or overpower, our freedom. The result is that we live in this world where ““sin in our members,” social influences, mistaken ideas, overwhelming feelings, or disconnections and ruptures in the depths of the soul” shape us and our culture into what we read about in our daily newspaper, or see on the TV news. And the problems is not only ‘out there,’ the problems are within us, also.

The crux of the problem lies in the our hearts(or wills). In Matthew 7:16 Jesus says, “You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? In the same way, every good tree bears good fruit,  but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit…” Our hearts need to be renewed by the grace of God. We may stop ourselves from acting on some ‘bad inclination” that arises in our minds and feelings. But the inclination is still there.

So, basic prayer to start out:

Lord, fix my heart! Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.”

David

David

In several of his books and articles, Dr. Willard describes how the original Good News that Jesus taught, and embodied, and passed on to his disciples was compromised to become something far different than Jesus intended. Of course, this involves 2000 years of Church History, and is very complicated in its details, but I will try to summarize and give you an overview. This is not just theoretical – it will help us locate how we think about the Gospel, and what we expect from being Christians. If we have the wrong basic ideas, then our whole Christian experience is going to be off.

            In the development of Christian thought, the focus over the years in the Western Church came to focus on ‘sin management.’ Christians recognized that there was a problem of sin, and more and more the focus began to be on how to take care of the sin. Theories of the atonement (how God takes care of our sin) came to take precedence over other aspects of Christian living. How to get forgiven became the central focus, and essentially what developed was “bar code Christianity” – you know, do you have the right bar code so that when you get to heaven you will be accepted. There was all kind of discussion what you had to do to get the right bar code, and a lot of disagreement and fighting. As these arguments went on, more and more the church was focused on forgiveness, and less and less on how to live after forgiveness was established.

            Now don’t get me wrong, forgiveness is important. We are forgiven through the death and sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross. But forgiveness is not all that there is. There are a lot of ‘forgiven’ folk walking around who live lives that are no different than their non-Christian neighbor. What happened to the abundant living that Jesus promised to those who followed him? What evolved are two extremes in the modern church. On the one hand are the evangelicals who are focused on getting everyone saved, i.e., forgiven so that they can get into heaven. After your initial conversion experience, evangelicals largely focus on how to stay forgiven. In other words, what I have to do so that I don’t mess up my forgiven status and miss heaven. On the other hand is what is generally known as liberal Christians. There concept of following Jesus is that one must seek the values and goals of Jesus. This usually gets translated into some idea of love or justice. We should go out and get ourselves involved in changing the system – the structural sin in the world – because that is what Jesus would do. In liberal Christianity, the focus of the church is the programs that are engaged in which lead to social involvement leading to Justice and Love. I have no problem with the fact that Christianity says something about justice and love – they are very important Biblical concepts. The problem is that modern culture usually defines what justice and love are all about. So Jesus has been envisioned as an anarchist, a communist, a radical revolutionary, and many other projections from modern culture.

            If you are raised in either one of these two church cultures, there is a lot of focus on what you should do – get saved and forgiven, or go out and work on changing the world. Getting saved and forgiven is important, and working for change in the world is important. But that is not the LIFE. In John’s Gospel, Jesus says, “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” Jesus came to give us life, abundant life, life to the full. And it is available right now. It starts by knowing God and Jesus – that means to have an interactive relationship with God – which begins and develops now – not later when you die. NOW! It is a way of living your life NOW which finds its motivating power from the Life of God given to us by God’s Spirit.

“We are going to go through the mill of life like everyone else. We are different because we also have a higher or “additional” life, a different quality of life, a spiritual life, an eternal life, not because we are spared the ordinary troubles which befall human beings.”
                                                                        Page 208, In Search of Guidance

We need to address this right at the beginning of this series of posts on apprenticeship, or discipleship to Jesus. The difference between those who are disciples and those who are not is not in what they suffer and experience. The difference is in what they have in them as they go through those experiences. Many Christians expect that God is going to bail them out of the troubles of life. In fact, a lot of people in the church advertise Christianity as if it were some panacea that would keep us from harm. They treat the faith almost like magic – if I just say the right prayers, or do the right liturgy, or the right practice, or “hold my nose just right” (I’m kidding), then I will be somehow spared from harm. NOT!!!

As Dr. Willard suggests above, it is not that we are going to get a different set of circumstances because we are apprentices, rather, we will experience the same kinds of circumstance as non-disciples (the rain falls on the just and the unjust) but we will have the additional reality of God’s eternal kind of life (Kingdom life, Spiritual Life, etc) in us as we go through these experiences. And that is quite a difference.

So we need to get this straight – God isn’t providing an ‘escape clause’ to us because we sign on to apprenticeship with Jesus. However, there will be tangible results in our lives. Think about it this way – a lot of the trouble in our lives comes about because of our separation from God. We are sinners – and because of that we make bad choices, do stupid things, and seek after the wrong things. That is the human condition apart from God! The effects of that ‘separated life” (which Ephesians calls “being dead in our trespasses and sins” Eph. 2:2) is that we suffer consequences. In all six areas of who we are we suffer consequences – our thought life, our feeling life, our choices, our bodies, our social contexts, and our souls which integrate all of this. As souls, we experience the effects of our separation from God throughout our whole being  

When we apprentice ourselves to Jesus (remember, he graciously calls us to follow him and be his apprentice), we still suffer the consequences of our former way of life. As an example, I deal with parents who have had years of bad parenting before they show up at CPS. We often can help them mend their ways, and learn new skills, and commit to a better way, but this will not erase the bad training they have given to their children. We often get phone calls from parents who have out of control teenagers. They want CPS, or Behavioral Health, or ‘somebody’ to come and fix their child (which usually means make their child unselfish and compliant with their parent’s wishes). SORRY! There is no magic pill which will erase the consequences of their bad parenting. Apprenticeship to Jesus is not a MAGIC PILL.

But, there is GOOD NEWS! When we open our lives to the gracious intervention of God, and he through the Holy Spirit takes up residence within us, he will begin to straighten out our insides – There will be inner healing of the effects of sin on our lives, we will learn new ways to respond to life’s difficulties, the healing of God will begin to flow through us – in other words, GOD’S RULE in our lives will begin to change how we respond in our lives. Slowly, this is a process remember, as we change, the bad effects and consequences begin to disappear. We find healing in our inner lives and social contexts, our thought life gets straightened out, and we will find that life begins to look totally different to us. After all, Paul said God’s Kingdom is “righteousness and joy and peace.”

One other piece of GOOD NEWS! God is able to work on us in the middle of our circumstances. Whether the circumstances are good or bad doesn’t matter; God is able to work in us to shape our hearts, minds, bodies, relationships, down to the core of our soles. That is why St. James tells us to rejoice when we encounter various trials – not because they are trials, but rather because God is at work in the midst of our trials, changing us into the image of his dear Son.

Rejoice! God can and will use even the bad to transform us!