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Morning Devotion for the Season of Easter
May 15, 2023
Invitatory
On this day the Lord has acted; we will rejoice and be glad in it.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son: and to the Holy Ghost;
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. Amen.
Reading: James 5:13-15
Are any among you suffering? They should pray. Are any cheerful? They should sing songs of praise. Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up, and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven.
Meditation – Peter Vanderveen
We are living in an increasingly secular age. Few would disagree with this. And most would say that secularism is defined by lack of belief in God. I’m not at all sure what this means. Belief is hard to measure; it’s even harder to affirm or deny with any kind of consequential certainty. It can arise as if out of nowhere or disappear just as mysteriously.
Secularism isn’t a matter of belief; it’s a matter of practice. And the practice that matters most is prayer. It’s an act that seems increasingly foreign to us, whether we consider it irrelevant or vestigial or simply a language that we no longer know how to speak. When God is reduced, even with a sense of humbleness and solemnity, to no more than “the ground of all being,” this idea may seem plausible and something that could be contemplated. Just as we envision that God may be the guarantor of justice and goodness, serving us as a final judge. We invoke these ideas without having to say first that we do, in fact, believe in God. But to claim that God knows us or hears us and can be addressed by us can seem immediately anomalous. Or more, that God might act, or might act in response to what we have imagined we have somehow said to God, this can strike us as the worst kind of dreaming – co-opting God, bending him to our own wishes.
Ludwig Wittgenstein made this cryptic note in his diary about his own struggling attempts to pray: “it’s as if my knees were stiff.” This inability to kneel defines our secularism; for kneeling is a form of recognition of dependence that runs counter to the deepest commitment we have – our trust that the world is ours, and only we can solve the problems we face.
To counter this, the English theologian Herbert McCabe wrote that “We must keep this firmly in mind: it is God who prays. Not just God who answers prayer but God who prays in us in the first place.” We hardly ever think of the world or our lives in this mode – that all that is and all that we experience is, in fact, God addressing us. Our only role is response. The Genesis accounts of creation are masterful. God spoke the world into being. God knelt down over Adam to breathe into him a living soul. God prayed us into existence. And yet, we tend to pray as if we have to inform God about something God does not know. How supremely odd and misguided this is, when all our time is our being at play within the ongoing discourse of God. Our praying should be as natural as breathing.
Secularism is our assumption that God is essentially silent and that our words are entirely our own, and, when we pray, we are thus speaking into the void. (So we close our eyes, shutting out the world). What if we were to kneel, figuratively and literally, so as to see the world as the speech of God. It would be lovely to feel as if it were hard enough just to get in a word edgewise.
Prayer
You come to us, O Christ.
You are the Alpha and the Omega
The beginning and the end. All times
And seasons are yours, and in you
All things hold together and are brought to completion.
Draw us by your Spirit into communion
With you and one another and make us and all things
Whole and free in the full force
Of your deathless love.
The Most Rev. Frank T. Griswold
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