Faith in a Skeptical Age

Hebrews 11: 1-3, 8-16

19^th Sunday in Ordinary Time/ 8^th August 2010

  

“I wish I had more faith.”  It’s a refrain we often hear in the church.  Even when it’s not heard, this hope, and the accompanying anxiety associated with it, is always just below the surface in the church.  Surprisingly, there’s a lot of anxiety around faith in the church.  Religion is about, faith, right?  It’s supposed to be, we think, about having lots of it and using it.  Jesus tells us that if we had just a little faith, mustard-seed-sized faith (Matthew 17:20) it would be enough to move mountains.   And because the literalist in all of us takes him at his word and because none of us are moving mountains, it’s very easy for us to feel as if we don’t have faith – or that whatever faith we do have, it’s not enough.

            The anxiety is around a feeling of insufficiency.  Hence we pray, “Lord give me more faith.”  Or we say to a close friend, “I wish I had more faith.”  Or we confess, “I wish I could have your faith. For me, it’s so difficult to believe at all.”  This last comment is often said to pastors – the professional faith people – as if we were the experts in this area.

            The anxiety is also around a feeling of inadequacy.  In addition to not having enough faith, there is the feeling that the faith we have is not good enough or the right kind of faith that we think God wants from us.

            The anxiety of insufficiency (not having enough) and inadequacy (not good enough) together leads, unintentionally, to further anxiety about one’s relationship with God, anxiety about what it means to have faith, to live from and for faith.  It leads to a lack of confidence that works against faith and makes it difficult for us to talk about our faith, about how it shapes our lives.

            All of this goes on in church settings, religious settings, among, so-called, “people of faith.”  Just imagine what it feels like beyond the church, for people who didn’t grow up in a religious environment, who have some interest in spiritual things, in theological questions, maybe even curious about what goes on behind the mysterious walls of a church, but never venture through our doors because they think they don’t have enough faith.  Never suspecting that we on the inside have the same questions!

            “I wish I had more faith,” people say.  But what is faith?  Why do some people seem to have it, in abundance, and others can’t quite get there?  Why are some people troubled by the fact that they don’t have faith and why are there folks who don’t seem to care? What do we really mean by it?  What does it mean?

            For some, faith is equated with belief.  “I wish I had more faith,” means, “I wish I had more faith to believe …,” in the existence of God or believe that Jesus was divine, believe in the reality of grace or believe in life after death.  Belief and faith are related, but they’re not the same.  Belief is associated with the content of the faith, the various articles in a creed or confession, “I believe in God the Father, maker of heaven and earth…,” as in the Apostles’ Creed.  Belief has to do with ideas or content of a faith.  Belief, then, easily slips over into the world of intellectual argument and debate, dependent upon proof and defense.

            This is where most of the arguments around faith and religion like to live – arguing over the content of belief, what I believe and don’t believe and why, what one should or should not believe, determining what is and isn’t orthodox.  Sometimes these discussions are rooted in strong intellectual arguments; sometimes they’re rooted in nothing more than uninformed opinion, yet believed uncritically.  

            In our age, despite the rising interest in things spiritual, religion, particularly Christianity is under widespread attack in our culture.  It’s been this way for about two hundred years, but it’s particularly worse now.  There are many reasons for this shift.  One is the fact that we live in an exceptionally skeptical age – we’re suspicious of everyone and everything, it seems, we take little at face value, we’re often trying to protect ourselves against being betrayed or disappointed or betrayed or robbed.  From personal experience we have come to question authority – sometimes with good reason – whether it’s the church or government or any other organized institution with power, money, and influence.  Far too many people have been burned, emotionally and personally wounded by family, by church, by government; lied to by family members, by church members, and government.  Skepticism makes sense; it’s a defense.  It’s very difficult for people to believe in what a church says it believes (or is supposed to) when their experience has been something very different.  How does one have faith then? 

            Our skeptical age is also fueled by the science-religion debate, including the evolution vs. intelligent design argument, which has been going on since the 19^th century.  While many people in the scientific community do indeed hold to religious beliefs and would consider themselves people of faith, there is a general perception that to be a sophisticated, intelligent, ‘with-it’ modern means to cast off primitive religion and move on up to the reasoned world of science. For those who live that way, it’s remarkable how much they sound like people of faith, with beliefs and conviction, religiously holding to a dogmatic anti-religious view of reality.[1]

            All of this has led some to think that to be a person of faith, to be a Christian one has to leave one’s head, one’s reason at the door and just accept the religious things we talk about “by faith,” which generally means without thought.  And because many value their thought and the value of reason as a gift (from God!), they’re not willing to set these aside in order to be religious.  Sometimes we inside the doors of the church don’t help the matter when we think that “having faith” means we just accept certain things to be true and then never have to think about them again or what they mean – or ever wonder that we might, indeed, be wrong.  It’s a “leap of faith,” we say.[2]  We just have to jump and hope that there’s something, someone on the other to catch us or save us.

            Such a view brings us back to a feeling of inadequacy and insufficiency – who is courageous enough to just leap, to jump? Some are.  There are risk-takers and adventurers among us, who, like Abraham, will leave everything behind and go because they heard God say, “Go.”  But most of us, including myself, don’t have that kind of courage. 

            We know we’re supposed to live by faith, but when we look at how much of our lives are planned and organized, either by ourselves or by someone else, truth is, there’s very little room left for the unknown, so that we never have to take that leap.  In fact, we are skilled, trained, educated to anticipate the unknown, to prepare for the unknown, so that nothing ever catches us by surprise.  We’re even insured up to the gills against the unknown. We’re very good at making sure there’s little in our lives by which we have to live by any kind of faith in the unknown.  Unless we know the known, we won’t go there.  There’s probably no other time in the life of this church when how we relate to the unknown is tested than when your Session has to wrestle long and hard in putting together the annual budget.  This year, Session presented what some would call a deficit budget for 2010, a $20,000 deficit. Others refer to that deficit line as the “Holy Spirit line” or the “Hoped for Additional Giving,” a hopeful budget because we know how much we need to do God’s work here this year and we’re going to trust that God working through the members and friends of this congregation will be generous and provide.  Church budgets are written with faith.  Our home budgets might not be, but they are in the church.

