Psalm 119:97-104 & John 16:12-15

Rumination

I have a confession to make. I eat too quickly. I am almost always the first to finish my meal when I’m eating with others. It’s not that I deliberately rush or bolt my food, it’s just that my plate seems to get cleared pretty quickly. I never got the hang of chewing everything 30 times or however many times it is you’re meant to chew things. And, to be honest, I rarely see eating as much more than refuelling. I’m the very opposite of a foody. On special occasions, if I’m out for a meal with Liz, or have folk round for dinner, I will make an effort to eat more slowly. I know how to do it, it just takes effort and concentration to remember not to shovel in the next forkful as soon as the last is on it’s way down. When I go on retreat to the Franciscan monastery at Glasshampton we take meals in silence, and everybody waits until the last person is finished before moving. In this context I am very aware of my eating patterns, and deliberately slow down and engage with the act of eating, rather than just refuelling.

But hold on a minute, I hear you thinking, we did fasting last week, why is he going on about food and eating again, I thought that this week we were exploring meditation? Well, there is a good reason, I promise. I’d like to suggest that there are some parallels between our approach to physical food and our approach to spiritual food. Are we people who bolt through our spiritual meals, seeing them merely as refuelling, or can we, by practising the discipline of meditation, learn to appreciate, savour and actually extract all the goodness from the word of God and the other things that point us to Jesus?

For some of us, however, I know that there may be warning bells when people start talking about meditation. And these warning bells are well founded. There are understandings of meditation that can be deeply unhelpful and lead us away from God. However, it seems to me that the best response to this is not to condemn all meditation, but to understand what Godly, Christian meditation looks like and to practice that. Otherwise, we cut ourselves off from a good gift of God, that is intended to deepen our relationship with God. This understanding is built on the fact that meditation is found throughout the pages of the Bible. We’ve read about the psalmist’s meditation on God’s word, we read of Jesus going off into the wilderness to pray and meditate, and in the passage from John we are hear Jesus promising that the Holy Spirit will continue to make known things to God’s people. How can we receive those things if we are not listening for them attentively?

So, what do I mean by Christian meditation, what does the Bible mean when we read about meditation?

Christian meditation is about developing the ability to hear God’s voice and to obey God’s word.
Christian meditation is aimed at filling the mind with an awareness of God’s pervading presence, and living in the light of that awareness.
To do this means using our imagination and intellect to reflect on Scripture, our lives, creation, the world around us, while being open to the Holy Spirit speaking to us.

Let’s look at each of these in turn.

Firstly, Christian meditation is about developing the ability to hear God’s voice and to obey God’s word.

It is my firm belief that God continues to speak today. Consider the alternative, that the last thing that God said was the last verse of Revelation. None of the great Christians writers over the centuries – Luther, Wesley, C.S. Lewis, Mother Julian, were channels of God’s communication to the world. None of the sermons ever preached, including this one, contained any communication from God, they were just the thoughts and reflections of people. None of reassurances of God’s peace ever experienced in the dark night were anything but wishful thinking. If I believed this to be the case, I would not be here this morning – not just not preaching, I wouldn’t even be in church. But, it is my belief and experience that God continues to speak to us, and that it is worth spending the time learning to listen. Of course, what we hear should be tested against Scripture and in counsel with other Christians, but we can all hear God speaking with us.

A simple example. We had a PCC meeting on Monday evening, and we were discussing what we planned for the new Action Groups. I’d already had some ideas, and they seemed good to the meeting to accept, and then Malcolm asked if they could also encourage us to celebrate what God is doing in each area of church life. The way that the suggestion fell in the room was like a light bulb going on. It just seemed right and good to everyone in the room. It was a God moment – Malcolm was attentive to the prompting of the Holy Spirit, obedient to speak, gave it to the community for discernment and we, together, heard God leading us.

That obedience thing is really important. We read this in the book of James,

“Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. But whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom and continues in it – not forgetting what they have heard but doing it – they will be blessed in what they do.”

Christian meditation, looking intently, is all about hearing and doing.

Secondly, Christian meditation is aimed at filling the mind with an awareness of God’s pervading presence, and living in the light of that awareness.

God is everywhere, we are never alone or abandoned. There is no part of our lives that God is not interested in or part of. God is present, not absent. When we sing about welcoming God, that is not because God is not there if we do not welcome or has only just arrived, but about us deliberately choosing to acknowledge God’s presence and honour that presence. If and when we have experiences of meeting with God in a particularly intense way, that is not because God has showed up but because we have been open to God’s presence and what God is doing on that occasion.

