Prayer of the Heart

Sermon for the 4th Sunday of Lent (RCL – Year B)
Offered by Nathan Ferrell at HS, Bellmawr & St. Luke’s, Westville

Texts: Numbers 21:4-9; Psalm 107:1-3,17-22; Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3:14-21
The Illumined Heart: Chapters 7, 8, and 9

Where is my home?
Is it the house where I live,
The garden where I sit in
summer,
The country where I roam,
Or the church where I
worship?

The place I call home
Is where my heart is at
rest.
And my heart is most at rest
When it turns to God in prayer.
So
wherever I pray is home.
(From Celtic Parables by Robert Van De Weyer,
Northstone Publishing, 1998, p.100)

My friends, we are on a journey to find our true home, because we are on a journey to learn how to live and how to pray. For wherever we pray, there is our home.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (John 3:16).

God’s forgiving love for the world and for you is never-ending, and never to be questioned. Chesed is the word that the Hebrews used to describe this eternal quality of God. Chesed is used very often in the Psalms and it is right here in our Psalm for today.

“Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; and his mercy (his chesed) endures for ever” (Psalm 107:1 – BCP).

But we need the Son of God to guide us into a life centered on that love, the kind of life that is eternal. For when our lives are rooted and grounded in the love of God, then they are destined to last forever. We perish when we stray from God and live life guided by other forces and other mentors.

In our Lenten study book, we have been reading about disciplines for the body and for soul – physical and spiritual disciplines. These are training exercises that are essential if we are ever to move beyond the surface level of things, to move beyond the elemental steps of our relationship with God. These disciplines boil down to two basic practices: fasting and prayer. Every Christian needs to have some regular practices of fasting and prayer in order to grow spiritually. There is no alternative. We cannot grow in Christ if we allow ourselves to be governed by every desire of the body and every thought of the mind. Learning self-control is the path that leads to peace and joy.

Now, I am no expert in fasting or in prayer. I am trying to learn, and I have been saying the Jesus Prayer on and off now for about 12 years, since I learned about prayer in seminary. I say it in this form: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” I try to coordinate it with my breathing, so that while I take a deep breath in, I pray in my heart, “Lord, Jesus Christ.” To me, this symbolizes that just as I take in oxygen deeply into my lungs, so I am taking the glorious name of our Lord deep into my heart.

As I breathe out and give my air back to the world, so I declare “Son of God”, giving forth my confession that Jesus is the eternal Son of God. In this way I recognize the truth that God is made manifest in our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

As I breathe in again, I pray in my heart, “have mercy on me.” I am seeking to fill myself with the deep mercy of God available at all times and in all places. I need this mercy to live.

And as I breathe out again, I now declare the truth about myself: “a sinner.” As we have discovered while probing the idea of repentance over the last few weeks, this is not an exercise in self-mutilation. I am not trying to beat myself up by repeating over and over again that I am a sinner. Rather, I seek the truth. I seek to be completely open and honest and vulnerable. It is a statement without judgment: “have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Sometimes I have tried to pray with the use of a prayer rope (which I have brought this morning if anyone wishes to see it), though more often than not my hands are already full with something else. This pattern of prayer will not work for many of you, but for me, I have found that this practice of praying in my heart while intentionally trying to breathe deeply has been a great help to me. Ever though I am a beginner, there are many times even now when the prayer flows with my breathing without much thought or effort on my part.

Sadly, these moments are far too rare, and it is much more common for me to be blown about by the tempests of my wildly fluctuating thoughts. Frederica Mathewes-Green has a good handle on what happens in most of our minds for most of the time:

“Our conflicting thoughts alternately buoy us up or cast us down, and if they
are not controlled we snap around behind them like a kite in the wind. The
opposite of this is tranquility. If we could catch the false meddling thoughts
when they first sneak in the window and toss them right back out, our lives
would be a lot more coherent. We would be markedly more peaceful” (The Illumined Heart, p. 67).

Can you imagine what it would be like to live in this way, with a way to consistently direct and govern our thoughts so that we were not subjected to every random thought that arrived in our minds? So that when the thought arose to reply to Erin, my wife, with some nasty, sarcastic comment, instead my heart – lead by the Holy Spirit – could reject that thought and guide me to speak to her with love and respect. So that when the thought arose in your mind to speed up in your car and cut off some guy who was tailgating you and trying to pass you and you were angry and wanted to teach him a lesson, that instead your heart could catch that sneaky thought and guide you rather to be patient, to show mercy, and to let him pass you since you don’t know what kind of rush he might be in.

Can you imagine how much more peaceful and joyful and loving and enjoyable our lives would be if we all lived with our minds centered in our hearts, in continual prayer, governed by the Holy Spirit?

We all think we know more than we really do. A friend of mine who was a pastor in Virginia told of a time when he was driving out to the local hospital to visit a parishioner. In that town, the road to the hospital began as a two-lane road and then widened to 4 lanes about a mile before the hospital. And as this pastor was driving, a young man in a big, jacked up pick-up truck was right behind him, tailgating, like a foot off of his bumper. The young man had a girl in the truck with him, and the pastor immediately thought the young man was trying to show off. So he slowed way down to teach this guy a lesson. Once they got to 4-lane section of road, the young guy in the truck raced off around him and sped away. The pastor grumbled and probably said something a bit nasty under his breath. He had enough self-control not to give the guy any particular hand gestures, but he was annoyed and a bit angry. However, as the pastor pulled into the hospital parking lot, he saw this young driver at the hospital as well. There he was, walking slowly while bracing the young girl. She was pregnant, obviously full-term and obviously in labor pains. The pastor could see that they were young and scared. What a fool and a jerk he felt like at that moment, and he knew that he needed to ask for God’s forgiveness.

You see, we really don’t know other people’s situations. We think we know more than we really do. How much better all of our lives would be if, instead of responding with anger, we could respond with patient understanding, mercy and a willingness to help each other.

That is what a life of prayer promises to bring you. Please, please don’t think of the continual prayer of the heart as some mystical, otherworldy experience. It is eminently practical. It is the path to a healthy and real life – an eternal kind of life.
“For we are what [God] has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life” (Ephesians 2:10). Let us walk in this way of life, my brothers and sisters, learning to pray without ceasing in our hearts as we grow in the amazing love and mercy of God. Amen.