The Examen

Jason Freyer

Teach us to Pray • Sermon • Submitted 2 months ago • Presented 2 months ago

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Scripture Readings

New Revised Standard Version: Updated Edition Psalm 139

1 O LORD, you have searched me and known me.

2 You know when I sit down and when I rise up;

you discern my thoughts from far away.

3 You search out my path and my lying down

and are acquainted with all my ways.

4 Even before a word is on my tongue,

O LORD, you know it completely.

5 You hem me in, behind and before,

and lay your hand upon me.

6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;

it is so high that I cannot attain it.

7 Where can I go from your spirit?

Or where can I flee from your presence?

8 If I ascend to heaven, you are there;

if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.

9 If I take the wings of the morning

and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,

10 even there your hand shall lead me,

and your right hand shall hold me fast.

11 If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,

and night wraps itself around me,”,*

12 even the darkness is not dark to you;

the night is as bright as the day,

for darkness is as light to you.

13 For it was you who formed my inward parts;

you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

14 I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Wonderful are your works;

that I know very well.

15 My frame was not hidden from you,

when I was being made in secret,

intricately woven in the depths of the earth.

16 Your eyes beheld my unformed substance.

In your book were written

all the days that were formed for me,

when none of them as yet existed.

17 How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God!

How vast is the sum of them!

18 I try to count them—they are more than the sand;

I come to the end—I am still with you.

19 O that you would kill the wicked, O God,

and that the bloodthirsty would depart from me—

20 those who speak of you maliciously

and lift themselves up against you for evil!,*

21 Do I not hate those who hate you, O LORD?

And do I not loathe those who rise up against you?

22 I hate them with perfect hatred;

I count them my enemies.

23 Search me, O God, and know my heart;

test me and know my thoughts.

24 See if there is any wicked way in me,

and lead me in the way everlasting.,*

New Revised Standard Version: Updated Edition Luke 8

16 “No one after lighting a lamp hides it under a jar or puts it under a bed; rather, one puts it on a lampstand, so that those who enter may see the light. 17 For nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed, nor is anything secret that will not become known and come to light. 18 So pay attention to how you listen, for to those who have, more will be given, and from those who do not have, even what they seem to have will be taken away.”

WWTW- Me Again

Introduction

Some times I’m amazed I never got fired as a youth pastor.

This, is a Ripstik.

At a previous church I served, we had a gym, and a bunch of kids with ripstiks.

So we invented a game called Ripstik Soccer.

Simple enough:

3 on 3.

You could only touch the ball with the board.

And you could hit other players boards with yours to knock them off their stick.

One night, we were playing a pretty aggressive game, and one of the littlest tiniest middle school girls was there playing with us.

And I know you think you know where this story is going…

But you’re wrong.

Because she hit me like she was a 400 pound linebacker, sent my board flying backwards, and propelled me a good 10 feet away where I landed firmly on my backside.

Two competing instincts were at play here:

The first is that as a leader, as someone who wanted the respect of the teenagers, I wasn’t going to let on that anything was wrong.

But the second was that I was in that moment a severely broken man.

So it led to a whole bunch of me looking tough and menacing and intense whenever someone was looking at me.

But then weeping quietly into the sleeve of my hoodie when I thought no one was looking.

This is a kind of natural human thing, isn’t it?

Try to pretend there isn’t any brokenness.

And when there is, hide the brokenness.

Today we’re going to be studying the Prayer of Examen, which goes right against both of those instincts.

So buckle up!

The Prayer of Examen

Basic Facts

This prayer comes to us from Saint Ignatius.

Saint Ignatius is the founded of the Jesuit movement within Catholicism.

Ignatius worked on a series of Spiritual Exercises.

He’s kind of like the Forest Gump of Christian prayer life. The dude shows up everywhere!

Chances are likely that if you have a regular kind of prayer practice, a good piece of them have come from Ignatian Exercises.

But today’s prayer specifically comes from the Latin word for Examination.

We’re going to test our day.

The Examen is a prayer that is best done at the end of the day, before you go to sleep.

It’s also a journal heavy practice too, so it might be helpful to keep a notebook nearby if you’re going to engage in this practice.

But not only is the prayer of Examen a good practice to be in,

I think like most of the prayers we’ve studied so far the prayer itself points to much more of the spiritual depth of our day to day lives.

Basic Movements

Give thanks for God’s great love for you.

More and more I am convinced that this is a cornerstone of Christian faith.

