Practice Connecting with God

Welcome to the weekly Dulen Podcast, a ministry of Dulen United Methodist Church in Falls Church, Virginia. Each week, we share a short reflection on faith and life in community, exploring how God's grace moves among us and through us. We're glad you're here.

Hello, friends. It's me, James, pastor here at Doolin Church, and welcome to another opportunity for us to reflect together about what faith looks like in our lives. As you know, we've been working our way through the three general rules, and that third general rule is what our topic is today. Remember the first two? First, do no harm.

Second, do all the good you can in all the places you can, etcetera. The third one, I'm going to say it the way pretty close to the way John Wesley wrote it, And then I'm going to tell you how I interpret it, because I think it might be helpful. John Wesley said to us in that third rule that we should attend to the ordinances of the church. Now, by ordinances of the church, the things that kept order, things like go to worship, and take communion, and pray, and read scripture. These were all practices that he was encouraging.

Now, in a recent book, little tiny book that were about the three rules written by Ruben Job, I believe, he said the third rule boils down to love God. I think that's and if you read that chapter in his book, you'll understand what he means, and I think that he's probably right, but I think it's misleading. We are meant to love God. That part's not misleading, But what I think John Wesley means, and that has been helpful for me as a way of thinking about it, is when I hear attend to the ordinances of the church, what I hear in that is find the practices that bring you, draw you closer to God and practice them. So if for instance, meditation is a way you are drawn closer to God, meditate.

If reading scripture, verse by verse in a Lectio Divina format, If you don't know what that is, we'll talk about that in another session, but Lectio Divina, okay, to make it short, you read the scripture and you listen to what it says to you. Just listen for the words, how the spirit speaks to you today for a word, a phrase, an image that rises when you read a particular text. You keep it short when you read it. So you might read it that way. You might read it in a Bible study where you pull out a number of commentaries and you come to understand what the original intent was.

You might discuss scripture with other folks. You might read scripture from two or three different versions of the Bible, so you get different kind of takes on it and then listen for it. You might journal the Bible, read scripture and write about it. So if reading scripture brings you closer to God, a particular form of reading scripture, do that. If journaling helps you keep close to God, by all means journal.

If praying like daily saying the Lord's prayer, for me, it has become saying the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic every day and then doing a slow translation in my mind of what the words mean in addition to what we've translated them as, the way we say it every Sunday morning at Dualit Church. There are some other implications, some other ways of hearing it. We'll talk about that in a series that I'm going to be preaching starting in January, but there are other implications. So I listen for that. And so when I pray the Lord's Prayer, I'm looking for the ways not only that I'm speaking to God, but how God is speaking to me as I pray.

Maybe silence is the way that you connect with God. Do you see there are so many possibilities about the ways that you can find a practice or a series of practices that draw you closer to God. You could make a practice out of the first two rules. Do no harm. Your practice could be to intentionally state ways you're not going to do harm in the morning and to at the end of your day, ask the question, in what ways do I see myself having done harm today where I tripped up a little bit, where I did make that mistake of doing harm?

You could have an intention entering your day to do all the good that you can. And when you take stock at the end of the day, you could look at the opportunities you had to do good and the opportunities you took to do good can be an opportunity to affirm the work that you're doing on God's behalf, the good you're doing for God in this world and for others. It's an opportunity to take stock. There is a practice called the examine that traditionally is done at the end of the day. It was taught by Saint Ignatius.

The Jesuits practice it. And at the end of the day, you sort of take stock of the day. You ask yourself what places you felt close to God, What places you felt far away from God? And what were you doing in both of those times? Did you play a part in feeling closer to God or feeling further away from God?

Is there something going on in your life? Could have small group is another way to practice. There are taking walk in nature. There are so many ways that you can practice the presence of God. One of my favorite, very simple saints, Brother Lawrence, he's a simple saint to me anyway, you know, he was illiterate so he did not write a book, but a book was written about him called Practicing the Presence.

And it took a series of his quotes, how he was a monk and he often had kitchen duty, washing dishes and the like, and he made washing dishes a practice to the glory of God, peeling potatoes to the glory of God, baking cornbread to the glory of God. Whatever he did, he made it to the glory of God. Do you see how there are all these now, Wesley says attend to the ordinances of the church. He has some specific things in mind. I'd like to broaden those.

I've mentioned some of the ways I would broaden them. Certainly, know, John Wesley wanted you to take communion as often as you could. For me, communion is a connection to God that is a mystery. Is not unknowable, it's infinitely knowable. And so as I take communion, receive communion, I reflect on what it means to mysteriously in some way participate in the body of Christ and experience the real presence of Christ in that breaking the bread in the community of faith.

The third rule wants us to take seriously practices that bring us closer to God and to practice those practices. Now, would be the first to say to you when I teach practicing, when I teach practices of faith, the first thing I say sort of a precursor to the ways we practice our faith. Don't let taking up a practice become another way to beat yourself up. So often we take up a practice, tithing, for instance, at church, and we hit a bump, we'd lose our job, we can't afford the tithe we set and we have to readjust. And then we feel we might feel guilty about that.

I don't think that any practice that we take up when we fail at it is an invitation for us to think even less of ourselves, to beat up on ourselves. It's an opportunity to learn from our failure. We make mistakes. It's part of being alive. And so when we fail at it, we do what God does, which is have grace for us and we get up and we try again.

We try again maybe differently, maybe something else. Maybe you have tried centering prayer for months, for weeks, for years, and it is not what's drawing you closer to God. Try something different and it's okay. Try something different. Try a different practice.

We are all different people and we experience God differently. The practices that are going to work for us are not going to work for somebody else maybe. So rather than prescribe a group of practices for you, I want you to think of the practices. Think of one practice this week that you can do that might draw you closer to God and then practice it. It might be that simple do no harm intention that I mentioned to you and then measuring at the end of the day the places, looking carefully at it.

Not so much to say to yourself, oh, man, I messed up. You did. Okay, now let it go. But to see the places where you tend to you might see patterns about where you do harm if you practice, if you do all the good you can. That kind of a practice can also fit into your day.

Looking back on your day, the places that you did good, and even maybe discovering that you did good in places because it was so habitual for you to do good, you did good in places you weren't even planning on doing good. These are the ways that you practice your faith. So find the practices for you. Find one this week. Give it a try.

Give it a try. See if it draws you closer to God. Take something up. And if that feeds you, feeds your spirit, echoes with you in your connection to God, it brings you into harmonious relationship with God and your neighbors, then clearly it's moving you in that right direction. We'll talk about at a later point what do you do when practices that have fed you for a long time become dry practices where they don't seem to feed you anymore, they don't seem to connect you more deeply with God, but that's for another conversation.

Well, friends, thanks for joining me for this podcast. I'm so glad that we're offering in this here at Doolin as a podcast as well as a broadcast, a video broadcast that happens Thursdays around noon. So I'm wishing you all the best in your practice. Give it a shot. Be back next week with some more thoughts.

But in the interim, remember how precious you are to God, infinitely precious, and how unconditionally loved you are for the gift you already are. Until next week, wishing you all the very best. Until then.