Contemplative Prayer |
Photo by C-M Entwistle
|
|
Photo by CME
|
Just after Moses has led God's people Israel through the Red Sea out of slavery in Egypt, they are full of praise for God who had delivered them. But soon they are grumbling because they have no water to drink. Moses prays to God and is shown how to provide them with drinkable water. God makes a covenant with them that if they obey his laws he will not inflict the diseases on them that plagued Egypt: 'For I am the Lord who heals you'.
We all know that suffering is part of life. Scratch the surface of any human life and you will find suffering and pain and tragedy that has been or is being lived through. And yet we humans overcome and live and even thrive. As Christians we can know the fullness of life that Jesus promised to bring us. But part of that is in carrying our own cross and following him.
As I write I'm about to have investigations for an as yet undiagnosed condition which was caught before it killed me and is currently life limiting and restricting but not life threatening. I've spoken today to people about tragedy and suffering in life far beyond my own. So how can we make any sense of our God being ‘the Lord who heals' in the midst of such unresolved sickness and pain in our world?
Only a God who suffers with us can make any kind of sense of it all. Only a God who endured extreme undeserved physical, mental and emotional pain as Jesus did on the cross can help us to see that suffering is 'just' part of life. And God not only understands but suffers with us. As the Body of Christ as we suffer individually, so all suffer and Christ suffers with us. There is comfort and strength here - we never suffer alone.
And how can we truly know that Christ is with us in our suffering? We sit quietly and intentionally in God's presence just where we are and allow ourselves to: 'Be still and know that I am God'. Then as we experience God's presence with us we can truly know: 'I am the God that healeth thee'. And as we deeply know this truth we can respond with: 'In thee O Lord do I put my trust'.
FEBRUARY 2020 SAYING
“Cease to do evil; learn to do good . . . your sins are forgiven”
Isaiah 1.16-17 & Luke 5.20 (RSV)
“Cease to do evil; learn to do good . . . your sins are forgiven”
Isaiah 1.16-17 & Luke 5.20 (RSV)
There is a strong strand of teaching in the Bible that connects misfortune with sin. In some instances, it can be both crude and cruel to make such a direct connection — the suffering of the innocent is a case in point. The teaching is strongest in the Old Testament, where it is robustly challenged by the book of Job. It is challenged again by Jesus, both in his association with sinners and in his teaching (e.g. re- the tower of Siloam in Luke 13.4).
The relationship between human sin and misfortune, whether sickness or some other disaster, is clearly an extremely subtle one, and it cannot be ignored. This month’s Saying will give us a contemplative background as we wrestle with this doctrine.
The Word of God through Isaiah has a sense of continuity about it. Not just, “Don’t do this — do that”, so much as, “Strive continually to direct yourself from sinfulness” and at the same time school yourself in thinking and behaving positively in the direction of goodness and love. (The Hebrew word for “cease” has overtones of “being flabby, idle, ineffectual”. So one’s attitude towards sin is to see it as something essentially weak and useless, not worth the candle).
Then comes Jesus, boldly pronouncing God’s forgiveness to a paralysed man — something the patient needed but didn’t ask for. The hidden subtlety of the sin/sickness connection is stated, but at the same time the flow of God’s healing love is not impeded, and the paralytic walks home.
In this ‘compound’ Saying, the relationship between the words from Isaiah and those of Jesus recorded in Luke can inform our understanding of both. For the purposes of contemplation, when we have spent time with the whole, we might use just a part for our time of silent prayer. We can then also use this as Watchword for daily life during the month ahead, as we embark on the time of Lent. We may determine that we are going to do things differently; to change our lives in some way, large or small; to deepen our faith and extend our understanding of the love that Jesus showed us in his life and death and resurrection.
to edit.
The relationship between human sin and misfortune, whether sickness or some other disaster, is clearly an extremely subtle one, and it cannot be ignored. This month’s Saying will give us a contemplative background as we wrestle with this doctrine.
