Sometimes I really wish I had been one of the original disciples so I could ask Jesus all the questions I have. Especially about prayer. Yet I also know that Jesus often did not answer questions directly, and in the spiritual journey it is the questions that pull us forward.

Here are some of the questions that I ask: If God knows everything then why do we need to pray anyway? Do we really need to draw things to God’s attention? Does it make sense to keep repeating the same prayers? And how can we “pray without ceasing” as Paul tells us to?

I would love to know what questions you have about prayer so let’s take a couple of minutes to think, pair and share. Please find someone else to talk to even if it means changing seats and take a couple of minutes to share your questions and your wonderings about prayer…
 
There are hundreds of books written about prayer and within the time frame of a sermon I can’t cover much ground. But I have three observations I would like to share with you. 1. How you think about prayer depends on how you think about God. 2. There are many different ways to pray and 3. Its better together.

So #1 – how you think about prayer depends on how you think about God.

A friend of mine once said, “I’ll believe in God when he starts answering my prayers.” So her idea of God seems to be someone external to her who grants her wishes. That’s the genie in the bottle idea – that God manifests when we call on him to grant us three or more wishes.

Then there’s the vending machine model. We put our prayers in the slot and as long as we have the right change, the right words and so on, God will deliver our selected outcome. If we get something different then obviously we didn’t pray the right prayers or push the right button.

This is similar to the Santa Claus idea, where God keeps a list, a list of all our good deeds and our bad ones and answers our prayers depending on whether we’ve been naughty or nice.

All of these ways of thinking envision God as quite disconnected from our lives; a rather capricious authority figure whom we have to try to persuade to give us what we want. Someone who is watching us from a distance.

These are all transactional ways of thinking about our relationship with God; we do something and God does something in return. But we know from our lives that close friendships and intimate relationships are not built on transactions. They are built on mutual sharing and mutual enjoyment. They are built on self-disclosure in a relationship of love.

So we can think of God as a friend as the old hymn says,
What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear
What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer.

This emphasizes the relationship – God is a good friend who will listen to all our woes and problems. God isn’t out there somewhere, God is right here next to us. But I wonder if that doesn’t domesticate God? -whether we imagine we are somehow taming the wild and totally free God; making the God who creates all things into little more than an invisible friend.

But what if God is both transcendent and immanent? In other words what if God is out there AND in here, closer than our breathing? And what if God loves us unconditionally and loves nothing more than to be in mutual relationship with us? What if we are called to be co-creators with God, together building the reign of God based on Jesus teaching?

How then shall we pray?

I think we pray both with awe and with intimacy. As we pray, we come to know God more fully and we are changed in the process. As we pray, we invite God into the joys and the tangles of our lives; our prayer is a form of self-disclosure – God, this is who I am, and it is a journey of self-discovery as we learn how God sees us. Prayer is no longer asking for something specific but inviting God with her power and love into the situations of our lives. Instead of asking for a red bike, we share with God the need we see for better transport and ask for solutions to unfold for the highest good of all beings. And who knows, that might be a red bike.

Onto my second reflection: there are many different ways to pray, and they complement one another.

Practicing the presence of God is foundational to all spiritual life, all prayer. This is intentionally reaching out to the divine and opening ourselves to him or her or them. I found an unexpected description of prayer in a novel I am reading. The protagonist is a woman who was brought up as a strict Moslem but has left her faith. She says,

I missed prayer. It had been a gift. Tilting my head toward the sky, luminescent as though backlit by God himself, silently unburdening myself, inhaling the expansiveness of his deliverance. It had been a relief to surrender, to accept my smallness, to merge into a sacred whole.[i]

I’m going to read that again, because I think it is a beautiful description of prayer which experiences God as both transcendent (out there) and immanent (in here).

I missed prayer. It had been a gift. Tilting my head toward the sky, luminescent as though backlit by God himself, silently unburdening myself, inhaling the expansiveness of his deliverance. It had been a relief to surrender, to accept my smallness, to merge into a sacred whole.

We may practice the presence of God in meditation or walking by the bay or gardening or even in the everyday work of housekeeping. Practicing means doing it with intention. Over a lifetime we may come to a place where we constantly know the presence of God but until then we need to practice.

