A Prayer Practice For Epiphany
A Prayer Practice for Epiphany
Our Epiphany sermon series is called New Beginnings and we’ll be walking with Jesus as we study the stories collected in Mark’s gospel. The light of our theme graphic is prompting us to attune ourselves to what the Spirit is illuminating in our lives in what we learn and take away from these stories.
I’m inviting you to a practice of imaginative prayer as you encounter these stories with Jesus. Below you’ll find the sermon texts for the season of Epiphany. Feel free to use them as you engage in this practice that I’ve borrowed from Richard Rohr’s daily devotions from the Center for Action and Contemplation.
New Beginnings with Jesus
Mark 2:1-22
Mark 4:1-34
Mark 5:1-20
Mark 5:21-43
Mark 6:1-29
Mark 8:27-9:8
Many of the stories are about someone being healed. Where are you in relation to the healing? Are you the one being healed? Are you there in the crowd? There are also quite a few parables and teachings. How are you receiving the teaching? Where are you when you are listening to him teach?
So please enjoy engaging in this imaginative and illuminating practice. And let me know what you think. You can comment below. Or you can share your experience with me on Sunday. I’m always curious and gain so much from how God speaks to you through scripture.
Imaginative Prayer
Adapted from Margaret Silf, Inner Compass: An Invitation to Ignatian Spirituality (Loyola Press: 1999), 152–153
The call to friendship with God invites us to allow our lives, with everything we most truly are, to become more closely linked to the life, death, and resurrection of the Lord and to everything he truly is. . . . One way to allow this closer linking to happen is to enter imaginatively into scenes from the earthly life of Jesus, in what is called imaginative meditation [or contemplation].
Choose a passage that seems to speak to you in some way—a favorite Gospel scene perhaps, or one of the healing miracles. If you don’t know which passage to choose, just rest, relax, and ask God to guide you; then wait to see whether any particular scene or event comes to mind. . . .
When you have chosen a passage, read it several times until it is familiar and you feel at home with it.
Now imagine that the event is happening here and now and that you are an active participant in it. Don’t worry if you don’t find it easy to imagine it vividly. . . . And don’t worry about getting the facts right. You may well find that your scene doesn’t take place in first-century Palestine, but in Chicago (or San Juan Capistrano ☺) rush-hour traffic, or that the desert tracts of the Good Samaritan story turn into the sidewalks in your neighborhood.
Ask God for what you desire—perhaps to meet God more closely or to feel God’s touch upon your life.
Fill out the scene as much as you can by, for example, becoming aware of who is there, the surroundings, the sights, the smells, the tastes, the weather, and the feel of the place (peaceful or threatening). What role do you find yourself taking in the scene—for example, are you one of the disciples, a bystander, or the person being healed? Listen inwardly to what God is showing you through your role in the scene. . . .
Talk with the characters in the scene, especially to Jesus. Speak from your heart simply and honestly. Tell him what you fear, what you hope for, what troubles you. . . . Don’t worry if your attention wanders. If you realize that this is happening, just bring yourself gently back to the scene for as long as you feel drawn to stay there.
There are two absolute rules:
Never moralize or judge yourself
Always respond from your heart and not from your head
Our purpose in prayer is not to defend or condemn ourselves or to come up with any kind of analysis or sermon, but simply to respond, from our inmost depths, to what God is sharing with us of God’s own self.
Praying For You
Pastor Leanne
Community Presbyterian Church
32202 Del Obispo
San Juan Capistrano. CA 92675
949-493-1502