            An example of this church venturing out with faith is our decision to proceed with the renovations, which included securing a $900,000 mortgage.  That was a leap into the unknown.  We’re slowly reducing that balance (now to just above $710,000) and doing this in the midst of a major recession.  We’re still here, the better for taking the risk.

            The author of Hebrews didn’t have church budgets in mind when he wrote, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen (Hebrews 11:1).”  What we have here in Hebrews, and other places in the New Testament, is a very different understanding of this word, “faith.”  Hebrews has a particular meaning of the word that could change how we view the Christian life and offers good news for the skeptic among us and within us.  Yes, we know verses like, we are “saved by grace through faith (Ephesians 2:8).”  As Protestants we know is it faith that saves, not works, not living up to commandments.  It’s faith that is salvific. Yet, it’s easy to think that the more faith we have the more we can be assured that we are saved.  What if one doubts?  Does this mean that one’s salvation is in question?   I used to think this way.  When I was in seminary I found myself conscious of my own inadequacies and insufficiencies, struggling for more faith, trying to remove all doubt from my mind.  Until one day it dawned upon me that I was turning faith into a kind of work, using it as something that was going to earn God’s favor and acceptance.  No wonder people feel guilty for not having faith in God.  No wonder people feel inadequate and insufficient because who ever has enough faith?  No wonder people feel guilty when they doubt or question.  There are so many who think that doubt and questioning are the opposite of faith, yet both are integral to it.         

            The author to Hebrews didn’t ask for “more faith.”  For him, it’s already a given.  He wants his hearers to live from it.  For him, it’s not an intellectual exercise.  He’s not asking them to defend the truths of Christianity.  It’s not really about belief.  This is about exercising faith, faith understood as primarily trust, assurance, and confidence.  And this is not a blind trust, either, a leap into the dark.  The author of Hebrews, in giving this long overview of Abraham’s faith and Isaac and Moses and all the others in Israel’s history, right up to and including Jesus, is offering a distinctively Jewish-Christian understanding of faith as trust, assurance, and confidence in God. Why?  How?  Not because God just wants us to trust as some kind of test.  Hebrews shows us that Israel and now the church can place its trust in God and live from that trust because God was and is and always will be faithful.

            This is the foundation of faith, this is the source our faith, this is the reason for our faith, the justification of our faith:  the faithfulness of God.  Our faith is rooted in the fact that God is faithful to us, no matter what.  Our faith is grounded in God’s faithfulness to us – to creation, to humanity – no matter what.  God has made promises to us – covenants with us – that link us inextricably to God and God to us and God cannot give up on these covenants of faithfulness without God betraying Godself.  In other words, God has made these promises to us and God is trustworthy and worthy of our trust.  God keeps God’s word.  God relates to us in good-faith.  For God to do otherwise would mean that God has turned on his identity, God has ceased being God.  If you look very closely at the New Testament and see how faith is exercised, particularly in Jesus, it’s never done in a vacuum; it’s done within the context, the prior knowledge or experience that God was and is faithful.  At the height of the storm depicted in Mark 4: 25-41, we find Jesus “in the stern, asleep on the cushion,” – “asleep on the cushion,” – for “such was his own trust in God.”[3]  Jesus knows God to be trustworthy; therefore Jesus can rest in God.  Knowing God as faithful calls forth from within us assurance, calls for faith.  As John Calvin (1509-1564) said, “We make the freely given promise of God the foundation of faith because upon it faith properly rests. …faith properly begins with the promise [of God], rests in it, and ends in it.  For in God faith seeks life:  a life that is not found in commandments and declarations of penalties, but in the promise of mercy, and only in a freely given promise.”[4]

            It’s the exercising of this kind of faith, of assurance, that then sends us forward into God’s future.  The entire orientation of this Hebrews text is forward, into the future.  If God has been faithful to Israel, and faithful to Jesus raising him from the dead, then God will be faithful to the church, and to those of us who continue this pilgrim journey. Because God is faithful we venture forth into the unknown. We can risk. We can step-out.  This kind of faith actually gives us a future. With faces forward we wait with anticipation for the further fulfillment of God’s promises.  This becomes the foundation of Christian hope.  Things that are yet unseen will in time be seen, will become real and true and worthy of praise.[5]

            In the meantime, there are times when we can exercise our faith and other times when we will feel weak and scared.  What do we do in those moments?  Maybe we shouldn’t pray, “Give us more faith.”  We don’t have to go inward to find resources within us to believe, to have more faith.   Calvin on faith was really sublime.  He gives us the best advice, liberating advice.  “Therefore, if we would not have our faith tremble and waver, we must buttress it with the promise of salvation, which is willingly and freely offered to us by the Lord in consideration of our misery rather than our deserts.”[6]    In other words: Remember the promise.  Look back and remember all the times in your life when God has been faithful.  Remember the promise.  The Lord was and is and will be merciful and good.  Remember the God you have come to know, especially through the life and witness, in the face of Jesus Christ. Remember the promise and then venture forth into God’s future with confidence, with faith, in faith.

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[i] See Marilynne Robinson on religion and science, most recently in Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2010).

[2] The phrase, “leap of faith,” is often attributed to Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), although an analysis of his works in Danish suggest that this is a mistranslation into the English.  He did, at length, refer to “leap,” particularly in The Concept of Anxiety (1844); or, “What if, rather than speaking or dreaming of an absolute beginning, we speak of a leap?” Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (1846).

[3] See Robin McL. Wilson, Hebrews (Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans, 1987), 202.