That sense of being in God’s presence and the awareness of our smallness and yet our preciousness is the backdrop for all other forms of prayer – the arrow prayers when we quickly ask for help or for wisdom or to find the car keys; intercessory prayer when we pray for a friend or loved one – like the Snoopy cartoon in this week’s Pebble “When my arms can’t reach people I love, I hug them with my prayers.”; and intercessory prayer when we pray for people who we don’t love and people we have never met, and when we pray for our world and the planet itself.

These prayers are not like vending machine prayers because they are based in an ever growing and deepening relationship of intimacy which we nurture by consciously practicing the presence of God. And God uses those prayers to help bring about the best possible outcomes. Our goodwill, our desire for healing and for wholeness helps to move the world closer to reconciliation with God.

And my third and final observation – its better together. Jesus once said, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them.” (Matt 18:20) The power of prayer is multiplied exponentially when we pray together, when we combine our experiences of God and align our own wills and intentions.

We gather together on Sundays for liturgy – liturgy means the work of the people – in our prayers and in our hymns we are worshiping God, we are serving God and in the process we are ourselves formed. We are changed by the words and by the fellowship. And we are and are becoming the Body of Christ – the community of God, inspired and led by the Holy Spirit.

Sometimes it seems like we are just saying the same old words but our prayers join with the prayers of millions around the world, and together, together we are the light of the world, moving all beings closer to wholeness as we ourselves are transformed into the people we were created to be.
 
 
 the Rev. Dr. Caroline Hall
 
 
 
 


[i][i] Fundamentally, a novel, Nussaibah Younis, PenguinRandomHouse, 2025

For a few weeks, several of us have been reading and discussing Richard Rohr’s book, The Universal Christ. Richard Rohr is a Franciscan priest and a very popular spiritual teacher. In this book, The Universal Christ, Rohr highlights and develops one particular strand in Christian thought. He presents it as The Truth, but I think that he would be the first to say that the fullness of God is something that is beyond our ken. Rather than thinking that there is one ‘truth’, I find it more helpful to see the strands of Christian thought as a beautiful and intricate tapestry in which many different ideas and knowings and experiences come together.

Lenny talked about interpretation in her homily last week, reminding us that our faith tradition goes back thousands of years and so we have to interpret ancient scriptures to see how they are relevant to us today. And it’s not just scripture but we also get to interpret the writings of Christians who have come before us - prophets and mystics and teachers.

The great formula of Anglican theology is that we interpret scripture in the light of tradition and reason. The Christian tradition outside of scripture was already developing and being written down years before the last book included in the New Testament was written. So, in addition to scripture, we have over 2000 years of Christian tradition. 2000 years to create a rich tapestry of different teachings, ideas and experiences.

The Universal or Cosmic Christ is one of the strands in the tapestry, once which we hear clear and loud in the New Testament reading today from Colossians.

Christ Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers-- all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

This is a very different picture of Jesus Christ than the one we get from the gospels, like todays’ gospel where Jesus has dinner in the home of Mary and Martha.

There’s a similar contrast between the cosmic and the earthly at the very beginning of the four gospels. Mark jumps straight to Jesus’ baptism, Matthew gives us magi and Luke shepherds, but John comes swooping in with a cosmic view, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” The first three tell us what was happening on earth but John gives us a cosmic perspective.

So when we tease out of the great tapestry the thread of the Cosmic Christ we need to remember that it is but one thread, however magnificent, which must be balanced against the lived experience of Christ incarnate in Jesus. The Jesus who would eat and drink with anyone and who loved to talk late into the night with his friends, the Jesus who healed those who came to him with compassion and love; the Jesus who sweated blood before he was betrayed and crucified.
 
In 1968, on Christmas Eve, the Apollo 8 space crew passed behind the moon for the first time and took a photo of our planet, Earth, hanging over a bleak lunar landscape. That photo, known as Earthrise, together with the iconic Blue Marble photo taken four years later, also on Christmas Eve have transformed our understanding of the world. And when we add in the astonishing images that have come from telescopes and satellites, it is not surprising that human awareness of our planet, the solar system and the worlds beyond has completely changed within the lifetime of most of us sitting here.

