Sunshine Cathedral Sermons

The Good News Written

Ash Wednesday

From the wisdom of Charles Fillmore:

Ashes symbolize repentance. John the Baptist came, saying, “Repent ye; for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Repentance means denial; it is a relinquishment and should be made without too much vehemence. Therefore, I deny out of consciousness old error thoughts, as if I were gently sweeping away cobwebs, and I affirm positively and fearlessly that I am a child of God, and that my inheritance is from God…
In Christ it is not difficult to eliminate belief in strife and contention. If petty quarrels, jealousy, uncharitable thoughts come into my life, I overcome them by a quiet but positive denial made in the realization that no error has any power or reality in itself. I turn away from the belief in negation, and my thinking changes. I rid my consciousness of limited thoughts that have encumbered and darkened my understanding. I break down mortal thought and ascend into a spiritual realm… In the spirit of divine love I affirm: “Forgetting the things that are behind, I realize I am strong, positive, powerful, wise, loving, fearless, free spirit. I am God’s perfect child.”

Matthew 6.1-6 (The Message)

¹“Be especially careful when you are trying to be good so that you don’t make a performance out of it. It might be good theater, but the God who made you won’t be applauding. ^2-4“When you do something for someone else, don’t call attention to yourself. You’ve seen them in action, I’m sure — ‘play-actors’ I call them — treating prayer meeting and street corner alike as a stage, acting compassionate as long as someone is watching, playing to the crowds. They get applause, true, but that’s all they get. When you help someone out, don’t think about how it looks. Just do it — quietly and unobtrusively. That is the way your God, who conceived you in love, working behind the scenes, helps you out.

⁵“And when you come before God, don’t turn that into a… production either. All these people making a regular show out of their prayers, hoping for stardom! Do you think God sits in a box seat?

⁶“Here’s what I want you to do: Find a quiet, secluded place so you won’t be tempted to role-play before God. Just be there as simply and honestly as you can manage. The focus will shift from you to God, and you will begin to sense [God’s] grace.”

The Good News Proclaimed

Preached by the Reverend Doctor Durrell Watkins at the Sunshine Cathedral on Ash Wednesday, February 17, 2010.

Matthew chapter 6 is a hard passage of scripture. It isn’t hard to understand; it’s hard to accept. It is part of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, and much of that sermon is confrontive, challenging, prophetic. Chapter 6 is so difficult, we’ve enshrined part of it… the prayer Jesus taught us (often called the Lord’s Prayer) while ignoring the tone and teaching of the chapter. It’s always easier to venerate than to emulate, and so, we have repetitiously recited the Lord’s Prayer, while ignoring the larger context in which the prayer is offered.

Matthew’s Jesus says, “When you pray, don’t make a big production of it in the worship space and on street corners (which would certainly include public school class rooms), but instead, when you pray go to your ‘inner’ room, close the door, pray in secret. And God who is with you in the secret place will reward you.” Then in verse 9, he goes on to say, “This is how you are to pray…” and that’s where the Lord’s Prayer, as a model, is presented (a shortened version is repeated in Luke’s gospel).

Now we know the words to the prayer.
What we often over look is the method of the prayer:

Creator in heaven, hallowed is your name.
To acknowledge and honor our divine Source is the first step to achieving peace and hope in any given moment.

Your dominion come, your will be done on earth as in heaven.
The reign of God is the omnipresence of God. The will of God is for what is godly to be experienced in our lives (on earth as in heaven). What is godly? Peace. Hope. Joy. Love. Compassion. Goodwill. Generosity. Concern for others. After acknowledging and honoring the divine, we then allow ourselves to know that we are the conduits through which the divine presence and activity must flow.

Give us today our daily bread; and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And you will not subject us to trials but you will deliver us from evil.
Having acknowledged God and recognized our unity with God, we then declare that our needs are being met by God. God is offering us opportunities, and as we show love and grace, we experience love and grace in our own lives. We know that difficulties don’t come from God, but God is the one holding us in love no matter what happens in the world.

And some manuscripts end there; others add a doxology that probably came sometime later: For the dominion, the power and the glory are yours, now and forever. Amen.
Praise and gratitude will lift our spirits, increase our faith, and help us to allow more good to be experienced in our own lives. “Amen” simply means, “So be it” or “Let it be so” or as we say in the affirmative around here, “And so it is.”

The Lord’s Prayer isn’t a set of magic words that will earn us benefits if we say them over and over… in fact, repetitious public prayers are exactly what Matthew 6 tells us to avoid! But the Lord’s Prayer does offer us a model for how to effectively pray: Acknowledge the God of our understanding, recognize our unity with God, affirm the possibilities that God has in store for us, commit to doing our part because what God does for us God does through us, and then in gratitude and joyful expectation release the prayer to the perfection of divine right action. But as good as that model is, there is one more part to it…

“When you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray in secret” (Matt. 6.6). We sing our songs of praise, of course. We say our prayers… some poetic and uniform, some new and spontaneous. We sing the Lord’s Prayer (it is beautiful after all). We hear scripture read and we hear reflections on the texts. We share in a ritual feast of all-inclusive and unconditional love. We give our offerings, hug one another with love in our hearts, and all in all, it’s a pretty great worship experience. But then, we are to take that experience into our hearts, into our minds, into our bodies, so that what we shared together for an hour in this place, we can experience in the Silence in our homes, in nature, in the shower, in the car, and anywhere that we might find we can go into our “inner” room and pray in secret, in Silence.

That prayer of Silence isn’t about the words we say… it’s about simply practicing the presence of God. If the Lord’s prayer or a Psalm or an affirmation helps us get into an attitude of prayer, then fine, but then let it be followed by simple, sweet, silence… where every breath is a prayer, every heartbeat is a prayer, every good desire is a prayer.

And over time, we find that with OR WITHOUT words, we can acknowledge the presence of God, recognize our unity with God, expect the best from God, be grateful to God, and allow God to be God in, through, and as us. The Lord’s Prayer becomes not the words we say on Sunday, but the lives we live day in and day out.

This Lent, will you practice with me the art of living prayer?
We’ll say and sing our prayers in church, of course.

But then at home, every day, let’s spend time in the Silence. Just knowing that God is as close as our breath, that God is wanting only what is good for us, and then, we can be filled with gladness and gratitude and a willingness to let Life unfold in miraculous ways. That’s the Lord’s prayer… more than saying it, we want to live it. That is, after all, how we can pray without ceasing (1 Thess. 5.17).

This Lent, I hope you’ll worship every week with us. I hope you’ll give generously to your church. I hope you’ll affirm your sacred value and show compassion for others and work for justice where justice has been denied. I hope you’ll reflect on Spirit & Truth each day and I hope you’ll reflect on the Lenten lessons we’ll be sending by email each week. I hope you’ll take a Light University course and I hope you’ll give up one thing that is keeping you from living in utter joy… not chocolate or soda or smoking (though your doctor may want you to give up those things, and less sugar and fresher air is never bad advice)… but I want you to give up is some prejudice, some fear, some nagging sense that you aren’t good enough just as you are.

Now… how that’s a pretty tall order… worship weekly, be generous, study, and give up something that keeps us from being as in love with life as we ought to be! How can we do all that? Prayerfully. By practicing the presence of God… by spending time each day in the Silence, knowing that God is right where you are, wanting only the best for you, and by allowing yourself to feel glad and grateful for that truth. That’s how Jesus taught us to pray, and as we practice that kind of living prayer, we’ll find that Lent isn’t a time of self-denial, but of self-affirmation and of healing and of spiritual growth. This is the good news. Amen.