Tag: prayer

Prayer of Thanks

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Uncategorized3 Comments
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Creeping Thistle. Image by Ivar Leidus

 

By Walter Rauschenbusch

Reblogged from NPR’s On Being

For the wide sky and the blessed sun,
For the salt sea and the running water,
For the everlasting hills
And the never-resting winds,
For trees and the common grass underfoot.
We thank you for our senses
By which we hear the songs of birds,
And see the splendor of the summer fields,
And taste of the autumn fruits,
And rejoice in the feel of the snow,
And smell the breath of the spring.
Grant us a heart wide open to all this beauty;
And save our souls from being so blind
That we pass unseeing
When even the common thornbush
Is aflame with your glory,
O God our creator,
Who lives and reigns for ever and ever.

Jesus is the Problem

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Uncategorized1 Comment

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I chuckle to myself sometimes when I drive around and I see bumper stickers and billboards with hokey slogans like “Jesus is the Answer” because that phrase makes me want to say something snarky like, “Could you repeat the question?”

I find that folks who resort to one-liners like that are too quick to boil down the deep, rich complexity of two thousand years of Christian tradition to a cheap, one-sided formula and I just don’t think you can honestly do that if you actually read the Bible and wrestle with the things it says.  When I think about the person Jesus of Nazareth and the kinds of things he said and did, I’m frankly puzzled and disturbed more often than not.  One of the things that keeps me engaged with Jesus as my Lord and Savior is the way that he challenges me time and time again to grow as person and to break out of old, destructive ways of thinking and living.  Most often, he does this by telling stories and asking questions of his audience.  So yeah, I laugh when I see signs that say “Jesus is the answer” because, frankly, the one I want to slap on the back of my car would have to say, “Jesus is the problem.”

Jesus is a problem.  If you actually read the gospels, you’ll see he’s that perpetual, prophetic pebble in the shoe to those who think they hold all power and know all the answers to every question ever asked.  It’s literally impossible to hang around Jesus for any length of time and not get your worldview seriously knocked off-balance in some kind of significant way.

And in today’s gospel reading, Jesus is once again doing just that: knocking things off-balance as usual.

Today’s reading is all about Jesus’ teaching on the subject of prayer.  What he has to say about it challenged people in his time and continues to challenge us in our own time, although in a slightly different way.

In the ancient world, the story Jesus tells about one friend begging bread from another friend in the middle of the night would have been heard, not as a story about prayer, but as a story about public protest.

In this story, a friend shows up at his friend’s house in the middle of the night, asking for bread, “Friend,” he says, “lend me three loaves of bread; for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.”  And the other friend says, “Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.”

But, according to Jesus, this conflict is preordained to end in the first friend’s favor because “even though [the second friend] will not get up and give [the first one] anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.”

Now, the key word in that last sentence is persistence.  In some older translations, the word they used was importunity.  But the original Greek word here is anaideian, which literally means “shamelessness”.  By behaving so shamelessly in public, in the middle of the night, the first friend is demonstrating the abject desperation of his situation and appealing directly to his friend’s moral character.  The second friend, on the other hand, is now honor-bound to respond because refusing to do so would cost him respect in the eyes of the village, and remember that respect in the ancient world was at least as valuable as money.  So, in the end, Jesus’ parable is really all about the character of the one being asked for bread.  Taken as a metaphor for prayer, this parable is about God’s character as the one being prayed to by believers.  The question ultimately being asked here is not, “How do I get my prayers answered?” but rather “Who is God?”

Among the religious authorities in that part of the ancient world, they believed that God answered prayer based on a kind of merit system in relation to the Jewish Torah.  Only decent, established leaders with proper pedigrees and credentials would dare to approach the almighty God with a request.  Jesus, on the other hand, is turning that cultural expectation on its head.  He’s saying that it’s not the character of the person that determines God’s willingness to hear prayer, but the character of God.  God, according to Jesus, is not a bean-counting judge who’s “making a list and checking it twice” before deciding whether someone’s prayers are worth hearing.  Rather, the God that Jesus believes in is a generous, loving presence whose office door is perpetually open to any and every broken heart that comes knocking in the middle of the night, looking for some sign that they matter and they are loved.  God doesn’t care whether you have the right beliefs or the right morals.  It doesn’t matter whether or not you deserve love, you get it anyway because that’s just who God is.  God is love.  Full stop.  End of sentence.  Nothing else matters.  There’s nothing you can do about it.  Deal with it.

So that’s what the parable means in the ancient world: prayer is about shameless audacity.  Prayer is not about the worthiness of the one who is asking, but the character the one who is asked.

Here in the modern world, Jesus’ parable on prayer has just as many challenging things to say to us, although in a different way.  Unlike the world of the ancient Middle East, our culture has been shaped by two centuries of industrial capitalism.  Our main question when it comes to prayer is, “Does it work?”

We’re obsessed with things working in the modern world.  We define reality by what we can observe and measure.  If you can’t see it or attach a number to it in some way, then it must not be real.  We are the only culture in the history of the human race to think this way.  Shouldn’t that strike us as odd?  Every other human civilization has left room open in their worldview for some kind of transcendent mystery.  Some parts of reality just can’t be measured.  Everybody else seems to get that but us.  So, statistically speaking, I think we enlightened, evolved westerners should at least ask ourselves the question: Could it be possible that we are actually the ones with the problem?

