ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET
Sermon preached by Fr. Julian Browning at High Mass on the Fifth Sunday after Trinity, 4th July 2010.
Readings: Isaiah 66.10-14; Galatians 6.1-6; Luke 10.1-11, 16-20.
Luke 10.20 Rejoice that your names are written in heaven.
Today's gospel is about the mission of the Church. Mission is our responsibility. We are to say to others, The kingdom of God is very near to you. When you were baptised, you became a missionary. Maybe you were too small to notice, maybe nobody told you, but that's what happened. Are we any good at it? Do we find ourselves woefully inadequate for the task? I hope so, because that is the only place to start, at the beginning, with nothing. We are being sent out, says Jesus, as lambs among wolves, with nothing. No purse, no haversack, no sandals.
What comes out of this story of the Mission of the Seventy Disciples, for me, is the spirit of adventure. This is not just the game plan for spreading Christian ideas round the world. This is how we are to approach the spiritual journey of our lives. It is an adventure into the unknown. Go on your way, says Jesus. The call to embark on some spiritual journey is not something odd or strange. It is entirely natural for human beings to seek God, as natural for us as it is natural for birds to migrate. We know it has to happen, the only question is when and how. The answer to 'when?' is now. The answer to 'how?' is by waiting on God, resting in Him, and starting a new life, a life of prayer. Our outward mission can only begin when the inward mission is under way, the conversion of our lives into lives of prayer. That is typical of the topsy-turvy world of Christianity, a fact understood in many a monastic cloister down the ages. The way to change the world, is to turn inwards and change myself. A life of prayer is not about becoming impossibly good and pious. Prayer is not piety. Prayer is usually an unholy struggle, as dangerous and adventurous as lambs going out among the wolves. At its best, prayer is just simple and loving attention to God, that's all it is. God meets each of us where we are. We just have to get started. I love reading books about prayer. In fact I'd rather do anything than settle down to prayer itself. Domestic chores become suddenly attractive. And that's the trouble. The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.
Let's have a practical interlude. Here are the random thoughts of someone who finds it hard to pray. Christians should pray at home as well as in church. Jesus says, Whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. We can't pray in rooms full of computers, televisions and telephones, and all our other toys. Each of us needs his or her dedicated space for prayer, a corner of a room, one chair, will do. I have a small room with a window, which is also a large stationery cupboard. If we are feeling High Church, we might dress this space up a bit, an icon here, a bit of drapery there. We probably would, wouldn't we? But beware. If we get too much into nesting, we shall sit there thinking, I wonder if those colours match. And don't do what I did once. I introduced a cd player. That turned my lovely uncluttered prayer space into a fully functioning Anglican cathedral. Jesus sends us on without purse, haversack, and sandals. Lack of clutter is key for sharp spiritual focus. Daily prayer, a few minutes morning and evening, transforms a life. We don't have to say anything if we don't want to. God's first language is silence. All we have to do is stop talking to ourselves, stop that endless interior dialogue with its complaints and fantasies, and consent instead to the action of God in our hearts, in the present moment, which is in fact the only place where God is to be found. Awareness of the divine presence, that is what prayer is. It can change everything. It certainly changes Sundays. Instead of Sunday being the day we go to church, Sunday becomes the climax to one week's prayer, and the triumphant start of another week of prayer, another week's journey with God. Yet we go, as today's Gospel indicates, with nothing: no security, no plans, no preconceived ideas. Once we have nothing, the problem of mission solves itself. We are the Gospel, we become the Gospel, our lives proclaim the nearness of the kingdom of God because we are experiencing it ourselves. As Jesus says, anyone who listens to you listens to me.
In God's eyes, motivation, direction, is everything, more important to Him than our various lifestyles, prayer styles or worship styles. Though we sit or kneel on our own, we are, like those migrating birds, travelling in the same direction, experiencing the same hardships, the same exhaustion. I know there's a healthy English tradition of the individual spiritual journey, of not being part of anything really, just doing your own Pilgrim's Progress. But we're not on our own. And in that great book, all the different pilgrim roads converge anyway in the end at the gates of the one Celestial City. When we enter a life of prayer, we are part of something greater than ourselves, and in that rich and full tradition, which this church can reveal to us, we shall find the hope we need to be missionaries in our generation. As Jesus assures us in today's Gospel, your names are written in heaven. Last week in the Gospel we heard about people wanting to follow Christ. Today, unusually, we hear about Christ following us. The Lord appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go. That's the great challenge, and that is why we sometimes falter, it's a challenge to go into the unknown, with very little. The Christian's faith is that where we go Christ will follow.