Sermon: "Knocking on Heaven's Door?"

This week I returned to Durham from ten weeks in Dallas as a seminarian at Church of the Incarnation as part of my degree requirements at Duke Divinity School.  While there, I was given the opportunity to preach a sermon during the three traditional services one Sunday.  I preached on Jesus' teaching on prayer in Luke 11:1-13 (the other readings were Genesis 18:20-33; Psalm 138; Col. 2:6-15).  The experience has, among other things, showed me the weight of responsibility involved in faithfully proclaiming the Gospel.  I've posted the manuscript below.  (You can listen to me preach it here.)

“Knocking on heaven’s door?” (Luke 11:1-13)
July 25, 2010 | Year C, Proper 12

Beginning in the third century of our era, many earnest Christian men and women set out into the deserts of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt in pursuit of a life totally dedicated to God.  The sayings of these ‘desert fathers’, as these simple hermits came to be known, have been handed down to us in a collection conveniently known as The Sayings of the Desert Fathers.  One of them goes like this:

Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, 'Abba as far as I can, I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace, and, as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?' Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, 'If you will, you can become all flame' [From The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks, ed. Benedicta Ward (New York: Penguin, 2003).]

“If you will, you can become all flame.”  Now, I don’t know if one can become all flame, or even whether Abba Joseph’s fingers really did become like ten lamps of fire.  But I share this story with you because Abba Joseph’s response shows the power of a transformed imagination.  Abba Lot could not imagine what else he could do to grow in love and devotion to God, but Abba Joseph’s uplifted, flaming fingers showed him that something else was possible.  Abba Lot had suffered from an inadequate perception of the possible, until Abba Joseph showed him that he could become all flame.

If we are honest with ourselves, I think that we often suffer from a similar lack of imagination, a similarly limited worldview.  And I want to suggest that Abba Joseph’s horizon-expanding response is similar in effect to the parables of Jesus.  That is, Jesus challenges our perceptions of what God is like and what it means to be in relation with him.  Take today’s Gospel lesson for instance.  How might Jesus’ teaching on prayer effect a transformation in the way we view God and our relation with him?  Consider for a moment what you imagine God to be like.  Is he like a man sleeping at midnight, oblivious to our needs unless we bang on his door, and only then reluctantly answering us?  Or do you believe God will graciously give you what you ask? that you will find what you seek? that God will open the door at your knock?  What do you imagine God is like?

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Liturgy and the Parousia

“The motif of the Parousia becomes the obligation to live the Liturgy as a feast of hope-filled presence directed towards Christ, the universal ruler.  In this way, it must become the origin and focus of the love in which the Lord can take up his dwelling.  In his Cross, the Lord has preceded us so to prepare for us a place in the house of the Father.  In the Liturgy the Church should, as it were, in following him, prepare for him a dwelling in the world.  The theme of watchfulness thus penetrates to the point where it takes on the character of a mission: to let the Liturgy be real, until that time when the Lord himself gives to it that final reality which meanwhile can be sought only in image.” 
- Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life

As part of my internship this summer, I've been teaching a class on eschatology (we're calling it "The End of the World").  I have made use of Joseph Ratzinger's brilliant textbook, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, which he wrote for the Dogmatic Theology series, edited by himself and Johann Auer.  As previous posts may suggest, I have found it to be full of extraordinarily rich theological insights.

The above passage is a good example of the richness of Ratzinger's theological vision, and one that has made me look at the liturgy in a new light.  For Ratzinger, the Eucharistic Liturgy figures the Parousia and the Parousia interprets the liturgy.  That is, insofar as Jesus is present in the bread and wine, the Liturgy is an actual foretaste of the Lord's second advent.  Therefore, the Eucharistic Liturgy is an image of the Parousia, of that great Day when the Lord will return in power and glory to "judge the quick and the dead." 

The Eucharist then is not only about remembrance, anamnesis, of Christ's life, death, resurrection and ascension, but it is also a looking forward.  As one of the eucharistic prayers in the Prayer Book has it, we come to the Table (which is also called the altar because on it we remember the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ, the true Paschal Lamb, who is also the one true Priest) "looking for his coming again with power and great glory."  Before this we say, “Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord,” echoing the words of the crowds who greeted Jesus as he went to the Cross, and welcoming his presence as the Host of the marriage-supper of the Lamb of which the Eucharist is a foretaste.

Coming to the Eucharist with these ideas rattling around in my head has helped me appreciate both the solemnity and the joy of it.  As Geoffrey Wainwright, in his nourishing study Eucharist and Eschatology, writes:

"In the eucharist the Lord comes to judge and to recreate; to cast out what remains of unrighteousness in His people, and to continue the work of renewal begun in baptism; to threaten the world with an end to its old existence, and to give it the promise, through the new use to which bread and wine is put, of attaining to its true destiny."  

In other words, solemnity, because if the liturgy is a Parousia in miniature, then it is also a moment of judgment.  Joy, because the heart of  Christian hope is expressed in the cry, "Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!" (1 Cor 16:22; Rev 22:20).