Great is the mystery of Faith 2 – To Whom All Hearts are Open

Today, in the second of our sermon series on our liturgy – we are beginning to look at individual prayers in more detail.

Liturgy is Biblical
It's tried and tested
Helps us approach God
Gives us a balanced diet
Fills our senses
Provides a framework

Last time, we discussed why liturgy (that is, the form of our worship – usually written down in our service sheets) is a good thing. At the beginning of our service, we always say a collect together:  A collect is a prayer which collects the prayers of the congregation together.

A traditional version of this prayer starts like this:

Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hidden.  Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and magnify your holy name...

This prayer is known as the collect for purity, or sometimes, the prayer of preparation.

Have you ever wondered why we say this prayer, or one very like it, at the beginning of our service?

It’s an ancient prayer, going back well before the time of Cranmer, as a prayer for the priest to focus his mind on celebrating the mass.  Gradually, it became said not just by the priest, but by the whole congregation.  

I said last time, that good liturgy links us directly to the Bible.  Listen to the words of this much loved Psalm.

O Lord, you have searched me and  know me.  You know when I sit down, and when I rise up  .... (you)... are acquainted with all my ways.  Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely. Such Knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it.  Psalm 139.

God knows us completely.  It’s even deeper than the knowledge of a parent of a child, or of a wife and husband.   We might be able to second guess what our wife, husband or child is going to do, because we know them well, but God’s knowledge of us is of a different order. Another part of the psalm says:  you knit me together in my mother’s womb’  He knows every cell in our body – he put us together. He knows us better than we know ourselves.  We can’t get away from him, the Psalm says – there is nowhere in the world that you can escape from God, even the land of the dead. Your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.’

This is reflected in our prayer – all our hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hidden. I said last time that good liturgy gets lots of concepts across in no time at all – and this phrase is one of them.

But the Psalm reassures us - It’s OK.  God knows just what we’re like already – warts and all.  And that’s a good thing!  Because he loves us just the way we are, and therefore we can come confidently into God’s presence.

It means firstly that: There’s no point in hiding from God – that’s just a waste of time.  We may as well get real with him.

Secondly, if God sees us the way we are – the challenge is that we need to see ourselves in that way too –  it’s really hard to know ourselves fully, as God knows us.  We veer either on the side of thinking that we’re not at all bad sorts really, or of thinking we’re really rubbish, and can never amount to much in the spiritual department. 

Actually, both these limit God’s work in us. 
The former was why the Scribes and the Pharisees got into trouble so much with Jesus. They thought they were it spiritually. They kept the law to the letter, but failed spectacularly in the humility department.  They thought their inner thoughts and life didn’t matter, it was all about outward appearance. 

The second is actually just as bad. Do you remember the story Jesus told about the talents?  3 men were given some money to invest – and two of them produced a profit.  The third was risk averse.  He buried his talent in the ground, and when the master claimed the money back – he gave it to him intact, without profit. 

God knows everything about us, including what we are capable of with the help of the Holy Spirit.  So, when you hear yourself say:  I haven’t got it in me to lead the intercessions, or I’m not good enough to read a lesson.  WE might think we’re a shy kitten, but God sees us as a lion! Think again.  Just think – if Jesus had done what Peter asked right at the beginning of his encounter with Jesus – which was ‘depart from me, I’m a sinful man’.  What would the history of the church be like?

Fortunately, for Peter, and for us, Jesus didn’t take him at his word.  He persisted with him.  And God persists with us too.  Don’t be afraid is the most commonly repeated verse in teh Bible.

So, don’t try and hide your faults, but do step out in faith when you hear God’s prompting – by doing so, you will discover your true potential. 

Hey – I’ve got through the first sentence  of the first prayer!

It goes on:  Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy Name.

So, we ask God to help us get our thought processes right – to think the way God wants us to think.  This is not confession – we come to that later in our service – this is about aligning our minds and emotions with God’s will. 

And we can only do that by the power of the Holy Spirit – Inspiration –  could be inhalation – we breathe in the Holy Spirit (one of the symbols for which is wind, or breath), as well as allowing the Holy Spirit to inspire us!

The oxygen we breathe in goes into every cell of our body, it’s absolutely necessary for releasing energy, which in turn fires all the other thousands upon thousands of chemical reactions that take place every second in our bodies.

We are asking the God who knows us through and through to fill us through and through with the Holy Spirit.

This is far more and far deeper than the prayer we often think it is – which might boil down to: ‘give us some religious feelings and help us to concentrate on God for the next hour’. It’s a prayer for a deep clean rather than a quick dust down.

And why do we pray this? 

So that we may perfectly love you...

The great commandment – You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might’

We are praying that the relationship between ourselves and God will continually deepen and strengthen.

And worthily magnify your holy name

So the prayer ends with asking God that we might worship him as he deserves.
 
The co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs died this week.  In a tribute, Radio 4’s pm programme broadcast a speech he made to young graduates.  In it, he said,  ‘when I get up in the morning, I ask myself – If this were the last day of my life, are  the things I have to do today, the things I really want to do?  If the answer to that question is no for several days, I re-evaluate what I am doing.

Steve Jobs was not a Christian. But we could easily take what he said and adapt it.  When I get up in the morning, I ask myself,
if I were to die tonight, and meet Jesus, are the things I am doing, the things that God really wants me to do?  If the answer is no, then perhaps we should re-evaluate our lives.   Don’t waste your life.  Make the most of it.  So you may worthily magnify God’s holy name.