[4] John Calvin, Institutes of  the Christian Religion (1559), III. II. 29.

[5] Cf. Marcus Dods, “…faith gives to things future, which as yet are only hoped for, all the reality of actual present existence; and irresistibly convinces us of the reality of things unseen and brings us into their presence.  Things future and things unseen must become certainties to the mind if a balanced life is to be lived.”  Cited in Wilson, 202.  I’m grateful for Wilson’s scholarship and, most of all, his friendship over the years through our mutual associations with St. Leonard’s Parish Church, St. Andrews, Scotland.

[6] Calvin, Institutes, III. II. 29.  Emphasis added.

All Divisions Healed

Colossians 3:1-11

18^th Sunday in Ordinary Time/ 1^st August 2010/ Sacrament of Holy Communion

            I would love to have seen the reaction of First Church, Colossae, when they heard this, when the Colossians heard Paul say that even Scythians should be welcomed into their worship.  The reference comes in 3:11. Paul shows a new future where old divisions are healed and cultural distinctions removed.  In the renewal of the world, with our minds set on Christ, with our lives participating in Christ something new will emerge.  Paul describes a new kind of community – the church – where “there is no longer Greek or Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all in all (3:11).” This verse is very similar to what we find in Galatians 3:28; except there Paul says, “there is no longer male or female.”  Here in Colossae we have barbarians and, what is worse, Scythians thrown into the mix – what a church that must have been.

            What’s a barbarian?  Originally, a barbarian meant anyone who wasn’t Greek.  It’s obviously a pejorative term. It’s never used in praise.  You never hear someone affirming, “You’re such a great barbarian!” From a Greek point of view there were only two groups of people in the world, Greek and barbarian, and barbarian clearly “conveyed contempt for inferior peoples.”[1]  The term literally meant someone who talks funny, or is inarticulate, who speaks a language you cannot understand (because they’re not speaking Greek!), whose speech is unintelligible (because they’re not speaking Greek!).  The Greek word here, barbaros, refers to bar-bar, a kind random hubbub produced by hearing a spoken language that one cannot understand, similar to blah blah and babble in modern English. We could call them blahblahrians.  The definition of the other as barbarian is from the exclusive position of the Greek who divides up the world from the arrogance of the Greek perspective.  They would say there are people “like us,” and then there’s all the rest and all the rest don’t matter.  If it sounds like the Greeks had a superiority complex, they did.  Plutarch (c. 46-120), the first-century moralist, wrote that Greeks should rule barbarians.  Plato (429–347 BC) gave thanks that “he was born a Greek and not a barbarian and human rather than a creature without reason (an animal).”[2]  The Greek adopted an exclusivist perspective and then stigmatized everyone who wasn’t like them.

            Among the barbarians the most contemptible of all, the lowest of the low, again from the “superior” view of the Greeks, were the Scythians.  Who were they?  The Scythian state emerged around the 7^th century BC, with their kingdom stretching from just north of the Black Sea (modern southern Russia and Ukraine) east across central Asia, through Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan.  This ethnic group came out of the heart of Iran, of Persian descent. The Jewish historian, Josephus (37-c. 100), writing just after Jesus, claimed that the Scythians were descended from Magog, the grandson of Noah.  Josephus describes them “little better than wild beasts.”[3] That’s who Paul expects to be on the membership rolls of First Church, Colossae.  Even the Scythians have a place at the table. 

            How did Paul come to say this?  How did he come to believe this?  Paul had a different view of reality.  It was not the reality he naturally grew up with; it was not shaped by the religious and cultural norms of his community; it was not shaped by the tradition of his household.  There was a time when he viewed the world from the superiority of his own perspective.  There were people like him, Jewish, and then all the rest.  That’s what Gentile means, literally, “the nations,” meaning everyone else.  For him either one was circumcised or uncircumcised, that’s how the world was divided up.  There were other divisions for him too, either male or female, with male being vastly superior to being female.  He also lived within a Roman culture that divided up the world between slave and free.  That was his world; that was his reality that shaped his ethics, the way he moved in the world. It’s what he knew and he assumed he was right, standing firmly in his convictions.  That was until Jesus knocked Paul off his high-horse, threw him, literally, to the ground and blinded him, never again to “see” reality from his limited perspective (Acts 9:1-9).  In time Paul got his sight back, although nothing looked the same, he was given new eyes, new insight into the nature of another reality defined by his new relationship with the Risen Christ.

            Paul was transformed and given a new identity, rooted not in his religious, social, or ethnic identities, but in whom he came to know himself to be in Christ.  The fact that Paul can say that all these traditional, religious, social, and ethnic divisions mean nothing and can therefore be set aside (or “put to death,” as he says), is because he came to see his identity rooted in something far more profound.  These really are extraordinary claims for us to hear from Paul.  I stand amazed by his boldness of vision, how radical and subversive they were for his time (and ours).  In his vision every wall of division is obliterated and every distinction based on perspectives of superiority-inferiority, of exclusion-inclusion that defined the Greco-Roman-Jewish mean nothing in the church of Jesus Christ.  He could imagine a new world for the church, for what the true church should be about, not because he had a good idea and thought this would be a good evangelism gimmick to get people to join.  It was the reality he was compelled to live into because he had already received a glimpse of it in the way Jesus Christ treated him, in the way Paul – a violent persecutor of Jesus’ followers – could be thrown into a new reality of Christ’s grace and freedom.  He was welcomed into a new world.

