One of my favorite scenes in the entire Bible is today’s scene of the Ascension from Acts. To set the scene… We’ve got the disciples who not very long before witnessed Jesus’ death on the cross, then he appearing to the disciples in his resurrected form. Here in Acts is one of those appearances. They have so many questions for him, as I’m sure we would too if we got to see Jesus resurrected, and here is the question they ask: “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” Clearly, they are still thinking about a Messiah King and Israel and haven’t quite grasped what’s really going on here. They still haven’t really gotten it. Jesus replies in his usual gracious manner that doesn’t really answer the question they ask. But he does tell them they won’t get to know the time that God the Father has set, but instead they will get the Holy Spirit and they get to be Christ’s witnesses to the ends of the earth. Which is all well and good, but probably not what they were expecting. And then after he said this and while they all had their eyes on him, poof, he was lifted up in a cloud out of their sight.

Can you even imagine? Jesus died, came back, then rose up into the clouds in front of their very eyes. They must have been dumbfounded. So what do they do? They stand there gazing up towards heaven. Which is what any of us probably would have done if we saw the same thing happen before our eyes, right? I know I would. I’d be so incredibly confused and probably stare at the space where my friend and teacher had just been seconds before. And sometimes, don’t we tend to do kind of the same thing when things are confusing? We stop and look up to heaven. Even Jesus looks up to heaven when he speaks to his Father in the gospel message. Looking up to heaven is not a bad thing.

It’s a good and natural thing for us to do – especially in trying times like we find ourselves in today – to stop and look up at heaven. We gaze up to heaven and ask God why? Why are people dying and some people saved? Why has our way of life been turned upside down from two months ago? Why is there disease and germs in this world we live in? Why, God, why? We look up to heaven and ask God all these things.

Unfortunately, just like how Jesus told the disciples it isn’t for them to know the times or periods that the Father has set, we may never know the answer to the questions we ask. But what we are promised is the Holy Spirit, which will soon come upon the disciples at Pentecost. And we know that will come just next Sunday. But in the meantime, what do we do?

Well, let’s look at the rest of the Ascension story, which only gets weirder from where we stopped with the disciples looking up to heaven. Next, two guys in white robes magically appear and ask why they’re all standing around just looking at heaven. These two guys in white robes say that Jesus has been taking from you and will return again in the same way. And that was that. So what do the disciples do? They head back to Jerusalem and hide out in the upper room. And who could blame them? If that much happened in the span of a short time, I’d want to hide in my room too. And isn’t that kind of what we’re doing these days? We’re all stuck at home and a little bit unsure what to do next. What’s safe to do these days? What’s not? There’s so much confusing information out there.

But the disciples don’t just hide out in their bedrooms under the covers of their beds. Acts tells us

“all the disciples were constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers.”

Acts 1:14

So after looking to heaven to the answers and being told that isn’t where they will find their answers, they go back home to Jerusalem and constantly devote themselves to prayer.

Perhaps this is our next step as a faith community too. Perhaps it is time for all of us to be in our homes and constantly devote ourselves to prayer.

The wonderful thing is that I have seen this happen across our diocese. Even here at St. James’, you all are offering Wednesday evening prayer in addition to this Sunday morning worship. I’ve seen daily office offerings for Morning Prayer, Noonday Prayer, Evening Prayer and Compline offered via Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Zoom. It’s been a beautiful thing to see come alive here in the diocese and across the Episcopal Church. But as the disciples did, prayer is something we can constantly devote ourselves to. Or, as the passage in 1 Thessalonians says, we are to pray without ceasing. Which is a huge goal. But each minute and second we devote more to prayer, we get closer to that goal where our lives are fully saturated with prayer.

Praying without ceasing or constantly devoting ourselves to prayer can seem like an impossible goal, but how we get to where our lives are lives devoted to prayer is by cultivating habits of prayer. There’s actually lots of good psychological research out there about how to develop good habits and stop bad habits, but rarely have I seen that research applied to create habits of prayer. But the principles are easy enough to apply. And in fact, one of the principles of creating habits, according to the popular writer Gretchen Rubin, who wrote about habits in her book Better than Before, is the principle of the clean slate. When our lives our turned upside down or reset in some way, it gives us a clean slate to start our new habits. So if you’re starting a new job or moving to a new town, it’s a great time to start jogging or drinking more water or whatever habit you want to form. Or, in our case, we’re living in a global pandemic that has shaken our lives to the core, so it’s a clean slate to develop new habits, like a habit of prayer.

