LESSONS IN LIVING Scientific Mind and Mystic Heart: Prayer as the Root of Love Part 2 Why Pray at All? A St. Andrew s Sermon Delivered by Dr. Jim Rigby September 9, 2018 Scripture Reading: Matthew 7: 7-12 (The Inclusive Bible) Ask and keep asking, and you will receive. Seek and keep seeking, and you will find. Knock and keep knocking, and the door will be opened to you. For the one who keeps asking, receives. The one who keeps seeking, finds. And the one who keeps knocking, enters. Is there any among you who would hand your daughter a stone when she asked for bread? Would one of you hand your son a snake when he asked for a fish? If you, with all your faults, know how to give your children what is good, how much more will your Heavenly Parent give good things to those who ask! Therefore treat others as you would have them treat you. This is the whole meaning of the Law and the prophets. I don t know about you, but the statement this week by evangelicals I think like three-thousand signed this statement condemning churches that get involved in social justice, brings to the surface the fact that, first of all, the Church is very divided, but second of all, a lot of the Church isn't coping very well with modernity. They deny what science tells us about climate change. They are justifying an administration that's putting children in cages. It's important to realize this isn't happening because people are bad. It's happening because their religion no longer works. As important as it is to struggle as an activist for a better world, if people internally are not able to do the kinds of calculations that allow them to be scientific and activist and artistic and creative, then we pass like ships in the night. The work of theology is not to talk about invisible people; it's about crafting a worldview that works as the science changes, as the culture changes. This has always been the case. You see in
scripture radical changes of understanding. But what happens when you write it down in a book, some people think that's the final revelation, and you stop thinking at the end of that book. Now think of the pain that has caused. Not just with science--that's the least of it--with ethics and morals and the roles of human beings in this culture. So I want to suggest the work that we do in thinking, not just with our heads but with our hearts, about what it means to be a human being in the cosmos is some of the most important work we can do as human beings. There's been a dichotomy in the worldview where people have had to feel or have been led to feel that they either have to be scientific and reasonable or religious. And religion is as guilty as anybody. When you build a worldview out of your wishes, out of what makes you comfortable, you begin to drift away from life as you experience it, with its disappointments, with its ambiguities. What we're seeing in our nation that's tearing the nation apart, is not good against evil. It is people choosing between science and reason and religion, and I want to tell you that those two need to be together. If religion can't be scientific, then we need to drop it. But if science cannot go into meaning, if it's only about objectivity, then it can also lead to madness. Human consciousness is divided between the objective and the subjective. You are both of those. And your subjective is not only as important as your objective consciousness, but it's also deeper. So when you say, I'm just going to ignore the irrational parts of your animal consciousness because that's not scientific, it's not objective, that creates a great crisis. And people snap away from that. So what we're talking about is a kind of healing, and when we talk about prayer we're talking about healing our understanding of prayer. I ran across this quote recently. I love people who hate religion; and it's because they push us, right? I want to find the kernel of truth in what they're saying. This is a philosopher that said, "People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern. To stupefy themselves. To forget their misery. To imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy." Now there's more than a kernel of truth in that, right? We don't do Jell-O shots, (laughter) but we can get so caught in our own comfort zone. We can become so convinced about things we want to be true, that the real world doesn't have a place for us. If we are honest about our own hearts, we know that we would not want an understanding of prayer where God gives us everything we want. But our scripture today seems to say that: "Ask and you will receive. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened." When I was a kid I used to pray for Shetland ponies almost every birthday. Now I didn t take good care of my goldfish. (laughter) We didn t have very much of a backyard, so that was not a very good thing. It would have been hell had that prayer been granted. And one of the things Jesus is saying in this passage is that if you pray for bread, God won t give you a scorpion. Well, sometimes we pray for scorpions. Sometimes we pray for things that we think will make us permanently eternally happy, and it s only true for a very short period of time, or only in some ways. 2