            That new reality for Paul didn’t involve trying to imitate Jesus.  That was impossible.  Instead, for Paul, to be a disciple is to participate in the very life of Christ – the life, the death, and the resurrection.  It’s right there at 3:1:  “So, if you have been raised with Christ,” with the implication here being that we have – “since” we have been raised.  Actually, the Greek here is since you have been co-resurrected with Christ, then “seek the things that are above.”  Now, this does not mean, keep your head in the clouds.  It means allow your minds (the core of your being), to be shaped and defined from this new perspective we are being given in Christ.  “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God (3:3).”  This, too, is participation language.  Can you hear it?  “For you have died” – already.  From Paul’s perspective, we have already died and now live on the other side of death as resurrection people.  Our lives are hidden with Christ in God, now – not in some far-off afterlife –  already; which means that we are already participating in the new reality of resurrection.  Since we have and are putting on a new life in Christ, forever discovering what it means to participate in this new reality, we are then putting off the old life, the former person, the old way of doing things, the old way of viewing things.

            Taking on and putting off.  Taking off and putting on.  Rising and dying.  Dying and rising.  Sounds like baptism language, doesn’t it?  Baptism in the early church consisted of taking off one’s garments, going naked down into a pool, and then coming up and out, rising up to new life and given a new garment.  Actually, Colossians 3 could have been a baptism text.   Baptism is not so much about initiation into the church for Paul as it’s about participation in the very life of Christ.  For the one baptized all of reality has been and is being transfigured and transformed.  Everything has changed and is changing.  It’s this reality that allowed the early church to become a new kind of community, a community of equals who gathered around one table of the Lord.[4]

            That’s the vision Paul holds out for us; this is what the church should be about.  Yet, we know all too well that the history of the church, even its contemporary incarnation, is rife with divisions.  The church and our nation continue to wrestle with divisions of all kinds, many of which are based on race.  The church and our nation continue to struggle with racism of all forms.  The national conversation about immigration, particularly in Arizona, is full of this language – who is in, who is out, who belongs and who doesn’t. Racial profiling and other forms of racism involve perspective, what we see and don’t see in the other before us.  Do we see the other, whoever the other happens to be in our midst, as stranger, as threat, as barbarian, Scythian?  If they are not “like us” are they then shunned?  Or when we look out to the other – whoever the other is – do we see a baptized child of God, a fellow brother or sister in Christ, a fellow human being created in the image of God?  Now, you won’t hear these questions in The Baltimore Sun paper. Not because there’s something wrong with The Sun.  They’re just part of a secular press.  These are not their questions.  But these are our questions.  When we see the other, what do we see?  Whom do we see?  We see the world from a different perspective, a different reality.  At least we ought to.  Sometimes we don’t.

            In Alice Walker’s short story “The Welcome Table” she tells of an old Africa American woman, tired and thirsty, entering the vestibule of a white church.  “Some of them there at the church saw the age, the dotage, the missing buttons down the front of her mildewed black dress.  Others saw cooks, chauffeurs, maids…Many of them saw jungle orgies in an evil place, where others were reminded of riotous anarchists looting and raping in the street.”  And so the hierarchy of the church mobilizes in defense of the racism of the congregation. [Leading the way was the pastor.] “The reverend of the church stopped her pleasantly as she stepped into the vestibule…. ‘Auntie, you know this is not your church?’ As if one could choose the wrong one.”  [Later,] out on the hot highway, dying as her heart gives out, she sees Jesus walking down the road and tells him, “how they had tossed her out of his church.”[5]  Truth is that kind of church is not his church; it’s a club.

            I don’t think Paul was so naïve to think that the kingdom had dawned in his churches because they were all a mess (that’s why he wrote all those letters!), but he had a vision of what the church can be like when it claims its baptismal identity, when the baptized community participates more profoundly and deeply in the very life of Christ who continually seeks to renew us and give us life.  When we do we are welcomed into a new reality. 

            We come to the Lord’s Table this morning as equals.  The Table changes how we see one another.  How we see one another is informed by this meal.  How?  Because we do more here than just “remember” what Jesus did, here we participate in the body and blood of Christ, with him and in him, in the way of life and the way of death and the way of new life that changes the perspective of everything.  Here we can see the Scythian as our brother and sister in Christ, as one baptized and equal to us, and welcomed with the embrace of peace.  May it be so. 

           

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[1] Marianne Meye Thompson, Colossians & Philemon (Grand Rapids:  Eerdmans, 2005), 79

[2] Plutarch, Politics 1.2; Plato, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Thales, both cited in Thompson, 79.  Also according to Diogenes Laertius (third century AD), Socrates was grateful to Fortune that “I was born a human being and not one of the brutes; next, that I was born a man and not a woman; thirdly, a Greek and not a barbarian.”   Lives, cited in Thompson, 79.

[3] Josephus, Against Apion 2.269, cited in Thompson, 79. Emphasis added.

[4] Cf. quote from the worship bulletin:  “If the church of the baptized should be a community of a new kind of liberty, so the church that gathers around the Lord’s Table ought to form a community of a new kind of equality.”  William Placher, Narratives of a Vulnerable God:  Christ, Theology, and Scripture (Louisville:  Westminster John Knox Press, 1994), 151.

[5] Alice Walker, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women, as summarized in Placher, 154.

Image:  Mystical Supper, Russian icon, 1497.

Prayer 101: Ask. Seek. Knock.

Luke 11: 1-13
17^th Sunday in Ordinary Time/ 25^th July 2010

It’s probably the one issue people of faith struggle with most:  prayer.  In many surveys over the years here at CPC, the adult education committee almost always receives requests to do a workshop or offer a seminar on prayer.  The PrayerFest we offered last spring flowed from those requests.  The PrayerFest was a great success.  We had a great response; received good feedback; and we were told to do it again.  One thing most noticeable about the event was that there were mostly women in attendance.  I’m not sure what this says about the prayer life of men, because I know men do indeed pray – actually, we need a lot of prayer.  Maybe some guys are just reluctant to admit they need help.

