Rogation Sunday
“But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.”
I hope that one of the things you’ve been picking up from the readings and the sermons throughout Lent and, to some degree, Eastertide, is the necessity for us to recognize our own insufficiency to do, to be, to think, and to say the things that we most truly need. That at the core of what it means to be a human being is to be fractured or broken and in need of putting back together. We all experience fallenness and brokenness in different ways, and the specific things we need to see and address those things may be different between you and me, but the fact remains that we all need – fundamentally – the same thing.
In understanding this we come to see that there’s nothing in this world or indeed in ourselves that is going to fix that brokenness, try as we might – and we do. We feel this void within us, this hole as if we were broken and pieced back together, but like a smashed plate a shard slid under the stove. We paste over the hole or just ignore it, but that doesn’t work; some people fill the hole with drugs or alcohol or numerous other kinds of addictions which might help us to forget it exists but ultimately fixes nothing; some people lean into the brokenness because it’s all they’ve known, but that seldom leads you anywhere but down.
The fix, of course – as we’ve been talking about – is God, cliched as that might sound.
Today is the fifth Sunday after Easter, the Sunday prior to Ascension day (this Thursday) and two weeks before Pentecost, and for nearly two millennia this Sunday has also been known as Rogation Sunday.
In the year 470 a series of natural disasters in France threatened a region’s crops and food sources. The bishop at the time decreed that three days of fasting would be observed and the people would process around their fields and communities in prayer so they could ask God’s protection upon their crops that were just beginning to grow. The word Rogation comes from the Latin word rogare which means to ask; and so the Rogation days stayed in the calendar and become days of special asking, days of special prayer with a particular emphasis on the natural world.
Over time these days came to be not just about prayer and fasting but celebrations of the Spring and for asking God’s blessing to be upon those places we live, our parish, and the fields that sustain us. Traditionally in England, parishes on this day would hold rogation processions where they would beat the bounds of their parish and walk the parish border, reminding people of the area in which they lived, and stopping to pray for fields, and gardens, homes, and farms – a reminder that all we have, all we eat, the places we live, are all given from God and properly belong to God.
The timing and focus on the natural world is timely of course because it’s what’s going on all around us in May on PEI, in the lawn, the garden, and the fields, but it’s useful also for us to think about what prayer actually is. A great mid-20th century theologian, writing on prayer, made the comparison between prayer and our pray-ing and seeds in the earth.
She said that prayer is the substance of eternal life, that is that prayer is not some thing we do to get what we want, prayer isn’t something we say but that praying is a way of entering – spiritually – into God’s eternal life, something we live and do all the time, a posture of our hearts.
I got a shortwave radio for Christmas about a decade ago and got quite taken with using it; with the right antenna at the right time of day I could tune into other worlds, radio broadcasts from Turkey, Russia, and China. Prayer is a bit similar – it is tuning our hearts into the frequency of eternity, tuning our hearts into life of God. It’s not momentary chit-chat we cap with an amen, but a realignment of our hearts to God, bringing our souls into Union with Him, so that knowing the Father they might forever be changed.
But back to seeds…when a seed germinates, she says, we think only of what we see coming up – the green shoots that eventually become the fruit-bearing plant – but we forget the roots beneath shooting down into dark unknown and giving the plant its life; without the unseen roots there is no plant. So it should be with you and me; we each, though like broken clay pots, have this eternal seed planted within us, the Word, God. The circumstances of our lives, our own self-sabotage, and unseen forces outside of us will try to stunt the seed’s growth and without those strong roots anchored in soil will mostly likely succeed. Too often we ignore the root and focus only on the shoot, the good things that seem to be happening, forgetting the need for growth in those unseen ways and places. To pray, to enter into that life of God, is to give time to those roots, to anchor ourselves in something that gives us life, that keeps us grounded and secure against every wind that blows us around, and opens up a entire unseen world before us.
Our readings today are beautifully chosen and arranged to teach us of these facts. The Gospel, again from John 16, is all about how we pray and how we ask, “Very truly, I tell you, if you ask anything of the Father in my name, he will give it to you.” The Gospel here is anticipating the Ascension and Pentecost, preparing the disciples for that time when Jesus will depart from them, when their union with him is no longer physical but through prayer. It’s easy to keep in touch with a friend when they live with us, but harder if we must write letters and schedule phone calls; likewise for the disciples, how it easy it would be to let their relationship to Christ fall by the wayside without him with them, how true that is for us.
But even in this life this is not quite enough, and this is what James tells us in the Epistle. There are two types of prayer, prayer in spirit and prayer in deeds and we must do both, “For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror, for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like.” How many of us hear the word, hear the truth, walk out the door and don’t think about it one wit until next Sunday morning?
James’ point is that sometimes we pray for forgiveness but are unwilling to change, we ask for charity and help but struggle to help others, what’s the point of asking God to increase our faith if we aren’t going to dedicate even ten minutes to deepen our relationship with Him through the week? James, refreshingly, sees our faith in practical ways, “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”
This is the first time ‘the world’ is mentioned in the readings today; the world is all that out there, that place that operates on a different set of values to God, that place where the first are always first and the last last, where you’re lucky to be forgiven once much less seventy-times-seven times, where the dignity and worth of one’s life is measured not by being made in the image of God, but in one’s ability to be productive, to be mentally or physically ‘normal’.
“In the world you will have tribulation,” Jesus says to us, and indeed we will because the world has always been hostile to this message, “But take courage, I have conquered the world.” And the message is that through prayer, with hearts realigned and tuned into eternity, to God’s heart and life, we too can conquer the world. Hence the collect, the prayer for today, in which we pray that we through Him we may think those things that be good, and by thy merciful guiding may perform the same; through our Lord Jesus Christ.
