Tabernacle Presbyterian Church
February 10, 2008

Rev. L. John Gable

“THE CONTEMPLATIVE TRADITION"
Ephesians 5:1-20, I John 2:3-6

As we enter in to this season of Lent - this season in the church year set apart and designed to help us ready ourselves to hear and experience the passion and death and ultimately the glory of the resurrection of our Lord - we would do well to spend some time in reflection and repentance and prayer.  To use the phrase of A. W. Tozer, we will use this time together to better enable us to “follow hard after God” and we will use the great traditions of our faith to help us do just that.

This past week during the Ash Wednesday service I told a story about being with my wife, Kristin, in San Francisco several years ago.  We had explored Fisherman’s Wharf, and were taking a cable car ride up to the Nob Hill Neighborhood when, quite unexpectedly, we stumbled upon Grace Episcopal Cathedral.  It is a beautiful and magnificent structure, so we decided to go in and take a look around.  We entered the narthex (gathering area), and were admiring the beautiful sanctuary when we noticed a labyrinth laid out on the floor.  A labyrinth is a pattern or pathway specifically designed for spiritual reflection and prayer.  I had never walked a labyrinth before and we were in no particular hurry so I decided to do so then, while Kristin sat and read.

I will confess to being a little suspect at first, but very quickly found myself enjoying the freedom of movement and the quiet time for reflection and prayer.  Shortly after I started I noticed a woman who began the labyrinth behind me.  There were two paths laid out and it became curious to me how sometimes we were separated by great distances and other times we came very close, almost too close, nearly shoulder to shoulder, before separating again.  But as I said, I found myself immersed in this experience, when suddenly the doors of the cathedral flew open and in marched a man dressed in a business suit.  Now this was a man on a mission.  I heard him before I saw him, his hard heels clicking rapidly against the marble floors.  To my surprise, rather than walking around the labyrinth, he marched straight through it on his way to the altar, presumably to pray.

Not only was I startled by his abruptness, I was irritated by his intrusion.  His pathway to God cut straight across mine, and I didn’t appreciate it…at all.  But afterward it caused me to reflect.  Every one of us is on a spiritual journey.  Some of us are new to the path and others of us have been on it a long time.  Some of our journeys look very similar and are very familiar to us. Others are venturing in to areas of spirituality we have never experienced and can only imagine; experiences that perhaps may even feel rather fringe to us.  But suffice it say, all of us are seeking the same end: an encounter with and experience of God.  The question then becomes what pathway should we use to enter into this kind of relationship?  Is there only one, or are there numerous paths leading us to the same end?  Let me be clear here.   I am not talking about the common notion that all paths lead to God like all roads lead to Rome.  No, Scripture is plain to tell us that Jesus Christ is “the Way, the Truth and the Life, no one comes to the Father but through Him”, and that, “there is no other name given under heaven by which we may be saved”.  But given that, we can see, and need to appreciate, that there are many ways that we can seek to follow hard after God, there are many faithful ways to follow Jesus. 

During this season of Lent we will look at six different traditions which have been put into practice down through the ages to help believers experience God and grow in their practice of the faith.  As we will see, they don’t look very much like one another, but taken together, they will help us develop a balanced life of faith.  Just as having good physical health requires a healthy balance of good food and rest and exercise, so a healthy spiritual life requires some balance of each of the six traditions as well.  Each can be seen in the life and ministry of Jesus Himself, the One we want to imitate and follow.

It is appropriate for us to begin our study today by looking carefully at what is called the Contemplative Tradition.  While deeply grounded in the teachings of all of Scripture, this tradition found its footing in the 4th century when, believe it or not, believers found the cities of the day too congested and noisy.  Can you imagine their response to the cities of today?  As a result they began to leave the hustle and bustle of the city and founded cloisters and monasteries where they emphasized the importance of solitude, meditation and prayer.  They saw this kind of seclusion and intimacy with God as the balm which could cure the disease of an increasingly secular society.  So we hear of the communities established by St. Benedict and the Benedictine order, and Anthony of Egypt, who founded what came to be called the “Desert Mothers and Fathers.”  Rather than seeing them as escapists, the Church was actually strengthened by their emphasis on intimacy with God as they were committed to prayer and meditation, in imitation of our Lord.