And when human consciousness takes such a great leap, our tradition must be revisited and mined to help us understand these new ideas within the context of our knowledge of God and of God’s ways. So it is not surprising that Christian theologians and scientists are currently rediscovering the cosmic Christ who is present in the creation of the cosmos and in whom as our reading this morning said, all things hold together. In this amazing expanding universe, it is the Christ who holds all things together.

In my own spiritual evolution, I have found and continue to find, the cosmic Christ to be a huge inspiration. The idea that Christ is in all creation and is constantly drawing the universe to its highest potential, and that we get to play a role in that creation, that we are indeed co-creators with God, blows my mind.

And it has expanded my vision of God from the childhood ‘Father’ who punishes you when you’ve been bad and treats when he feels like it, all because he really loves you, to a generous and unconditionally loving God who is as close to me as the neutrons, protons and electrons within the atoms which make up my body. The cosmic Christ is also the quantum Christ in whom all things live and move and have their being; the one through whom and for whom all things were created.

This strand in the grand tapestry of scripture and tradition challenges and stands in tension with other strands which have seen God and creation as distinctly separate. Those strands argue that the Creator God  created the world as a separate creation which is not God and that through human disobedience it became even more separate so it was necessary for the Christ to incarnate as Jesus and to suffer and die because humanity had sinned. (That’s a simplistic description which we could unpack for a long time, but it’s good enough for now.)

People for whom that strand is deeply meaningful are concerned that the vision of the cosmic Christ subtracts from the importance of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. But look at how the writer to the Colossians ties the two together: “in him [that is, in Christ Jesus] all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.”

The cosmic Christ is also Jesus Christ who died on the cross. Through him God made peace, reconciling us and all things to himself. Now this writer doesn’t concern him or herself with why reconciliation was necessary, but God was pleased, yes God was pleased “to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of Jesus’ cross.”

All things – the whole cosmos – reconciled to God through the cross. Isn’t that the good news? The gospel? We don’t have to do anything, we don’t have to lift a finger. It is all grace. There is nothing we need do to have peace with God because the cosmic Christ already sorted that one in his incarnation as Christ Jesus.

So when you wake up in the night and are flooded with guilt, when you feel that you just aren’t good enough, when you feel inadequate, when you look at the world around us and you shudder, remember this: God has already sorted it, and God was pleased to do so. From the perspective of the divine there is nothing we need do because it has all been brought into glorious and generous completion in the cosmic Christ - for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers-- all things have been created through him and for him. Including you and me, with all our flaws.
And, my friends, God is pleased.
the Rev. Dr. Caroline Hall
 

Homily 7/13      on Amos 7:7-17

I’d like to take a look at the Old Testament lesson today.  The gospel of the Good Samaritan is so familiar, from way back to our children’s Bible story books, that I wouldn’t have much to add. But with Amos today, I’m not going to explicate so much what he says as how we are to understand it.  I’d like to explore Biblical interpretation.

Let’s take a look at the passage from the prophet Amos with the allegory of the plumb line.  Would you look at your bulletins and just scan it for a few moments?

You’ve heard Ann Patry read the OT lesson from Amos, and you’ve looked it over.  In it Amos has a vision of God by a wall with a plumb line, commenting unfavorably on Israel’s loyalty, faithfulness, and rectitude.  Then Amos says God predicts doom on Israel’s future as a nation.

 Now, if you were in San Francisco, standing on a street corner, waiting for a bus to take you up Nob Hill to Grace Cathedral, and a man on the corner took up a position and yelled to the passers-by that God talked to him and that God told him what to say to all who would listen, and if he then quoted God in the words that Amos did, and gave the allegory of the plumb line and predicted doom and disaster on all those around, would you listen to that man as carefully as you listened to Ann, or would you shake your head and deliberately head for the next corner to take the bus?

Why the difference in attention, in respect for the words?  Why is Amos a prophet and the guy on the corner a nut case?  What we’re dealing with here is context, and context makes all the difference.  Amos’ words are only one part of a whole tradition of Hebrew/Jewish insight into questions of the existence of God, the nature of God, God’s relationship to humans, God’s work in the world (or not,) human freedom of will, creation and creaturehood, etcetera ad infinitum.  The words of the man on the corner are 10 verses of words picked out from an anthology containing scores of authors and editors, putting forth diverse opinions about all the topics above, and collected from a span of 1000 years.

