“Got Prayer? Acting So Jesus Might Know Who We Are”
The question is, in the vernacular, how do we know if and when we’ve “got a
prayer?” If and when we “stand a chance” in the midst of whatever our
situation? The answer has something to do with what Paul here calls living
our lives “in Christ!” “Rooted and built up in Christ.” Established
in faith and abounding in thanksgiving. In fact, says Meister Eckhart,
if our only prayer were “Thank you,” that would be enough! Where there’s
life, there’s hope. Where there’s love, there’s even more hope!
For we “have received Christ Jesus the Lord.”
We have been given the gift to acknowledge that the Messiah, the “kingdom of
God” has come near, once and forever! We believe the radical possibility
of every good thing God has promised about being human in this world comes to
pass in this Jesus whom we call “Christ the Lord.” Therefore we are called
as those without any reason, any excuse, but to believe and to act upon the
very best of all hopes for this world! According to Jesus, we’ve always
“got a prayer.” We always “stand a chance.” No matter what the odds
against us all!
We hear the poet Auden plead, in “For the Time being,” –
We who must die demand a miracle.
How could the Eternal do a temporal act,
The Infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible:
We who must die demand a miracle.
Join us in Prayer Group every Thursday at noon. We demand miracles all
the time!
Our belief and our action upon it defy both reason and what we call “natural
law,” -- as if such belief and action could be proved and approved by human
tradition and/or by the workings of the universe. This means we are called
to relinquish any illusions of innate superiority, -- either as one species
over other species, -- or as the strongest within a species over the weakest.
In all things we trust “in Christ,” our ruler and our authority, our liberator
and our leader. In our baptisms we are spiritually marked, -- buried and
raised, -- as those who no longer accept that death and the powers of sin, --
the powers to kill, the powers to hurt and destroy, -- must take and must keep
control of our lives and our life together.
We do not believe that any more. We do not act like that any more,
“In Christ” we proclaim the Jubilee, once and forever, -- the fully and freely
acceptable time of the Lord! In Christ crucified, we are released from
the past for the future, -- forgiven all trespasses, sins, and debts held against
us according to law, -- set free to start living by grace, by the infinite measure
of God’s amazing grace, -- grace available in and to, for and through, each
and every one of us, -- prevenient, justifying, sanctifying and sustaining grace,
John Wesley names it. Grace that goes before us, making a way before we
know it. Grace that comes behind us, raising and renewing us from every
fall and every fault. Grace that leads us to see and to practice a whole
new way of living together, -- life without arms, life without violence, life
without fear or ignorance of any other living thing.
As per this summer time of celebrating the call of God in each one of our lives,
and in our life together, the disciples in this gospel story are telling Jesus,
-- whom Luke shows so often at prayer, -- John and all the other rabbis teach
their students to pray in ways that reveal and identify them to be disciples
of that particular rabbi. So if we want our lives to look like yours,
Jesus -- if we want to be known as your disciples, -- how shall we pray?
What does our calling look like and sound like? How do we put into words
just who and just whose we are? What we believe for and what we act for?
What we live for and what we die for?
Jesus’ prayer is much shorter and to the point here in Luke than in Matthew.
Just as the Ten Commandments divide between four honoring God and six honoring
one another, so do Jesus’ five phrases here divide between two honoring God
(“Father, Reveal who you are. Set the world right.”) and three honoring
one another (“Keep us alive with three square meals. Keep us forgiven
with you and forgiving others. Keep us safe from ourselves and the Devil.”).
(Eugene Peterson version) God is allowed to reign in us, 1) by the bread we
allow ourselves to be given, 2) by the sins we allow ourselves to be forgiven,
3) by the debts we allow ourselves to forgive, . . and, 4) by the conflicts
we allow ourselves to settle nonviolently! Is that really what Jesus is
saying?
Krister Stendahl points out, “Jesus did not teach us to pray “Strengthen
us in the moment of temptation, but deliver us from evil (or: the Evil One)”.
“Do not bring us to the time of trial!” For we know there is nothing heroic
about fighting “Satan,” the powers and principalities -- no matter what some
religious and political leaders may claim! Or the latest in the best-selling
“Left Behind” series of evangelical thriller-fiction may tempt us to believe!
By ourselves we do not have a prayer. By ourselves we do not stand a chance.
Prayer is allowing God to be for us. Prayer is acknowledging, as we like
to say, “God don’t make no junk,” “God is not done with any of us yet,” and
“We are all in this together!”
More than any specific fulfillment of what we think we need and pray for from
God, we are given the gift of the Holy Spirit, -- to know we are saved, -- that
is, sacred, -- created, beloved, belonging to God, -- no matter what!