In our Gospel lesson from Matthew we hear the story of perhaps the most familiar of Jesus’ miracles - the feeding of the 5000.  Notably it is the only one of Jesus’ miracles that is recorded in all four Gospels, but are you aware that that miracle was actually something of an interruption to the real work that Jesus intended to do that day?  Put this story in context; what Jesus was really about that day was prayer and time alone with His Heavenly Father.

We read that Jesus has just received news that John the Baptist, His first cousin and the primary announcer of His ministry, has been executed by Herod.  Here we see the very human side of Jesus; like any one of us, He was broken by grief and desperately wanted to be alone.  So we read, “He withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by Himself.”  This is what He intended to do that day; to be alone in the company of His Father.  But the crowds saw where He was going and followed.  And quite remarkably, rather than attending to His own needs, Jesus responded to their needs by curing their sick and ultimately by providing them all dinner, some 5000 of them, plus women and children.  We will want to return to that story again one day, but for our purposes today, we need to move on to see that after the meal, Jesus sent His disciples on ahead across the Sea of Galilee in a boat, while He released the crowd.  And then He got back to the business at hand, His real work for that day, “He went up the mountain by Himself to pray.”    Perhaps Jesus’ most memorable miracle was little more than an interruption in His day.
       
This is not an isolated incident in the Gospels. Time and again we read that Jesus separated Himself from others so that He could be alone with His Father.  This relationship was the primary focus of His life and ministry.  This relationship was the source and the resource for His ministry of teaching, healing and miracles, such that He would say He could do nothing apart from God, and that His entire mission in life was to do the will of His Father.  Now, folks, if Jesus needed this kind of quiet time with God in order to do what He was given to do, how much more do we need it to do what we’ve been given to do?

Clearly the disciples saw that Jesus had something very special in His relationship with God, so they asked Him, “Lord, teach us to pray like You do.”  I dare say, we want that, too.  Dallas Willard, in his book The Divine Conspiracy, speaks of what he calls “Kingdom praying”; which is praying like Jesus. He writes, “In apprenticeship to Jesus this is one of the most important things we learn how to do.  He teaches us how to be in prayer what we are in life, and how to be in life what we are in prayer…Prayer is, above all, a means of forming character.” 

Yet how many of us say, either with our lips or with our lives, “I’m too busy to pray?”  If those in the 4th century thought their lives were rushed, what of us?  Marjorie Thompson writes a telling article in the journal Weavings.  “I watch as I fill up every available slot in my appointment book, fill every minute of the day, and do not leave time or space to come wholly into the presence of God with my entire being, my entire self.  This is no accident, although I like to pretend that it is.  I like to believe that I am very busy doing God’s work, and God, being omniscient, ought to know this and be content to wait until I’m ready to meet.  It looks right now, according to my calendar, as though this meeting might take place in the middle of the spring quarter (next year).” 

Yet have you noticed in the Gospels, the busier Jesus got, the higher priority prayer became for Him, including His final hours in the garden of Gethsemane?  Rather than saying, “I have so much to do I don’t have time to pray”, as we might, He said, “Given so much to do I don’t have time not to pray.” 
       
This is the power which underlies the contemplative tradition.  It is the recognition that we can’t do the ministry of Jesus without the power of Jesus.  It is the clear and consistent reminder of our dependence on the power and indwelling of the Holy Spirit, which we will focus on again in a couple of weeks when we talk about the Charismatic Tradition, but it is a good reminder to us that we need a balanced diet in the spiritual life and each of these traditions is interdependent.  In short, as E. Stanley Jones reminds us, “we are as spiritual as we are prayerful; no more, no less.”

