Prayer: A Way to Balance "Doing" and "Being"

A reflection on Luke 11:1-13

A mother sent her fifth grade boy up to bed. In a few minutes she went to make sure that he was getting in bed. When she stuck her head into his room, she saw that he was kneeling beside his bed in prayer. Pausing to listen to his prayers, she heard her son praying over and over again. "Let it be Tokyo! Please dear God, let it be Tokyo!"

When he finished his prayers, she asked him, "What did you mean, 'Let it be Tokyo'?"

"Oh," the boy said with embarrassment, "we had our geography exam today and I was praying that God would make Tokyo the capital of France."

The last few weeks our scripture readings, especially the Gospel, have pointed us to look at our relationship with God. They’ve all asked the questions, “What does it mean to love God?”. Two weeks ago we read about the lawyer debating with Jesus. Jesus responds to the lawyer with the parable of the Good Samaritan. The point: it isn’t enough to know what God wants of us - love God, love self, love others - we need to live it.

Last week we heard the story of Mary and Martha, Mary who sits at Jesus’ feet and listens to his teachings, Martha, as the host, is busy cleaning and cooking and working. The point: We need to live balanced lives that include both living an active faith and nurturing that faith with worship, study and prayer.

Today we learn how prayer is an essential element in living a balanced life – this reading points us to see that who we are and what we do needs to be grounded in prayer. But of course, we have our own ideas of what it means to pray, which are not necessarily Jesus’.

In a Peanuts cartoon Charlie Brown is kneeling beside his bed for prayer. Suddenly he stops and says to Lucy, "I think I've made a new theological discovery, a real breakthrough. If you hold your hands upside down, you get the opposite of what you pray for."

Our prayers tend to be occasions to ask God to do what we want in our lives. We want God to do this or that. Now, certainly it is alright to ask God to help us. It’s just that God doesn’t always help us in exactly the way we think God ought too.

In this Gospel reading Jesus directs the disciples to consider prayer from another perspective. Jesus was praying. The disciples saw this and wanted to learn how to pray in a similar manner. So Jesus teaches them to pray in a way that brings the whole self to God.

Jesus opens the prayer with “Father,” a term that suggests he is speaking to someone very close to him. Later Augustine would describe this relationship as one in which God is more intimate with us than we are to ourselves – God knows us better than we know do. And Teresa of Avila said that this relationship, of God with us, means that God resides at the very center of the human person: the way Jesus prays describes a deep, intimate relationship.

We often pray with the intent of asking God to do something for us, we need God to do what we want in our lives…and then we are left wondering about those times in our lives, and in others, when the prayers appear to be unanswered.

Praying to God is less about changing God and more about changing us. Prayer is not so much about what God is doing for us. Prayer is about God being in us. When we pray we open ourselves up to God and allow God to work in us and through us.

In the novel "The Great Hunger," a newcomer comes to a farm community. He refuses all friendship with his neighbors and puts out the no trespassing sign. One day a little child from the town climbs underneath his fence to pet his dog. The territorial dog thinks she is a threat, leaps on her and kills her.

Hostility spreads throughout the community. When the newcomer comes to town no one will speak to him. Clerks refuse to wait on him. Spring comes and the merchants refuse to sell him seed. Finally, the father of the girl who was killed comes over and sows his field. This act of kindness is too much for the insufferable newcomer. "Why-you of all people?" he asks. The father responds: “To keep God alive in my heart.”

The point of praying is to let God in, to wake God up inside of us, so that we can be changed into a more God-centered people. Praying is at the heart of doing and being. Praying changes us from the inside out. Prayer is how the lawyer will come to know the real meaning of the law. Prayer is how Mary becomes Martha and Martha becomes Mary. Prayer is how the disciples become more like Christ. Praying is how we become God-centered people. As God-centered people we are able to help others know God, just by being who we are. Our “being” becomes our “doing:” the way WE are able to be the face of Christ in a broken world.

Illustrations from www.esermons.com
The theme for this homily was influenced by John Shea, “The Relentless Widow” The Spiritual Wisdom of the Gospels for Christian Preachers and Teachers, Luke, Year C

The Art of Hospitality: Balancing Doing and Being

A reflection on: Genesis 18:1-10; Luke 10:38-42

Benedict of Nursia lived in Italy between the 5th and 6th centuries. Born into some wealth, he was sent to Rome for his formal education. This education would have established him in the life of a noble man, but after his education he chose to leave Rome and settle in the desert for a life of studying God and faith.

Over his life time Benedict started and directed twelve monasteries. So profound was his leadership that he is called the founder of Western monastic life for both men and women. For 1500 years monastic communities around the world have been established under the Benedictine order and follow the Rule of St. Benedict.

Essentially this rule is a set of guidelines for living in community; guidelines for developing one’s personal faith life, developing a corporate faith life, and the rules give guidelines for managing a monastic community.

The principle rule of life in Benedictine spirituality is hospitality.

As a result many monastic communities offer retreat centers, grounded in the Benedictine spirituality of hospitality. The Episcopal Church celebrates his feast day on July 11.

Embracing Benedictine spirituality is not limited to monasteries; many churches center their community faith life in the Benedictine spirituality of hospitality. Hospitality is one of the guiding principles of Diana Butler Bass’ book, “Christianity for the Rest of Us,” which many of us have read.

Hospitality means essentially: how we welcome others into our community and how we care for one another. The welcome, in its fullest sense, means all are welcome. Some call this: “radical hospitality.”

Faith communities around the country are finding creative ways to bring this ancient principle alive in their churches. It lives in the way churches worship, the way the congregation is attentive to newcomers, and the way we open ourselves up to everyone who walks in our doors.

Our readings today from Genesis and Luke point us to some of the scriptural foundations for using hospitality as a guiding principle for our lives.

In Genesis we hear the story that underlies the icon of the Trinity hanging in our narthex. This icon, written by a Russian iconographer represents the three persons - “angels” who appear to Abraham and Sarah. When they appear Abraham runs out to greet them and offers them profound hospitality – rest and food, bathing and comfort.

This was not such an easy thing to do, for the three could just as easily have been thieves out to rob them, very common among nomadic people in the desert.

But rather than presume they were thieves Abraham welcomes them. It is this radical hospitality, in the face of fear, that tells the story, for the three persons, are really angels of God – and in the Christian tradition of this icon – they have come to be the Trinity, God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit.

In radical hospitality we are called to welcome all people because in doing so we also welcome God.

Mary and Martha continue the theme of hospitality and faith by unpacking two sides of this teaching: the balance between doing and being.

The spiritual teaching of this reading asks us to see the sisters of Mary and Martha as if they were two sides of one person. One side is the worker bee – always doing, the other is the quiet thinking side – always being.

This story teaches us that we need to balance these two pieces of our selves in order to live a good faithful Christian life. We must strive to balance the busyness of our lives with time for study, prayer, and quietness.

And then we are to go out and do likewise: we are to live an active life of faith – because the things we do are to be grounded in God through prayer and study.

In other words, the work each of us does in our daily lives, in our jobs, our homes, our lives, is to be grounded in our faith – this is how we live a Christian life.

Balancing life is an on-going process. Some of us are more inclined to be busy, like Martha. However, being overly busy may make us distracted or anxious instead of being grounded in a calm sense of God’s grace. Others of us are more inclined to study, like Mary. But if all we do is study or live quiet lives we may not be active in expressing our faith.

The goal is to do both, so that one informs the other – our quietness, study, or prayer informs our busyness, the work we do becomes the work of God. And the work of God is always grounded in hospitality, which means caring for others in a radical way:

loving God, loving self, loving others.