“Our hearts are restless till they find their
rest in you”. Today’s
collect – the special prayer for the day – is one which many people love* I’m
always glad when it comes around. Like many of the best prayers it has a long
pedigree. It is based on the words of St Augustine of Hippo, a fourth century
Christian leader from North Africa, and it is from a book which is basically
his autobiography, called the “Confessions”.
To sum it up in one sentence, it’s the story about how his “restless heart”
finally came to rest in God.
Augustine had been born and brought up in the Roman town of
Thagaste in North Africa in the dying years of the Roman Empire, by a Christian
mother, Monica, and a pagan father, Patricius. The young Augustine didn’t look
remotely saintly, though. He was looking for meaning and happiness, as we all
do, but he tried whatever came to hand in order to find it. He tried wild nights
out with his mates, wine, women and song… but fun though they were, they didn’t
really hit the spot. All he ended up with was a rather tangled personal life,
which included a child, born when he was 17, by a woman he never got around to
marrying. So he looked to religion and philosophy – and there were plenty of
options to choose from. We may think we live in a multi-faith, multi-cultural
society, but it was nothing compared to the Roman Empire. All sorts of ideas jostled for followers.
There was Christianity, the newly declared the official faith of the empire.
There were the old Roman and Greek religions with their multitude of gods and
goddesses. There were mystery religions with strange secret rituals and beliefs.
Who had the truth? What was life really all about? By the age of twenty,
Augustine’s “restless heart” had led him to a group called the Manicheans, who
were followers of a Persian philosopher Mani. Like many groups we now tend to
lump together under the name Gnostics, the Manicheans believed that the created
world, the world of matter and the flesh, was at best inferior, the work of a
lesser god, and at worst evil. The soul was a divine spark, they said, which
had been imprisoned in the body, and longed to be free of it. To Augustine, who
often felt like a battleground of conflicting impulses and desires, it all
sounded very convincing.
But after a while Augustine
started to feel unsatisfied with the Manicheans too. Their accounts of creation
seemed too far-fetched, and he suspected that many of their teachers didn’t
really understand their own teachings. So he looked once more at Christian
belief, and gradually came to believe, at least in his head, that this was the
faith that made most sense to him. But it was still just in his head, not his
heart. He believed things about God, but putting his life into God’s
hands, letting his faith make a difference to his life was a different
matter. What might he have to give up? How might he
have to change? It was as if his “restless heart” had led him to the brink of the
ocean, but would he have the courage to jump into the water and trust it would
support him?
He struggled. He
thought big and complicated thoughts about faith and philosophy, but in the end
that wasn’t what really changed him. It was this. One day he was sitting in his
garden, he said, in despair, when he heard the sing-song voice of a child from
somewhere nearby.
“Take
it and read, take it and read…”
sang the child. Puzzled, he picked up a Bible. It fell open at the letter to
the Romans…”Let us live honourably, as in
the day, not in revelling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and
licentiousness, not in quarrelling and jealously. Instead, put on the Lord
Jesus…”
Somehow those words
went right to the heart of his struggle. Living well wasn’t just about changing
your mind, adopting a new set of philosophical beliefs; it was about letting
God change your life – and his life needed to change.
But he hadn’t worked
this out through his own cleverness, or through the teaching of some great
spiritual teacher; he’d been directed to it by the words of a child, who didn’t
even know that they were doing it. He’d been striving to find the way to God
with his restless heart, but all the time God had been right there waiting for
him to stop striving and to fall into his arms, into the place where he really
belonged. It was God who had found him. Indeed God had never lost him.
There are plenty of
restless hearts in the readings today too.
James writes to a
church full of people who are tossed about by their fears , by the “cravings that are at war within them” .
They covet things they can’t have. They are ruled by “bitter envy and selfish ambition” . They grasp for power, and they
don’t care who gets hurt along the way. And why? Because they are struggling to
find peace and meaning, not realising that what they seek is theirs already, if
they will only “draw near to God.” .
