Sermon for the Twenty-first Sunday After Pentecost

Proper 24 C ~ October 21, 2007

Holy Trinity & St. Anskar

Jesus told the disciples a parable about

THEIR need to pray always and not to lose heart…

+In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity

I spent my nineteenth summer at a Russian monastery. The seminarians who were about my age all looked on Fr. Konstantin as a very strict and holy old man. When I looked at him in church, however, he usually seemed to be asleep ~ sitting in a corner with his head nodding on his chest. One evening I went to his cell with some questions. One was about the endless repetition of the prayer “hospodi, pomiluy”. As many as forty times, seemingly as fast as the reader could go. I asked Fr. Konstantin how this could be squared with the Lord’s command not to trust in “vain repetitions” like the pagans. Fr. Konstantin, of the severe reputation, was gentle with me. He smiled and said that he was glad I was familiar with holy scripture, and that it was a very good question. The reason for the repetition, he said, was not to convince God, but ourselves!

We are the ones who need to be alerted to our need for God’s help. And we have to open our hearts to receive that help. God doesn’t need to be reminded to be good. God doesn’t need us to tell Him how to be just, how to do the right thing. God is NOT like the unjust judge of the parable, who will finally do the right thing just so that he will no longer have to endure the incessant whining of that annoying woman. God doesn’t need our prayers to be God. We need them.

Intercessory prayer may be another matter. I speculate that God wants our free coöperation in healing the world, and so God will not intervene without our permission. Perhaps God waits for our invitation, as He waited for Mary’s consent to the Incarnation. But mystical prayer, the prayer of communion with the Most Holy Trinity, is a matter of opening the heart. Melting it. Breaking it. For that, a discipline is necessary. Disciple needs to pray always and not to lose heart. Jesus’s parable of the Unjust Judge was for the disciples, those under discipline. They were not addressed to the crowds. The reference to the heart here may well have mystical significance beyond the ordinary metaphor.

Fr. Konstantin would certainly have thought so. You see, he was not nodding off as he sat in that corner at liturgy, he was praying, his head bent over in the prescribed position for the practice of what is called the prayer of the heart, in which the disciple’s attention is fixed on his actual, physical heart. Not to lose heart, in that context, would not mean to get scared, but not to let one’s attention drift from its focus on the heart, which is the center not only of the physical body and it animal emotions, but of the whole creature, mind and spirit included. This heart must not be lost. It must not be given over to distraction and thereby hardened like Pharaoh’s and closed off to God, not given over to decay, like last week’s lepers. Breaking the heart open and keeping it that way, and cleansing it of the leprosy of ego is the aim of repetitive prayer ~ inviting the Lord to have mercy upon us, by inviting the Holy Spirit into our hearts. That is, into the center of our inmost being. This is not an attempt to convince God to do something, but to convince oneself of one’s need.

This is something that happens over time, not suddenly. Unlike Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus, it is gradual not instantaneous. It doesn’t necessarily knock us off our horse and strike us blind. It is subtle, although at first big changes can happen, as with the lepers last week. It occurred to me that the form of their petition to our Lord was identical to the Jesus Prayer, which is the prayer Fr. Konstantin was repeating in the corner with his head bent and his beard on his chest: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.

Orthodox monks spend most of their lives ~ all of it, they hope ~ repeating this prayer and synchronizing it with their breathing. The Ten Lepers cried out to Jesus in the same way, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us. Their leprosy rendered them unfit for the society of humans. The very word, leper, has come to mean an outcast, someone shunned ~ and for good reason. A leper is outside the community. Isolated, out of touch, out of communion. As long as my heart is hard, I am a leper, in that I am shut off from the communion for which I was created, unable to participat in the Life of God. My turning to God, expressed in the prayer, cleanses me immediately. (Your faith has healed you, Jesus tells the Samaritan Leper.) My heart is now open to God. I am no longer a leper, shunned and cut off. But the fullness of communion is yet to come. I must go and show [my]self to the priests. This is a process that takes time and effort. As a disciple, I need to practice this prayer, this turning, this repentance, this dhikr, this remembrance of God and practice it constantly ~ always.

God doesn’t need me to remind Him to be God, to be good. But I need to be reminded of God. I need to pray always and not to lose heart. And I can do so. Anyone can. And those who do so, those who do not lose heart “purify themselves even as He is pure.” Impossible things happen to such people. They are the ones of whom the Lord said, Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

AMEN

MARANATHA

COME, LORD JESUS!