SERMONS
Christ Church 1/3/09 Covenant Service
Psalm 116
“I love the (Yahweh) because he (God) has heard my voice and my supplication.”
It has taken a hundred and fifteen psalms prior to this one – many that circle around such a statement – to get to such a point of raw and rare confession. I love the Lord, because God has heard my voice and supplication. In other words, God has taken seriously my person. God has honoured and valued all that I am and all that I will ever be.
To be frank, this is almost like a foreign language, is it not? Familiar enough on a religious level, but not so on a purely experiential level; very often the very mention of God provoking an immediate sense of obligation, duty, inadequacy, even fear. Put that alongside the intangibility or hiddenness of God, and you have a human experience that struggles greatly, not only into the reciprocal language of love, but with an ethic or a response centred in and out of it.
And so thank goodness for brave souls who begin their expression of faith, not with a command or an opinion, but with a liberating experience, like the psalmist and Jesus for that matter, who proclaim and give witness to the divine embrace and not prattle the “you must” and the “you will.”
Rainer Rilke (often described as the poets’ poet) was one such young and tenacious soul when he wrote this quite amazing poem/prayer of love:
“We must not portray you in king’s robes,
you drifting mist that brought forth the morning.
Once again from the old paint-boxes
we take the same gold for sceptre and crown
that has disguised you through the ages.
Piously we produce our images of you
till they stand around you like a thousand walls.
And when our hearts would simply open
our fervent hands hide you...”
A potentially heartfelt and quite intimate experience of God, hidden even buried beneath idol and ideology, beneath self-justification and self-sufficiency. Love being but a faint echo, a muffled tapping from below. And yet it is this love, this yearning and embracing Spirit of God (the morning mist) that can take a Covenant prayer and a Covenant service and create within such ritual, the freedom and space of new possibilities, the freedom of personal responsibility.
“What shall I offer, what shall I return for this love” cries the psalmist, “what sacrifice of praise might I bring, what dream or desire can I express so as to turn it into a concrete reality in my life?” For such is this love that that it simply desires our well-being, our gratitude and the love of life itself, which is no less than the cup of salvation to hold up before the whole community and to allow all to drink from. A love for love’s sake, not for a transaction of any kind.
Still, this is a long way removed from traditional Christian duty and appearance and that is why perhaps it sounds somewhat ethereal and strange. But unless our Covenant prayer arises from what John Wesley expressed as the “me in thee and thee in me” experience, that holy place of welcome and honour, that mystery of communion between God and humanity, God and the Creation, unless we pray from that perspective of intimacy, knowing and longing, our prayer will be but mere ordering of words and empty resolutions, not an opening window of opportunity for change and growth as people. A “ripening” as the poet often puts it. A continual opening and reaching outwards.
Well, at the risk of overkill, yet with the promise of Covenant before us and the call of Lent beckoning us, I’ll conclude with the voice of God recorded through the reaching hands of the poetic imagination of Rilke:
“You, sent out beyond our recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows that I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life
You will know it by its seriousness.”
Give me your hand...
Friends, ultimately it is that invitation that under girds and sustains the whole of the Christian life. The linking of hands, the joining of hearts, no less and it’s from that quite secure and sacred place we offer not only our gratitude but our very lives: their beauty, their uniqueness, their potential and their wonder, all in the name and the service of love.
Thanks be to God.
A (Covenant) Prayer of Desire
I love you Lord because you hear my voice.
Yet even before the day of my conception
You held and nurtured me in grace.
Therefore, at home in You
and awake to my own calling,
I willingly give my life to the service of Love.
Stir me when I remain listless.
Amaze me when I complain of boredom.
Lead me out when I would prefer to turn back.
For with You is abundance of life.
It is that same fullness
I seek to know and share
with a generosity of spirit,
and an openness of heart.
O God, this is my honest desire.
This is the yearning given by You!
Make it further come to completion in me, I pray:
In the name of Christ and through the power of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
SMG 2009