James talks about
the “harvest of righteousness, sown in peace” which they long for. Peace, in
the Bible – shalom in Hebrew - is always about far more than the absence of war
or the absence of noise. It’s about
everything being as it ought to be, in its proper place, healed and whole. And
it starts inside us, in our hearts. We can’t have peace out there, if we
haven’t got it in here. We strive for
wealth and status, for lots of “likes” on our facebook post or our Instagram
feed, for constant affirmation, we work our fingers to the bone to get that
promotion, but when we get them, we find that, actually, we don’t feel any
better at all because whatever we have gained we can also lose. It’s only when
we realise that we are held in God’s love, when we are centred and secure in
that, that we find the peace that can’t be destroyed or taken away. “Our hearts are restless till they find
their rest in you” says Augustine, and his words make as much sense now as
they did 1700 or so years ago when he first wrote them.
That’s a lesson
which Jesus’ disciples had to learn too. In our Gospel story today, he tries to
teach them, yet again, that he will be betrayed and killed but that he’ll rise
again. But they still aren’t ready to hear it. As they walk along the road,
Jesus is aware that they are squabbling among themselves. He knows what it’s
about. It’s what squabbles are always about. Who is
the greatest? It doesn’t matter whether it’s children fighting for the
biggest slice of cake, or nations fighting for land and political influence, our
squabbles are always, in some sense, about
wanting to feel bigger and better than others, because then we think we will
feel more secure and more significant in a world which is so much bigger than
we are, beyond our understanding and control.
For Jesus’ disciples
it was no different. Like all their fellow Jews they lived under the perpetual
threat of Roman takeover, and longed for a Messiah, God’s anointed one, to
deliver them from that threat, to make Israel great again (and if that sounds
familiar, it’s meant to). They want to believe Jesus is that person, and that
he’s about to take his throne, but the problem is that their vision of greatness
is one patterned on the empires they see around them. All they can imagine is
that Jesus will be like the Roman Emperor only infinitely bigger and better. And
when that moment comes, each of them wants to be his right hand man, the one
who will share the biggest slice of his power and glory… That person will have it made. They’ll never
have to worry about where the next meal is coming from ever again. They’ll have
won the lottery of life.
But when they
shamefacedly admit that this is really what they are thinking, Jesus simply
takes a child, a small child, a vulnerable child with not a scrap of power, and puts it in their midst.
If you want to really have that security you crave, the ultimate peace you are
trampling over each other to find, you need to take a lesson from this little
one. It’s only when you can welcome littleness and vulnerability, when you can
own and embrace the stuff in you which feels helpless, when you can accept that
actually, you really have no more power to control your life than this child
does, that you will discover that God is with you, at work in you, that he
loves you, and that there’s nothing you need to do, nothing you can do, to make
him love you more – or less – than he does already. Discover that and you won’t
need to worry about who is the greatest at all.
That’s as hard for
us to learn as it was for Jesus’ disciples and for those whom James was writing to and for Augustine, who struggled with it all
his life, but it’s the key to finding what we all need, the peace of God that passes understanding. The restlessness of our hearts may show itself
in all sorts of ways. We may be anxious about our lives or the lives of those
we love. We may be constantly distracted, never able to trust that we have
chosen the right path, or that what we have will be enough. We may be locked in
feuds or burdened by grudges which we can’t let go of because we can’t imagine
life without them. We may be relentlessly competitive, in ways that drive
others away from us.
Whatever form our restlessness
takes, though, Augustine – and James and Jesus – would tell us that the answer
to it is the same. “Lord, you have made us for yourself” says Augustine. We don’t
have to compete for God’s love, or work for it; we don’t have to push others
out of it in order to gain it. It is ours already. There is an “us-shaped”
place in the heart of God, an “me” shaped place, a “you” shaped place, a space
shaped like each of us, a space for each of us. All we have to do is fall into it
and learn to trust it, and our “restless hearts” will find the true rest they
have been craving.
Amen
and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you:
pour your love into our hearts and draw us to yourself,
and so bring us at last to your heavenly city
where we shall see you face to face;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you
in the unity of the Holy Spirit
one God, now and forever.
Amen
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