            I’ll confess, though.  I’ll put myself in that category.  I need help.  When I hear the disciples ask Jesus, “Lord, teach us to pray,” I can resonate with that.  I need help.   I pray, but I wouldn’t call myself a “prayer warrior.” I know people who can spend hours at intercessory prayer, praying over every aspect of their lives.  I don’t do that.   I pray and know the power of prayer.  Prayer changes things.  It makes a difference in my life.  And, according to Jesus, our praying has the capacity to change the world.  I pray regularly, but I don’t have a pattern or rhythm or a set-schedule.  I know people who go into their “prayer closets,” a special place to pray with God.  I don’t have such a place.  I have shelves of prayer books, books on the theology of prayer, spirituality of prayer, you name it, but I wouldn’t say I’m an expert.  Many of these books were purchased during a season in my life when I said, “I need to deepen my prayer life,” and then the rest of life gets in the way of my plans, the half-read book is placed on the shelf until the season comes around when I say, “I need to deepen my prayer life,” and I buy another book.  It’s a great way to build a library!  But it’s a lousy way to learn how to pray.

            In the schoolhouse of prayer, we’re all students, we’re all disciples, and we all have much to learn.  But, I’m beginning to be a little suspicious of all the books about prayer on the market these days, books about the secrets of prayer, books on the techniques and methods of prayers, or yet another collection of someone else’s prayers.[1]  Jesus didn’t need prayer manuals or prayers written by others.  Jesus – prayed.  He didn’t learn about prayer, he prayed.  He didn’t worry about deepening his prayer life, he prayed.  He got on with it.  For Jesus, prayer wasn’t an option; it wasn’t something he got around to after the end of a busy day or something he turned to in a time of crsis.  My guess is he never went very long between prayers; it was a constant in his life.  In Mark’s gospel, in particularly, there is a clear rhythm of prayer and minister, prayer and ministry, throughout his life.  Jesus  prayed.  He just did it.  A lot.  His disciples knew he prayed, for he was forever going off by himself to pray.  They knew how central it was in his life, in his ministry.  They didn’t know how to do it.  So one day they asked him.  And he told them – tells us.  This is how you pray….

            “When you pray, say:  ‘Father, hallowed be your name…’”   We know how the rest goes. We pray these words every week in worship.  “Every day, in countless languages, in public and private, in virtually every country of the world, this prayer ascends to God.  It could be argued that no single minute passes when it is not being uttered.”[2]  Yet, it’s used so often and it’s so well-known (like Psalm 23 or 1 Corinthians 13), that we might say the words or hear them said without really connecting with what they say, without really hearing them.  It’s so easy to miss what’s contained in this prayer, the only prayer we have from Jesus. For example, try praying the Lord’s Prayer some time, whether here in worship or at home, being attentive to every word.   Concentrating on the meaning of every word, see if you can get through the prayer without being distracted, without having a wayward thought (such as, I wonder what I’m going to have for lunch?) or any other association.  It’s not easy.

            What Jesus gives us in his prayer is both simple and profound at the same time.  He shows us that, on the one hand, the structure of prayer is not really all that complex.  The “how” of prayer is really very simple.   There are two accounts of the Lord’s Prayer in the New Testament, Matthews’s version and Luke’s version.  Both authors are quoting from an earlier source biblical scholars call “Q,” for the German word, Quelle, meaning, “Source.”  Matthew’s version is wordier than Luke’s.  His version of the Lord’s Prayer consists of seven imperatives or demands of God (they’re more than petitions).  Luke’s is simpler; there are only five imperatives.  Let’s look at Luke.

            After the address to God as Father, suggesting an extraordinary intimacy between Jesus and God, Jesus makes five imperatives that are amazingly comprehensive and far-reaching.  That’s how we start in prayer as well, in our address to God.  The kind of relationship Jesus had with God, as son to Father, is the same kind of relationship with all of God’s children.  We are all son’s and daughter’s of God who can be assured of a similar kind of human-divine relationship.   With just one word, “Father,” Jesus echoes his use of the Aramaic, “Abba,” Daddy, for God, signifying an extraordinary intimacy.   Suggesting level of closeness between humanity and God was unheard of in First Century Judaism.

            And notice, Jesus “didn’t respond by suggesting some technique or regimen.  He said that genuine prayer depends upon knowing the character of God rather than human effort.” [3] Knowing God as Father (the best, possible Father), as kind and benevolent parent, as Daddy then shapes the way we pray (and we can push this, I believe, to include Mommy, because the point is parental trust).  How we view God, our own personal images of God, have considerable power over how pray and when. 

            Then pray this way:  Imperative 1:  Hallow the name of God.  Sanctify the name.  Remember to set the name of God above and apart of all names.  It declares God’s absolute difference from all created things, God’s otherness.   The sense of this imperative is:  God show up!  God be holy!  God be God!  Remember who you are! 

            Imperative 2:  Ask for the kingdom.  “God, bring the kingdom.  Bring the rule of God into the world of humans.”  The term “kingdom” is used 123 times in the four Gospels.  It’s at the heart of Jesus’ ministry.  He was unique among his peers to see that the kingdom represents God’s rule of love and justice not in some far-off distance, but in the present.  In many ways, this imperative sets the tone for all the others; it establishes the horizon or purpose of every prayer uttered to God, that God’s kingdom of love, healing, justice come and be real among us.  That was the core teaching of Jesus’ ministry.  Every healing Jesus offered, every teaching, every parable points to the importance of God’s kingdom. Even the way we understand the cross and resurrection must be seen in light of the central of the kingdom of God.  Although there’s no petition for God’s will to be done here, “on earth as it is in heaven,” as we find in Matthew’s version, it’s implied in this simple request:  “Your kingdom come.”

            Imperative 3:  Give us each day our daily bread.  It’s a challenge to make sense of this, to be honest, because there’s a Greek word [epiousion from epiousios] Luke uses which in the vast body of Greek literature available to scholars today is only found here.  It means more than: may there be food on the table or may we have a well-stocked refrigerator or freezer.  It could be translated, “daily” bread, “future” bread, or “necessary” bread.  But perhaps the best understanding suggests “the bread we need.”[4]  This is not a request for God to help us live a simpler life and reduce our caloric intake. Instead, it suggests a plea that God remind us that the future is not in our hands, that so much of our lives are beyond our control; that sometimes we have to trust that indeed the Lord will provide, that we have to count on the hospitality of strangers in order to find the food we need to survive.  It’s to live knowing that the things we most need come from God and not from amassing our own resources.