Gratitude in general is something that is sorely lacking in our world today.

But we as Christians should carry around a deep and abiding sense of gratitude for the love that God pours out on us every day.

God knows each of us on a deeply personal level.

God sees how we are at our very best moments, and at our very worst moments.

And in spite of all of that, God loves us all very very deeply!

I think there’s cause to zoom out here too:

There is the deep and basic level of love that we have from God in Christ Jesus.

The foundational gospel level Jesus died for us kind of love.

Of course we should celebrate and carry gratitude for that.

But there’s also a day to day kind of love from God that we ought to give thanks for.

The kind of street level love of God that can actually go rather unnoticed without a regular practice like the examen.

So perhaps your practice of the examen starts with listing how you’ve felt God’s love for you today, and how you want to say thank you to God for it.

Pray for the grace to understand how God is acting in your life.

When I was a kid, these things were all the rage. Have you ever seen a magic eye?

For those who are uninitiated, there’s the image you see at first.

But if you stare at the image long enough, there’s a 3D image that’s kind of hiding behind it.

They put a bunch of these into books, and they were the hot commodity at the book fair when I was a kid.

I’m going to go ahead and leave this up here for a while, because when I was a kid I was miserable at these!

I could stare and stare and stare and never see the image.

I could only see the surface.

After a while I figured it out, and I could see them pretty quickly, which is a skill that apparently goes away, because I can’t see them at all anymore!

Life is kind of like that.

God is the 3D version of the image I think.

We have our day, we have what’s regularly going on, the stuff that’s super easy to see.

But behind it all, if only we have eyes to see, God is at work in our lives.

And so we have to pray for the Grace to see God at work in our day.

Was that really just a random phone call, or was God at work trying to tell you something?

Was that traffic just a major annoyance, or did it keep you out of the accident you came across a few miles later?

Was that person on your mind for no reason at all, or does God want you to reach out and tell them something?

We need to pray for the grace to see God at work in the ordinary and everyday.

This takes practice, sure.

But I think it’s important to note that we have to ask for the Grace to see it.

The ability to see God at work in our day is ultimately, a gift from God.

And so when it happens, that leads us to still more gratitude in our prayers.

Review your day- Recall specific moments and your feelings at the time.

This is one of the only prayers I know where it’s helpful to have your day planner and your todo-list in front of you.

Not the one for tomorrow.

Today’s.

What did you get done?

What did you have to push back to tomorrow?

What meetings did you have?

Who were you texting with?

What’d you eat?

At least in my life, I worry sometimes that I’m a little bit too much on autopilot.

Sometimes I get to the end of the day, and Sarah will ask how my day was, and I legitimately don’t know because I was just bouncing from thing to thing to thing.

Sometimes it’s good to review the day.

But that’s not all.

Reflect on what you did, said, or thought in those instances. Were you drawing closer to God, or further away?

This is where this prayer gets interesting.

That phone call you had with that old friend from college? Was that a step closer in your relationship with God, or a step further away?

That meeting you had with your boss? Closer or further?

Family dinner at the table? Closer or further?

Not at all a real life example, but the Penguins game a friend invited you to on Thursday where they somehow managed to loose 6-0…closer or further?

And that last example proves this, sometimes that’s complicated.

The friendship and conversation and fellowship I enjoyed with my friend at the game? Closer to God.

My thoughts any time my eyes drifted down toward the ice? Further from God.

The other thing that makes this complicated is that we have to do it from a non-judgmental place.

One of the scriptures that seemingly everybody knows is Matthew 7:1 ““Do not judge, so that you may not be judged.”

For as much as that applies to everyone out there, it also applies in here too.

If you were further from God today than you’d like to be, that’s ok!

Accept the grace from God and move forward.

Sometimes I think we judge ourselves so harshly that we actually never get a full sense of our confessions, because we’re afraid.

Remember how this prayer started: God already loves you! It’s a given!

Look toward tomorrow- Think of how you might collaborate more effectively with God’s plan. Be specific, and conclude with the Lord’s Prayer.

This too is where we can move forward with a sense of hope.

If there are places that always come to mind as moving you further away from God, pay attention to that.

If you absolutely know that meeting with that assistant to the regional manager brings out the worst in you, budget a little bit of prayer time before your meeting.

If traffic makes you grumpy as can be before you sit down with your family, take a few minutes in the car to catch your breath before you go in.

If the news takes you away from things like kindness and patience and self-control, turn it off.