There can be no doubt that our means-ends rationality has taken us far.  We have made unparalleled leaps in the fields of science, technology, medicine, communication, travel, and exploration.  The modern mind has obviously been a blessing.  But we’ve also caused more death, extinction, pollution, annihilation, and oppression than any other culture in history, so we can’t stay high up on our pedestal for very long.  Without an overarching sense of meaning and mystery, we’ve managed to do a lot without knowing what it’s all for.  So I ask again: maybe ours is the culture with the problem.

When it comes to prayer, modern westerners have repeatedly come back to that rational question: Does it work?  And they’ve typically presented one of two possible answers.

On the one hand, you have some believers arguing that it absolutely does.  They say that prayer is like magic.  If you pray to the right person in the right way, you will get what you want.  If you don’t get the result you want, then you forgot to pray, or you didn’t do it right, or you didn’t have enough faith.  This is the ultimate form of “blaming the victim” when it comes to spirituality and suffering.  Needless to say, I think this “prayer is magic” philosophy is a pile of baloney.

On the other hand, there are lots of other modern folks who say that prayer is just a placebo: a psychological self-help exercise that just comforts people and brings communities together without making a real difference in the world.  I have to say that this perspective makes me just as uncomfortable as the “prayer is magic” approach because it too neatly divides reality into the material and the spiritual, with the material being regarded as the only part that’s really real.  In the five years that I’ve been a pastor, I’ve walked with people and families through some really hard times.  I’ve seen some amazing things for which I have no logical explanation.  One might even call them miraculous.  On the other hand, I’ve seen good, devout people face unimaginable tragedy with seemingly unanswered prayers.  I’ve seen innocent children suffer and die under the deafening silence of heaven.  So, when it comes to the observable, measurable effectiveness of prayer, I don’t have a one-size-fits-all direct answer.  It’s ambiguous.

The place I come to when I hear Jesus’ teaching on prayer is that getting things done is not the point.  If we’re stuck in that place where we’re asking, “Does prayer work?” then we’re asking the wrong question.

Just like the friend in Jesus’ parable, the question comes down to this: Who is God?  Prayer draws our attention to that same loving, open presence that envelopes us all, whether we deserve it or not, whether we believe in it or not.  Prayer is not about you and it’s not about getting things done.  Prayer changes us, regardless of whether or not it changes our circumstances.  Prayer gets us out of our narrow-minded, modern rationality and helps us to grow in our awareness of the great mystery within around us.  Prayer opens our hearts and minds to hear and to trust in that silent, inner voice that continually calls out to us, saying, “I love you, God loves you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Be blessed and be a blessing.

A Song of Peace

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Uncategorized1 Comment
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Kolob Canyons, Zion National Park, Utah. Image by Michael Gäbler. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.

 Happy In(ter)dependence Day!

Lyrics by Lloyd Stone

May be sung to the tune ‘Finlandia’.

This is my song, O God of all the nations,
A song of peace for lands afar and mine.
This is my home, the country where my heart is;
Here are my hopes, my dreams, my sacred shrine.
But other hearts in other lands are beating,
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean,
And sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine.
But other lands have sunlight too and clover,
And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
O hear my song, O God of all the nations,
A song of peace for their land and for mine.

Prayers For Boston Bombing Suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Pour In After Arrest

On By J. Barrett LeeIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Re-blogged from Huffington Post:

As 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the remaining man suspected in Monday’s Boston Marathon bombings and Thursday night’s shootout with police was arrested Friday, cheers erupted on Boston streets and on television broadcasts. It wasn’t uncommon to see Boston residents give thanks to God, and similar sentiments echoed across social media.

But prayers of another kind also poured out online: those for Tsarnaev.

Click here to read the full article…

Here is my prayer for Dzhokhar:

God, who ignites the spark of creativity in every being and event in this universe: We hold before you in love and anger the pain of grief, the ashes of destruction, and the wasted potential of your son, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, asking that the inspiration of your Holy Spirit might open our hearts to bring light out of darkness, order out of chaos, and new life out of death; through Jesus Christ our Lord who came, full of grace and truth, that we might have life in abundance.  Amen.

Silence

On By J. Barrett LeeIn UncategorizedLeave a comment
Photo of Lake Bondhus, Norway by Alchemist-hp

“Be still and know that I am God.”  -Psalm 46

“God was not in the fire, or in the earthquake, or in the wind, but in the still, small voice.”  1 Kings 19:12

To sit together in silence requires confronting the inner workings of our own minds.  In silence, we see more clearly our thoughts and feelings, our hopes and losses.  We can shut them out by compiling our to-do lists or fretting about the crying baby, but if we continue with the silence, we feel the tug of the spirit calling us to a larger life.    For some, these feelings are strange and unsettling.  There is nothing to do in that silence but “be.”  There are no landmarks, no roadmaps, no GPS systems to guide us, save for the rhythm of our own heartbeat and the rise and fall of our own breath.

