Sermon: Drawing Near - Intimacy with God: the Contemplative Tradition

Mark 14:32-42

Drawing Near

Intimacy with God: The Contemplative Tradition

James Sledge                                                                                       August 10, 2014

I’ve mentioned before that while in seminary, I had the opportunity to visit the Middle East. It wasn’t the typical tourist trip, but we still did plenty of the typical tourist things. That included a visit to the Garden of Gethsemane. Not that anyone knows exactly where this famous garden was, but that’s the case for a lot of sites in the Holy Land.

The Garden of Gethsemane is on the list of popular tourist stops because most Christians are familiar with the story of Jesus praying there prior to his arrest. It is a famous event that has been depicted in countless paintings and movies. But as familiar and well known as it is, I had never noticed something remarkably obvious about the story until just the other day.

Mark’s gospel gives us an intimate picture of that night. We see sleepy disciples who cannot manage to stay awake in support of their friend and teacher at his moment of greatest difficulty. We see an anguished Jesus who struggles to fulfill his call, hoping and praying repeatedly for some other way to complete his mission. “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want.”

Abba. It’s an Aramaic word that is a lot closer to “Daddy” than it is to “Father.” Abba was used by little children, a warm, familiar, intimate term. Jesus approaches God not as some far off, distant deity, but as someone with whom he has a close, intimate relationship. There is no religious formality here. Jesus pours out his heart to one he knows intimately as a tender and loving parent. He does so repeatedly, but Mark says nothing about God answering Jesus.

That’s the thing I had never noticed before. “Daddy,” Jesus prays and pleads. He gets up to check on the disciples, then comes back and prays and pleads again, “Daddy.” After another check on the disciples, Jesus prays again, but we never hear from God.

Mark’s gospel doesn’t say exactly how much time passed. Jesus mentions an hour, but I don't know how literal that is. Does he pray thirty minutes, an hour, two hours? We do not know, but in the end, Jesus is once again focused on his purpose. “Get up, let us be going. See, my betrayer is at hand.”

What happened during Jesus’ prayers? Why doesn’t Mark, or the other gospel writers for that matter, tell us anything about what Jesus heard in those moments? What reassured him? What steeled his resolve? Does Mark not know? Or is it simply a level of intimacy not meant to be shared? Is it enough for us to know that Jesus has drawn close to God in prayer, as he had on so many previous occasions, and in those moments, what he must do became clear?

As a very young boy, I said prayers just before going to bed. That was a long time ago, and my memories are a bit hazy. But as I recall, my father would read Bible stories to my brother and me, and then we would say short prayers. I’m mostly guessing as to specifics, but we likely thanked God for a few things or people, perhaps asked blessing on some folks, and maybe made a request or two.

My family was at church most Sundays, and so I heard Sunday School teachers pray, and I heard the pastor offer prayers in worship. The pastor’s prayers were large, finely crafted, formal things, spoken to some far off God whose presence did not seem very real to me. My prayers and the Sunday School teachers’ were less professionally done, but they too were spoken into the emptiness and left to float away. Maybe I never noticed how the Gethsemane story says nothing about God’s response because that was the way all prayer looked to me.

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Pastors get asked to pray a fair amount. As designated religious leaders that’s hardly surprising, but I sometimes wonder if being a designated pray-er doesn’t encourage some misunderstandings. For me as a child, and probably for a fair number of adults, prayer was something akin to a letter to Santa. You list the things you want, send it off, and hope. And if there’s someone closer to Santa (God) than you are, well it only makes sense to let that person hand deliver your letter.

If someone asked you to characterize your prayer life, what would you say? Does it look at all like a child’s letter to Santa? How does it look different? What are the different ways that you pray? How much of prayer is you speaking? What sort of things do you say? How much is you listening? What are you trying to hear?

When Mark’s gospel tells of Jesus praying in Gethsemane, I get the impression that he prayed for quite a long time. Yet the words of Jesus’ prayer take only about ten seconds to say. So what was going on the rest of the time? Clearly something, because in the end, Jesus moves without hesitation toward the cross.

There are surely as many different ways of praying and interacting with God as there are of interacting with someone with whom we have or are seeking a deep, intimate relationship. We are called to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. What could be deeper and more intimate than that? And so prayer needs time of telling and asking, as well as times of waiting and listening. It needs time of simply being together, not speaking but simply resting in one another’s presence. At times, prayer needs to declare one’s love and affection. Sometimes a song might be a good idea. At times so is a long letter. Sometimes prayer needs to linger with the letters we have from God in the Scriptures. Sometimes yelling and anger is unavoidable. Other times we need to offer apologies and make renewed promises. At times our life with God can use a little help by talking things out with a trusted friend or working with a small group or seeing a spiritual director.

As I said, it’s not so different from working on a deep and intimate relationship with another person. Except that God is a less talkative than most people, and so silence and stillness are crucial.

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I’ve said this before, but one of the great mistakes the Church made down through the centuries was to equate salvation with going to heaven. This not only distorted the original meaning of the word, but ignored vast amounts of Jesus’ teachings. Jesus said he came to bring good news to the poor, spoke of doing God’s will and becoming part of God’s new day that was coming, and called the church to make disciples of all peoples by teaching them to do all that he had commanded. Be we somehow turned into salvation and the cross into a divine parlor trick for getting people into heaven.

Fortunately, the pendulum has begun to swing on this. The emergent church movement has reemphasized the earthly kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed rather than a heavenly escape from earth. And the surge in exploring spirituality has helped many recognize the intimate, relational nature of the faith Jesus proclaimed rather than simply believing the right things. Faith and salvation are about drawing near to God and being transformed by the encounter. Salvation is so much more than a status; it is healing, wholeness, reorientation, new and transformed life.

Just as falling in love can be the start of a wonderful new life, drawing near to God and beginning to discover an intimacy with God can be the beginning of a wonderful new life, a life that opens us to our truest and deepest purpose, life that begins to know and love God with heart and soul and mind and strength, and so overflows into loving neighbor as self. But that’s part of another sermon in this series.