The ancient Monastery of Saint Catherine is nestled deep in the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt. The better part of the present Monastery was erected in the 6th century. But there were communities of monks praying in these abrasive red-brown mountains since the 4th century. They came there to pray because this area of the Sinai mountains had long been identified by Christians as the location of Moses’ encounter with God in the Burning Bush and the giving of the Ten Commandments. The basilica church in fact sits over the very spot where the Burning Bush was supposed to be.
Prayer is the business of the 20 or so Greek Orthodox monks that presently live in cells within the monastery’s massive fortress walls. Day after day, for the various liturgies, the monks come to together at a site sustained by some 1,500 years of prayer. Prayer that is at once both imperfect and unceasing. Even if always present, monks may trickle in late to the services. As they do, you may notice from time to time a monk stealing a seat by the electric heaters plugged in under ancient icons; whether their eyes are closed in a cozy dozing or peaceful contemplation one could not say. It is this imperfect and unceasing prayer that becomes a kind of chain moving endlessly, quietly, patiently between the God of heaven and human hearts.
That God would come to humanity first in a Burning Bush and then in the bodily, earthly fulness of Jesus Christ his only Son only solidifies the acuteness of prayer’s power at Sinai. It was never something done simply at the appointed hour. It is an entire way of being that yearns to know the fulness of the God of Sinai’s heights and the God whose truth for us is that the Kingdom is to be found in our hearts. Although a truck delivers food daily to the monastery there is still the need to ask for bread “for the coming day”, as the Lord’s Prayer according to St. Luke puts it. There is always a need to ask for God’s provisions. There is always the need to pray that the Kingdom of God will come. The Lord’s Prayer in its Lukan simplicity brings us back to ourselves in its very reminder that what goes on in earth has something to do with God’s celestial will. The reminder itself, brought into the world with our own God-given breath—and the whole way of life that must always be bound up with the reminder—is a prayer.
A man we know as John Climacus was the abbot at Sinai in the 7th century. He wrote a famous text about prayer as a way of life called The Ladder of Divine Ascent. He composed it as a guide for monks at a neighboring monastery, but it no doubt reflects his experiences at Mount Sinai.
Although profoundly aware of the imperfections and travails of human prayer, John’s good news for his monks was that prayer is “by nature a dialogue and union of man with God. Its effect is to hold the world together.”[1] Indeed, notice how in the Lord’s Prayer according to St. Luke that the declaration that God’s kingdom come is immediately followed by the injunction that we must forgive just as God forgives. The reality of the kingdom, coming even now, demands our own compassionate agency and participation in the divine mission. Prayer, a way of life, becomes the enfleshed, spoken reminder that we are “alive together with God” in Christ Jesus (as St. Paul puts it).[2]
That humanity and God might meet—and be bound together in some kind of dialogue—is not a notion necessarily peculiar to the New Testament; though it finds an extraordinary realization there in Christ Jesus’ Incarnation. In Genesis this morning we continue the story of Abraham and so find a curious image where the Lord “comes down” to talk with Abraham. In some sense, we might say that Abraham is engaged in prayer with the Lord; Abraham bargains with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, appealing to a sense of justice that humans are shown to share with God. Notwithstanding the complexities of this story, the point for now is that humans are engaged in extraordinary dialogue with their God. Not because they are gods, but because what goes on in earth means something to the God of heaven and vice versa.
And so, in St. Luke’s Gospel, the God of heaven has come down again, but now as one who is fully human and fully divine. And the God of heaven is, at this point in St. Luke’s narrative, on the way to Jerusalem to die on the Cross. And today, this God is teaching his disciples how to pray. The chain between heaven and earth is there, and it has strengthened even more as a dozen fishermen, tax collectors, and all kinds of other imperfect people have been taught by this God to say and live that they are a part of the holy Kingdom. The intimacy of calling upon the name of God as Father, the glorious but heavy reality that we must forgive as the Father forgives, the mutual need for daily provision of bread (and here, in a world always hungry and starving, we would do well to note that the heavenly kind is not to the exclusion of the earthly kind), the plea that we not be led into temptation; a few simple reminders become the way of life, or the enfleshed prayer, of the ones who follow this Lord Jesus, whose life is the meaning of prayer itself.
The Jesus of St. Luke—the great enfleshment of the God of Abraham and the God of Sinai’s covenantal heights—has revealed again an extraordinary binding between earth and heaven, and his prayer with us is a few lines long.
The very simplicity of Jesus’ prayer may mean that it falls into a complacent kind of ordinariness for us. Indeed, St. Luke’s prayer is even more concentrated in its striking brevity that the version in St. Matthew we all know. John Climacus, too, knew that the everydayness of prayer, the echo of familiar ones, and especially our perception of prayers unanswered could be cause for a certain kind of spiritual giving-up. And yet, John advised his monks: “After a long spell of prayer, do not say that nothing has been gained, for you have already achieved something. For, what higher good is there than to cling to the Lord and persevere in unceasing union with him?”[3] And, of course, this striving for holy union, this quiet, patient, chain binding heaven and earth, does not demand we be at Sinai—as much as that place may teach us about prayer. And John would have agreed. For the endless chain of prayer enfleshed, prayer as a way of being, is between a God who has taught us to call upon his heavenly name from within our own hearts, and so come to marvel even now at our place in truth of his binding Kingdom.
Sermon by Mr. John Hager, Summer Seminarian Intern
The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
July 29, 2025
[1] St. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Translated by C. Luibheid and N. Russell. New York: Paulist Press, 1982; p. 274.
[2] Colossians 2:13.
[3] St. John Climacus, The Ladder p. 278.