A SINGING HEART

It’s easy to sink into gloom and moroseness, especially in the dark days at the end of the year. Yet we are surrounded (even in London Zone 4) with trees that sing for joy. Walking past the small, ancient meadow which clings to the slopes of the hill close to where we live I suddenly ‘saw’ the trees glowing with the yellowness of late autumn – and my heart sang for joy. The man walking in front of me had his eyes glued to his iPhone – maybe he was watching something that lightened his heart, but so often we simply don’t ‘see’ what creation offers to change our hearts.

The psalmist knows this and often tells of the way the whole world sings for joy:

Let the heavens rejoice and earth be glad;

let the sea and all within it thunder praise.

Let the land and all it bears rejoice.

Then will all the trees of the wood shout for joy

at the presence of the LORD. (Ps.96. 12f)

When I see the heavens, the work of your fingers,

the moon and the stars which you arranged,

what is man that you should keep him in mind,

the son of man that you care for him? (Ps.8. 4f)

              It’s easy to let ourselves be drawn into despondency, sadness and despair yet we are surrounded by a world which cries out that beauty, wonder and mystery surround us. The Psalms, in particular, will direct our attention to the glory and majesty that is ours as part of a good creation, yet we can forget or ignore this source of well-being. The waters that feed our heart can be fresh or they can be brackish, pure or toxic. Just as we are becoming aware of the dangers to our bodies of feeding off unhealthy food, so we need to be aware that what we look at can nourish or poison us.

Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice,
    and let them say among the nations, “The Lord is king!”

Let the sea roar, and all that fills it;
    let the field exult, and everything in it.

Then shall the trees of the forest sing for joy
    before the Lord, for he comes to judge the earth.

O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good;
    for his steadfast love endures forever. (1 Chronicles 16. 31f)

COME TO THE WATER

THIRD SUNDAY IN LENT

Sermon preached in the Church of All Saints, New Eltham

at Parish Mass on March 3^rd, 2013

____________________________

O God, you are my God; eagerly I seek you;

my soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you,

as in a barren and dry land where there is no water.

X

INTRODUCTION

I’m fascinated by ponds.  There’s something alluring about them whatever their shape or size, from ones as big as the Serpentine to the little one I had dug in my back garden when I lived in Romford.  I can spend ages looking into their murky depths and wondering what lies deep in the heart of the waters.  But better still is sitting by the ocean – just … watching. 

Water fascinates most of us, maybe because we have a primordial memory of life emerging from the seas or because of the fact that life still comes into being surrounded by water.  Or because most of our bodies are made up of the stuff.  So the opening of today’s first reading from the Prophet Isaiah is likely to speak to many of us: ‘Come, all who are thirsty, come to the water!’  Maybe such a call in our rain-sodden climate lacks something of the resonance it would have for people in hotter lands but we are still have a physical, emotional – and spiritual - need of water. 

WATER AND THE BIBLE

The passage was written when the Israelites were refugees in the desert-bound land of what is now Iraq, and that invitation to feast on free food and drink would have played in their memory of the country they once inhabited.  Like all refugees, they would have longed for all that had sustained them.  But Isaiah’s words are also a wake-up call to something far deeper than having plenty to eat and drink for he goes on to add: ‘Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near.’  It’s part of a wider call to the Israelites that they return to their relationship with God, the source of life.  Three chapters on Isaiah continues this call to return to living in close relationship with God and speaks of the way this must be associated with practising justice for all.  He says that if they seek the Lord and his ways then they will be:

‘like a well-watered garden,

like a spring whose water never run dry.’ (58:11)

Elsewhere in the bible people are invited to uncover their own ‘springs of living water’, a theme taken up by St. John at the story of the encounter between Jesus and the unnamed woman of Samaria whom he encounters at a well.  During their pointed exchange, Jesus declares that: ‘no one who drinks the water that I shall give will ever be thirsty again: the water I shall give will become a spring of water, welling up for eternal life.’ (Jn. 4:14)

LIVING WATER AND THE LIFE OF PRAYER

Now all this is highly symbolic, but all of us have the ability to be life-giving: we can be, as it were, a spring of water for others.  I guess we’ve all had the experience of being with people we find really refreshing, who seem to have a secret source of life.  And of being with those who drain us, who seem shrivelled up and barren.  In those words to the Samaritan woman, Jesus points to the way that within each of us is the entrance to life in all its fullness, to the spring of living water, water for the benefit of all. 

There’s something very powerful in the symbolism of the Well: that small opening in the earth that plumbs into the darkness and enables us to draw life from the depths.  It’s symbolic of our hidden life with God who is the ultimate source of those ‘waters of life.’  When trying to talk about the ways in which we can develop this hidden life with God, the great Carmelite, St. Teresa of Avila, compared it to how a garden is watered.  Teresa noted that (in her day) there were four ways to do that.  You can draw it up from a well by hand; by the use of a pump; by a stream flowing through the garden – or by waiting for rain to water a garden.  And she went on, in her classic Autobiography, to explain how all these methods apply to the life of prayer. 