            Here, perhaps, is a good illustration of this.  A year ago at this time there was an article in The Washington Post about six Franciscan friars, dressed in their long, brown robes and sandals, who made the trek from their abbey near Roanoke, Virginia, to Washington, DC, more than 300 miles.  They didn’t have a plan, they didn’t have any money.  For six weeks they walked relying on the providence of God and the kindness of strangers to feed and shelter them.  Each day they didn’t know where they were going to spend the next night.  Each morning they didn’t know where the next meal was going to come from.  The people they met responded with considerable curiosity (and suspicion) and a lot of generosity.  People pressed dollar bills into their hands, provided shelter.  One mother of three saw them walking along Lee Highway in Fairfax, so she pulled over her minivan and offered to buy them lunch at Chick-fil-A.   Everyone was staring at them, the brothers said.  “The high point was when the guy dressed up like a cow came out and gave us all high fives.  He was in costume. They were in robes.  A lot of people were wondering what was going on.”[5]  They were living out the meaning of “give us this day our daily bread.”  Living this way makes us odd. When we get glimpse of the oddness of the kingdom, people often wonder what is going on, because it makes no sense.  Yet, from the perspective of most kingdom living is odd.

            Imperative 4 is simple.  Forgive.   The gospel is all about forgiveness.  Demand forgiveness of God, because forgiveness is the way of the kingdom.  Then we demand God to help us forgive those who are indebted to us, either because of the wrong we have done them or they, us. 

            Imperative 5 is probably the most confusing.  We say, using Matthew’s versions, “Lead us not into temptation,” and probably think this means protect us from the temptation of Satan.  Here, the term is not “temptation,” but “trial,” or literally, “testing.”  What trial?  What testing?   The trying of followers of Jesus who are up against a world of injustice and cruelty, who are up against a world of people who do not seek first the kingdom, who resist the kingdom, who can’t stand the kingdom, who can’t stand justice and peace, love and forgiveness and will do whatever it takes to thwart the work of God.  The testing refers to Christians who are tested, put to the test because of their trust in God by people who are not receptive to kingdom ways.  Jesus assumes here that this imperative is needed because to be his follower means we will experience hardship, persecution, peril, and maybe even, for some, the sword.   This imperative is saying – God, give us the power to endure, to thrive, to not fail the test, but be equal to the challenges facing the struggle for the kingdom that is coming.

            Simple, right?  The structure is pretty simple.  The implications of such a prayer are radical and even revolutionary.  To pray for God’s kingdom is perhaps the most radical part of this prayer, for us and for the world. We we utter these words we are being drawn into the work of the kingdom. We are being incorporated into the very life and work of God.  That’s why Karl Barth (1886-1968) could say, “To claps the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.”

            And then Jesus says, keep doing it over and over and over again.  Never give up.  If parents who are evil (Lk 11:13) – as Jesus says – can still give good things to their children, then how much more will God, who is not evil, be more parent-like in providing for the needs of God’s children?  By calling parents evil and then comparing them to God’s benevolence might sound hard, but this is actually a rabbinic and Greek rhetoric device (qal wehomer, meaning “from the lesser to the greater”), comparing from less to more, with an emphasis on the more.  In this case, the emphasis is on the nature of God. The point here is:  there’s no malice or trickery in God.  There’s no deception.  God’s trustworthy; worthy of our trust, the one we can trust with the worth of our lives, our hearts, and passions.  And the more we pray, the more we realize who God really is.

            That’s why we are told to ask, to seek, to knock again and again – to request, to search, to hunt, to pound on heaven’s door demanding of God these very things.  Biblical scholar Walter Wink says, “Biblical prayer is impertinent, persistent, shameless, indecorous.  It is more like haggling in an outdoor bazaar than the polite monologues of the churches.”[6]  

            That’s why Jesus tells us to ask, to seek, to knock, go after the very things that God wants.  It’s about struggle, wrestling with God, over and over again, engaging God in a profoundly personal, passionate, potentially transforming way.  For what we ask for –if we ask, not for anything we might desire, but to ask for these things – such as the kingdom, forgiveness, daily bread – they will be given.  For the kingdom has come and is on its way.  What we search for – if we search after these things that matter most to God – we will indeed find.  And when we knock away on a closed door, if that door is the threshold into the wider kingdom of God – it will open.    And it’s clear that God wants us to ask, and search, and bang away at prayer.  Gregory the Great (540-604) once said, “God wishes to be asked, he wishes to be forced, he wishes, in a certain manner, to be overcome by our prayers.”   For the more we ask, and the more we search after and pound away at the things that matter most, if we strive after these things the more we will find ourselves being changed, the more we will find the content of our prayer changing, the dimensions of our hearts changing, the choices we make changing, the things that matter most to us changing, the things that we hope for changing. 

            Maybe this is why prayer mattered so much in Jesus’ ministry and why we all need to be schooled in it.  The fear and resistance are great because at some level we know that to take the Lord’s Prayer seriously, to take prayer seriously means at some level we will be changed, the world will be changed.  This scares us.  Yet, the more we pray this way, as Jesus’ prayed – asking, seeking, knocking – the more our lives might actually reflect the glory, the love, the justice, and the forgiveness of God. 

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[1] I’m thinking here of John Wilkinson’s best-seller, The Prayer of Jabez: Breaking Through to a Blessed Life (Multnomah Press, 2004).  For a wide and wild sample of the variety of books on prayer available, just type in “prayer” using the search engine at Amazon.com.

