Praying the News”
Acts 2: 42-47
A Sermon by the Reverend Odette Lockwood-Stewart

There is a scene I love at the beginning of an old Steve Martin film called “Roxanne.”  Martin is whistling and walking down the street. He stops at a newspaper kiosk, reaches in his pocket for a coin, places it in the machine, opens the door, takes a newspaper, opens it, begins to read, screams, refolds the paper, gets another coin from his pocket, puts it into the machine, opens the door, and places the newspaper back inside.  
That done, he once again whistles and walks down the street.

A friend of mine says that he has placed himself on a permanent news diet.  He believes that no news is the only good news.  

“The news” -- always coming at us ... inundating us with information ... stories ... spin... pictures ... events ... some so trivial that they don’t even deserve a glance but are flashed before us every thirty seconds ... some so profound as to overwhelm even the most callous heart.
*yesterday’s New York Times –pray (two-word prayers,one-word, listen)
We read the news ... online or in a paper ... or listen to the news ... or watch the news ... or ignore the news ... or avoid the news ... this morning I invite us to pray the news as spiritual practice.

In the Epworth newsletter last week, I shared these words from Parker Palmer’s book A Hidden Wholeness:  The Journey Toward an Undivided Life.  He wrote,
 “All of the great spiritual traditions want to awaken us to the fact that we co-create the reality in which we live.  
And all of them ask two questions intended to help keep us awake:
What are we sending from within ourselves out into the world, and what impact is it having ‘out there’?  What is the world sending back at us, and what impact is it having ‘in here’?  

We are continually engaged in the evolution of self and world – and we have the power to choose, moment by moment, between that which gives life and that which deals death.”

It’s more than a dialogue ... more than talking and listening ... it is centering ... being with and breathing through ... the realities of life and lives and world ... letting each decision flow from and through the indwelling center of love and of light.  It is contemplating the realities of this world with the deepest resources of our Source and our Spirit.  

Thomas Kelly, great Quaker mystic of the first half of the twentieth century wrote of what he called a “Holy Now.”  He said,
        “The Holy Now is not something which we, by our activity, by our dynamic energy, overtake or come upon.  It is a now which itself is dynamic, which lays hold actively upon us, which breaks in actively upon us and re-energizes us from within a new center.”

To pray the news keeps us awake to: what the world is sending at us, and what impact that is having within us, what we are sending to the world, and what impact that is having beyond us.

The late June Jordan, poet, Cal professor, founder of Poetry for the People, wrote a collaborative theater/music piece, which she called an earthquake/romance.  All the characters are 25 years old or younger living in LA in the 1990s.

In one act three desperate characters: a young man imprisoned by the three strikes law, a woman abused by her partner, and a faithless minister sing these words ... together:
        For days I been dreaming about changing the news
        For days I been dreaming about changing the news
        But sometimes the news ain’ something you choose …
        Political nightmare all over the place
        I’m running relentless a circular race
        And sometimes it scares me to see my own face.

Jordan opens the whole play with all the characters gathered together in the aftermath of a great earthquake.  Together they sing these words
        I was looking at the ceiling and then I saw the sky!
        I was miserable and aching
                At the way the news kept breaking
        I felt broken into compromise
                With nothing left to hope or prize
        I was looking at the ceiling and then I saw the sky!

We who live in a land of earthquakes, we who dream about changing the news, we, by our practice, may limit our sight to the ceiling ... containing and closing us in.

But then some earthquake ... of soil and rock or spirit ... will shake the foundations of our world, will break open the containment of the ceiling, and the shelter of the ceiling, and reveal and expose us to new light ... open sky.

Every time 16-year-old  Suzan Johnson left the house, her grandmother called out, “Suzan Denise Johnson, remember who you are!”  “Yes, ma’am,” Suzan would answer.

Years later, Johnson admitted that her grandmother’s strategy worked, even though it drove her crazy at the time.  We all need reminders to be our truest selves, rather than living out other people’s expectations, whether those of friends or of enemies.   (*My Soul Is A Witness)

Prayer opens us to the center and the sky; reminds us to not lose sight of the light that is our truest self; reminds us that who we are is illumined by love beyond ceilings. Prayer awakens us to the reality that we live and move and have our being in the Holy.  (Acts 17:28)

Pico Iyer’s new book, The Open Road:  The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama writes of all those who “changed the world by changing the way they looked at the world.”

To change we need prayer and we need community.
Our New Testament text this morning describes in awe the “many wonders and signs” that were being done by the first followers of Jesus. They lived in the world differently because they recognized and honored the light at the center of their lives.  As we heard, “Day by day as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home, and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.”
Learning together.  Breaking bread together. Praying together. They shared lives and therefore shared all things in common.

Dom Helder Camara once said, When we dream alone it remains only a dream.  When we dream together, It is not just a dream.  It is the beginning of Reality.

A part of our common life is the practice paying attention to all the realities of world around us.  Reading the news ... taking it in ... taking it on ... letting it go ... praying the news brings the center of our selves into vital relationship with the world God so loves.