-Wayne Arnason & Kathleen Rolenz, Worship That Works, 110-111

New Day, New Song, New Hope

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Uncategorized1 Comment
Photo taken by Bogdan in Neptun, Romania. Sunrise over the Black Sea.

In keeping with the musical prayers I’ve been posting in connection with the voting on Amendment One, here is one that I offer on this, the morning after. I believe it captures the defiant hope that has not yet been strangled out of us. If you want to pray, then pray with me and belt this song out at the top of your lungs from the bottom of your heart!

Singing Up the Sun: A Prayer for the Church

On By J. Barrett LeeIn Uncategorized1 Comment

Christians in the Reformed tradition have long recognized the dual nature of our life together as a faith community.  On the one hand, you have churches that exist as religious institutions.  On the other hand, you have the Church that lives as the Body of Christ, the spiritual fellowship of God’s covenant people.

Heinrich Bullinger, writing in 1561, observed:

Again, not all that are reckoned in the number of the Church are saints, and living and true members of the Church. For there are many hypocrites, who outwardly hear the Word of God, and publicly receive the sacraments, and seem to pray to God through Christ alone, to confess Christ to be their only righteousness, and to worship God, and to exercise the duties of charity, and for a time to endure with patience in misfortune. And yet they are inwardly destitute of true illumination of the Spirit, of faith and sincerity of heart, and of perseverance to the end… And therefore the Church of God is rightly compared to a net which catches fish of all kinds, and to a field, in which both wheat and tares are found (Matt. 13:24 ff., 47 ff.).

The Westminster divines identified this duality by referring to the visible church, which is “a society made up of all such as in all ages and places of the world do profess the true religion, and of their children” and the invisible church, which is “the whole number of the elect, that have been, are, or shall be gathered into one under Christ the head.”

Writing over three centuries later, the authors of the Confession of 1967 noted,

The church in its mission encounters other religions and in that encounter becomes conscious of its own human character as a religion… The Christian religion, as distinct from God’s self-revelation, has been shaped throughout its history by the cultural forms of its environment… But the reconciling word of the gospel is God’s judgment upon all forms of religion, including the Christian.

Earlier today, as I was praying for my church, the image of an egg came to mind.  When people glance at an egg, they tend to notice the hard and plain exterior shell.  Most people don’t think about the baby chick inside.  They just see an egg.  But if they could somehow get inside, they would immediately notice the disparate chick-to-shell ratio.  There’s a lot more bird than egg in there!

As cracks start to appear, many throw up their hands in mourning (or celebration) that the egg is now broken, ruined, and not long for this world.  In one sense, they may be right.  However, I wonder whether those who focus exclusively on this fact might be forgetting about the amazing new life that lurks just beneath the surface.  The cracks signify, not the failure, but the success of life that has grown too big for its shell.  The cracks mean that the shell has done its job and life is now ready to burst forth into the world.

I think the church is like that egg.  It looks rather rigid, plain, and fragile from the outside.  The cracks in our institutional shell are obvious and appear at both congregational and denominational levels.  Here are just a few examples:

  • Lackluster theology
  • Biblical illiteracy
  • Indifference to social justice
  • Cliques
  • Power-plays
  • Denominational schisms
  • Liberal/conservative conspiracy theories (take your pick)
  • Not enough/too much inclusivity (take your pick)
  • Worship is too traditional/contemporary (take your pick)
  • Obsession with church property
  • Dwindling financial resources
  • Declining membership
  • I could keep going…

With all these cracks, it looks like our egg is falling apart.  That’s because it is falling apart.  It’s supposed to fall apart.  Ecclesia reforma, semper reformanda.  Our ancestors gave us this shell in order to safeguard the precious treasure of life within it.  Just as they hatched from their own institutional shells (think Calvin during the Reformation), life dictates that we must hatch from ours.  What’s more is that we will most likely hand our spiritual progeny another shell from which they too will one day break.  The shell’s job is to protect and nurture life.  Its breakage during times of change is a sign of success not failure.

There’s a lot more bird than egg in our church.  There is new life waiting to be born.  The future will not look like the past.  The decline of mainline Protestant churches doesn’t bother me.  I think God is coaxing our churches out of their collective shell so that we can take up the prophetic mantle once again.  We are not dying; we are being born.

For some this will mean questioning “the way we’ve always done it” and reforming our denominational or congregational structures from within.  For others it will mean abandoning traditional denominations or congregations altogether.  Whatever new thing they come up with will not be the end-all/be-all perfect solution forever.  It will one day be broken and discarded by their descendants.  As Jesus warned his disciples, “Not one stone will be left on top of another.”

Whatever path we feel called to follow, let’s let our focus be on the new life that God is bringing to birth from within the cracking shell of our churches.  Let’s be open to the vibrant and prophetic future into which we are being led.  Let’s move forward in faith, not fear.  For some of us, the chicks hatching from our eggs will be hens who produce new eggs with shells that will nurture and protect the next generation until those chicks are ready to break out.  For others of us, the chicks hatching from our eggs will be roosters who climb to the rooftops and sing up sun, announcing the arrival of a new dawn.

Thanks be to God!