And likewise, if there are places that bring you closer to God on a regular basis, plan accordingly there too.

If you know that walking outside is a way for your to connect with God, make sure to schedule time on a trail.

If you know that you’re an extrovert and being with people fills you with the Spirit, then live in to that and call some friends up!

If you’ve had too many noisy days, maybe you need to remember the practice of silence from last week and set aside some time for that tomorrow.

Difficult Movements

Prayers of Confession

I have told this story before, but it’s just so funny I can’t leave it alone.

At a previous church, a member once came up to me with the helpful suggestion that we should do away with the confession in worship.

It’s just such a bummer!

We have to admit that we’re already broken.

Like an aging youth pastor who was just obliterated by a middle school girl, sometimes we have a hard time letting our brokenness out.

If you engage in this practice for any length of time, you will come across something you don’t like.

None of us is pitching a perfect game in this life.

We make mistakes.

We say what we shouldn’t.

We do what we shouldn’t.

We don’t do what we should.

We fail to stick up for what’s right.

And sometimes we fight a little too hard for our own gain.

It’s ok to admit it.

We’re not telling God anything God doesn’t already know

What I love about my relationship with God is that it’s literally impossible to have surprises.

This is the God we meet in Psalm 139

This is the God who has searched us and knows us.

This is the God who knows us before a word is on our tongue.

This is the God who has fearfully and wonderfully made us.

It’s the same God we meet in Luke.

Nothing that is hidden won’t be brought to light.

We don’t have secrets with God.

I’m surprised constantly. God never is.

When I tell God that I was thinking unkind thoughts during the Penguin game, God’s response is “I know.”

When I fail to love my neighbor as deeply and meaningfully as I could, God’s response is “I know.”

When I find myself at the end of a day where I’ve wandered from God more than I’ve wandered toward him, God’s response is “I know.”

Well, actually, that’s a lie.

That’s not God’s response.

Jesus Forgives. Jesus Forgives. Jesus Forgives.

God doesn’t just say “I know” like the cosmic Han Solo…

God offers forgiveness.

God’s response is “I know…and I forgive.”

I know…and I forgive.

Nothing you can tell God will be a surprise.

And nothing you can tell God will be met by anything less than total forgiveness and grace.

Ending a day noticing the movements away from God can help lighten the load.

I was on a backpacking trip once a few years ago with a few students.

One of whom had never been backpacking, but had watched a lot of survival videos on YouTube.

As we were about 2 or 3 miles into our hike, we noticed that this young man was really really struggling.

So we pulled off to the side of the trail to see what was in his pack.

There was no literal kitchen sink in there…

But there might as well have been!

He brought enough food for 18 days (we were doing an overnighter)

He had 4 knives.

He was carrying a couple of sticks and twigs for kindling…(we were in the woods)

We had to beg and plead with him for a bit, but eventually we got him to let us help him.

We lightened the load.

When we realize we can get real with God every day, we lighten the load.

Every failure, every sin we carry kind of clings to us like baggage.

Why not set it down?

Why not tell God what God already knows?

Why not find that beautiful and graceful forgiveness that Christ has to offer?

Gratitude is the fuel of faithfulness.

I think what my friend from a previous church was missing when he said “the confession is such a bummer” is that it’s a gateway to gratitude.

We confess. We notice the way things went awry. We note the places in our day where we moved further from God.

And we are met with forgiveness.

And that brings us gratitude!

Not only that, but we notice the places where we got closer to God.

We notice those moments of beauty.

We notice those moments of connection.

We notice those moments of worship when we’re far away from this church building.

And those too can bring us gratitude.

The artist Scott Erickson who we’ve been looking at in our Prayer book (join us down the hall!)

He has a painting he made hanging above his desk in his studio.

It simply says “I get to.”

For him, when he’s engaged in hard and difficult work, he reminds himself that this isn’t something he has to do.

It’s something he gets to do.

I have been trying my very best to live with an “I get to” attitude in life.

I get to do this work.

I get to raise this family.

I get to have these profound moments of connection with God throughout my day.

I get to confess the moments where I was farther from God than I would have wanted, and I’m met with forgiveness.

And I get to wake up tomorrow, even when they steal an hour of sleep from me, and do it all over again.

I have to is religious obligation.

I get to, that’s a life of gratitude and wonder.

May our prayer life with the examen lead us to a place of grace and gratitude.

Because after all, this is the day the Lord has made…

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