The
Rev’d Stephen E. Stults
St. Barnabas Anglican Church
St. Barnabas Anglican Church
The Fifth
Sunday after Easter (Rogation Sunday)
May 5, 2013
“Spirituality and Action”
James 1:22 22 But be ye doers of the word, and
not hearers only, deceiving your own selves.”
And
John 16:23-24 23 And in that day ye shall ask me
nothing. Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in
my name, he will give it you. 24 Hitherto have ye asked nothing
in my name: ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full.
Imagine this scene: two men, friends, Christians, are having
breakfast together in a local diner.
After ordering and receiving their coffee, one man remarks to the other,
“Man, the spirits are bad today. On the
drive over here, I had to rebuke a lust demon three times. Then, some guy cut
me off, and I had to deal with an anger spirit. Wow…” His friend replied, “Yeah, man, I know what
you mean. You know business has been tough lately. On my drive here, I had to rebuke a regret
demon, as well as a bitterness demon.
You’re right, they are really active today.”
Sounds pretty far-fetched, doesn’t it?
To our modern, rationalist minds, this is just crazy…After all, there aren’t
such things as “lust demons” or “anger spirits”, or “regret demons”, are
there. Right? Really?
What if people really spoke this way?
What if we actually realized the raw spiritual activity around us? What if we actually recognized and dealt with
the spiritual forces affecting us every day?
Once again, to many modern Christians, and certainly to the modern
rationalist, this is pure superstition.
“It simply can’t be. Spirits are simply products of man’s imagination.” Really…
Yet, it wasn’t always seen this
way. It was said that in Constantinople,
one of the world’s greatest Christian cities until its overthrow by Islam in
the middle 15th century, even in the barbershops one could hear
discussions about the Holy Trinity and the nature of God Himself. Religion and
Christianity was freely discussed by all. Also, in Medieval Europe, there was a
very high recognition of spirits, both angelic and demonic. One might say that
the Medieval world, with all its “backwardness”, was actually more accurate
than the post-modern society of today. Some believe that their recognition of
the spiritual world was far more correct than our blindness to it.
This priest would submit to you that all
of us are engaged in a spiritual battle, in some way, every day. The problem is, most people, even Christians,
are not aware of it, and therein lies the real danger for them. If we ignore
the spiritual realities around us, we are in a much more dangerous state than
we realize. Recall if you will, from The
Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, how Uncle Screwtape, the senior tempter,
tells his neophyte nephew, Wormwood, that one of Satan’s greatest weapons is
convincing the world that he doesn’t exist.
How true, how sadly true. Instead
of being spiritually attuned, many, or even most modern folk go blithely along
in their humanistic arrogance to their own spiritual peril. In fact, the onset
of a spiritual attack is usually so subtle and so insidious that even the
mature Christian may not realize that he or she is being assaulted until they
are well into the experience itself.
This priest can’t tell you how many times this exact experience has
happened to him. When the priest feels depression, lust, regret, or anger to an
inordinate degree, he often doesn’t realize the source until he is in its
grips. Then, the Holy Spirit comes to my
aid, and I am able to recognize and rebuke the spirits. After rebuking the
spirit in the Name of Jesus, this priest feels a lightening of his spirit, and
God’s Sunlight pours into my soul again.
This may sound terribly Fundamentalist,
but it is very important to the soul who wants to “grow in grace as he grows in
age”, to paraphrase the statement from Family Morning Prayer in the back of the
Prayer Book. We have the power to control our temperament and our outlook with
prayer. One way to do this is to
recognize the various spirits seeking an audience with our your soul. If in the
words of St. John, if that spirit cannot confess that Jesus is the Christ, that
spirit must not be heeded. In fact, that
spirit needs to be rebuked in the name of Jesus Christ and sent packing back to
the infernal regions from whence he came.
You see, you, the individual Christian, have the power to use Jesus’
name to control who you speak to spiritually, and more importantly, who speaks
to you.
Remember, St. Paul tells us in 1
Corinthians 14:10 “There are, it may
be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification.”
When you have thoughts that don’t feel like your own, take a moment and
ask, is this thought (spirit) able to confess Christ? If so, it will
remain. If not, the thought will flee in
horror and loathing.
Right now, you are probably thinking,
“Whoa….Fr. Stults has gone off the deep end.