When we read the Bible we have to put ourselves in another culture to even begin to understand where they’re coming from.  Translating from one culture to another is, in itself, hard to do and harder yet to know if we got it right.  Translating, understanding another culture, interpreting—all this must go along while we listen to Ann read Amos’ words.  As we listen to the words of Amos, we need to know that he is of a culture that values the visionary as a means to communicate with God.  He is of a culture in which many thought that if a nation disdains God, God will punish it, but if it acts righteously, God will favor it.  (It’s clear that God is in a punishing mode!)  He is of a culture that has the audacity to quote God!  The quote marks are there; these are not quote marks around Amos’ words when he speaks for God; the quoted words are the words Amos heard God speak.  These are very different mind-sets from ours today; I find it interesting that we can so easily nod along with it and say, “Nice reading, Ann.”

What do we really make of Amos’ words?  Do we go along with the idea that God speaks sentences in Hebrew?  Do we go along with the idea that God manipulates certain nations to destroy other nations to wreak vengeance for God?  If we don’t share these opinions, then what do we do?   And here’s where we have to find interpretive principles to listen to Amos and take his message seriously.  To find from him what we can apply to our own lives and what we can’t.

As we have come upon modernity, we have found ways to deal with the divide from antiquity.  Early on, before literacy was widespread, the problem of interpretation didn’t seem to bother the hearer.  They probably took the words at face value and literally.  As literacy did become widespread, the very power to read and understand the word invested the written word with a sort of authority which made one hesitate to question it.  If you read it in a book, it was true.  If you saw it in a newspaper, you didn’t question it.  I remember my father saying that theological questions in the rural Swedish Covenant church where he grew up in the 1890s were settled by someone pointing out, “Sa stor det,”  --  “So stands it” meaning,  it’s in print, so it has to be right.
 
The fundamentalist movement in the 1800s suggested that the Bible is printed and is God’s word, which makes it right and true.  The issue of contrary and contradictory points of view within the Bible is brushed aside, not dealt with.  It was, perhaps, a bibliolotry—a worship of the printed form of the Bible, even to a reverence for a given treasured translation.  In the early 20 century the need for interpretive principles became apparent; we needed to apply historical interpretations, literary interpretations, linguistic interpretations, source interpretations.  And we ourselves, as avid Bible readers,  need to be aware of and apply these insights as we read the Bible, as we study the Bible, or we will be in danger of misunderstanding the author’s intent.  Before we can apply the Bible to our lives, we need to know the context from which it comes, we need to make analogies from their lives to our lives.  We need to know what God’s use of a plumb line meant to Amos, and how, when we do know what that means, it can be applied to us.
 
Well, what does it mean to Amos?  It’s a builder’s device to make sure a vertical structure, like a wall, are truly vertical—90 deg. to the ground, that the structure is not tilted or askew.  Amos could count on the Israelites applying that analogically to their national life—that their national life had gone askew, left the path of righteousness and loyalty to God, and God, being in their mind punishing and favoring, would implacably punish them.  Our job is to see if this is true for us, for our national life, for our community life, for our personal lives.  How must we act to being us back to plumb?  My point today is not so much about the meaning of the plumb line story as it is about the duty of a Christian to move beyond 8th century BCE and apply it to the 21st century ICE.

Then, as an addendum, I thought about the role of Jesus in the interpretive process.  When Jesus appeared on the scene, he was hailed as the Messiah, Savior, and also as God because he seemed to have an innate authority to bridge the gap of years and history and cultures, to say what the prophets and priests of Judaism meant.   Amos spoke God’s very words in quotes because Amos  felt he was not the author of the words; he received the words; he spoke those words out to the Israelites in quotes.  Jesus spoke without quotes.  He spoke from inner authority.  Perhaps this is why we call him God, because he was not speaking for God; he was God--and unlike the prophet, he spoke without quotes.

Lenny Erickson

One of my greatest joys when I was a bit younger was to go backpacking in the Sierras. For a week or more I was out in the wildness of nature with only as much as I could carry on my back. But I was not alone, I was not self-sufficient. I always went with a group, and we shared the group equipment. I might be carrying a saucepan and a fuel container and Wednesday night’s dinner while someone else would have the stove, the shower and half of Thursday night’s dinner.

