Today is Rogation Sunday, a day when we traditionally ask for God’s blessing on crops, and as we look around us and see the beautiful countryside by which we are surrounded, it is easy to be thankful to God for the beauty of this earth.
The word rogation comes from the Latin rogare, which means to ask.
Today I want to think about rogation, and what it means for both us and for our world. You all know that I love words, and I am pleased to say that everything I want to say this morning begins with the letter P. I am going to think about Prayer, Practice and Praise.
PRAYER – We hear a lot about prayer, but one story tells of a little boy who was sent to his room because he had been naughty. After he had been there a little while, he came out and informed his mother that it would all be ok now because he had said a prayer. The mother was pleased and said, “If you ask God to make you good, He will help you.” “Oh, I didn’t ask Him to help me be good,” replied the boy. “I asked Him to help you put up with me.”
Prayer is about asking; it is about talking to God. God knows what we need before we ask Him; this does not mean that we should not ask. In the reading from the Gospel this morning (John 14:15–21), we were reminded of Jesus’ command to love. I was reading about this passage the other day, and the writer of what I was reading compared loving with learning something new. In the same way that whenever we learn something new, we need a teacher. So, she said that as we continue to both learn and to continue loving, we are to look to our teacher Jesus.
We will always need to ask for God’s help. We will need to love unconditionally; this is hard. Some people will disappoint us, some people will hurt us, but we are to love. Jesus, our teacher, promised extra help in the Gospel reading. This help was the Holy Spirit.
At our birthday gathering on 24th May, we will remember the impact of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. In the reading today, the Holy Spirit was described as an advocate. I love this description because it means that when we ask for God’s help and strength, we know we have an advocate.
On this Rogation Sunday, as we ask God to bless our land, so we can ask Him to help us to love others as He would. We must also ask God to bless all those whose lives cross with ours; we can ask Him to help those who are in need; we can ask Him to make us better able to be like Him. We should ask for strength to proclaim His name to those who need to know Him; we must ask for the strength of God to help us to work for Him, bringing hope, the resurrection hope – that is everlasting hope – to the world.
PRACTICE – By seeking to be more like God and to pray for change and hope, we have a responsibility. A responsibility to – for want of a better phrase – “practice what we pray.” That is not to just ask God for something and do nothing about it ourselves, but to actually seek to do more. By this I mean not to just pray for a better world, but to seek to make the world a better place. We will do this by being more like God, by offering hope and support to all those who need it. We will do this by listening to God, and through reading the Bible more to find out the ways that He would do things and to do this ourselves. To give of our time, money and willingness to listen to God and act on His word.
In the reading we heard from the book of Acts (17:22–31), Paul used his best reasoning to impress the people of Athens so that they would come to believe in Jesus. He used what was around him, such as the altar to an unknown God, which had been put there just in case there was a god they missed when they were praying. It sounds ridiculous to us, but to the Athenians at the time it made perfect sense. Paul had a visual image he could use to state his point, and as he did this, he was able to tell people about Jesus in a way that they would understand.
This is to be our practice as well. We have nature around us that we can use as a way to thank God. We can also use it to explain that the intricacies of a flower come about ultimately because of a divine creator. Something so beautiful must be from God.
As we practice loving as Jesus would, so we can practice using our beautiful scenery as both a way to give thanks to God but also to tell others about His creation.
PRAISE – When we ask God for good things, we are always to give thanks. To praise God that wonderful things can happen so that even when it seems unlikely to us, we can remember that God can step in.
As we ask for God’s blessing in PRAYER, as we seek to do our bit in PRACTICE, so in PRAISE we can remember that this Rogation Day, and always, we are to PRAISE God because He alone is worthy to be praised. In the Gospel reading we were not just reminded to love others, but we were reminded that we are loved. God loves us, and He accepts us as we are. This is amazing and certainly something to want to praise and to give thanks to God for.
As we pray for our area, the world and all those around us, we are reminded that we too can and should not just pray but practice being more like God and telling others about Him. We are to praise Him for all that He both has done and continues to do for us and this world. May we seek to be a blessing to others through love, may we always share that love, and may we praise God and give thanks for all that He has done. Amen.
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