[2] John Koening, Rediscovering New Testament Prayer:  Boldness and Blessing in the Name of Jesus (HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), 40.

[3] Dan Clendenin, Journey with Jesus, http://www.journeywithjesus.net/Essays/20100719JJ.shtml

[4] Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke (Collegeville, MN:  The Liturgical Press, 1991), 177-178.

[5] William Wan, The Washington Post, July 29, 2009.

[6] Walter Wink quoted in Richard J. Foster, Finding the Heart’s True Home (HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), 247.

The One Thing Needed

Luke 10: 38-42

 16^th Sunday in Ordinary Time/ 18^th July 2010

            Are you the Martha-type or the Mary-type?  Are you Martha or Mary?  I’m also talking to the guys here:  which one are you?  Martha is the doer, the organizer, the planner, the busy-one, flitting about (to use a good Scots word); she gets things done.  Martha is also the servant, the care-provider, extending hospitality and welcome, attending to the needs of others.  Mary is the opposite of Martha; she’s the contemplative, the listener, she’s casually spending her days in conversation.  The way the story is told, Jesus obviously lifts up one way of being over the other, rebuking Martha and applauding Mary.

            Now, if you’re a Martha-type, Jesus’ words can sound pretty cruel and unfair, particularly because this story follows on the heels of the Parable of the Good Samaritan, a story that calls for sacrificial service to one’s neighbor as the way of the kingdom.  In fact, this is a theme throughout Luke’s gospel, the importance of diakonia, that is service.  It’s from this word diakonia that we get the word deacon, the one who serves (literally, a deacon is a servant who waits on tables).  Martha has just extended hospitality to the guest, to Jesus.  Shouldn’t Martha be applauded for her service?  She is sweating away in the kitchen getting the meal together.  And what is her sister doing?  She’s not helping at all, she’s extending no hospitality.  Mary’s sitting on the floor, at Jesus’ feet, listening to Jesus.  Apparently, from Martha’s perspective, Mary’s doing nothing.

            Mary is listening to Jesus when Martha comes by, obviously agitated, and tells Jesus to tell Mary to get her but off the floor and help.  This is a classic example of triangulation.  Instead of communicating directly with someone, we turn to a third person to say or do what we’re reluctant to say or do directly.  Very often a lot of interpersonal damage is done when we triangulate or find ourselves being triangulated.  Actually, Jesus allows himself to be triangulated here.  Martha approaches Jesus assuming that he would be on her side, assuming that she was in the right, doing the proper thing, the proper thing for a woman to do in his time (prepare the meal), while Mary was being neglectful of her responsibilities.  That’s when Jesus rebukes Martha.  Jesus probably wouldn’t have said anything to her had she not complained to Jesus about Mary.

            Are you Martha or Mary?   Who wants to be Martha if you’re going to be rebuked by Jesus?   Is Jesus really saying that Martha was in the wrong?  Shouldn’t we be like Martha?  Isn’t the Christian life about service to the Kingdom, serving the needs of our brothers and sisters?  Shouldn’t we be extending hospitality and welcome to everyone in God’s name?  The kingdom needs doers, planners, people who care and provide for the needs of the saints, building homes, teaching church school, visiting hospitals and care centers, caring for the homeless – and because we love to eat, we need people to make the tuna fish casseroles and Jell-O molds for potluck suppers and people to bake brownies and cookies for fellowship hour.  Where would the church be with Martha-types?         

            Where would be without Mary-types?  The reflective listener, the contemplative, the thinkers and dreamers, those willing to engage in conversation around ultimate things. 

            But we have to be careful here.  It’s not a matter of either-or, Martha or Mary, although I’ve intentionally set it up like this.  In fact, this dualist way of thinking is not helpful and leads to a misreading of the text.  It might appear to be this way, given Jesus’ rebuke of Martha.   Again, Jesus probably wouldn’t have said a thing to Martha but for her complaint of Mary.  What Martha was doing matters.  What Mary was doing also matters.    Both ways of being matter in the kingdom.

            What Jesus cautions against is not the many ways Martha is serving, but the spirit behind the way she serves.  It’s difficult to see this in the English translation, but embedded in the Greek we find a Martha who is, yes, the doer, but she’s running in ten thousand different directions at the same time; she’s being pulled and dragged away from the things that matter most.  As a result, she’s nervous, concerned, anxious, and agitated.  She’s worried.  She looks over and sees her sister calm, unbothered, without a concern in the world, talking away with Jesus.  Then she explodes, “Lord, don’t you care?”  Or, “How careless can you be?  Don’t you see what she’s doing?  She should be in the kitchen with me.  Tell her to help me.  It’s not fair.  Tell her.”  At that point I can imagine Jesus standing up, placing his arms on either side of Martha, hold her arms down, gently but firmly, calmly, looking her in the eye and saying,  “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things;  there is need of only one thing.”   Yet, implied in this statement is that Mary, not Martha, knows what it is.

            So what has Mary chosen?  What is Martha missing?  What is the better part?  What has Mary done? That’s the point of the story.

            I’ll get right to the point.  There are two themes here, both inter-related.  Both require us to remember that when Mary sits at Jesus’ feet that they are very human feet, but also the feet of God.  In other words, she’s not engaged in idle chatter with a stranger-as-guest who shows up at one’s house.  They both know who he is.  They call him, “Lord.”  If we probe a little deeper here, we see that this is really a story about hospitality or welcome:  it’s about how we receive the Lord.  How do we live in the presence of of God?  How do we welcome the Lord’s presence in our lives on a daily basis?  How do we welcome the Lord where we live – in our lives, in our households, in the life of the church?  Are we running about, flitting about, distracted, worried, anxious, busy-bodies with our to-do lists, always on the go, and thus failing to be attentive to the guest in our midst, of the Lord in our midst?  Mary recognized the nature of the guest and she throws protocol and tradition to the wind.  Jesus is more important than tradition.  Mary takes advantage of the occasion, of the visitation, sits at Jesus’ feet and listens to him.  To be like Mary is to listen to him.  To choose the better part is to choose to take the time to listen.