Baptist preacher Gordon Cosby founded The Church of the Saviour in Washington,
D.C.
(www.pottershousebooks.org)
It is a congregation that knows God called, and continues to call, it to be
in Christ, -- one day, one week, one year at a time. It is a call to be
left not alone, not by ourselves, -- as if any of us can be truly “self-made”
or “self-sufficient” today -- but grasped by One who is greater than we!
Made part of the body of Christ! The good news about call is that we cannot
possibly keep it to ourselves!
Julie and I are reminded, especially on this day, of the small United Methodist
congregation on the north side of Chicago, named then by the people “Parish
of the Holy Covenant,” (www.muralchurch.org)
following a merger, -- the congregation we found in seminary, the congregation
into whom I was confirmed! The pastor was James Merrill (Jim) Reed, in
most ways our mentor in ministry, baptizer of our children, who died five years
ago today. We learned both the joy and the justice of worship and mission
there. We learned the intentionality and the accountability of the church
as “called” community. Preparing members accepted a six-month discipline
of worship, prayer, small group, financial support, social action, and attendance
at the Ecumenical Institute’s weekend course, “Theological Revolution of the
20th Century!” Part of the work of small groups was to help
members not take for granted but renew their commitments to the congregation
with each new year.
Gordon Cosby Shares the amazing pastoral insight: God does not create “a single
person whose essence and uniqueness are not eternally needed!” You, and
you, and you, and all of us, -- even me! Creation as God makes and sees
it is forever incomplete without the gift and the calling of each one of us.
Cosby proclaims the work of the church is to call forth this gift and these
gifts of the Spirit from one another – “We are not sent into the world in order
to make people good,” he writes. “God forbid!” Rather, “We are to let
people know that God is for them! . . . God is calling us into the family
of God’s love; the uniqueness of each forms a part of the whole! God is
a gracious God who has already judged the earth in mercy in Jesus Christ.
This is the Good news – that we can be! We can be what in our deepest
hearts we know we are intended to be. We can do what we are meant to do.”
How often we need to hear that, believe that, and act on it!
(Handbook for Mission Groups)
Prayer is about our acting upon how seriously we believe God is taking us!
How much God believes in us! How much God entrusts us to be co-creators
and partners with God. Prayer is simply the language of divine-human partnership.
Jesus tells us here to imagine the best in ourselves and in each other, -- to
find all the strengths we can be to build on, -- all the ways in which we are
only half-full. Then to magnify all the best we find in ourselves as God’s
children, -- God’s “likenesses” and junior partners, -- and apply all the best
in the measure of God! If even we, who are so limited, who see such a
small part of the whole picture, and who end up doing what we would not do,
and not doing what we would do, -- if even WE know how to give good gifts to
our children, how much more will God give the Spirit for us to learn and to
grow, to reveal and identify with God in us!
We are not alone. We are not left by ourselves. Even when somebody
drops in without warning at midnight, and we find no unbroken loaves of bread
left fit for a guest, in a culture where hospitality is the highest art, --
we know we are in this together! Guests are not just the responsibility
of one family, but of the whole community! And bread is not baked by one
household alone, but by many together! So we know who else is likely to
have fresh and unbroken bread fit for our guests. We are entitled, we
are empowered, to say and to do all it takes, --even to shouting and banging
on doors at midnight, -- to see that justice is done! To see that dignity is
respected! Community is offered! Even for the most unexpected of
guests in our lives. For we know how deeply each other sleeps when it
comes to our lives being intruded, interrupted, and inconvenienced!
But Jesus will not give up on us! Ask, he commands us! Search and
knock! As Walter Wink puts it, “Praying is rattling God’s cage and waking
God up and setting God free and giving this famished God water and this starved
God food and cutting the ropes off God’s hands and the manacles off God’s feet
and washing the caked sweat from God’s eyes and then watching God swell with
life and vitality and energy and following God wherever God goes!
“When we pray,” Wink continues, “we are not sending a letter to a celestial
White House, where it is sorted among piles of others. We are engaged,
rather, in an act of co-creation, in which one little sector of the universe
rises up and becomes translucent, incandescent, a vibratory center of power
that radiates the power of the universe!” That’s the image of Jesus in
Transfiguration on the mountaintop as God prepares him to go up to confront
all the powers that sit in Jerusalem, -- the image that just guided the Youth
Group on their Mission/Mystery trip! (They will be sharing with us after
10 am worship August 15!) “History,” Wink concludes, “belongs to the intercessors,
who believe the future into being.” As they say at Sojourners magazine,
“Faith is believing in spite of the evidence, then watching the evidence change!”
Let us pray to believe in spite of the evidence! And to watch the evidence
change. Amen.
Rev. John Auer
