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Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Welcome to the CommonsCast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 2:Today, we are wrapping up our current series on patron saints. It's been such a great exercise to think about some of the shaping influences in our personal lives as a pastoral team, but also about desires and passions and intuitions that emerge from within our community and shape us as a church. But you know what? I might be the only person on the team who legit has a patron saint. I was born on June 3, which in the Russian Orthodox calendar happens to be the feast of Saint Yelena, the mother of the emperor Constantine, who in the fourth century made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.
Speaker 2:And Constantine's own conversion is traditionally attributed to the influence of his mother. So Saint Helena is considered a patron saint of new Christians and archaeology. I'll take that, at least the new Christians part. Did my grandmother, who insisted on naming me Yelena, know all these things? Of course not.
Speaker 2:She just didn't like the name that my parents chose for me, so she went and checked the calendar and pulled the saints card. That's a power move. Right? But isn't it interesting to think about how we end up with the saints we end up with? How they come to us, sometimes uninvited, or how at certain points in our lives, we seek them out to take us into new territory and be our guides.
Speaker 2:So four weeks ago, Jeremy kicked off the series with Rene Girard, a French historian turned theologian whose understanding of human violence and the cross of Christ has shaped some of the theological foundations of commons. Then Scott introduced us to Amy Jill Levin, a Jewish scholar whose work helps us practice intellectual honesty as we learn to appreciate the Jewishness of Jesus and his historical context. Then last week, Bobby immersed us into the work and life of Mary Oliver, a poet whose love of words and of the world helps us discover the ways of God in earthly things, to quote Bobby. And today, we have Anthony Bloom, an Orthodox priest who believed that prayer begins in silence, that the realm of God is dangerous, and if we dare to enter it, we will receive a new vision of the world. So our outline for today is this, stories and communities, relationship of freedom, the gift of being real, and how do we begin to pray.
Speaker 2:Would you join me in prayer before we dive in? Loving God, we take a moment now to be still, to listen not so much to the silence around us but to the sounds, to our breath, to our heartbeat. These are the sounds of our life in you. You are the source of all that is true and good and beautiful. And we are so made that we are able to recognize truth, goodness, and beauty when we see it and encounter it in ourselves and other people.
Speaker 2:We are drawn to the likeness of Christ in our saints and we are drawn to them as our bridges to you, our revealers of you and people from whom we get permission to chart our own path. So, we thank you for the gift of all these saints. May their faithfulness and freedom be an inspiration to us and may our faithfulness and our freedom be an inspiration to those around us. Amen. Our topic today is prayer.
Speaker 2:Because this is what Anthony Blum was known for as a writer and a spiritual guide. But first, let me throw a picture of him on the screens for you and tell you how he came into my life. Sometimes I jokingly say that I am a product of evangelical missions to Central Asia in the early two thousands. The truth is that my faith journey began at the intersection of a deeply personal experience of God through ritual and the work of evangelical missions. And the personal experience came first.
Speaker 2:I was born in Kazakhstan, when it was still part of the Soviet Union, in a family that did not have any substantial knowledge or practice of Christianity. And then at 17, I had a mini existential crisis, as you do. And I say mini, but it felt pretty significant at the time. And it led me to realize that I was actually a Christian. The problem was that God didn't know I was a Christian.
Speaker 2:Or that's what I thought, as I had this theory that unless I'm baptized, I'm invisible to God. I'm an outsider. Now, do not take any theological notes from a 17 year old Yelena. Just just like vivid imagination. But pretty quickly, my spiritual longing crystallized into a decision.
Speaker 2:I walked into a Russian Orthodox church nearby. Cause this was the only church I was at least culturally familiar with, and asked if I could be baptized. And this is when the grace of God met me right there, as if God had been waiting for me all along. Unknowingly, I walked in five minutes before a baptismal service, and they baptized me right on the spot. And I would want to say, my life was completely transformed after that moment.
Speaker 2:Of course not. I was 17. Yet, yet the power of that liturgy was enough to make me attentive to God in a different way. And it made me open to being part of a Christian community. So a year after I was baptized, I joined a Christian student group planted by an international evangelical mission.
Speaker 2:And evangelicalism started to grow in Kazakhstan following the collapse of the Soviet Union, which brought decades of social and economic turbulence for people, but also created some genuine openness to spirituality. So the missionaries worked really hard to spread the gospel, equip new Christians, and plant churches. But they themselves were the products of their cultures and their churches and their sending agencies. And they only had access to the tools they had. And those were the tools that were given to us, new believers, and more often than not in our second language.
Speaker 2:So after a few years of an almost complete immersion in Western evangelicalism and some of its local expressions, our student community started to develop a growing sense of dissatisfaction. The theological and liturgical world of Russian Orthodoxy was a constant draw for us, yet now we couldn't fully embrace it. But the world of Evangelical Christianity was its focus on personal salvation and the pressure, low key pressure of constant evangelism was becoming too small. And the question we all struggled with was, how do I make this faith my own? And I do not remember the exact moment I came across the writings of Bloom, but I know that it came out of the questioning of that student community.