One of the most accessible books on habit formation is the wildly popular book Atomic Habits by James Clear, which I recommend if you’re interested in that sort of thing. His framework for starting new good habits is four-fold:

1. Make it obvious
2. Make it attractive
3. Make it easy
4. Make it satisfying

Let’s look at each of these steps on how we can develop a good habit of prayer during this time of COVID19:

1. Make it obvious. The first step with this is simply to make our intentions deliberate. Say out loud: I will pray @ x time every day. Whatever that time is. Or I will pray Morning Prayer every day. Or I will pray for those affected by COVID19 before bed every day. Whatever it is for you, name it. The second way to make a habit obvious is what Clear calls “habit stacking.” This is the idea that, for example, every time you brush your teeth you also floss your teeth. Those two habits are stacked together in your brain so that it’s natural. So maybe you stack having your morning coffee with prayer time. Or maybe you finish work every day by taking a walk and listening to evening prayer in your headphones. The final way to make your habit obvious is to design your environment. Maybe keep your Book of Common Prayer in a place you’ll see it every day. Or put a reminder on the lock screen on your phone. The idea is some sort of visual cue in your environment to remind you to pray. A cross beside your work computer maybe. Anything that will make it obvious in the world around you to remind you to pray.
2. Make it attractive. There are a few ways this could work for prayer. It could be making you a special prayer corner that’s so pretty that you want to spend time in prayer there every day. Also, making habits attractive are about creating a whole culture where prayer is the desired behavior. Which is what we do at church: we make a whole culture around prayer together. This is one of the reasons so many of us miss those habits and cues of our weekly in-person worship right now. Because it created a culture where prayer is the norm. Because when we walk into our spaces of worship that we can’t go into right now, but when we are allowed in, we know what those beautiful spaces are for. That’s the visual cues of making habits attractive that Clear is talking about in his book. So think through ways that you could make prayer attractive like it is when we enter our worship spaces.
3. Make it easy. One way to make the habit of prayer easy is to decrease the number of steps it takes to pray. Maybe it’s as simple as bookmarking the pages of your BCP to the prayer you want to pray. Or make it easy by not just deciding to pray with your morning coffee, but putting your prayer book next to your coffee mugs in the morning. Another way to make it easy is what Clear calls the two-minute rule. You can start just about any habit by doing something for just two minutes at a time. I know I can’t run a marathon anytime soon, but I could maybe run for two minutes. Maybe. I’ve been sitting at home an awful lot right now. But you could easily set a timer and pray for two minutes at a time. That’s doable for anyone. And the final way to make it easy is to use technology. There’s amazing apps out there for prayer – including ones for the Daily Office. All you have to do is click and they have the daily prayer lined out with the scripture for the day. Any way that you can make your prayer habit a little easier to do will make it more likely to stick as a habit.
4. The final way to make a new habit is to make it satisfying. The two main ways to do this are by using a habit tracker, which there are a million ways to do that from pretty bullet journaling to putting marbles in a jar each time you prayed that day. This is the way that Snapchat gets people addicted to it – because it tracks how many days the user is connected with each friend and counts the days as streaks. I have a prayer app that counts the streaks I have for prayer. If it feels satisfying to see those numbers or those marbles in a jar or whatever way you are counting more up and up and up, then find a way to track your prayer habit. Lastly, you can make a habit satisfying by finding someone to be an accountability partner for your prayer habit. Find someone who will ask you how your prayer life is going and you can ask them. Because God made us for community. Our prayer life is not just about us, but about our community around us too.

I am sure there are a million other ways to make prayer a habit, but the idea behind it is to pick something that works for your prayer life and try it out. Then we will all inch closer and closer to being like the disciples in the upper room, devoting ourselves to prayer.

Because despite wanting to stare at heaven like the disciples did, we too can devote ourselves to prayer even when we’re not in our worship spaces and even when we’re stuck in our homes, just like the disciples were in the upper room.

Finally, as we inch closer and closer to having lives that are devoted to prayer like the disciples, Christ does not promise that our lives will be perfect any more than the disciples had easy or perfect lives in the rest of Acts. But, Jesus, in the last part of today’s Gospel passage, does ask something specific of His Father for us that I’d like to highlight as I close. Jesus asks the Father to “protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.” Jesus asks his Father for protection for us, but he asks for our protection for a specific reason: so that we and God can be one, just as Christ and his Father are one.

And that is my prayer for you all at St. James during this time of social distancing, quarantine, online worship, and hopefully new habits of prayer: I pray for the protection of God the Father so that you and God can be one, as Christ and the Father are one. Amen.

A sermon delivered electronically to St. James the Apostle Episcopal Church in Conroe, TX on May 24, 2020.