I have recently finished reading a book on evangelism titled “Unbinding the Gospel”.  In it the author relates story after story of how lives and churches are being transformed and changed by the power of the Gospel today.  She tells of one particular church which had two women who asked her what they could do to help their church grow.  Martha Reece answered, “Commit to praying for three months…don’t do anything, just pray.”  They thought that was a pretty lame answer, until they actually did it and the results were amazing.  In 1857 - a prosperous time financially in these United States but also a time of great moral degradation - a man named Jeremiah Lanphier started a Wednesday noon prayer meeting in an upper room of the Dutch Reformed Church in Manhattan, just a few blocks from Wall Street.  He advertised the meeting and six people showed up. The following week they had 14, and then 23.  They decided to begin meeting daily and soon they filled the Dutch Reformed Church, so they overflowed to the Methodist church and it wasn’t long before they filled every public building in downtown New York City.  One newspaper reporter, Horace Greeley, attended 12 meetings in an hour and he counted 6100 men, and then the landslide began.  People were being converted in New York City at a rate of 10,000 a day and then the movement spread to New England.  Church bells rang every day at 8 a.m., noon and 6 p.m., calling the people to prayer, and by year’s end more than a million people were converted.  There were only 30 million Americans at the time.   Can we imagine what God could do with us, even here at Tab, if just six of us were really committed to prayer?

The contemplative tradition calls us to a prayer-filled life and Jesus shows us what that life is like.  How can we begin?  Rather than feeling guilty about how feeble our prayer lives have been up until now, let us in this season of Lent make a commitment, individually and together, to grow in this area of our spiritual lives.

In your bulletin there is an insert which I’ll invite you to take out now.  Here are five exercises we can start with.  I invite you to try one, or try them all:

Set aside five to ten minutes each day for prayer. 

I know Martin Luther said, “I have so much to do I cannot get on without spending three hours daily in prayer”, but this is a place to start, five to ten minutes, which may in fact seem like a long time at first.

Follow that with: Five to ten minutes a day in silence. 

How many of us think that “Amen” is the way we end our prayers?  In reality this only marks the time when we should stop talking and start listening.  How many of us complain that God doesn’t speak to us anymore?  Maybe the issue is not His, but ours.

Read a selection from a devotional book each day. 

There are some classics; St. Augustine’s Confessions, Brother Lawrence’s The Practice of the Presence of God, or Oswald Chambers’ My Utmost for His Highest. We also have Lenten Devotionals at the Reception window that you can pick up.  Find something that suits your needs and ask God to speak to you through what you read.

Pray the same prayer for five minutes every day. 

I have often used the ancient prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me a sinner.”  Or perhaps repeat a favorite passage of Scripture, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me” (Psalm 51:1), or the father’s response in the parable of the Prodigal Son, “My child, you are always with Me and all that is Mine is yours” (Luke 15:31).

Begin to journal or write a prayer to God. 

Writing forces us to slow down and focus our thoughts. Certainly there are many ways to begin exercising the contemplative aspects of our spirituality. Explore and find what works for you.  Whether you are one who is slowly walking around the labyrinth, or one who is cutting straight through, whether you are one who is sitting on the perimeter silently reading or out on the sidewalk sharing the Gospel, all of us are on a spiritual journey and each of us would do well to remember that “we need times of solitude and silence, times of contemplation and reflection, times of prayer and meditation.  We need these times - just as much as Jesus needed them - to gain strength and wisdom and compassion”.  As Jim Wallis put it so aptly, “Prayer is not undertaken in place of other actions; it is the foundation for all the other actions we take.”  About this we will talk more in the weeks to come.

Let us pray.  This prayer was composed for the Lambeth Conference in 1948 and it seems fitting for us today.  “Almighty God, give us grace to be not only hearers, but doers of Your Holy Word; not only to admire, but to obey Your doctrine; not only to profess, but to practice Your true religion; not only to love, but to live Your Gospel.  So grant that what we learn of Your glory we may receive into our hearts and show forth in our lives.  This we pray through Jesus Christ our Lord.”