If two people want to be in relationship with the same person romantically, and they both pray for that person, probably one of them is not going to get that prayer answered. Particularly if the person they re praying to get, is praying to get with somebody else. (laughter) It s not even those two people. If prayer worked, it wouldn t have rained today. I don t like it when it rains on Sunday. And the Cowboys would have good management as a football team. (laughter) Right? I would squander my prayer on immature things. I haven t changed that much. Probably you would too, if you had that kind of power. What we re talking about, I think, or what Jesus is talking about at least, is a process of spiritually maturing. It s not the magic trick. It s not sitting on Santa s lap and getting the Shetland pony. Ask and you will receive. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened. I think by ask, Jesus is talking about going deeply into your consciousness and seeing what it is you desire. This isn t something you have to learn how to do; you already know that there s desire going on inside of you. It s getting quiet enough to hear that. Mahatma Gandhi said that s the beginning of prayer. Not what you want to be, right? There s no point in praying for world peace if your real wish is to strangle somebody. The authentic prayer would be Oh God, help me strangle so and so, but that doesn t feel right. And so the process of sitting in stillness and becoming aware of my deepest energies begins to transform them. It s the same thing as meditation. It s realizing that if I could get what I want, I really wouldn t be as happy as I thought that what I need is maturity. I need wisdom; I need compassion, because as long as my heart is out of tune, my world will be out of tune as well. No matter how important the concert is, if you don t think you have time to tune your instrument, there s a problem. When we think we re too pushed and too busy for meditation or prayer or quietness or centering, or whatever you want to call it, there s a sort of self-abuse in that. There s something about setting aside time, not for you to do my kind of praying, not to be Presbyterian, not to be Catholic, not to be Christian or religious. I think sometimes it s better not to think of religion at all, to begin with, because what we re talking about is life, depths of life. We re talking about reverence; we re not talking about magic. So what I m going to do in this sermon today is use the notebooks of Vincent Van Gogh, because I think what he was doing with his art is one understanding of what prayer is. He was very miserable. He was very lonely. He wasn t respected, and when he first tried to do art, he wasn t very good at it. But his notebooks talk about a kind of process, beginning with authenticity inside, listening to the world around him, and being transformed. Listen to this part from his journal. This is where he starts off; he s not candy-coating it at all: What am I in the eyes of most people? A non-entity an eccentric or an unpleasant person somebody who has no position in society and will never have in short, the lowest of the low. Alright then, even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, what such a nobody has in his heart. 3
That is my ambition based less on resentment than on love, in spite of everything. Based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still a calmness, pure harmony, and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners, and my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum. He s in a sense praying through his art for new eyes for deeper processing of his perception for a transformation. Not for a different world, but so that he can see the sacredness of this world. The problem is not God. The problem is not the world. The problem is that we need to be transformed. When as children we re taught that there s an invisible being who grants our wishes, I want to suggest that makes it very difficult to be scientific. Why be logical and scientific if there s an invisible person moving things around? You see, that s a crisis in modern theology. Our understanding of causality is now not one Being pushing everything, but the interrelatedness of the whole, which I believe is much closer anyway to what Buddha and Jesus and those kinds of people are talking about. What we re needing are not toys and prizes, but deeper harmony. So some of the mystics call what emerges out of prayer as the wings of the soul, our winged self, our supreme identity, the bird of heaven that s the dove coming down, or in India I think it s a swan that comes down. It s the idea of something you re not in control of with your conscious rational mind; it emerges out of you. But if the process of talking to another person is what brings that out, if that s how you feel that interconnectedness, then that may be the way to go. You can only know from the inside out. No teacher can tell you what is the proper way of prayer for you. So the first step he calls asking, which possibly is coming to terms with your desire, what you re already asking, what you re seeking in life. Because if your idea of happiness is erroneous do you understand what I m saying if your unconscious pursuit of happiness isn t really what you want, if that s not mature, then getting it would just make you less happy. So I think the first step is coming to terms with that deep movement within you not shaming it not judging it: whatever is there is the starting place the energy that you will transform. And the second is seek, which I think when you ve tuned your heart, all of the sudden the universe changes. You re getting