Readings for the Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost (Year B – Track 1 – Proper 24)
Job 38:1-7, (34-41)
Psalm 104:1-9, 25, 37b
Hebrews 5:1-10
Mark 10:35-45
This sermon was preached at Christ Episcopal Church in Eureka CA on Sunday October 20, 2024.
Over the last several weeks, I’ve been teaching a course online entitled “Early and Medieval Christian Spirituality” in which students practice a different spiritual discipline each week, including Centering Prayer, the Jesus Prayer, Spiritual Friendship Practices, as well as forms of Forest Therapy inspired by St. Francis. Our rich Christian tradition offers a panoply of prayer methods and practices, with enough variety to suit each and every temperament and personality. In our reading from Hebrews today, we learn how Jesus prayed by offering up supplications, with loud cries and tears, not unlike his precursor Job, who complained and lamented and even argued with God. Jesus and Job both knew how to be brutally honest with God in their prayers and yet they also knew when it was time to simply stand in humble awe and silent wonder in God’s presence. According to Hebrews, Jesus’s prayers were heard because of his reverent humility.[1] In our reading from the Book of Job today, God speaks to Job out of a whirlwind and Job eventually responds by saying, “I am speechless: what can I say? I put my hand on my mouth. I have said too much already; now I will speak no more” (Job 40:4-5).[2] Sometimes silence is the most appropriate form of prayer: a silence of reverent humility and awe-filled wonder. It’s hard to read today’s Psalm without being brought to a place of awe and wonder. And it’s hard to read today’s Gospel without hearing Christ’s call to humility.
Now I encourage all of us to develop disciplines and practices of prayer throughout the week so that we continue to grow closer to Christ as his disciples not just on Sunday, but every day. Getting into the habit of praying prayers like the Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me” on a regular basis will help ground us in the Love that God is always offering us. Practicing Centering Prayer has all kinds of spiritual and physical benefits. And intercessory prayer might be the most beneficial and fruitful prayer of all. I encourage you to find a prayer practice that works for you and for where you are in your life right now. We all go through different seasons in life in which some spiritual disciplines work better than others. If you’re having trouble finding a fruitful prayer practice, then pray that God leads you to discover a discipline that deepens your identity as a disciple of Christ.
If you feel overwhelmed or intimidated by this invitation, then let me suggest the practice of mindfully enjoying the simple pleasures of life with a sense of awe and wonder and gratitude for God and God’s creation. When I was in high school and going through a pious phase (and high school is a very awkward time to be going through a pious phase), I would sometimes go on walks and runs and later think that I should have been praying that whole time. How productive would I have been if I had been praying that whole time! I remember having a conversation about this with my high school English teacher. (I tended to get a lot more spiritual wisdom from my English teachers and professors than my Religions Studies teachers and professors, which is probably why I am became an Anglican). My English teacher reminded me of this passage from book by an Anglican author whom Evangelicals love and whom Anglicans generally don’t love enough, C.S. Lewis; and the book was The Screwtape Letters, in which he imagines an older, more experienced demon named Screwtape write letters to a novice demon, his nephew Wormwood who has been put in charge of securing the damnation of a young man’s soul.
In one of his letters, Screwtape reprimands Wormwood for permitting his patient (the young man) to enjoy the simple pleasures of reading a book and then taking a walk. He writes, “My dear Wormwood, the situation is very grave, and I really see no reason why I should try to shield you from the consequences of your inefficiency….You first of all allowed the patient to read a book he really enjoyed, because he enjoyed it and not in order to make clever remarks about it to his new friends. In the second place, you allowed him to walk down to the old mill and have tea there – a walk through country he really likes, and taken alone. In other words, you allowed him two real positive Pleasures. Were you so ignorant as not to see the danger of this?…How can you have failed to see that a real pleasure was the last thing you ought to have let him [experience]? Didn’t you foresee that it would just kill by contrast all the trumpery which you have been so laboriously teaching him to value?” – trumpery being that which is showy but worthless – “[And didn’t you know] that the sort of pleasure which the book and the walk gave him was the most dangerous of all? That it would peel off from his sensibility that kind of crust you have been forming on it, and make him feel that he was coming home, recovering himself?”[3] According to C. S. Lewis, if you want to upset the devil and his demons, if you want to come home to yourself, then learn to enjoy the simple pleasures of life, such as reading a book and taking a walk. My English teacher pointed out to me this idea that the devil gets uncomfortable when you go for a walk and simply enjoy the pleasure of going for a walk.
Again, as your priest, of course, I encourage you to pray in the many tried-and-true ways that our Christian tradition upholds; but also, as your priest, I invite you to notice the spiritual potency in occasionally closing our mouths in humility like Job and simply enjoying the real positive Pleasures God bestows upon us each day: a simple walk, a cup of tea, a good book. In the same letter, Screwtape writes, “I would make it a rule to eradicate from my patient any strong personal taste which is not actually a sin, even if it is something quite trivial such as a fondness for county cricket or collecting stamps or drinking cocoa. Such things, I grant you, have nothing of virtue in them; but there is a sort of innocence and humility and self-forgetfulness about them which I distrust. The [person] who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring two-pence what other people say about it, is by that very fact forearmed against some of our subtlest modes of attack.”[4] May we all be forearmed against evil and “trumpery” by our humility and self-forgetfulness as we enjoy the simple pleasures God bestows upon us each day and as we appreciate the gift of joy and wonder in all God’s works. Amen.
[1] The Greek word εὐλάβεια is translated in the NRSV as “reverent submission” but “reverent humility” is my preferred translation. In Hebrews 12:28, the word (εὐλάβεια) is used alongside δέους which means “awe.”
[2] Stephen Mitchell, The Book of Job, 84.
[3] C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 64 – 65.
[4] Lewis, 66.
DANIEL DeFOREST LONDON 