Thank you for sharing Carla with Emmanuel, Mercer Island, this morning,
and thank you for having me here with you today.
Pulpit exchanges are a double benefit:
a good way for a congregation to hear
a different voice and a different perspective on the gospel,
and an opportunity for the clergy
to experience how another congregation worships
plus that little but dangerous enticement of being a new voice
and thus likely to be more appreciated than at home.
Carla and I are each getting to preach on our favorite topics.
Carla is back with a congregation that knows and loves her
to have her take part in Emmanuel’s Rogation celebration.
Emmanuel is blest with expansive grounds
with some garden areas that are particularly beautiful right now
and also a large pea patch for vegetable gardens.
And this year our Kids Green Team
is planting their own section of the pea patch.
And I am honored to be back here at Ascension
where I had held a Prayer of the Lamb seminar
and led a 12 week group.
Today’s pulpit exchange was originally to have happened during Lent
when the topic of prayer and meditation was part of your lenten program,
but those plans had to be changed,
and now here we are, and prayer is always a topic that can be addressed.
The prayer relationship with Jesus is at the heart of our Christian faith.
This is where faith is made real,
where the rubber hits the road,
whenever we bring ourselves into the posture of prayer or meditation.
The prayer relationship with Jesus is foundational to trust and commitment.
It informs all that we subsequently do.
Prayer is the time and place where grace is given freedom to act in our lives.
What we experience in prayer and meditation
shapes our motivation for service and enables us for action.
That is why it is so very important to pray first before engaging in action.
So now, how to talk about prayer and meditation
in this short space of time this morning…
There is so much that can be said,
BUT I always find that a gospel passage gives a good way
to focus in on an aspect of prayer and meditation
that is a gold mine to explore,
and today’s gospel is no exception.
Actually I think that John 15 describes rather well
what is at the heart of prayer and what is realized in meditation.
Jesus says, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.”
This love of which he speaks is, of course, agaph love,
that is the unitive love of God
which is a dynamic force and action within the heart of God,
within the Holy Trinity,
and this is what Jesus preached, demonstrated, and lived.
This agaph love flowed from Jesus continually,
so that in all the gospels everything recorded about Jesus
indicates this dynamic
and reveals no self-interest, no self-concern,
no self-contraction away from others and their needs.
This is a way of being that has overcome the mindset of the world,
where self-preservation arises
out of concern for having one’s own needs met.
Indeed Jesus so loved that he willingly laid down his life for his friends.
Jesus says, “Remain in my love,”
remain in this agaph, unitive love of God: be here!
Don’t go back to the old mind set.
Don’t get hooked by the pressures of the world.
Then he says, “If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love,”
which can also be said the other way around:
“If you remain in my love, you will be able to keep my commandment,”
because what was that commandment of Jesus?
Love one another – in the same way he has loved us.
Look, this is for the sake of joy – your joy, joy that completely fills you up,
joy that permeates to the depth of your being,
joy that swallows up all grief, all suffering, all sadness, all anxiety,
all fear, all despair, all confusion, all self-constriction,
all that melting away in unbounded, liberating, life-giving joy.
Again, this love talk in today’s gospel is at the heart of prayer
and what is realized in meditation,
AND what can be experienced at every point in life.
I am saying that to sit in meditation
is to put ourselves in the best possible position for being able to
recognize and experience this agaph love, this unitive love.
See! We can’t be loved from afar.
God seeks to have us realize that God’s love is so intimate
that it is unitive.
So Jesus says remain in the love – don’t go back to the old mind set,
don’t get hooked by pressures from the world.
You can take a lot of hits from the world, if you are wakeful to the Love.
Now, a word about being chosen, since it’s right here in the text:
Jesus said, “You did not chose me, but I chose you…”
This is not an issue of being chosen out of the great pool of all living beings
to have an exclusive claim about relationship with Jesus.
Not that at all.
This is about initiative.
