There Is No Escape

Luke 11:1-13 

July 10, 2016 

Mark S. Bollwinkel 

            “Tradition has it that on the morning Teresa of Avila was leaving her home to join a convent, a gentleman saw her climbing into the carriage and could not resist making an appreciative assessment of her ankles.  “Take a good look,” she is said to have called out merrily, “that’s the last one you’ll get!” (Enduring Grace, Flinders, Harpers, 1993, page 155).

            We don’t usually think of saints as people with a sense of humor.  Most of us think of the mystics of the Middle Ages as severe, morose and hermit-like people.

            Teresa of Avila didn’t practice physical self-punishment.  She was a beautiful woman.  She was well known as a great cook.  She was a “superb conversationalist”, the type of person that was a joy to be around.  She is not known to have performed many miracles and no real exorcisms.

            Teresa of Avila has been venerated for her brilliant visionary faith in one of the darkest times in history.  The Spanish Inquisition was in full rage in the 16^th century when her writings on the spiritual life began to circulate.  If she was perceived as a heretic or if her visions of God were suggested to be hallucinations of the devil, she would have easily been burned at the stake.  Those who expressed faith different than those in power, especially women, were prime targets for the Inquisition’s terror.

            At that time women were prohibited from preaching or writing about the scriptures.  This did not stop Teresa from publishing four books, hundreds of letters and poems.   Her wonderful descriptions of contemplative prayer have been treasured for centuries.  Teresa of Avila was a woman of real courage and wisdom.  She writes, “Without [a] doubt, I fear those who have such great fear of the devil more than I do the devil himself” (Autobiography).

                        We most often think of mystics as those who seek to escape this world through spiritual discipline, especially prayer.  This is a shallow form of mysticism and not the case with Teresa.

            Western culture, and Christianity in particular, has had to struggle with the Platonic dualism of the Greek world.  Those philosophers suggested that there is a dual nature to human life.  The physical, earthly life is considered profane and limited, while the spiritual life, or the soul, is held up as sacred and eternal.  These two natures are considered in opposition to each other.  Some forms of mysticism claim that an individual can nurture an inner life capable of “escaping” the defiled outer life of daily existence.

            Prayer for folks like this becomes a technique where by we master our evil, physical selves and escape to a higher, spiritual plain. 

Consider this modern definition of prayer taken out of an advertisement from the Bay Guardian for a New Age religious workshop:

Prayer is the bringing of one’s heart into the sunshine, so that like a plant, its inward life may thrive for an outward development.  It is the plea of one’s better self against one’s weaker self.  It is the ascent of the soul above time into the freedom of eternity.

             For those convinced of a dual nature to life, prayer becomes an escape from time, history and self, to the ‘freedom of eternity”, from the slavery of our bodies and our daily needs.

            This is not the transcendence of which Teresa wrote.  She knew an intimacy with God so complete that the divinity inherent in this life was fully experienced not avoided or denied.

            John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement in England during the 1700’s, rejected the notion that we are divided selves, sacred spirits and profane bodies.  He writes, “All the other enemies of Christianity are triflers…the mystics are the most dangerous…” Albert Outler writes that Wesley understood discipleship as “active holiness in this life” not out of it (John Wesley, Oxford, 1964).

            As a result, John Wesley took his ministry to the factories and mines, preaching in prisons and market places.  The first Methodists actively opposed slavery in Great Britain.  They started the first public education of children.

            I share Wesley’s suspicion for techniques of spiritual escape.  Did you see the ad in the newspaper the other day that read, “The Clairvoyant Society has cancelled its scheduled meeting for tomorrow due to unforeseen circumstances?”

            Faith in Jesus Christ is not a means to escape life, but rather, by God’s grace, faith is a means to fully engage life and find God there.

            Listen to the words from the writer of Colossians, “In Christ the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fullness of life in him” (2:9). It reminds us of John’s gospel where we hear that in Jesus “The word became flesh and dwelt among us” (1:14).

            We worship an incarnate God.  A God who is fully and finally revealed as a human being, in a human body, living a human life of eating, walking, laughing and dying.  In Christ we are not offered an escape hatch from this profane world.  How can the world be profane if God is one with it?