            Go a little deeper; Luke depicts Mary in an unconventional way for his time.  The women would have been in the kitchen or outside by the ovens cooking, while the men stayed inside to talk.  (I saw this in the Congo.  The women cooked and talked outside.  Only the men ate indoors at the table.)  But here Mary is welcomed into the world of men, as it were, and, what is more, the fact that she is listening to Jesus suggests that she is being attentive to his teaching.  Luke depicts Mary as a disciple – as a student who sits at the feet of Rabbi Jesus to learn from him.  And that’s what matters most.  Martha is missing out on this opportunity because of all her distractions – distractions that prevent here from being a student of the Lord.

            And to go deeper still – and this is easy to miss in the English – the text says, Mary “listened to what he was saying.”  This might sound like idle chatter or a generic conversation before supper, but it’s not.  The Greek is singular, ton logon – literally, the word. Mary was not listening to words, but to “the word,” as in “The Word,” with a capital “W.”  Not the Word, as in the Bible, but the Word as in, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God and the Word was with God (John 1:1).”   The same Word made flesh in Jesus; God’s Word spoken in the flesh to us.  “Word” in both the Old and New Testaments refers to the divine, creative speech of God that creates, redeems, restores, and renews creation and God’s people.  The Word is the dynamic, purposeful presence and power of God.  The Word is active; it does something, it moves us and allows us to move.  It’s the Word, the creative divine voice, that’s found in the pages of scripture; it’s the Word embedded in the sermon and released by the Holy Spirit.  When you sense God speaking through the words of the sermon, it’s not me; it’s the Word in the words at work.  It’s the Word, the creative divine speech embodied in Jesus, so that to hear his word is to hear the Word of God.  The Word of God is creative – it offers new vistas, new horizons, new ways of living and being and serving.  As Karl Barth (1886-1968) said, “The Word of God always tells us something fresh that we had never heard before from anyone.”[1]  Mary knew this, that’s what she chose and nothing will distract her from hearing the Word.

            Marys and Marthas are both needed in the kingdom, but what takes priority is being attentive to the Word of God.  Both Mary and Martha’s way of being need to be undergirded by the Word of God – the very Word Mary took time time to adore and ponder at Jesus’ feet.  She took the time to listen for the Word of God – the very Word of life that grants meaning and purpose to our lives. When the focus is on the Word of God, then everything else falls into place, then we have the energy for everything else; when the focus is not on the Word – on God’s vision, God’s purpose – we might be busy and productive, but toward what end, for what purpose? 

            My friend, Tom Long, teaches at Emory University and tells the story of years ago being part of an advisory group to the chaplains at a major university.  Their job was to meet, to listen to reports from the chaplains about their work, and to offer support and counsel.  At one point they were asking questions of the chaplains.  One member of the group, an older gentleman, asked, “What are the university students like morally these days?”  The chaplains looked at each other, wondering how to answer that question.  Finally, one of them took a stab at it.  “Well,” she said, “I think you’d be basically pleased.  The students are pretty ambitious in terms of their careers, but that’s not all they are. A lot of them tutor kids after school. Some work in a night shelter and in a soup kitchen for the homeless.  Last week a group of students protested apartheid in South Africa…” As she talked, the Jewish chaplain who was listening to her began to grin.  The more she talked, the bigger he grinned, until finally it became distracting.  “Am I saying something funny?” she said to the Jewish chaplain.  “No, no, I’m sorry,” he replied.  “I was just sitting here thinking.  You are saying that the university students are good people, and you’re right.  And you’re saying that they are involved in good social causes, and they are.  But what I was thinking is that the one thing they lack is a vision of salvation.”  They all looked in shock at the Jewish chaplain.  “No, it’s true,” he said.  “If you do not have some vision of what God is doing to repair the whole creation, you can’t get up every day and work in a soup kitchen.  It finally beats you down.”[2]

            Without that vision of God’s salvation, without a grounding in God’s Word, it’s easy for us to become anxious, frenetic, distracted Marthas, going about our business and busy-ness, getting things done, but frustrated and maybe even resentful of others and not taking delight and joy in the work before us.  It’s so easy in our lives to be go, go, go, and forget the reason why we go, go, go.  It’s so easy in the church to get caught up in all the activity, with our committee meetings filled with motions and minutes, but missing the Spirit, missing the joy and passion.  It’s so easy for church folk to get burned out.  Sometimes that’s caused by the circumstances in the church; other times it’s because the work has become an end in itself, the work has become divorced from the worship. That is, we have forgotten why we do what we do and for whom. 

            Mary knew what mattered most – hearing the Word, being attentive to the presence of Christ, drawing upon his love and grace and then in love being graceful to a world in need.  If you don’t have some vision of what God is doing, it finally beats you down and burns you up.  Mary sits at Jesus’ feet and listens to his Word, listens to his vision.  Without that Word we won’t last long in the Martha-like work required of us in the kingdom.  “It will finally worry us, distract us, anger us, exhaust us, and beat us down.  With that Word, though, we can prepare meals for the hungry, care tenderly for the sick, show hospitality to the stranger and keep on loving and living in the name of Christ.”[3]

            The one thing needed is the Word of Jesus who continues to speak to us all the time.  Although we often fail to hear because of our distractions; our distractions hinder us from listening.  But to listen to his Word – that’s the better part, the good part, the best part that once received can never be taken away.  The one thing needed is the Word, the Word of Jesus, whose word to us is the very Word of Life.

           

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[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, I.5.ii (Edinburgh:  T & T Clark, 1975), 133.

[2] Thomas G. Long, “Mary and Martha,” sermon online at http://day1.org/1052-mary_and_martha.print.

[3] Thomas G. Long, “Mary and Martha.”