All of us have the means of drawing from our well.  We can ‘let down’ the bucket into the depths of our being by turning our inner eye – our awareness, our attention – to rest on the world within.  Like the person who, coming to the edge of a well, pauses, rests their arms on its sill and gazes into the cool depths, listening for the sounds, smelling the coolness and looking to see if they can find the bottom, the heart of prayer concerns desiring to seek God in the depths of our being.  St. Teresa realised this takes time and effort: drawing from a well is not as easy as waiting for it to rain, but if the rains don’t come or the streams dry up (metaphorically speaking) the well can be the only way to find life-giving water.  The trouble, of course, is that many have given up bothering to nourish their inner life which, as a consequence, has shrivelled.  Like some seed that has fallen in the desert it can never die, but it can lie dormant and useless for many years.  But, with only a little watering, it can come alive.

PRAYING WITH THE PSALMS

Lent is a time to tend the garden of our life with God.  The desert into which Jesus was driven, the inhospitable place where the Israelites lived as refugees, all remind us of our need to nurture our life with God.  Jesus sometimes used images of hidden things to speak about relationship with God: a treasure buried in a field; yeast hidden in dough; a mustard seed.  Once we are acknowledge the hidden presence of God we can try, for a few minutes each day, to imagine ourselves sitting by a well and turning our inner eye to the depths of our being where God dwells. 

Today’s Gradual Psalm touches on this deep need:

O God, you are my God; eagerly I seek you;

my soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you,

 as in a barren and dry land where there is no water.

The psalmist uses images of thirst and hunger and tells us that our deepest need is for a relationship with God who can quench our thirst and satisfy our hunger.  For God has placed within each of us a desire that only God can only be satisfy.  As another psalm expresses:

Deep calls to deep in the thunder of your waterfalls… (Ps. 42: 8)

I am glad that you are re-introducing the psalms for these are rightly called the ‘prayer-book of the Bible’.  Reciting or singing them in a reflective way can open that yearning for God which underlies each of them.  And it’s from the ground of our entire human experience that the psalms arise, not just from the ‘holy’ parts.  Grief, anger, frustration, joy, longing, fear – all this, and more, is the ground out of which the psalmist’s prayer springs.  Generations of Jews and Christians have used them as a means, not just of giving expression to their own feelings, but of recognising that the whole of life needs to be opened to God.  So try meditating on some verses from that psalm (63).  Let its words speak into your heart:

Therefore I have gazed upon you in your holy place,

that I might behold your power and glory.

CONCLUSION

Our society is full of people whose hunger and thirst is never satisfied and who search for something that will fulfil their deepest need.  But the only way we will be satisfied in the deepest part of our being, that part which is hungry and thirsty for Life in all its fullness, is to spend time, each day, just seeking to listen to the voice of God’s loving call to us.   ‘Come, all who are thirsty, come to the water.  Why spend … your labour for that which does not satisfy?  Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so you may live.’ (Is. 55: 2,3)

As we continue to journey with the Lord in the barren wilderness of Lent try turning your attention to your need for living water and seek to find that place of hidden springs within you so that, when Easter comes, you will know the life of God flowing through you.

So to end there’s a little poem by R. S. Thomas I’d like to share with you as a parting gift:

Some ask the world

            and are diminished

in the receiving

of it.  You gave me

only this small pool

that the more I drink

from, the more overflows

            me with sourceless light.

ADVENT SUNDAY 2008

INTRODUCTION
‘God is faithful. By him you were called into the fellowship of his son, Jesus Christ the Lord’ (I Cor. 1:9)

“I couldn’t do the job you do!” said the electrician who was working in the Rectory last week. “After all, I don’t have any faith”. I decided not to point out that I couldn’t do his job either – I once had to call in an electrician to change a light bulb – but we did have a short conversation about faith.

So many people say something similar yet don’t reflect on the way life without faith is impossible. We need faith in others to enable relationships to flourish, and without those, where would we be?

For the next three weeks I want to reflect on subjects at the heart of Christianity – Faith, Forgiveness and Prayer. Firstly the question of Faith and how it affects the way we live.

Faith, belief and trust.
I think my electrician was getting confused between faith and belief. He probably meant that he didn’t believe in God and we could have had an interesting conversation about God and belief.

But I wanted him to finish his job! There are, of course, a number of concepts which are closely related to faith and belief – trust and hope, for example – and often these terms understandably become confused. In his classic book, ‘Stages of Faith’, James Fowler quotes the following lines: ‘Faith … is a quality of human living. At it’s best it has taken the form of serenity and courage and loyalty and service: a quiet confidence and joy which enable one to feel at home in the universe, and to find meaning in the world and in one’s own life, a meaning that is profound and ultimate, and is stable no matter what may happen … Men and women of this kind of faith face catastrophe and confusion, affluence and sorrow, unperturbed; face opportunity with conviction and drive, and face others with cheerful charity’ (W. C. Smith).

Now I guess many of us would like that kind of faith!