Self-sufficiency is a big part of the American myth. If you google the term, you will quickly find a number of pop-psychology articles and blogs about the importance of self-sufficiency. Yet Jesus did not send his disciples out as self-sufficient well-equipped individuals with everything they needed for their journey. Jesus did not send them out alone.

In today’s gospel reading Jesus sent seventy disciples out in pairs to places which he intended to visit: he sent them with no spare clothes and no cash so they were entirely dependent on God’s provision. God’s provision which would come through their work together and through the kindness of strangers. And whether or not they were welcomed, they always had the same message “The kin-dom of God has come near you.”

Now notice what he tells them first – pray. Ask for God’s help. Although their journey might be dangerous or difficult, they were commissioned by Jesus and sent by God through prayer. In the few months I have been worshiping with you, I have heard several people wondering about how St Peters can grow and particularly how you can attract more young people. This is how you do it. You pray and then you pray some more. I notice that there is no regular prayer group here and I wonder how y’all pray for the church.

You do a great job of looking after the physical property. Sarah cares beautifully for the memorial gardens and I often meet Gary here, improving this or that. But I wonder how you take care of the spiritual body of the church. Is there a way that together you nurture your spiritual life through prayer, and pray to engage with more people? Or is that something you leave to the priest or to chance?

The foundation of the disciples’ journey was prayer and dependence upon God and each other. And wherever they went they brought a blessing of peace. Jesus said, “Whatever house you enter, first say, `Peace to this house!' And if anyone is there who shares in peace, your peace will rest on that person; but if not, it will return to you.” I wonder how it would be if wherever we went we brought a blessing of peace? Every Sunday we greet one another with a sign of peace and being a small church, we can take the time to greet almost everyone, but what if that extended to every place we go and every person we meet? I feel sure that if each and every time we went into Albertsons, everyone in this church prayed for a blessing of peace on everyone in the store it would make a difference, yes a subtle one, but a difference.

The message the disciples bring is the same whether or not they are welcomed – the reign of God has come near you. Some translators argue that the text really means “the reign of God has come upon you.” Either way, Jesus’ proclamation and ours is that the reign of God is here and now.

We are not waiting passively for the end of the world and the coming of the reign of God, because the reign of God is right here and right now. A few chapters after today’s reading, Jesus says, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed, nor will they say, “Look here it is!” or “There!” for indeed the kingdom of God is in your midst.” The reign of God is in your midst. In our midst.

Isn’t that amazing! While you were eating breakfast this morning, even while you were cleaning your teeth, the reign of God was right there, right then and the reign of God is right here, right now.

I know it doesn’t feel that way all the time. It’s difficult to imagine how the reign of God can be present in the midst of the Texas flooding with all the loss of life and the children still missing. This is where faith comes in. When we look at a tragedy, when we feel the grief of loss and the pain of betrayal we know that God is there. Jesus died on the cross. It was a tragedy. But God brought new life from it and showed that the reign of God was present all along.

Tragedy happens. It is part of being human. And we don’t understand why a loving God allows tragedy, why our loving God allows children to be swept away in the night. We don’t understand but our eyes of faith know that even in the midst of it all, Gods’ reign is there. God does not protect us from tragedy but God sustains us through it. The fruits of the Spirit, the gifts of a life spent in the reign of God are love, joy and peace.

This is our proclamation. The reign of God, of love, joy and peace is in our midst. It is available here and now. It never makes the headlines and it is subversive in a culture that feeds on death and disaster.

It is a gospel of dependence on God, not of self-sufficiency. And it is a gospel of community. There are no lone rangers in the reign of God.

God is sending us like the seventy disciples to go out together, in prayer and in complete dependence on God to meet all our needs, as we proclaim peace to each person we meet and each place we go, as we proclaim the reign of God and invite others to join us in worshiping and serving the God who does not protect us but always sustains us, and opens our eyes to the reign of God happening right here, right now in our midst.

The reign of love, joy and peace always with us like an inner fountain from which we can bring up the water of life and share it with those who need God’s healing touch.

Which, of course, is all of us.

the Rev. Dr. Caroline Hall