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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Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh

This summer, several of the priests at Church of the Incarnation have introduced me to the writings of Anthony Bloom (✝ 2003), Metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Diocese of Sourozh (see also here).  He writes with deep wisdom and simplicity in the best tradition of Eastern Orthodox spirituality.  His Beginning to Pray is one of the best books on prayer I have ever read (and I've only finished the first chapter).  Yesterday one of the priests lent me his well-loved copy of Anthony's Meditations: A Spiritual Journey Through the Parables (now out of print, but reissued by Continuum as Meditions on a Theme), warning me in no uncertain terms that I must return it to him.  Below are two passages from Meditions that struck me, and which give a taste of his thought:

"We must learn not only to accept our neighbour, but also to accept ourselves; we tend too easily to consider that all that we like in ourselves is our true self, while all that we and others find ugly is only accidental.  I am the real, attractive self, circumstances are distorting my best intentions, queering the pitch of my most perfect impulses.  We might usefully remember a page from the correspondence of one of the Russian staretz, Macarius of Optina, taken from an exchange of letters he had with a merchant of St Petersburg: 'My maid has left me and my friends recommend a village girl to replace her--what do you advise me to do? Shall I hire her or not?'  'Yes', answered the staretz.  After a while his correspondent writes again. 'Father, allow me to dismiss her, she is a real demon, since she has come I spend my time in rage and fury and have lost all control over myself!'  And the staretz replies: 'Take care not to dismiss her, she is an angel whom God has sent to you to make you see how much anger was hidden within you, which the previous maid had never been able to reveal to you.'  So it is not circumstances that make shadows darken our souls, nor is it God's fault, although we accuse him all the time.  How often have I heard people say 'Here are my sins', then stop a moment to take a breath and begin a long discourse to the effect that had not God afflicted them with such a hard life, they would not sin so much.  'Of course', they would say, 'I am in the wrong, but what can I do with such a son-in-law, my rheumatism or the Russian revolution?'  And more then once I suggested, before reading a prayer of absolution, that peace between God and man was a two-way traffic, and I asked whether the penitent was prepared to forgive God all his misdeeds, all the wrong he had done, all the circumstances which prevented this good Christian from being a saint.  People do not like this, and yet, unless we take full responsibility for the way we face our heredity, our situation, our God and ourselves, we shall never be able to face more than a small section of our life and self.  If we want to pass a true and balanced judgement on ourselves we must consider ourselves as a whole, in our entirety."

The passage reminds me a bit of Father Zosima in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, who urges the protagonist, Alyosha, to accept responsibility for sins of the whole world.  Perhaps Zosima's advice is too extreme, but both make the essential point that I must take responsibility for the wrong that is within me, if I am to be forgiven that wrong.

Here is another passage on discipline, which needs much unpacking, but I will let stand without comment:

"Doing the will of God is a discipline in the best sense of the word.  It is a test of our loyalty, of our fidelity to Christ.  It is by doing in ever detail, at every moment, to the utmost of our power, as perfectly as we can, with the greatest moral integrity, using our intelligence, our imagination, our will, our skill, our experience, that we can gradually learn to be strictly, earnestly obedient to the Lord God.  Unless we do this our discipleship is an illusion and all our life of discipline, when it is an act of self-imposed rules in which we delight, which makes us proud and self-satisfied, leaves us nowhere, because the essential momentum of our discipleship is the ability in this process of silence and listening, to reject our self, to allow the Lord Christ to be our mind, our will and our heart.  Unless we renounce ourselves and accept his life in place of our life, unless we aim at what St Paul defines as 'it is no longer I but Christ who lives in me', we shall never be either disciplined or disciples."