Voices in my head, indeed….crazy…” Well, this priest does know that we
are strange creatures, with one foot in the physical world, and one foot in the
spiritual world. This is owing to the
Trinitarian nature. We too, reflect the
glory of God in our makeup, for we too
have three basic parts (or “persons” if you will: mind, body, and soul. Note please, that two of our parts are
ethereral, they can’t be touched, tasted, or handled. Yet, please tell me if your mind, or your
soul isn’t real. In fact, we will submit
to you that they are more real than your body, for they last forever.
As we have said many times in the past,
and will, no doubt, say many times in the future, the seemingly “real” things
around us are solid and tangible, yes, but they are not permanent. All of the
material objects around us, and yes, we ourselves, will fall into decay,
someday. Our souls, our spirits, the “stuff’
that really makes us “us”, will last forever. It, being invisible (at least in
this realm), yet incredibly real, will have no ending. Once again, St. Paul instructs us out of 2
Corinthians 4:18 - 5:1 “While we
look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen:
for the things which are seen are temporal;
but the things which are not seen are eternal.”
Once again, we Christians, while
rejoicing and using this world’s good as a gift from God, do not put our trust
in it, for it is not able to save our soul.
So, what, you may ask, does any of this
have to do with today’s lessons from Holy Writ?
Basically, this “spirituality stuff” is all well and good, but it sure
doesn’t fill my gas tank or buy me a loaf of bread; to which we reply, really?
In today’s
Gospel, Jesus tells us to ask in His Name, and we will receive. He tells the disciples that up to point, they
have asked nothing. Christ tells them to
ask, they “your joy may be full.”[i] In
this case, Jesus is telling his disciples (and us) that we are to ask Christ
for all things, that our joy may be full.
There is no doubt in my mind that this asking extends to all aspects of
life, both material and spiritual. You might think that this concerns just
“things”, but it goes much farther than that.
In fact, this asking pertains to one of most important prayers a
Christian can ever pray, which coincides with that great Feast of the Church
upcoming, Pentecost, or as we Anglicans call it, Whitsunday. What prayer are we talking about? Simply that
wonderful prayer that the Holy Spirit come to us and make His abode with us. As
we have spoken of recently, we need not be alone, ever, unless we desire to
be. If we have asked our Father, through
the intercession of the Son, that the Comforter come to live with us, and be
with us, we are never alone. Praise God!
Thus, when Christ tells us to ask, he is
asking us to seek a closer relationship with Him.. Yes, that certainly means to
ask for our material needs, of which Our Father is acutely aware. He knows what we need, and we should
certainly seek those things which are needful from Him… Even those things which
are not especially needful may be asked for, as well. It’s just that things may not coincide with God’s
Will for us. This, coming from the man
who used to ask God to help find his golf balls when a boy…..
The point is, we are to ask, that “our
joy may be full.” In our asking, we should ask that whatsoever we ask for
accords with God’s Will. In so doing, we are seeking to be in God’s Will in all
things.
This is a good and worthy prayer. All of this should be done with the goal of
strengthening our relationship with God.
In so doing, all of us will find that the quality of our lives, despite
our circumstances, will be greatly enhanced.
So far, all of this has dealt with the purely spiritual, and this
is very important. There is no doubt
that the basis for a healthy life is a sound, balanced spiritual
orientation. Yet, as our Epistle from
St. James reminds us, one cannot simply abandon the physical and the material
Most of us, except for cloistered monastics, have to live in the here and now,
every day. By the by, as an aside, life
inside a monastery or a convent still has plenty of the world about it. Unfortunately, lest one thinks that the enclosed
religious life is perfect, let us remember that man’s fallen nature always
follows him. It may not be so
pronounced, but it is there.
St. James’ wonderful epistle is such a
wonderful “reality check” for all of us.
James strips away the gloss of surface holiness to tell us that aside
from a healthy spiritual orientation, one must act. One must live one’s faith. In fact, when one
does do things worthy of a Christian, one really completes the Christian
life. Yes, one must pray, one must
worship, and one must act. In James’
wonderful words, James 1:27 - 2:1 27 Pure religion and undefiled
before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their
affliction, and to keep himself
unspotted from the world.”
Let us ask God, in our asking, to lead
us to do the things we need to complete our spiritual life. We should pray,
we should ask, and we should do as we are called to do.
These are the keys to a fulfilling Christian
life. Glory be to God.
In the name of the Father, and of the
Son, and of the Holy Ghost…..AMEN
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