Sermon for the 5th Sunday after Easter, 2021

Sermon for Easter 5, 2021

Fr. Tony Melton

5/9/21

“Ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full.” + In the Name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Today is the 5th Sunday in Easter and is called Rogation Sunday. Rogation comes from the word Rogare, meaning, “to ask,” taken from our Gospel: “Ask, and ye shall receive.” Thus, in this week the Church focuses on Prayer. This is one of the reasons why we’ve introduced the practice of Lectio Divina in our cell groups just prior to Rogation Sunday.

In the centuries of Christians celebrating Rogation Day, a certain emphasis naturally emerged: the flourishing of crops and the safety of the village. If they were to “ask” God for what they needed, these were pretty good starting places for people throughout history. We see this emphasis in our Psalm for this morning on page 5 and 6 in your booklet. “Thou crownest the year with thy goodness; * and thy clouds drop fatness. 13 They shall drop upon the dwellings of the wilderness; * and the little hills shall rejoice on every side. 14 The folds shall be full of sheep; * the valleys also shall stand so thick with corn, that they shall laugh and sing.” You can hear an echo of the Gospel passage there at the end: “that your joy may be full.”

With this psalm in their heads and in their mouths, ancient Christians, especially in England, would have a Rogation Day procession where they would carry long sticks and walk around the town or parish to “beat the bounds”, or boundaries of village. As they walked, they would strike anything that they wished to grow or be strengthened by God’s mysterious blessing, so that striking or beating became an enacted prayer. In Dallas, we did this procession every year, and we beat a lot of things: we beat the fence that God would keep out those who mean to do harm, we beat the Prayer Garden and Prayer Walk that God would make it beautiful and attractive to the neighborhood, we beat the Garden boxes that God would make them plentiful, and we beat the children, O the sweet children, we beat them that they, like the corn, would grow up so strong in the Lord that they will laugh and sing. I was always in charge of finding some huge patch of bamboo in the city of Dallas and would cut about 75 stalks for the procession ranging from 4 to 7 feet. We will have our first procession next year, but because we know that you can’t wait, parents are invited to beat their children as an act of prayer after the Liturgy.

The theme for this Sunday is that Prayer brings Joy: “Ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full.” In order to make the relationship between Prayer and Joy more solid in your minds, for the next few minutes I’ll give you a brief theology of Prayer. OK?

God exists in three distinct persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. These three persons have existed in perfect Joy and Harmony for all eternity, before the world ever was. Their existence together was not static or still. The Fathers described the union of the Godhead as a dance. The term used was called perichoresis. Say that with me. [Perichoresis.] Peri means “around”, like with the word perimeter. Choresis means dance like in the word choreography. Perichoresis means a “dancing around.” The three Persons of the Godhead are in an Eternal Dance of Joy. I’d like to believe that this is part of the reason why Ezekiel saw God as a wheel within a wheel. Perhaps he was seeing the Dance of the Godhead.

Perhaps you remember your first school dance. Pray for me, CTK, that God does not strike me dead for relating the eternal, joyful, mysterious, perichoretical dance of the Triune God to a Middle School Snowball. As St. Timothy’s we would have English Country Dances, which the students loved. But the newer students or the guests or the shy boys would often stand on the side, awkwardly excluding themselves from the dance. What it would take is for someone from within the dance to momentarily leave the dance, come over, take them by the hand, and pull them into the dance. This is what Jesus did for us. He is in the Dance, and has been for all eternity. God created Man for the Dance, but Adam and Eve chose to stay on the side. Jesus came and took us further up and further in to the perichoretical dance of the Triune God. This is what Prayer is. It is entering into the Dance.