            Rather, in Christ we are given the means to encounter God in the world, even in our own complex and sometimes painful lives.

            Thus, being a Christian has as much to do with our lives from Monday to Saturday, then just on Sunday mornings.  How we work, play, relate to family and friends, is where God is to be found, not simply in church on Sunday.

            This has important implications for how we pray.

            In our gospel lesson, the disciples ask Jesus to teach them to pray.  Instead of a seven-week course and cassette tape package on the correct techniques of mediation, Jesus says, “When you pray, say, Father Hallowed be thy name.  Thy kingdom come.  Give us this day our daily bread.  Forgive us as we forgive others.  Lead us not into temptation.” 

Period.

            Is this “the ascent of the soul above time into the freedom of eternity”?

            So many of us are intimidated by prayer.  We feel like we shouldn’t bother God with our puny concerns.  We feel we haven’t learned the right words to say or the correct techniques to make prayer effective.  Many of us don’t bother with praying, thinking that it wouldn’t help us get along with the boss or handle the kids anyway.

            If God completely reveals divinity in the human life of Jesus, faith in that God has everything to do with our boss and the kids.  It has everything to do with our living, not only with what happened after we die.

            Jesus says, pray for your daily bread.  How much more “down to earth” can you get?  It reminds me of the play and movie “Fiddler on the Roof”.  Remember the scene when his students surround the old rabbi?  They are asking him all sorts of questions.  Right then, during the pogroms and persecution of Jews in Russia one of the students asks him how they should pray for the Czar.  The rabbi prays, “O God, keep our precious Czar…far away from us!”

            God is to be found in our lives, so pray for what you really need, even if it is for daily bread, or two hours of quiet, or a raise at work.  We count in the eyes of God; we can pray for what we really need.

            We can pray with real hope and expectation.  Jesus says to pray, “Thy Kingdom come”.  We can count on God to keep God’s promises.

            Wodell writes, “Our chronic weakness is not that we expect too much from God, but that we trust God too little.”  The answers to our prayers may be “no” or may come in surprising ways, but God’s Kingdom is here in our midst as well as in the future.  We can pray with real hope.

            We can pray actively not passively.  Jesus teaches us to pray for forgiveness as we forgive others.  Thus true prayer in not only sitting in a closet praying that you and your best friend will make up after the fight.  If prayer is to be effective, we also need to get up and go over to our friend’s house and work out our problems.

            Remember this old preacher’s story?  Each day the man went into the chapel and prayed, “Dear God, please let me win the lottery.”  He was devoted, he got on his knees, he lit a candle and everyday the urgent prayer was the same, “Dear God, please let me win the lottery.”  Finally, one day after this usual routine, frustrated and fed up, the man was about to leave the chapel muttering about how God had let him down again, when a voice from Heaven broke the silence, “My son at least you could do is buy a lottery ticket!”

            If we pray for peace, we need to work for it was well.  If we pray for a better world, we need to actively make it that way.  In the overwhelming news of violence in the world, our own country and our own cities we are often driven to prayers for peace and healing for the victims.  Which is a good thing to do!   But it is empty piety if we don’t use that compassion to do something about it: 

Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours.

Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world.

Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good.

Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world.

Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes, you are his body.

Christ has no body now on earth but yours.”

~ Teresa of Ávila

Prayer isn’t passive; it is active engagement in life.  We experience God’s forgiveness as we forgive others.

            In Jesus Christ we are called to find God in the midst of our humanity.  That means we can pray for what we really need, that we can pray with real hope, and that our prayers will empower us to actively find God in our lives and world.

            Saint Teresa of Avila did.  Like all true mystics, she led the contemplative life not to escape the world, but through transcendence to find God within it.

            She writes:

Let nothing upset you,

Let nothing frighten you.

Everything is changing;

God alone is changeless.

Patience attains the goal.

Who has God lacks nothing.

God alone fills all her needs.

            (The “Bookmark Prayer”)

            If we would have such faith there is no need for escape.

            Amen.