I know that sometimes it does feel like God is absent, the heavens have turned to brass, and the storms of life overwhelm us. Even Jesus felt like that, crying out from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me”. These are hard and painful times. They can be times of correction, times of training, times of us developing roots that go deeper as they search out the water of the Spirit in the time of drought, but sometimes they do seem just hard and meaningless. It is at these times that we have to decide whether or not we actually trust God. Do we believe the promise that God loves us and will not abandon us? Will we hold on to our faith, even if only by our fingernails?

Meditation can help us to do this, as we choose to fill our minds with the accounts of God at work from our own memories, from Scripture, from other Christian writings, with what we see in creation around us. This isn’t just for super spiritual experts, it’s for all of us. It has to be, because we all face these challenges. And what we hear from God as we meditate is very often mundane and practical, insights into how to relate to grumpy teenagers, or deal with a challenge at work, or to face the closing in of life in old age or infirmity. God is present in the every day, and will guide us through the every day as we become more aware of God’s presence there.

Thirdly, Christian meditation involves using our imagination and intellect to reflect on Scripture, our lives, creation, the world around us, while being open to the Holy Spirit speaking to us.

Depending on our personality, and our life experiences, especially, I think, with education, some of us will be more comfortable using our intellects in meditation, and some of us will be more comfortable using our imaginations. Some of us will be happier answering the question what do we think about something than expressing how we feel about it. Both approaches are valuable, and both have dangers if they are not balanced by the other. A purely intellectual, head approach, can leave us with cold analysis, only informed by what can be measured. A purely emotional, heart approach can leave us unrooted, vulnerable to being carried away. So, we would do well to develop a balanced approach that engages the whole of us – mind, spirit, body and senses in engaging in meditation, in perceiving the whole reality of what is happening and God is saying.

With our whole selves we approach the Bible, not in this case to study – we’ll be looking at the importance of that later in the series, but to meditate, to internalise and to allow the Holy Spirit to apply to our lives. A few years ago I was struggling with understanding how God saw me. My spiritual director encouraged me to meditate on God’s words to Jesus at his baptism. So, every day for a month I read the couple of verses from the gospels, each of which are slightly different, containing God’s words to Jesus at his baptism. I didn’t just read them though – I imagined myself there, I felt the water, I heard the voice, I reflected on the shades of difference in meaning in the different accounts. And so I heard God speaking those words over me, as I am in Christ, and so the truths of how God sees me were embedded in my heart and mind.

With our whole selves we reflect on our lives. A useful physical way of doing this is by simply doing a palms down, palms up exercise. We might begin with our palms down, and release things in our lives to God – anxieties, guilt, bitterness, frustrations. We acknowledge them in our lives, we name them, and we release them to God. After a while, in which we are conscious of surrendering these things to God, we then might turn our hands over to receive from God. We may ask to receive God’s forgiveness, peace, grace, love, patience, joy, in various areas of our lives. We again then might wait. We might have a sense of God doing something, we might not, but we will have created an expectant space for God to step into.

With our whole selves we can meditate on creation. The psalmists write of the whole of creation proclaiming the glories of God. Paul writes of the groanings of creation as it awaits the revealing of the sons of God. As we are in our gardens, out on the hills, walking through town, what is God saying through the creation? As we become aware of its groanings, what is God calling us to do?

With our whole selves we can meditate on the world around us, the events of our time – locally, nationally and globally. As we scroll through our Facebook feed, listen to the news, read the papers, are there patterns emerging? Does a particular news story grab our attention or strike our heart? Perhaps a little bit of homework for you. Buy a newspaper this week and give half an hour reading through it, explicitly with the question in your mind, “God what do you want me to see here and what do you want me to do about it?”

Christian meditation is about being open to what is God saying at this time, to us and to the community, through the Word, through lived experiences, through creation, through events in the world, and about being obedient to what God is telling us to do about it. I encourage you to set aside times to deliberately focus on this in order to build your capacity for attentiveness and obedience to God. You might like to share your experiences of this, and encourage each other, in your home groups. If you have testimonies or receive insights that might be helpful for the whole church, please do share them with me. God is speaking. Are we ready to listen and to do?

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