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Looking at God

Sermon preached by John Armes at Holy Communion on 29 October 2006, Charity Sunday (Task Brazil)

There's a story told about the saintly French priest John Vianney, the Curé D'Ars. An old peasant in his village rarely attended worship on a Sunday but would frequently visit the church during the week. He would sit there for a while and then leave. Eventually the priest felt he must speak to the old man. 'Do you mind telling me what you do when you go to church?' he asked. 'Well, sir' replied the man, 'I sits and looks at God and God looks at me and then I goes home.'

In its own way that's quite a good description of prayer - looking at God whilst God looks at me. I know we sometimes think of prayer in terms of what we do in church on a Sunday morning - full of lots of words; making lots of noble sounding requests we suspect won't be answered. But actually, many of us will relate to what that old man was getting at. He comes to the deserted church, away from his small, overcrowded home, away from the hassles of life and rests for a few minutes in his awareness of the One who is beyond words and in any objective sense beyond knowing. And then, revived and restored, he goes away again.

We may not speak about it in the same way, but we might recognise in ourselves a longing for the same kind of experience; something that takes us out of ourselves and allows us for a moment to be touched by something or someone that transcends us. For us it may well not be a church building, but perhaps we have a special place or a special time that we escape to, seeking renewal and refreshment.

It's partly to do with gaining a sense of perspective. Sometimes in newspapers a very small object may be photographed beside a pound coin to give an idea of its size. Prayer gives us this same sense. We may think we are very important, until we line ourselves up with God. We may think we are irrelevant, until we get a glimpse of God's love for us.

The story of Job is about this kind of perspective. As a man of exemplary faith who has everything and loses everything, Job's life is a convenient conceit on which to hang an extended reflection on the problem of suffering. In a sense the ending of the story, that we heard today, rather undermines the rest of the book. If God's ways are unknowable, to the extent that God's favour does not necessarily express itself in wealth and health, it's rather too convenient that Job ends up even richer than before.

Anyway, the conclusion Job reaches, before being blessed with all those donkeys and children, is that God is too wonderful to understand. Previously he heard with his outward ears, now he sees with his inward eyes that he is infinitely inferior to God; he has a new perspective, in other words. Seeing God more fully allows him to see himself more truthfully too.

In the same way, prayer moves us towards humility, by which I mean it helps us to gain a proper sense of self. A proper sense of self; let's be clear about this. Too often religion can be used as a way of reinforcing guilt, of telling people they're inadequate, of persuading them that no matter what they do it will never be good enough. This is not what I mean by humility. Humility is to recognize ourselves as we really are; less than God, loved by God.

Of course, like Job we may be led to repent in 'dust and ashes' because when illuminated by the bright light of God's love we discover things we regret or make us feel wretched about ourselves. But equally we'll be shown that nothing, however terrible, removes us from that love. Prayer presents us with a proper sense of self because it helps us to see ourselves, if only for a moment, how God sees us.

Without this still centre our various lists of requests, our intercessions as they're called, mean very little. For one thing God doesn't have to be told what we need; God knows there's a war in Iraq, that life makes us anxious, that somebody's ill. But for another, we're reminded in our second reading that Jesus our High Priest intercedes for us. Or, as St Paul puts it in his letter to the Romans, the Spirit interprets our inarticulate groans, our deepest longings that we cannot even put into words. In other words we don't need to list everything, or to worry that we might miss something or someone out.

What's more important is that we first place our petty desires and obsessions in the context of God's wisdom and goodness; to find a way of praying that takes us out of ourselves and identifies us instead with a process of understanding and love, of transformation and change. This kind of prayer is a risky business for we're likely to find that it requires us to change too; to become part of the answer to our own prayers; part of the answer to other people's prayers.

We don't need lists yet, as the story of Bartimaeus suggests, sometimes we do need to ask for what we want. Bartimaeus comes to Jesus with a prayer. 'Son of David, have mercy on me.' His persistence wins him an audience with Jesus. It's then, in the presence of Jesus, that he's able to articulate what he really wants.

To me, the most curious thing about the story is that Jesus asks him, 'What do you want me to do for you?' You'd have thought it was obvious, even to someone far less perceptive than Jesus! And yet, perhaps it was important for the blind man himself to make his request. Too often we make assumptions about the disabled without asking their opinion. 'What do you want?' Sometimes we assume that a person wants rid of their disability when all along they just want to be treated as a person rather than a problem.

But perhaps too it's important that we speak our needs to God because it establishes the kind of intimacy that God desires, that recognises that God really is concerned with all the tiny details of our tiny lives. But, more crucially than all these things, Bartimaeus is required to become a willing accomplice in the healing - he has to become part of the answer to his own prayer - and that means owning up to his real need (not always an easy thing to discern).

In fact he receives more than he asks for. His eyesight is restored, but more importantly he follows Jesus on the way. This suggests that he's developed the same inner vision that Job was blessed with - indeed, he sees now more clearly than most of the crowd; he sees that Jesus is someone to follow. He knows what he wants, and cooperates in his healing, but as in any encounter with God, he gets more than he expects. Like us he discovers that prayer is a risky business. An encounter with the God of love means that our lives will change for ever.

Today we're given the chance to be the answer to prayer by directing our giving towards Task Brazil a charity that gives hope and a future to some of the thousands of street children in Rio de Janeiro. Let's be generous. We have no need to ask them what they want; Task Brazil are telling us. This Charity Sunday, like all our Charity Sundays, is not about parading our generosity, but a way of accepting responsibility for the things we say to God; a way of recognising that like the French peasant or blind Bartimaeus, when we looks at God and God looks at us, our life will never be quite the same again.

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