It has always been recognised that Faith is a gift for which we should pray. For example, the apostles said to Jesus, ‘Increase our faith!’ and he replies: ‘If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, “Be uprooted and planted in the sea”, and it would obey you.’

So faith is something that needs to grow and develop within us. The trouble is that many grow up without the foundations which enable faith to develop. As children we need to have faith in our parents and such faith is rooted in a belief that the parent cares for the child and that they can trust what they say and do. If that is undermined, faith in them is weakened if not destroyed.

However, parents are not infallible. Some of what the child learns from them will be wrong, and some will be rejected. It’s normal for the child to trust the parent in the absence of other sources of information, but that doesn’t mean they should cling rigidly to everything they were originally taught in the face of contradictory evidence. Which is why adults and parents need the gift of wisdom to know how to respond to children’s developmental explorations.

GROWING IN FAITH
How, then, can we grow in faith? Well, firstly, we need to recognise the difference between belief, trust and faith.

Belief
To say one believes in something does not mean anything other than acknowledging its existence.

“I believe there is a train to London at 9 o’clock” can only be confirmed if the train arrives at 9 o’clock. Or to say, “I believe Persil washes whiter than Bold” means nothing until you try it out. Similarly, to say “I believe in God” means nothing until you begin to enter into a relationship with God and try to understand something of who God is. Then you need to act upon that understanding. Indeed, it has been rightly said that if you want your faith to grow, live as if you had faith!

Trust
Now I may believe Persil washes whiter than Bold but it’s only when I entrust my clothes to the washing process that I will know if it’s true.

I might have a profound belief in my parent’s authority, for example, but if I don’t trust them, that belief may be borne out of fear.

The American author Robert Kiyasaki once wrote of the way he came to understand that there are many people who believe in something, but it was before and during the life threatening missions he flew in Vietnam that he really came to understand trust. He explains it this way:

‘It's easy to believe in something and just do lip service to it. Lip service will only go so far when things become difficult and your belief is pushed to the limit. When we only believe in something it's easy to jump ship and go on to the next best thing to believe in.

Trust on the other hand is something that will go into the battle with you. When you truly trust in a Creator, your ability, your vision, the people you need to count on, then there comes with that trust a sense of peace in making the right choice.’

Faith
“Can I trust you?” is a fundamental relational question. Once we have sensed that we can then we can move on from trust to faith. Trust is, if you like, the bedrock on which a dynamic faith can be built, for faith enables action. I may believe that people don’t drown when they dive into a swimming pool and I may trust people who say I will float, but I need faith to make my own step into the water!

I may believe Persil washes whitest and trust what I am told about the product, but I need faith to place my best linen tablecloth in the wash!

Yet Faith isn’t a commodity we can get off the shelves. It is about the way we act, the devotion we nurture and the way we dedicate ourselves. And it will, at times, be full of emotion.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, the word used for faith is also used to describe the covenant of marriage, and what lies at the root of the relationship between husband and wife. As a gift of the Holy Spirit, faith needs nurturing if it is to grow, otherwise it will be like that gift buried in the ground we heard about in Jesus’ Parable of the Talents a couple of weeks ago.

In the Letter of St. James the author addresses this problem: ‘You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder.’

So he argues that faith without action is a dead thing: ‘What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, "Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed," but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it?

In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. But someone will say, "You have faith; I have deeds." Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do.’

CONCLUSION
“I wish I had faith like yours!” Well, if someone says that to you, ask them if they have ever prayed for the gift of faith and, if they have, whether they have then acted as if they had received the gift?

It isn’t a matter of having a ‘blind’ faith, an optimistic attitude to life or ignoring the problems and pains with which we are surrounded. It is rooted in a belief in a God who is faithful to us. As St. Paul said: ‘God is faithful. By him you were called into the fellowship of his son, Jesus Christ the Lord’.

So it is as we seek to develop in that relationship with God that our faith grows. If our relationship with God is weak, then faith will suffer. And that in which we ultimately have faith will shape who we are becoming.

So for thousands of year’s men and women, in seeking to grow in faith, have turned their gaze upon God, believing that they are held in his loving gaze. And in so doing they have come into a new relationship with themselves and the world around them. Of all the books in the Bible that speak about Faith it is in the psalms that we find how people have realised this gift:

Your steadfast love, O LORD, extends to the heavens,
your faithfulness to the clouds.
Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains,
your judgments are like the great deep;
you save humans and animals alike, O LORD.

How precious is your steadfast love, O God!
… For with you is the fountain of life;
in your light we see light. (Ps. 36)

Faith, together with Hope and Love, is one of the ‘Theological Virtues’ as taught by St. Paul. They are acquired virtues, to be sought by prayer, for they reside in God. There are many prayers seeking this gift, but one of the most beautiful was written by St. Francis. So l will leave you with his supplication:

Most High and glorious God,
enlighten the darkness of our hearts
and give us a true faith, a certain hope
and a perfect love.

Give us a sense of the divine
and knowledge of yourself,
so that we may do everything
in fulfilment of your holy will;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.