The Word of God through Isaiah has a sense of continuity about it. Not just, “Don’t do this — do that”, so much as, “Strive continually to direct yourself from sinfulness” and at the same time school yourself in thinking and behaving positively in the direction of goodness and love. (The Hebrew word for “cease” has overtones of “being flabby, idle, ineffectual”. So one’s attitude towards sin is to see it as something essentially weak and useless, not worth the candle).
Then comes Jesus, boldly pronouncing God’s forgiveness to a paralysed man — something the patient needed but didn’t ask for. The hidden subtlety of the sin/sickness connection is stated, but at the same time the flow of God’s healing love is not impeded, and the paralytic walks home.
In this ‘compound’ Saying, the relationship between the words from Isaiah and those of Jesus recorded in Luke can inform our understanding of both. For the purposes of contemplation, when we have spent time with the whole, we might use just a part for our time of silent prayer. We can then also use this as Watchword for daily life during the month ahead, as we embark on the time of Lent. We may determine that we are going to do things differently; to change our lives in some way, large or small; to deepen our faith and extend our understanding of the love that Jesus showed us in his life and death and resurrection.
to edit.
Photo by Lyn Burriss
JANUARY 2020 SAYING
“Behold, I am making all things new”
Revelation 21.5 (ESV)
If you find Revelation a hard and complex book to understand, you are not alone! It is full of strange, lurid and at times bizarre and violent imagery. Although we may enjoy such things in a SciFi movie, in the Bible such picture language can seem so alien to us that we often shy away from getting to grips with John’s vision. However, in many ways this book offers us hope and a really clear vision of God’s ultimate purpose for the whole of creation.
Despite the powerful forces of evil which are at work both openly in secular political systems, or covertly in the hidden recesses of the minds of those who would manipulate the vulnerable for their own ends, we know that salvation is real and, in its broadest terms, was ultimately given to us for all time through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.
Our word comes to us from the end of the book where the promise is spelt out to us in sentences which tumble one after another. Resonating against the old image of the first creation, we hear that God promises a completely ‘new heaven and a new earth’. Everything will be different in ways that are beyond our imagining.
Using the image of Jerusalem as the holy city, a new creation is described in the beauty of a bride adorned on her wedding day for the delight of her adoring husband. And this wonderful God is not a remote deity but has come to dwell with the people in all that their human lives entail. There is a completely new beginning as it was in the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth and it was all good, a blank canvas where all previous experience of pain and suffering will no longer exist.
And in our word for contemplation, Revelation 21.5, the Greek implies that this is an ongoing act by God…. “Behold, I am making all things new”. Not ‘has made’ or ‘will make’: in this saying we have the promise that God has acted and will continue to act in real time.
This is a wonderful promise which has the power to comfort and touch us all.
Despite the powerful forces of evil which are at work both openly in secular political systems, or covertly in the hidden recesses of the minds of those who would manipulate the vulnerable for their own ends, we know that salvation is real and, in its broadest terms, was ultimately given to us for all time through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.
Our word comes to us from the end of the book where the promise is spelt out to us in sentences which tumble one after another. Resonating against the old image of the first creation, we hear that God promises a completely ‘new heaven and a new earth’. Everything will be different in ways that are beyond our imagining.
Using the image of Jerusalem as the holy city, a new creation is described in the beauty of a bride adorned on her wedding day for the delight of her adoring husband. And this wonderful God is not a remote deity but has come to dwell with the people in all that their human lives entail. There is a completely new beginning as it was in the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth and it was all good, a blank canvas where all previous experience of pain and suffering will no longer exist.
And in our word for contemplation, Revelation 21.5, the Greek implies that this is an ongoing act by God…. “Behold, I am making all things new”. Not ‘has made’ or ‘will make’: in this saying we have the promise that God has acted and will continue to act in real time.
This is a wonderful promise which has the power to comfort and touch us all.