Speaker 2:When we came up on limitations of the tools of faith we had been given by our mentors, bless them. And when we began to look for voices that could speak to us and of God differently. So Anthony Blue was born in 1914 in Switzerland. His father was a Russian imperial diplomat, and the family moved around a lot. But after the communist revolution in 1917, the family never returned to Russia and eventually settled in France.
Speaker 2:The financial and relational struggles in immigration really impacted the family. Blum was in boarding schools for most of his childhood and youth. He had to start earning money at 12 to pay for his education. Then just before the second world war, he graduated from the University of Paris as a medical doctor. During the war, he worked as a surgeon in occupied France and participated in the resistance.
Speaker 2:And then finally, got officially ordained as a priest in 1948. A year later, with no knowledge of English, he moved to The UK to serve as a chaplain. And by the mid sixties, he became the head of the Russian Orthodox Church in Great Britain and Ireland. And to quote one BBC journalist of that time, he became the single most powerful Christian voice in the land. But that life of faith began for Bloom when he was around 15 and didn't care one bit about God.
Speaker 2:A small immigrant youth group in Paris that he was a part of invited a priest to give a talk about Christianity, mainly for the sake of young Bloom and his skeptical soul. And Bloom begrudgingly attended the talk, intending not to listen and just sit there and think his own thoughts. But the priest turned out to be really annoying because he talked about humility and meekness and turning the other cheek, all those things that couldn't work in the real world. So Bloom was so enraged by that version of Christianity that he went home, found the gospels, counted the pages to find the shortest. He didn't want to waste any more time than needed to prove that annoying priest wrong.
Speaker 2:Found the gospel of Mark, started reading. But before he could reach the third chapter, he suddenly became aware that on the other side of his desk, there was a presence. And he knew right away that it was Christ standing there. Later in life, Bloom would repeatedly go back to that story, saying that his faith began as an event. An encounter was the reason Jesus.
Speaker 2:And that the gospel did not unfold for him as a story that he could choose to believe or disbelieve. And that first mystical experience of the divine profoundly shaped not only the rest of Bloom's life, but also his understanding of prayer. Prayer for Bloom always begins when we break through to God or God breaks through to us. And often, those breakthroughs happen at the intersection of our stories and our communities. When the worlds we inhabit internally and externally are allowed to dance together.
Speaker 2:When our stories are free to take twists and turns, and there's room for our curiosity and our frustration. When our communities are not afraid to hold the complexity of our mystical and irrational, our intellectual honesty and our spiritual passion, our faith seeking understanding, and our faith longing to be alive to the mystery of God in us. Now let's walk through some of Bloom's reflections on prayer by looking at a short story in Mark four thirty five forty one. Mark's storytelling moves fast. By chapter four, we see that Jesus has gathered his 12 disciples.
Speaker 2:He's already a popular teacher and healer, and huge crowds from Judea, Jerusalem, and other regions follow him to the shore of a large lake called the Sea Of Galilee. To keep people from crowding him, Jesus teaches out of a small boat on the lake. Then one evening, after a whole day of teaching, Jesus and his disciples set out to cross the lake to the other side. And then we read. A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat so that it was nearly swamped.
Speaker 2:Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on the cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, teacher, don't you care if we drown? Now the lake's location and the terrain around it made it prone to unpredictable and volatile weather. And being caught in one of those big storms, especially at night, could be a matter of life or death, even for experienced fishermen. And the picture of a peacefully sleeping Jesus when his friends are fighting for their lives, and his life for that matter, is almost offensive.
Speaker 2:It kind of goes against everything we know and want to believe about God. We do not want God to be asleep or absent in our storms. And one way to explain why Jesus was asleep is to look at his humanity. He was tired after a long day of teaching under the hot sun, and the only thing he needed was to crawl into that sheltered nook on that boat was a little pillow. We just have an exhausted person on our hands who can sleep through a hurricane.
Speaker 2:I bet some parents can relate. Right? Another way that his sleep has been explained is that Mark wrote this as a discipleship story to encourage his small and persecuted community. He wanted them to keep their focus on the divinity of Christ. Jesus is always in full control.
Speaker 2:He is sleeping because he's not afraid of death, and his sleep is just another sign of his sovereignty over the chaos that wants to consume the church. For Bloom, there is no situation in which God is ever absent. But our experience of God's absence when we pray is something to struggle with. Because it teaches us it is a good thing to struggle with because it teaches us one fundamental thing about prayer. That it is a relationship that cannot be forced either on us or on God.
Speaker 2:It is a relationship of mutual freedom. And we would set ourselves up for disappointment if every time we pray, we would expect to experience closeness with God or a personal revelation. Bloom writes, God is not bound to reveal God's self to us simply because we have come and are gazing in God's direction. It is very important to remember that both God and we are free either to come or to go. And this freedom is of immense importance because it is characteristic of a real relationship.
Speaker 2:And however uncomfortable this idea of a totally free God might sound, God who is not bound to our prayer tools or our set prayer times, what it did for me is that it actually lifted the pressure of needing to have some kind of profound spiritual experience every time I pray. And the fact that I might not feel that closeness in prayer doesn't mean that God is absent or God doesn't care or that I do something wrong or that prayer doesn't work. As any relationship, prayer is not a function. It is a meeting of persons. It is an encounter that creates space for us and for God to become real to each other.
