God is very near to us

July 14, 2013

8 Pentecost, Proper 10 (Year C)

Deuteronomy 30:9-14

 

            One of my favorite ways of praying is by meditating with scripture – trying to enter into a story of divine encounter and see where I fit into it and what God might be saying to me through a particular story.   I guess because my mind tends to wander when left to my own devices, this kind of prayer works well for me.  And so I’ve found myself walking along the road to Emmaus with Jesus, sitting in a fishing boat with Peter, hiking down a mountain after the transfiguration. 

            The first time I’d heard of this kind of prayer was during spiritual direction in seminary.  At that point, I assumed prayer was either pious words or holy silence, and I wasn’t all that great at either one.  My experiences of God tended to be despite my attempts to find God, not so much because of them.  So my spiritual director led me to “prayer of the imagination” using stories in scripture.  This method of prayer begins with the assumption that scripture is alive – brimming over with God, right there for our discovery.

            The kids of St. Aidan’s are lucky because that is exactly what they do in Godly Play, though I’m sure most of them don’t realize it.  Our Gospel story for this morning is one of the ones we enter into with them.  And so I invite you to journey into it.  Enter into the presence of God that is already all around you.  At the end I’ll ask some “wondering” questions for us to think about for ourselves.

[Told Godly Play version of Good Samaritan story.]

I wonder where you are in this story, or what part of this story is about you?   Where does this story fit into your life experience at this time?

I wonder where you have experienced in your life (or might be experiencing now) something like the dark places in this story, the robbers and the people that pass by?

I wonder where you have experienced in your life (or might be experiencing now), something like the person that stopped to care?

How might God be speaking to you through this story today?

Now in Godly Play, we’d go on to see how the kids wanted to “work” with the story.  They could retell it themselves, or delve into it with markers or play dough or their journaling.  The idea is that the kids start to use their own language to tell the stories and start to make connections between the stories and their own lives. 

But I have a different kind of “work” to suggest for all of us this morning. 

What if we can experience the presence of God not just by interacting with the stories of scripture but in our own stories as well?  What if we start with the assumption that every bit of the world, every part of our lives is alive – brimming over with God, right there for our discovery? 

God is right there, present in all of our experiences, whether we know it or not.  That’s the promise that I hear from our Deuteronomy reading this morning, especially the last bit: “The word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.”  It isn’t so far away that you can’t reach it.  It isn’t so hard to reach that someone else has to do it for you.  It’s part of you; yours for the taking.

I have a book on my shelf that I return to over and over that bears this phrase from Deuteronomy as its title: The Word is Very Near You.  It’s a book about prayer written by Martin Smith, a priest who used to lead an Episcopal monastery. 

            But before he talks about how to do prayer –in fact for about the first 60 pages – he talks about what prayer is and what it is not.

We tend to think of prayer as a back and forth conversation with a God who is Other.  We start with something we want to say to God, whether it’s a thank you or a request or a question.  And then we hope and wait for some kind of a response.  Sometimes we might feel like we get one, and other times not.  But mostly, I think, we get frustrated and weary and disillusioned because it’s not working the way we hope and expect.

            But Martin Smith turns it all around.  What if instead, the whole of existence is a conversation that God has already begun and is continuing all the time.  God creates us, God touches us, God speaks to us, God moves us, God reveals truth to us, and life and prayer is our response to all of that.

            He talks about how prayer isn’t something that comes only from our conscious mind as we reason and talk and think and have “tidy controlled conversations” with God.  Instead, prayer is from the depths of our heart – complete with all of the messiness of need and anger and hurt and pain and beauty and wonder.  Prayer is how we open ourselves to being loved and claimed and transformed by the God who is already part of us. 

Smith writes about a deep desire that is within all of us (whether we recognize it or not) for intimacy with God – the spiritual yearning that we so often interpret as something else or try to answer with something other than God.  What if the way to fill the hole that exists in each of us is already planted within us?  The word is very near you!  Amen.