wisdom and information in ways you didn t before. Someone who loves animals in the forest when they walk through the woods, it s a different experience. They re hearing things and are in communication. It s not human communication, it s not an invisible being above it, it s within it all. But it s just as real and just as intimate and just as personal. The heart can be like a radio that s picking up all of the wisdom, the guidance, the connectedness, because whatever the mystic teaches us is the first error is in believing in our ego, in our separate self thinking that we re outside the universe, looking in. A lot of people have lost the symbol that counterbalances that which is God. Right? The symbol God is like a bag of sand you put on the other side of a little boat so you don t tump over, because your ego weighs a lot. 4
And the point is, not to keep believing in the invisible person, but to dissolve the other invisible person, which is your ego, your separateness, your greediness, your fear. What s real is the love. What s real is the interconnectedness. What s real is the safety of realizing you re not at stake. Van Gogh looked at the sky in a very different way. I m hoping everybody here has seen the painting, Starry, Starry Night. That s not the scientific mind. That s the mystic heart that feels the interconnectedness of it that responds to the beauty of it. This is how he talked about it when he s first thinking about doing that painting. At present I absolutely want to paint a starry sky. It often seems to me that night is still more richly colored than the day, having hues of the most intense violets, blues and greens. If only you pay attention to it, you will see that certain stars are lemon-yellow, others pink or green, blue and forget-me-not brilliance. And without my expiating on this theme, it is obvious that putting little white dots in the blue black, is not enough to paint the starry sky. See, the art comes from the inside out. There s no way science can do that. Science is from the outside in. We need both of those, and they need to be in balance, and both have to be honored every bit as much. A lot of the problem is people are trying to turn the heart into something objective, something literal, something that physically happens in the world. That s actually demeaning it, because what the heart is sensing is something that s invisible. The sacred is everywhere, in everything. If it were just another person, it wouldn t be everywhere. At some level we understand that. But if the picture of a person helps you get to that, then that s the way to go. Van Gogh said, The way to know God is to love many things. He said, When you love many things, your heart gets in tune and you see beauty everywhere. For your subjectivity, you don t need it to be objectively true, because your heart is picking up things. It needs poetry, it needs pictures, images, symbols, to express itself. It demeans it to say it has to happen in history, it has to be scientifically true, or it has to be exactly the way your mind pictures it. So the first is asking or listening, the second is seeking, which is becoming aware of it, all around you, and the last, it says, is knock. And I think that means to act out of that love, in whatever small way is available to you. Have you ever started to write an essay and you re just sitting there looking at the page, and you re just overwhelmed by the blankness of the page? This is Van Gogh talking about beginning a painting. He said, Just slap anything on when you see a blank canvas staring you in the face like some imbecile. (laughter) You don t know how paralyzing that is. That stare of a blank canvas which says to the painter, you can t do a thing. Now as important as that may be in painting, it s also important in living. When life seems absolutely meaningless to you, it s important to take that step because that openness does open you to healing. The question is whether it will be the healing that you particularly want. 5
But in some way, some shape, being in tune from your heart, and in tune with what is around you and living out of that, acting out of it, it changes the equation. Sir Edmund Hillary had a saying which I m going to butcher, but he s not here, what can he do? (laughter) Until you take that first step, it seems impossible; you don t know what you can do, but you take that first step out of faith. Don t think religion there. Erase the religion thought. Faith, trust in life, in yourself, in other people, in love, in life. When we step out from that, it changes things, it transforms things. So, why do we pray? I think what our text leads us to is a radical reformation on the idea of prayer. It s not a need, it s an aspiration. It s a calling, not to change the universe or the change God, but to so tune our hearts and our wills and our minds that we see wisdom, goodness and grace all around us. So, ask, listen to the energy within you. Seek, know that you are dressed by life itself, that love itself will be expressed in all kinds of surprising and amazing ways. And then live out of that, and realize that even if you have the trust of a mustard seed, when you take that step, you transform the world. Transcribed and edited by a member of the St. Andrew's Sermon Transcription Project. St. Andrew s Church Loving Progressive Presbyterian 14311 Wells Port Drive, Austin, Texas 78728 (512) 251-0698 Fax: (512) 251-2617 www.staopen.com 6