The First Sunday of
Lent
17 February 2013
Saint Faith’s
Anglican Church
Vancouver BC
Shining with the
Glory of God That Is in Us: Adoration
Deuteronomy 26.1-11; Psalm 91.1-2, 9-16; Romans 10.8b-13;
Luke 4.1-13
On
this Sunday over the course of almost five centuries Anglican Christians have
heard the familiar story of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. Generations of preachers have warned their
congregations of the dangers of the devil’s temptations and have, no doubt,
occasionally equated the diabolic temptations with the preacher’s own favourite
social ills: coffee, smoking, women’s
liberation, and the list goes on.
This
is not a tack I am going to take with you on this Sunday. Rather I want all of us to focus on one part
of Jesus’ conversation with the tempter as this conversation is told by Luke: “Then the devil led him up and showed [Jesus]
in an instant all the kingdoms of the world.
And the devil said to him, ‘To you will I give their glory and all this
authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I
please. If you, then, will worship me,
it will all be yours.’ Jesus answered
him, ‘It is written, “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.”’” [i]
Jesus
could just as well have said, “Adore the Lord your God, and serve only
him.” Both worship and prayer have as
their starting point ‘adoration’, an English word with roots in the Latin word
‘to pray’ or ‘to speak’. To adore
someone or something means ‘to pray to’ or ‘to speak to’ that person or
thing. It is unfortunate that our use of
the word ‘adore’ has undergone a devaluation over the years.
Words
do undergo changes, both in meaning and in use.
For example, an Englishman or woman writing in the eighteenth century
about their first visit to the Pyramids or some other marvel of human
construction might say, “I have just seen an awful monstrosity of mediocrity.” If you or I were to read those
words today, we might think that our eighteenth-century writer was saying that
the Pyramids were a horrible parody of substandard construction. But to our friend in the past, the words
meant that he or she had just witness an awe-inspiring demonstration of human
balance and design.
Just
as the language of everyday communication has undergone change, so, too, has
the language of prayer changed over the course of the last two hundred years. Prayers that had meaning for our ancestors do
not have the same significance for us; in fact, some ancient prayers are almost
off-putting and prevent contemporary believers and seekers from praying to or
speaking to the God whose love is made known to in creation and in Jesus of
Nazareth.
A
little more than two weeks ago I was in Toronto with five of my colleagues from
the Liturgy Task Force of the Anglican Church of Canada. We spent three days reading the Scriptures
and reading prayers composed by Christians from various traditions throughout
the world, both Anglican and non-Anglican.
Our task is to develop a series of prayers that work well with the
three-year lectionary we use here in Canada.
But
what we were really listening for in the prayers we read were words that we
believed would help us pray to God, speak to God, words that have meaning for
us as Christians living in the twenty-first century in Canada. There were prayers we did not choose: literate, theologically correct, true to the
Christian tradition but not our words or images that spoke to our place in time
and space. Adoration, praying to and
speaking to God, requires our words, our images, our cadences.
Almost
every Monday morning I arrive to a quiet office and I sit down to plan the
worship service for the coming Sunday or holy day. I have the work done by our music planning
team of Sally Baker, Ruben Federizon, Walter Herring and Eleanor Phillips, who
meet with me once a month or so to choose music for this congregation to sing. I have the worship resources of the Anglican
Church, whether in Canada or elsewhere, and of the Evangelical Lutheran Church
in Canada. I look at the prayers
prepared by the Consultation on Common Texts, an ecumenical group, who were
responsible for the lectionary we use.
With all these around me I ponder what will help us adore God, pray to
and speak to God. And then I start
working, in the hope that I have listened well to all the voices, in the hope
that I have found ways to deepen our connection with the living God.
If
someone comes up to me after worship and says, “That hymn spoke to me,” or “I
really liked that prayer,” or “I have never really heard God addressed that
way,” then I rejoice. I rejoice because
someone has found a new way to pray to God, to speak to the God who is always
more willing to listen than we are to speak.
I rejoice because someone may have heard God spoken to or spoken of in
new way that may banish old hurts or old fears.
I rejoice because in that moment, whether a moment of song or a moment
of prayer, there was a conversation between the God who loves us more than we
can imagine and the seeker who wants to know that she or he is beloved.
But
adoration is not limited to our formal acts of worship. Adoration comes when you and I abandon our
fears of saying the wrong thing to God and simply speak to God in the words our
times and our experiences have given us to give. I wish that my paternal grandfather, a
professional gambler, had learned to speak to God as one who took a risk in
creating the world and who continues to take risks by entrusting to us the care
of that world. I wish that my maternal
grandfather, a labourer all his life, had learned to speak to God as one who
laboured to bring all that is, seen and unseen, into existence and who
continues to labour in us and through us to bring about God’s purposes for all
creation. But neither of my grandfathers
were ever encouraged to do so; they were taught to believe in a God who could
only be addressed by a limited number of nouns, adjectives and verbs.
My
sisters and brothers, every human being is called to adore God. God does not wait for us to have the right
words before God begins the conversation; God only waits for our own words. And the good news is that those words are in
each one of us; they are in us to give voice to, to speak them and begin the
conversation. May you and I wait no
longer; may we speak to our God and experience the welcome.
And
then, like Moses and Jesus, shall our faces shine with the glory of God. Amen.
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