Sermon on September 27, 2020: 17th Sunday after Pentecost
There is a little prayer that some of us may have grown up praying. It goes like this:
Tony, Tony, look around. Something’s lost and must be found.
It’s a funny little prayer, and I didn’t grow up praying it because I was a Baptist and this isn’t a prayer that Baptists would pray. But for those of us who grew up as Roman Catholics, this one might be familiar. It’s a prayer that you might pray when looking for something you lost, asking for the intercession of St. Anthony of Padua, patron saint of lost and stolen items. Everyone who has prayed this prayer has a story about finding exactly what they were looking for right after they prayed it. There is a longer, more elegant version of this prayer, but even the short sing-songy version tells us something about the person who prays it. Praying this prayer reveals a few beliefs: the belief that there are saints in heaven, and that they can intercede to God on our behalf, and that this can impact the course of events on earth. Tony looked around, and something which was lost has now been found. It may be a childish sort of prayer, but it shows us something significant about prayer in general: that how we pray shapes what we believe.
There’s an old saying in Latin: lex orandi, lex credendi, which means something like “the law of prayer is the law of belief.” But a better way to translate it is that “praying shapes believing.” Lex orandi, lex credendi. The way you pray shapes what you believe. Whether you’re asking Tony to look around, or confessing your sins, or giving thanks for all the blessings of this life—those prayers shape the things you believe about God, about yourself, about the manner of life we are called to live as Christians.
Such prayers may be private, like a prayer to St. Anthony, or they may be public, like the prayers we say at mass. And it’s the public prayers, the prayers of the liturgy, which do so much of that shaping. As anyone who has spent plenty of time at mass will tell you, the prayers we pray have a way of sinking in. They are like tattoos inked upon our heart. They can change our spiritual DNA.
And the reverse is also true: what we believe will shape how we pray. We know this as Episcopalians. We are a people of the Prayer Book, and our liturgy is alive—it is not static, but moves through time. As times change, as beliefs change, so too do our prayers. Probably the best example of this is how our current prayer book, which we’ve had since 1979, affirms the belief that women are equal to men in human dignity and are therefore eligible to be ordained as bishops and priests in the church.
For most of its history, The Episcopal Church did not believe that. Even now, some other churches still don’t believe it. But when the church was moved, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to affirm that women can embody the presence of Christ just as much as men, this belief changed the shape of our prayer, and of our prayer book. Believing shapes praying. Lex credendi, lex orandi.
Prayer and belief. It’s like the chicken and the egg—which came first? We don’t know. But even Scripture shows us how intertwined they are. Today’s second lesson is a passage from St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians, where he is instructing the Philippian church to turn away from selfish ambition and practice humility, regarding others as better than yourselves. It’s like Paul is preaching a sermon and he’s got good things to say, but he really needs an illustration to connect with his audience and drive home his point. So right in the middle of his letter, he starts quoting a hymn that we may not even know is a hymn—but his listeners do. They know what he’s doing.
Be humble, says Paul. And you need to be humble not just because it’s the right and good and moral thing to do, but because humility is what Christ embodied. If you want to call yourselves Christians, then let your mind be like the mind of Christ, who
though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
That’s a hymn. We don’t have the music, but it’s a hymn. It’s called the Christ Hymn, and Paul’s audience would have known it. Hymns are prayers set to music. The Christ Hymn is a prayer, but it is also a statement of belief. In fact, it is thought that the Christ Hymn is quite perhaps the earliest Christian creed.
We are used to thinking of creeds as statements of belief—ways of right thinking about God and the church and ourselves. I wonder whether we have ever thought about the creeds as prayers—as ways we speak to God and connect with God. Ways that we are asking, and not just telling.
The Christ Hymn is a prayer that we should know inside and out. They are words that we should strive to know by heart. They show us who Jesus was. They reveal that God does not exploit—that exploitation is antithetical to the divine life. Rather, God is infinitely giving, giving to the point of absurdity, giving to the point of danger, giving even to the point of death. Jesus shows us the true heart of God in his life and ministry, in his crucifixion and death, and in his resurrection and ascension. In all that he did, he stretched out his arms and offered himself, in obedience to God’s will, a perfect sacrifice for the whole world.
That is the shape of the life that he lived. It is the shape we are called to imitate as Christians, a salvation that we can work out only when Christ is at work within us. It will put us at extreme odds with the world, will it not? Exploitation is the world’s inner logic; power is grabbed, not given up; ruthlessness is what wins the day, not humility.
But the Christ Hymn shows us how to believe otherwise, and how to pray otherwise. It’s a prayer for us to pray until it shapes us into people who believe that it’s true. Lex orandi, lex credendi. But there’s a third part of that saying: Lex vivendi—that is, how we live. As we pray, so also we believe, so also we live.
Compartmentalization is impossible for the Christian. Prayer, belief, and life are interwoven, interconnected. They must be. That’s why the Christ Hymn is so powerful—because it’s a prayer that can change us from the inside out. A prayer that enables us to know Christ so that we can make him known. So that our minds may be patterned after the mind of Christ—that prayer may shape belief, and belief may shape action, for the honor and glory of the name that is above every name, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.