The introductory talk given to the joint retreat of All Saints Anglican Church and the Company of Jesus held October 10-12 at the Davis-Cain Cabin in Lexington, Virginia. First of three talks.
The disciples of Jesus followed him for three years without being Christians. Even though they rubbed shoulders with Jesus and saw him minister healing, miracles and wonderful teaching, they still didn’t quite get it that Jesus was God in the Flesh. True, Peter did have some flashes of insight. And the day of the Transfiguration was really cool, but it wasn’t until Christ was resurrected that they began to get it that Jesus was God.
The thing they were really convinced of was that Jesus was real. He was a real person and he really was God in the flesh - the exact representation of God the Father. There was none of this nonsense about Jesus being a good teacher or a highly moral person – even a spiritual genius – anything but God. No, even the last holdout, Thomas, summed up nicely the attitude of the disciples towards Christ when he said, after looking at Jesus’ wounds up close and personal, “My King and My God.!”
They were all totally sold at that point. They believed: Jesus is God. He died for our sins, he arose from the grave and we have talked to him, touched him, eaten breakfast with him, and seen the reality of his resurrection in the breaking of the bread. Their relationship with him was very personal. As a result their lives were totally transformed.
At his ascension, Jesus told the disciples to stay in Jerusalem and wait for the coming of the Spirit that he would send. The disciples devoted themselves to prayer until the Spirit came and empowered them for ministry. After that great and wonderful event in which 3,000 people were added to the kingdom in one day, Acts 2:42 tells us that “they were continually devoting themselves to the apostle’s teaching, to fellowship, to the breaking of the bread and to prayer.”
Going on in the same passage, we see that there were signs and wonders taking place, the believers were selling their possessions and sharing with one another, taking meals together in each others’ homes, worshipping together in unity at the temple, and rejoicing as the Lord was adding to their number day by day, those who were being saved. This manner of living can be thought of as ‘Eighth Day Life” – life lived in the New Day of Christ’s resurrection, the Eighth Day of Creation. (Acts 2:43-47).
Theme: Out of this wonderful description of new life in the Spirit, we can discern four basic areas of Christian practice: Worship, Community, Formation and Mission.
This weekend, we will look at these four areas of Christian Discipleship and explore ways of integrating them into our lives – all for the purpose of fulfilling the two Great Commandments: loving God and loving our neighbor as ourselves. At the end of our time together this weekend, we should be well along the way to creating a spiritual plan for our lives that incorporates these Practices and helps us to grow in our love of God and our neighbor.
We’re also going to explore what it means that we are all here together – members of All Saints Anglican Church and the Company of Jesus. In some ways we are like the crowd that was assembled on the Day of Pentecost. We have Kentuckians, West Virginians, (native) Ohioans (me), Pennsylvanians, North Carolinians and Georgians and New Yorkers all in one place –each speaking their own languages , but able to understand each other!
So I’d like for us to imagine that we’ve just been saved on the Day of Pentecost and it’s now the day after. Maybe if we do what they did, we’ll get what they got – namely: a sense of awe, signs and wonders, unity in our community, gladness, joyful praise of God and an increase in the number of believers day by day.
Does anyone here think that sounds good? ….Alright!
So - what do we do? And how?
Worship: Fixed Hour Prayer
One of the things they did was to continue in the prayers. “The prayers” refers to ‘fixed hour prayer. Already at the time of the Apostles, the Jewish people had a tradition of saying standard prayers at certain hours of the Roman day:
Prime, the first hour @ 6:00am
Terce, third @ 9:00am
Sext, sixth @ 12pm
None, ninth @ 3pm
Vespers around 6pm
There was likely also prayers before bed and vigil prayers offered in the middle of the night or very early morning.
Acts 3:1 tells us that Peter and John were going up to the temple for prayer at the ninth hour (3pm). This tradition of fixed hour prayer was based on Ps. 119:164: “Seven times a day do I praise you”… Later, St. Benedict would adopt this pattern of fixed hour prayer and utilize standardized texts for the services. Shortly we will pray Compline together. We get this service pretty much verbatim as Benedict laid it out 1500 years ago.
Also, in the Book of Common Prayer, we have Morning and Evening Prayer services. It’s fair to say that the root of Anglicanism is Benedictine because when Thomas Cranmer compiled the first BCP, he compressed the monastic hours down into these two services, which form natural hinge points for our day. Morning and Evening Prayer are primarily public in nature, as of course, is the Eucharist, while the fixed hour prayer is often done privately.
As we go through our weekend, we will be praying several different types of offices, including Compline, Morning Prayer and the Eucharist, as well as some of the devotions for individual and families. We’re also going to be introduced into the use of the Anglican Rosary and make our way through the Way of the Cross
Adapted from St. Francis.
These times of worship should help us to actually experience ‘the prayers’ first hand. In the process, I hope you will catch a glimpse of a “continuous cascade of prayer” going up before the throne of God as we become aware that as soon as we finish one hour of prayer, someone in the next time zone will be taking up the same prayer. This is one of the ways that we can ‘continually devote ourselves to prayer.” I think it’s fair to say that the members of the Company of Jesus are here because they are drawn increasingly to a life of prayer and that the Prayers sustain them and help them grow in a way that is very daily, and often very humble, but ultimately very powerful. Such prayers virtually formed our Western world and can have a powerful impact on transforming our culture today.
So as we go through the weekend let’s worship as the early Christians might have, and trust the Lord, that if we do what they did we may get what they got. Amen.
Compline followed.
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