THIRD SUNDAY in ADVENT

December 11, 2011

Text: Romans 12:2

Rev. Dale G. Bauer

This is the third installment on a series entitled “The Light of Christ.” We’ve been searching for the light of Christ in this busy holiday season.

The series functions out of the conviction that we can find the Light of Christ this season when we turn our hearts from the tinsel of the season to the Christ-child of the season, and prepare room for him in our hearts.

The Scripture that drives this series is from Romans and should be familiar to us now:

Don’t become so well adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed inside out.

God gave to the Desert Fathers and Mothers of the fourth and fifth centuries the formula to separate themselves from the demands and expectations around them and to fix their attention on
God. It is called desert spirituality. The formula is a simple:

Solitude

Silence

Prayer

Solitude. Solitude is the desire to be with Christ and him alone. It is the desire to live out the great commandment to love the Lord our God with all our heart and all our mind and all our soul.

Silence. It is the discipline that allows solitude to happen. Silence is a discipline. It simply can’t happen unless we make it happen. That’s because we live in such a noisy world. We are surrounded by sound. Sound from our entertainment centers, sound from our appliances, and sound from living in an urban area: cars and compressors. We not only live in a noisy world, we live in a wordy world. Words are the floor, walls, and ceiling of our existence. Talk is plentiful and cheap. The Desert Fathers and Mothers believed that words chain us to this world; silence is the door to God’s world. Find silence.

Prayer. This is the third component of Desert Spirituality—and it may be the most important. That’s because solitude and silence create space for prayer of the heart. Now we are talking about an amazing kind of prayer. Spirituality of the Desert talks about it as the prayer of the heart. This is a prayer that touches the heart of God, bringing us into an amazing relationship with God.

Let’s talk about prayer of the heart. Prayer of the heart is not about the pump in our chest, what we call the heart, probably the most efficient pump there is. It is not the seat of sentimentality, as in a “broken heart.” It is in Scripture—especially in Hebrew Scripture, the sum of who we are physically, intellectually, emotionally. It is the place where our will resides and it is the place where sin hides out. This is the place where we want to meet God.

Prayer of the heart has three very simple dimensions.

Prayer of the Heart is simple, short prayer. Too many prayers are too wordy. My little friends from Preschool and Kindergarten remind me of that when they say, “Pastor, that was a long prayer.” History reminds us of that. The prayer at the dedication of the Gettysburg battlefield cemetery was almost four times as long as Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. A little piece of Scripture like, “The Lord is my shepherd,” repeated often in silence brings our hearts into the very presence of God. The best guide to this prayer comes from a little brochure called, Got Ten Minutes. You can connect with it at the connection center.

Prayer of the Heart is unceasing. Paul the missionary reminds us to pray always. Now if we pray with our words and our mind, we can never find the time to pray unceasingly. But if we use a simple prayer thousands of times, it becomes part of us. Repeating “Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy” thousands of times becomes part of you. It’s like muscle memory. Every winter when I put on my skis and ride the lift, I wonder if I will be able to unload and ski without a face plant. And every time I get off and ski, by muscle memory, I ski just like I did months earlier. Don’t lose sleep about how to pray. Let your heart take over.

Prayer of the heart is big. It includes everything: what we need, what others need, what this tired, old world of our needs.

Well, here we are, at the end of this series. I hope you’ve gotten solitude, found some silence, and let your heart do the praying. In this is the Light of Christ.

Amen.