[A sermon preached to Hinckley Unitarians on Sunday 4th of December 2022]
(Readings: Isaiah 11:1-10 and Have Patience! by Timothy Radcliffe OP)
It might be a surprise for you to learn that I was once invited to become a monk. It certainly came as a surprise to me!
The offer was made after I asked a question to a man with white hair, wearing a long white robe, at a conference of the Student Christian Movement. That man was Timothy Radcliffe, a Roman Catholic Dominican monk in the Order of Preachers who was the author of our second reading today.
Of course, I had to decline Timothy’s invitation for a number of reasons, the main one being I told him, was that my then-girlfriend, now fiancée, would probably not be too happy about me taking monastic vows – an excuse I remember he graciously accepted.
Timothy is a man of much wisdom, and his writing on Patience that we heard today really spoke to me.
Another surprising fact about me: I am not a patient man! This week I took receipt of an advent calendar I ordered the week before. I love coffee, so this is a coffee advent calendar consisting of 24 pouches of different beans from around the world. On the day I was expecting it to arrive, I got an email from Royal Mail informing me that they had accidentally shipped my advent calendar to their Loughborough Delivery Office, so it would be a day late. I was furious. My package was a whole day late! Then it turned up, and I realised that this package of beans from some of the world’s furthest, most remote corners had still made it to my home in Hinckley within just a few days of ordering it and still arrived before the 1st of December.
Yet it is easy to learn a lesson in patience when all that is at stake is coffee. What about people’s lives? Or the lives of our loved ones when we pray for them?
I have always struggled with intercessory and petitionary prayer. I have just never seen myself as important enough to ask God for things. This is, of course, a hangover on my part from having been encouraged for far too long as a child to see God as something like a cosmic President Bush, a Donald Trump in the clouds, who, if I’m very lucky and skilful, I might be able to persuade and manipulate into carrying out what I want.
This is not the case; it is simply not how God is.
Instead, I try and remind myself that I should really try to pray for my authentic needs and desires. Another piece of Dominican wisdom, this time from Victor White OP, holds that people are distracted in payer because they are praying for the wrong things – i.e. they are praying for world peace because that it what they are told that they ought to be praying for, but what they actually want is a red Ferrari or a holiday in Wales.
Rather than being an opportunity to convince the almighty powerful big magic man in the sky to find in our favour, pray is the opportunity to commune with the Divine Spirit that dwells within us all – presenting ourselves to it complete with our simple and honest desires.
Prayer is a form of self-exploration. By laying out our desires before the Divine, we have the potential to grow, develop, and change – to make our desires more mature and more authentically holy. But that process begins with the honesty to pray for that red Ferrari.
Similar wisdom exists in other religious traditions too. I once met a Buddhist teacher who practised a form of Buddhism that employed the practice of chanting in a similar way to petitionary prayer: you were encouraged to chat for what you desired.
She held introductory chanting classes in London back in the days when the city had no presence from the Sicilian Mafia (because the Kray twins controlled all organised crime in London and the Mafia were terrified of them, but that is beside the point). The point is that London used to be a safe haven for ex-mafiosos who had fallen out with the family firm. One day one of them walked into her chanting class. When she was having individual discussions with the participants a mafia boss who had fled to London after being usurped by his rival, confided in her and said, “I want to chant for my rival, and his entire close family and friends to all die horrible slow and painful deaths.” Now my Buddhist friend was somewhat taken aback by this and asked her own teacher for advice. His advice was that, while it was not an idea chant, it was not their job to police what people chanted for. So, she sent the former Mafia man away with his chant.
A week later, the man comes back to see her. He has been chanting his chant morning, noon, and night, but now desires to change his chant. “I still want them all to die,” he said. “but I’ve realised I do not know his family well and have no true desire to see them suffer too much – they can all have quick, painless, natural deaths instead.”
A week later, he is back again. “Actually, I don’t really need his family and friends to die at all – just so long as my rivel dies for what he did to me then I’ll be happy.”
Slowly but surely, over a period of months and regular chanting. This ex-mafioso was eventually able to get to the point where his daily chant became one wishing loving-kindness upon his former rival and all whom he had wronged during his criminal past.
Prayer changes us. Not instantly. The point of prayer is not to chase a feeling or to have a spiritual experience. Prayer is not about immediate satisfaction.
Of course, sometimes we wish it was. We want our loved ones to get well instantly when we pray for them in our distress. We want the poor and the oppressed to experience the justice of the Kingdom of God today, here and now, whenever we hear their cries for food.
Our first reading from Isaiah is a classic poetical text that attempts to describe that future Kingdom come on earth. Many Christian theologians have interpreted this passages references to the offshoot or root of Jesse to be a reference to Jesus (even my favourite Advent hymn – O Come O Come Immanuel dose this) yet, this passage of Hebrew scripture belongs first and foremost to the Jewish tradition where this passage is mostly attributed to being in reference to King Hezekiah of Judah whose reign ended in 687 BCE. This King achieved many righteous reforms but even his most fervent supporters would probably admit that he failed to live up to Isiah’s hype. An accusation that was surely levelled at Jesus too, when many must have seen what they believed to be his promised revolution to end in what they first observed as a humiliating failure. So why wait for this long-promised Kingdom?
In the words of St. Terissa of Avala, “Christ has no body now on earth but yours; no hands but yours; no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes through which the compassion of Christ must look out on the world. Yours are the feet with which He is to go about doing good. Yours are the hands with which He is to bless His people.” The Kingdom of God remains our task today, not only does it remain well worth waiting patiently for, but it is well worth working towards.
Amen.
