ST MATTHEW'S WESTMINSTER
  • Welcome
  • Livestream
  • Volunteering
  • Music at St Matthew's
  • Resources
    • Ascensiontide Novena of Prayer
    • Sermons
  • Safeguarding
  • Contact Us

10/3/2019

Dancing in the desert I (Fr Peter Hanaway)

0 Comments

Read Now
 
Sermon for the first Sunday in Lent 2019: part of the series 'Dancing in the desert: exploring faith in the wilderness'

Deuteronomy 26. 1-11
Romans 10. 8b-13
St Luke 4. 1-13


The Gospel reading today relates the desert experience to end all desert experiences. As we hear: 'Christ was led by the Holy Spirit in the wilderness, where, for forty days he was tempted by the devil'.

We may have different images of a desert: endless sand dunes, constantly shifting; flat and featureless, stretching for miles; the blistering heat, or the freezing cold at night, perhaps.


But the desert into which our Lord entered was stony and rocky and full of temptation. Maybe that is closer to the deserts of our lives.

Most, if not all of us, have had desert experiences in our lives: to know what it is to be between a rock and hard place.

Maria Boulding, in her book The Coming of God, describes these experiences thus:

"Our desert is any place where we confront God. It is not a change of scene, nor a place to run from our failures, nor a heroic adventure that does something for our ego. Our desert experience may be tedium, weariness, disappointment, loneliness, personal emptiness, emotional confusion, the feeling that we have nothing to give, the conviction that we constantly fail God in prayer".

"You just have to keep on keeping on in prayer and you are not aware of progress,  because there seems to be nothing by which it could be measured. There are no paths in the desert except the ones you make by walking on them". End of quotation.

Deserts, like our desert experiences, are places of liminality; thin places where hardly anything separates us from the presence of God. There is nowhere to hide - either from God or from ourselves.

The deserts of our lives, of our spiritual journey, require a response; otherwise we would just give in or give up. What sustains us in our desert places, our desert experiences, is our relationship with God. Only God has the power to see us through. PAUSE

And so we begin our journey through the desert of Lent and one of the most important things to be said is that in journeying through Lent, we journey with Christ in the wilderness.

It is probably the only time when it is we who are accompanying God in Christ, rather than the other way around and culminating in the final, fateful, part of His journey - through Holy Week to Good Friday. PAUSE

So how is all this achieved? Well, it is achieved by our accompanying Christ in Contemplation and the practice of Contemplative Prayer.

Why is this so important?

In 2012, the then Archbishop of Canterbury - Rowan Willaims - opened his address to a Synod of Bishops in Rome with theses words:

"The humanity we are growing into in the Spirit, the humanity that we seek to share with the world as the first fruit of Christ's redeeming work, is a contemplative humanity".

He goes on to say: "Contemplation is very far from being just one kind of thing Christians do: it is the key to prayer, to liturgy, to art and to ethics; it is the key to the essence of a renewed humanity, that is capable of seeing the world and other subjects in the world with freedom; freedom from self-oriented, acquisitive habits and the distorted understanding that comes from them.

To put it boldly, contemplation is the only ultimate answer to the insane world that our financial systems, our advertising culture and our chaotic and unexamined emotions encourage us to inhabit.

In short, to learn contemplative practice is to learn what we need so as to live truthfully, honestly and lovingly". End of quotation.

Thomas Merton put, perhaps more succinctly: "Without a humanity shaped by contemplation, we will have nothing to give others" PAUSE

All of that demonstrates why Contemplation and the practice of Contemplative prayer is central to who we are and all that we do.

As disciples and followers of Christ, we are here to do the 'Opus Dei' - the work of God. Too often we find ourselves doing whatever we think is right without asking, "Is this what God wants me to do?".

The only way of knowing whether we are truly doing the WORK of God is to learn first how to BE with God. And we do that through Contemplation and the practice of Contemplative prayer.

