Hold on! Hold on! (Proper 24C)

Jacob wrestling with the Angel, Marc Chagall

Hold on, Hold on!
Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 24 Year C RCL)
16 October 2016--8:00 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)

Readings: Genesis 32:22-31; Psalm 121; 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5; Luke 18:1-8

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone

 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

When I was in my basic training course after being sworn in as a Foreign Service Officer, I had an experience that has helped me throughout my adult life.  Amid all the technical training, regulations and policies, operations and culture of Embassies and State Department Bureaus, learning about effectively operating foreign environments, near the end of the course we had a week’s retreat in West Virginia, an offsite designed to work on our leadership, human relations, and social skills.  There was a dance.  Now, having been raised as a Mormon boy, I had received plenty of dance instruction in youth groups: waltz, fox trot, swing, cha-cha, and square dancing.  But we were on our own to learn what we called “slow dancing” and rock and roll fast dancing.  By the time I  had been to college and grad school, I had learned to think of myself as a poor dancer.  I was often too embarrassed to get out on the dance floor, much to Elena’s exasperation.  But here at this offsite, we had no accompanying spouses.  We were expected to dance and to mix, and to have a good time.  I noticed one of my classmates, a young man from upstate New York just out of college: he was GREAT!    Thinking that I had missed the new dances of his younger cohort, when we got back to Washington, I asked him to show me some steps.  He was flummoxed.  He had seen me dance and knew that I actually probably knew more dance steps and rhythms than he.   He wasn’t interested in showing me his “moves”: “You saw ‘em on the dance floor.  That’s all there is to it.  You just mimic, if you want.”  Then he added the important bit:  “The trick to being a good dancer, Tony, is to get out there and enjoy yourself.  You have to get rid of any idea that other people are watching you.  You have to lose all shame and fear, and just get into the music and your partners.  You have the moves, but you don’t have the heart.  And all you really need is heart.” 

This revelation made a big difference for me.  I learned to dance as if no one else were watching.  And dancing has been one of the joys of Elena and my life together ever since.  Even now, with her disability, we often dance:  a few rhythmic steps to my singing as we make transfers from her wheelchair to other places is one of the smoothest ways to get her Parkinson’s bound limbs to unlock.   And it always helps if we do it with abandon. 

 

Today’s scriptures tell us about hunger and yearning in engaging God.  Luke tells us Jesus’ parable of the widow and the unjust judge is to teach “persistence in prayer.”  The story of Jacob wrestling with God has become a commonplace for unrelenting effort in prayer, known to many of us through the words of Charles’ Wesley’s hymn “Come O Thou Traveler Unknown”:

Come, O thou Traveler unknown,
Whom still I hold, but cannot see!
My company before is gone,
And I am left alone with Thee;
With Thee all night I mean to stay,
And wrestle till the break of day.

Jacob, now named Israel (God struggles), limps away from the scene.  And indeed, both of these images—bad judge and wrestling angel—both of these images are limping, imperfect images of prayer. God is not worn down despite himself because of our long prayers.   And it is God who wrestles with us, holds on tight, and wins, not the other way around. 

Derek Olsen, in his recent book Inwardly Digest: The Prayer Book as a Guide to a Spiritual Life says that the most basic question we should ask ourselves in finding spiritual practices is this:  what do you wish to be formed as? 

“What will be our tool set and perspective for engaging life in God?  … Christianity offers a wide array of spiritual tool sets, some complementary to one another, others more exclusive.  There are a variety of Roman Catholic schools of practices as well as [Eastern] Orthodox ones; the Protestant array is even larger.  Once we are outside of Christianity, there is even a broader set of possibilities.  In the face of the vast multitude of options, one possibility is eclecticism, a sort of cafeteria spirituality where we take a bit from here, a bit from there, and not too much of any one thing.  In the modern, consumer-driven marketplace of twenty-first America, this option seems popular and is the hallmark of the spiritual but not religious set.   But what do you want to be formed as?  The trouble with eclecticism is that its specialty is forming spiritual dilettantes.”

Prayer and work in a loving and experienced community rooted in a tradition that beckons us onward and teaches us to welcome more than we already know, accept, and like, is the antidote. 

The image I prefer for prayer is dancing.  We learn to follow, take the rhythms and steps from the One with whom we dance. We lose our self-consciousness, and don’t worry about who may be watching or listening.   When the music gets a bit hard to follow, or too vigorous for our feet, we learn to follow more closely, and hold on for deal life.  That’s what “persistence in prayer,” the annoying widow and the bad judge, and the wrestling angel in the night are about.  Hold on, hold on.

It’s not really about staying at it until God hears us and gives us what we want.   The point here is that is that we persist in a practice of prayer, regardless of how things “turn out.”   In the process we find God’s rhythm, and take his lead.  We lose ourselves and learn the joy of praying with abandon.  We are changed and our will becomes closer to God’s.  We are able to say, with Jesus, “thy will, not mine, be done.”    Through prayer we gain acceptance of what we can’t change and strength for the truly intolerable. 

Persistence in prayer is not just about asking for things. As we pray, we learn that we need not just prayers of petition, but also ones of thanksgiving, adoration, and intercession for others.  As we persist in prayer, we often find that these other forms of prayer begin to predominate. 

Again, it is like dancing. We let ourselves be enticed into doing, and then loving something modeled and taught by someone else.  In the baptismal covenant, we promise to “continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers.”  Losing our self in the prayers passed down to us, finding true grounding and joy in them, teaches us the truth in the Eastern Orthodox teaching that the Holy Trinity itself is one great dance.

I try to recite the Prayer Book’s Morning and Evening Prayer office every day.  This creates a rhythm in my life that has helped me grow closer to God and better serve those around me.   It makes me part of a great dialogue of prayer of the Christian Church that has been going on more than 2,000 years.   But it takes time, about 20 minutes in the morning and 10 in the evening.  In prayer, as in so many other human endeavors, you get what you put into it.  But just throwing yourself into it, without worrying about how silly or inept it might make us look to others, is the point of departure for a real prayer life of joy. 

I invite all of us to pray daily, and to put some effort and thought into it.  If Daily Morning and Evening Prayer is too much, then start small—look at “Daily Devotions for Individuals and Families” on page 137 of the Prayer Book and start there.   What do you want to be formed as?  God wants us to learn the dance from him. The important thing is to set the time aside, create a regular practice of it, and joyfully abandon yourself to dancing with God.

In the name of God,  Amen.

Jacob wrestling with the Angel, Paul Gaugin, 1888