Sermon based on John 16:12-15 and Proverbs 8:1-4; 22-31
Today, on Trinity Sunday, we are focusing on the significance of praying to a Trinitarian God and to take the opportunity to reflect on our prayer life. Are we keeping our prayer life fresh, are we keeping it active and is it effective?
Earlier in the children’s address we seeked to further our understanding of what it means to worship one God that is made up of three parts or persons, God the Father, Jesus the Son and Holy Spirit. The Trinity, our Trinitarian God.
We demonstrated a living God. A living God in a community made up of 3 living persons in a relationship of love. Love between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and how, thanks to the loving sacrifice of Jesus, we too can join in with this loving relationship.
This perfect relationship is what God wanted right at the outset of creation and, as we heard in our Old Testament reading, Wisdom herself was there at the beginning. God made humans to be in a loving relationship with him and with access to divine wisdom.
God’s purpose from the beginning was to live in us and for us to live in him. How wonderful!
Our gospel reading today is a conversation. It is an image of a conversation between the trinity. Jesus talks about how the Spirit will ‘not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears’. The Spirit is going share with us what he hears in a conversation between the Trinity.
So Jesus is sharing with us an image of a conversation which illustrates the internal life of the Trinity – a three way conversation that draws us in, to want to discover more about God, and how we can join in on that conversation as the Spirit is going to share with us what she hears.
Conversation is massive part of any relationship. Without conversation we would know very little about our friends, the people we generally meet from day to day and even our own family. We wouldn’t know what makes them happy, what makes them sad, or what their needs were and, likewise, without conversation we would struggle to share our life’s journey with them.
Part of the joy of life is lost if we journey alone. Imagine for a moment a world without conversation. No mobile phones, no email, no letters, no talking. Silence.
My mother, for one, would be completely lost without talking….but the phone bill would be cheaper! We may find it novel for a while but how would we sustain relationships without conversation?
A really good conversation allows us to change who we are, and how we see the world around us. Conversation that includes listening, laughing, sharing, opening ourselves up to others and being open to them. These conversations can be life-enhancing and life changing.
So why do we sometimes forget how important communication is in our relationship with God? Why do we sometimes forget the importance of a two-way conversation with God?
By allowing space for good conversation with God, we allow the future to be created together. Not our will, but Gods will be done. A far brighter future in the knowledge of God’s purpose for our lives, rather than stumbling around doing what we think is best.
We know that we communicate to God through prayer but how does God join in on the conversation? How does God communicate back to us? Well the two main ways is through reading God’s written word in the Bible and also through prayer.
Prayer is the communication, spoken and unspoken, that takes place between ourselves and God.
When we pray to our Trinitarian God we are praying to God the father, through Christ the Son and in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Prayer is defined as the natural expression of the loving relationship with God our heavenly Father. We pray to him because we trust him and want to do his will in everything. We pray to him because we depend on him and seek his guidance, strength and comfort.
The ability to hear God, is what we might call wisdom. Wisdom is found, according to Proverbs, in busy places – at crossroads, at gates, places of transition and decision.
These are the places in which we should listen most clearly for wisdom, and try to hear the divine conversation that the Spirit invites us to enter into. If we are at a threshold, a decision that needs to be made, a change that is possible, are we able to hear, and are we willing to listen to God?
Prayer may be the “natural” expression of our relationship to God, but that does not mean that we necessarily find prayer easy. God is aware of our difficulties and gives us the help of the Holy Spirit.
How are we all getting on with praying? Are we keeping it fresh, are we keeping it active and is it effective?
I, for one, struggle at times with prayer. I’m good at rattling off a list of demands to God but struggle to take time out to listen for a response. A one-way conversation rather than two-way communication. That’s not a sign of a healthy relationship. It was actually by looking at how my non-Christian friends pray that I took stock and assessed the effectiveness of my approach to prayer.
Have you noticed the rapid growth of Spiritually outside of the church? Everywhere I look there are books on Mindfulness, meditation and prayer.
On programmes such as ‘Through the keyhole’ where the TV presenter takes you on a tour around a celebrity’s house, one thing that all these houses have in common is that they all have a token statue of Buddha on the mantelpiece.
People are openly not embarrassed to be seen as ‘spiritual’ and ‘prayerful’ but why do they not seem to see the Spiritually in the Christian faith? Why is the Holy Spirit of the Christian faith not on trend?
I even have a friend who has found Spiritually since leaving the Christian church and an ability to pray and meditate that he struggled to experience whilst following the traditional format of Christian prayer.
The amazing news that we need to be sharing, particularly with people whose hearts are already open to the need for a fulfilling spiritual life, is how we as Christians have direct access to God in our prayers.
Our prayers are unique and powerful since we pray to God through Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit. This 3 fold access means that our prayers will be answered. We can pray with certainty.
We know for certain that God graciously hears us; we know that because we pray through Christ, our imperfections do not get in the way of God hearing us, and we know that we have the awesome power of the Holy Spirit on hand to guide us.