The practice of contemplative prayer is, quite simply, opening our hearts to what it is that God is saying to us, and the way we do that is to go into the desert or to otherwise take ourselves away from our immediate surroundings. And we don't do that physically, we do it through the spiritual practice of contemplative prayer.

That is why it is so important that during this Lenten season, we accompany God into the desert, to learn what it means to encounter and resist temptation and to make a closer walk with God. PAUSE (850 words).

In our Gospel reading today, our Lord dances with the devil in the desert and explores His faith by resisting the devil's temptations and affirming His calling as the Incarnate Christ, come to redeem the world.

We too have to dance with the devil; we too have to constantly explore our faith.

It may not fall to us to be the Second Coming or to be redeemer of the world but by our own spiritual journey and spiritual practice, we can show others what that redemption might look like. That, as Thomas Merton may have said, is what we can give others. PAUSE

There remain a large number of people who, for one reason or another, think that the contemplative life is, at worse, an irrelevance that somehow implies being cut off from and unconcerned with, the world and its concerns and at best, something to which very few of us are called.

Those who engage in contemplation and practice contemplative prayer know that this is not the case.

Contemplation is a word that describes the most subtly significant thing that can happen to a person. It is the consummation in God of both life and death. St. Elizabeth of the Trinity, a French Carmelite nun, puts it this way: "God is your soul and your soul is He".

So without Contemplation and the practice of contemplative prayer, we cannot be in a right relationship with God or be one of His disciples. We are justified by faith and by works; to be and to do. To dance in the desert and explore faith in the wilderness; that is our calling this Lent. Amen

Share

0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

Details

    Back to resources

      Sermons
    Lectionary
       Essays
       Prayer
       The arts
       Links

    Categories

    All
    150th Anniversary
    Advent
    Affirming Catholicism
    Alan Moses
    Andreas Wenzel
    Andrew Crawford
    Annual Meeting
    Bernard Silverman
    Chris Minchin
    Eastertide
    Epiphany
    Festival
    Gerard Irvine
    Golden Jubilee
    Gregory Tucker
    Holy Week
    Jacqueline Cameron
    James Rosenthal
    Jamie Johnston
    Jaqueline Cameron
    Jeremy Davies
    Jonathan Aitken
    Lent
    Louis Weil
    Madonna And Child
    Martin Draper
    Martyr
    Matthew Catterick
    Michael Skinner
    Mothering Sunday
    Nick Mercer
    Ordinary Time
    Other Preachers
    Patronal
    Pentecost
    Peter Hanaway
    Peter Hyson
    Philip Chester
    Raymond Baudon
    Remembrance Sunday
    Rob Coupland
    Rochester
    Ross Meikle
    Rowan Williams
    Sermons
    Stephen Conway
    St Matthew
    Tamara Katzenbach
    Trinity

    Archives

    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    November 2018
    July 2018
    February 2018
    December 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    February 2016
    March 2015
    September 2014
    June 2014
    March 2014
    November 2013
    September 2013
    June 2013
    March 2013
    November 2012
    October 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    October 2011
    August 2011
    June 2011
    January 2011
    October 2010
    September 2010
    April 2010
    March 2010
    May 2009
    March 2007
    February 2007
    September 2006
    April 2006
    March 2006
    September 2005
    May 2005
    April 2005
    October 2004
    March 2004
    February 2004
    October 2003
    September 2003
    April 2002
    March 2002
    February 2002
    September 2001
    June 2001
    August 2000
    August 1997

    RSS Feed

Privacy & Safeguarding

Privacy Notice
​
Safeguarding

Other websites

St Matthew's School
Conference Centre
History of St Matthew's
Picture


© St Matthew’s Westminster, 2010-20   |   20 Great Peter Street, Westminster, London SW1P 2BU
 +44 (0)20 7222 3704  |  office@stmw.org  | ​
|  School   |   Conference Centre | 
Picture
  • Welcome
  • Livestream
  • Volunteering
  • Music at St Matthew's
  • Resources
    • Ascensiontide Novena of Prayer
    • Sermons
  • Safeguarding
  • Contact Us