We may think we have made the first move by coming to church,
by getting ourselves baptized or confirmed, by offering our prayers,
but the move was initiated by Jesus, his Resurrection Presence
through the Holy Spirit moving us to turn toward him:
Jesus lifted up on the cross drawing all to him.
Ah, so we come to offer prayer, we sit to meditate,
not because we thought it up, but because we cannot help it.
If some of you then begin to think, oops, I’m not a meditator
and I hardly remember to say my prayers each day,
take that self-realization as indication that you are being drawn, being called.
Now the reason for all this love,
and for being the object of Jesus’ initiative, his choosing:
it’s not so we can just sit around in this wonderful love being blissed out,
or just feeling comfortable in the self-satisfaction of knowing we are loved.
It’s not so that we can come to church each Sunday,
hear the beautiful words of the liturgy that pronounce this love,
have a cup of coffee with friends
and go home again to think about other things.
We are being loved and being chosen
so that, frankly, we can be of some good use,
so that we can be fruitful, create some results, bear fruit.
And what happens to fruit grown on a tree or vine?
It gets eaten.
That’s right. If we bear fruit, then expect to get eaten.
Expect to be nourishment for others.
Jesus did this big time.
Look – we come here, up to this table, and eat him,
this literal giving of his life blood for us.
I am speaking very intimately here, at at very fundamental, foundational level
about life in relationship to Jesus.
I speak this way because what I have come to see
through my own meditation practice
is the very solid and immediate reality of this Love that Jesus has for us.
And this has worked in me an action of grace and mercy
that has been liberating and healing.
I began to meditate as a response to huge grief and loss
through the deaths of two young men in our family
followed shortly after by the death of my father,
out of a deep inner need that began shout at me
to sit down, shut up and listen.
And when I did, I came to discover this huge love,
and as I opened my heart to let this love in
much more than the grief was transformed and healed.
There were many ways in which my own self-limitation, doubt, fear,
anger, aggression, and other self-destructive attitudes
were being addressed,
not through any agenda or effort of my own,
but as a result of sitting still and doing nothing,
that is, meditating.
That is why I recommend this spiritual practice to others.
As a spiritual practice meditation is tried and true, accessible,
and bears fruit for those who discern a call to engage the practice.
That is why I have dedicated my time and effort
into providing instruction and forming meditation groups
where establishing a stable and ongoing personal practice
can be supported.
Bearing fruit – let me say one thing more.
It should have been no surprise to me
that eventually my own mediation practice would start making
some use of me in a way that would go beyond
my own comfort level in offering ministry.
It started with a simple pastoral referral
when I was doing some interim work in Monroe.
A prisoner was sent there who was an Episcopalian. Would I visit him?
I don’t like prisons,
and I don’t particularly care for the kinds of people you find in prison.
I can work pastorally in other situations of need.
I have been a hospice director and a chaplain in a trauma hospital.
I’ve been with a lot of people in crisis and difficult situations.
But prison ministry and the personality types there –
well, others would do much better with that than I;
I had never been much good with that or felt comfortable in that setting.
Nevertheless I made the visit to the Monroe Correctional Complex,
and lo and behold, this inmate wanted to learn how to meditate.
So there we sat in the large visitors room
surrounded by everyone else visiting – prisoners and their families –
a veritable din going on around us,
and we mediated together.
This guy was super motivated,
and he went back to his cell and meditated daily between my visits.
This went on for months.
Then he introduced me to the chaplains,
and we talked about my coming as a volunteer to teach meditation to others.
Now I go out there on a weekly basis, and have just recently received
a grant that will help keep this going for the rest of the year.
So far over 30 men have at least sampled the meditation class,
and some have stayed and established a personal meditation practice.
I am learning along with these men about the mercy of God,
mercy for them for an openness to
healing and transformation in their lives,
and mercy for me in bringing me to repentance
about my own judgments about them,
freeing me from another inner prison.
I am learning more and more what it is to do what Jesus commands,
that we love one another.
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