Speaker 2:But back to our story. Jesus got up, rebuked the wind, and said to the waves, quiet, be still. Then the wind died down, and it was completely calm. He said to his disciples, why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?
Speaker 2:They were terrified and asked each other, who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him. Now, the cry of the disciples, Don't you care that we're dying? Worked, but not in the way they expected. Mark structures the story by using the Greek word for great, mega, three times.
Speaker 2:The boat is caught in the great storm, megaly wind. When Jesus quiets the wind and the waves, there is a great calm. And when the disciples realize what they've just witnessed, they are terrified. Or literally it says, they feared with mega fear. Interestingly though, we have two different kinds of fear here.
Speaker 2:When Jesus asks his disciples why they were so afraid, the word carries the connotation of anxiety that could lead to distrust. But the fear the disciples experience in response to the miracle falls into the category of awe. Which is not surprising because in the Jewish imagination of the divine, only God could speak to the wind and command the sea. In Psalm 107, we read, how the sailors cried out in their trouble, and God stilled the storm to a whisper, and the waves of the sea were hushed. Now, would Bloom call the desperate plea of the disciples prayer?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. He argues that often our prayer becomes real when we go through despair. Because then God stops being in addition to all the things we already have in our lives and becomes the center of daring hope. Moreover, Bloom would call the whole interaction between the disciples and Jesus an experience of prayer. Because the disciples got to encounter the unknown.
Speaker 2:For Bloom, the God we meet today is the God we have never met before. Whenever we come to God in prayer, we can only bring with us our yesterday's knowledge of the divine. And then the only pressure to assume in prayer would be complete openness to the God of today. He writes, we must collect all the knowledge of God which we possess in order to come into the divine presence. But then remember that all we know about God is our past.
Speaker 2:As if we're behind our back, and we are standing face to face with God in all God's complexity and all God's simplicity so close and yet unknown. And he warns us that if we try to recreate the experiences we've had in the past, we might miss out on the new contact with God who comes to us in new and various ways, in great mega awe, in pointed questions about our trust, in bursts of joy, in regret, in creativity, in art, in the quiet. And in my faith journey, as someone who was first taken through a bunch of step by step discipleship programs and then professionally trained in the methodical, systematic approach to scripture and theology, I need this reminder that God is wild and undomesticated and always new. And that whatever we know about God today, even our deepest theological convictions, should be held provisionally so that we do not fall into the illusion that we know more about God than we actually do. So to go back to the question I was asking as a young Christian, how do I make faith my own?
Speaker 2:And Bloom's answer would be I love the background, Bloom's. The Bloom's how do I make this faith my own? The Bloom's answer would be through prayer. Through a personal encounter with the divine that becomes a mutual and respectful relationship of freedom and which is unique to you. During their encounter with Jesus on the lake, the disciples' language changes.
Speaker 2:They move from addressing Jesus as a teacher to a question of who is this? And for Bloom, we begin to pray and our prayer becomes something alive when we are able to answer that same question personally. When from the depths of our heart, we find a name for God that rings true to our experience of God. He writes, when we can say to God, oh you my joy Or when we can say, oh you the pain of my life. Oh you who are standing in the midst of it as torment, as a problem, as a stumbling block.
Speaker 2:When we can address God with violence, then we have established the relationship of prayer. And what he's saying here is that there are names for God which belong to the church, to all of us, But in the relationship of prayer, which we do not share with many people, having a name that reflects how we see God today in this particular moment of our life becomes our way of saying to God, in my uniqueness, this is how I see your uniqueness. So let me leave you with five practical suggestions from Anthony Bloom. One, Ground your prayer in your story. Since the kingdom of God is within you, there is no other entry point to encounter with the divine other than through your own self.
Speaker 2:Two. Practice a certain amount of silence. How else would you be able to hear what your story has to tell you about God? Start by silencing your lips and learning to keep your body still, Then get bored with yourself sitting in silence. Get disappointed with yourself in your life to the point of despair.
Speaker 2:And then push through, lean into that despair to discover the goodness in you that is always visible to God. Three. Learn to listen to silence so it becomes a presence. Become comfortable to just sit there with God quietly as you would with a good friend. And allow Christ to calm or stir up the storms in you.
Speaker 2:Four. How can God respond if you are not calling? So call God, but by the name God has won in your life. And five. Do not be afraid to experiment.
Speaker 2:Remember that while you are learning to trust God, God has faith in you. Let us pray. God of peace and God of storms you are the one we know in Christ and you are still a mystery to us. As your spirit continues to teach us and lead us, would you give us hearts that are open and attentive? Eyes that can see you through despair and ears that can hear your whisper in the dark?
Speaker 2:And when we feel stuck or lost or unable to pray, would you give us the freedom to take a break? But also the courage to lean on others whose prayer can carry us a few more steps. Loving God, with all our heart we trust the story we have with you, for it tells us that we are never outside your grace. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, we pray. Amen.