A few Sundays ago I preached on the Joy that we have because Jesus has been born from the grave, a Joy that no man can take from us. Resurrection Joy is real. Resurrection Joy is yours. But how is Resurrection Joy accessed and from where does it radiate? “Ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full.” We have Resurrection Joy when we Pray, for in Prayer we are with God. Even more, we are in God. In His Joyful Dance because of Jesus. This is why we offer our Prayers in Jesus Name, because He is the One who gave us access to the Joyful Dance of Heaven. Do you understand why Prayer leads to Joy? It is about Communion. Man is made for Communion, for Prayer, for the Dance. This is the end of all things.

OK. So we now have connected Prayer with Joy, but as we look at the passages appointed for this Sunday, which by the way are the same passages used by Church since the 5th century, we have yet to connect Prayer and Joy with Crops. Our Old Testament Lesson from Ezekiel 34 and Psalm 65 both emphasize God’s blessing of the land with increase at the righteousness and prayers of His people. At a basic level, it is correct to say that the Church prays, we ask; God hears and answers our prayer; He gives us rain, crops, safety. And we, in turn, have Joy. So, is true that Prayer leads directly to Joy because we have direct access to the Dance. It is also true that Prayer leads to Crops which lead to Joy.

In fact, a fascinating study will show that, generally speaking, wherever the Gospel has gone and taken deep root, that country has flourished agriculturally. We take for granted that Muslim countries are mainly desert, but this was not always the case. Some of those lands have become wastelands since losing the Gospel. On the other side, countries that have accepted Jesus Christ have been the breadbasket of the world. There is a direct and simple relationship between Christian Prayer and plentiful crops.

But the relationship between Prayer, Joy, and Crops goes deeper than that. Turn to page 6 with me. Our lesson is from Ezekiel 34. Here God promises a covenant of peace with His people that will result in many things. The evil beasts will turn into a blessing. God will send rain to turn the wilderness into an orchard. He will guard the people from their enemies. And then God says, “And I will raise up for them a plant of renown, and they shall be no more consumed with hunger in the land, neither bear the shame of the heathen any more.” You could read these verses and the verses from our Psalm as an example of Christian prosperity. This would not be untrue. Christian nations generally do prosper. But what is really going on here is God in His covenant of peace is remaking the Garden. Can’t you hear it in Ezekiel 34? Rain, fruit trees, safety, docile animals, and a tree of renown in the middle?

This adds an important element in how we understand Prayer. Not only are we to Pray as if we are walking with God in the cool of the day like Adam and Eve did in the Garden. We are to understand that our lives, our families, our church, the area surrounding our church is, by God’s grace and by our prayers, being changed into the New Garden. Our Christian hope is not for some disembodied, ghostly eternity reserved only for the future so that our lives now are really just a shell. Churches that believe that are usually very ugly. Families that believe that are often contentious and empty. Their homes reflect the disjunct between Gospel and Garden, Prayer and Joy, Joy and Crops. There is nothing disjointed about the Christian Gospel. God is making Himself a People redeemed, invited to the Dance by the Host, the eternal Father, included in the Joyful Dance of the Godhead through union with Jesus Christ, sanctified and trained for the Dance by the Holy Spirit. This Dance of Prayer is the Source of Joy, and wherever God’s people join that Dance, you can expect that their homes, their workplaces, their churches, their private lives will be changed, bit by bit, into a little Garden. God is redeeming the Earth through His Church!

You will hear this idea a lot in the coming months. The theme of our Family Camp in early June is “The Christian Home: A Nursery for Heaven.” It will focus on how to make our homes into places of Prayer, nurseries or greenhouses for Heaven, the eternal Garden. When we move into the sanctuary, one of our first goals will be to train lay readers to help keep the Daily Office at church and to create a Garden for those who come to prayer to sit and contemplate the readings for that morning at their church. Only when we commune with God through Prayer will be radiate the Truth, Goodness, and Beauty of King Jesus.

So, beloved, let us give thanks that we have been invited to the Dance. Let us be grateful for the first buds of fruit in our lives, homes, and church because of God’s presence with us. Don’t sit on the side of the Dance, glum. Don’t stay in the desert, hungry. Let us devote ourselves to Prayer, that our Joy may be full. Amen.