Having a friend who has found a more fulfilling spiritual life after leaving the church saddens me. It saddens me that he never found it whilst coming to church all of his life. To come every Sunday but apparently not hearing the joyful message that we can live our life in the Spirit, in spiritual communion with God.
The loving, active and participative relationship we have with God our father, Son and Holy Spirit is an integral part of our faith, in fact the absolute essence of our faith, but I wonder if our Christian message has been lost in translation.
For some reason people see Christianity as irrelevant yet there are a staggeringly high percentage of people who are open to accepting that they are a spiritual being having a human experience and are desperate to know how to commune with and have a relationship with God.
If you want to see how on trend it is just have a look at the amount of mindfulness colouring in books there are that are flying off the shelves at the moment. Take a look at the gondola ends in WHSmiths or promotional tables in Waterstones and see for yourselves the movement in spiritually that is taking place.
A shift is happening, hearts and minds are opening and we must share our amazing news of our unique relationship with God.
The Easter period has come to a close but the Easter message continues. God revealed himself in Jesus Christ, we accept Jesus as our Lord and Saviour and we live in communion with God and in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Our prayers of intercession today are going to be different to the traditional format during a service and instead of lots of lists of requests we are going to have a time of listening to God. A fresh approach to how we pray.
Meditation is a big part of the shift that I have been talking about. Everyone seems to be at it but I don’t hear Christians talking about it. I have many non-Christian friends who are meditating and finding peace through this form of communion with God but where does it fit within Christian prayer?
I looked at my friends who were meditating and couldn’t help but think that their format of being still and listening to God made complete sense.
Rather than a load of rambling prayers to God, deep down, I knew I needed to take a fresh look at how I pray and learn to listen; to discern God’s will rather than mine. Do any of you feel similar?
I looked at my meditating Non-Christian friends and I could see meditation as the solution but didn’t want to do anything that could possibly be outside of Jesus’s teaching so I held back on it.
I didn’t do anything about it until I got to unit 13 of Faith and Worship which is the study materials that trainee local preachers, like myself, use to become qualified local Methodist preachers.
It explained the importance of meditation. Defining meditation as ‘when we reflect quietly on the nature of God and what he has done, and wait for him to speak to us. Part of the skill of spiritual devotion is to find quietness, even in the midst of noise.’
It quotes Michael Ramsey, the 100th Archbishop of Canterbury, “Silence enables us to be aware of God, to let mind and imagination dwell upon his truth, to let prayer be listening before it is talking and to discover our own selves in a way that is not always possible when we are making or listening to noise. There comes sometimes an interior silence in which the soul discovers itself in a new dimension of energy and peace, a dimension which the restless life can miss. If the possibilities of silence were often hard in biblical times, they are infinitely harder in the world in which we live today. A world tightening in its speed and noise is a world where silence alone may enable man’s true freedom to be found”.
Mediation is a form of prayer that makes use of the silence. But what did Jesus do? How did he pray? He taught us the words to pray by using the Lord’s Prayer but he also set the example to us on how to listen.
Jesus often got up early in the morning, even whilst it was still dark, went to a solitary place and prayed. Jesus understood the need to pray alone. Jesus started his day off with prayer and so should we.
But did Jesus meditate? Well, we have the example of Jesus fasting in the desert for 40 days.
There are examples of him spending the night praying to God. Jesus knew how to dedicate long periods of time to prayer. Praying through the night must have involved long periods of silent listening to God in order to discern his will.
We too need to be able to dedicate long periods of our lives to prayer as well as short prayers, such as The Lord’s Prayer. Easier said than done I hear! But like all good relationships, they are nurtured by spending time together.
Jesus also taught persistence in prayer, we should pray without ceasing. We also have his instruction, “when you pray do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask.” And we have Gods’ well known instruction, “Be still, and know that I am God.”
Less words, more listening.
So why doesn’t this seem to be common practice? Has the message go so lost in translation that I even feared that I would be doing something wrong if I meditated.
As part of my training I need to read a fab little book called ‘A Catechism for the use of the people called Methodists’, which sets out to provide a statement of the Christian faith. If anyone ever asks you the question, ‘What do Methodists believe? This little book is a summary of our beliefs, our faith.
The section on prayer states that our prayers should include 6 types of prayer – adoration, confession, intercession, petition, thanksgiving and the sixth one is ‘meditation’. And it says that in meditation we reflect quietly on the nature of God and what he has done, and wait for him to speak to us.
We want our prayers to be effective and to be effective we need instruction from God. We may be the means by which God answers our prayers or those of others. So we need to learn to listen.
Let’s take on the challenge to take a fresh look at our prayer life and ensure that we are doing enough listening to God as we pray to the Father, through Christ the Son and in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Amen
Practice what was just preached and click here to go to the Meditative Prayers of Intercession that were used later in the service.
Debbie Story 