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Foundry is an historic, progressive United Methodist Church that welcomes all, worships passionately, challenges the status quo, & seeks to transform the world.
Episodes
Sunday Aug 26, 2012
Sunday Aug 26, 2012
Rev. Dean Snyder James 5:13-18
One of the questions that came up when we were talking with people and surveying people to prepare for this series on prayer was “What about miracles?”
Is it okay to pray for a miracle? Should we expect miracles? What if we pray for a miracle and it doesn’t happen; what then?
What about praying for physical healing? Whose fault is it if it doesn’t happen?
What about praying about our finances? Is it okay to ask God for money?
Someone asked this question -- How much money do we need to have before praying for more becomes tacky?
So all of this is an interesting topic and we will surely have some disagreement in our congregation about this. Which is ok. Matter of fact, if we can talk honestly about our disagreements about these kinds of topics it will be a very good thing and we will learn from one another.
So I want to try to be real with you about my thinking about some of these things and I hope you will be real with me and each other.
I am a product of modernity …Western modernity … like most of us are. Western modernity was built on deist assumptions. The assumption of modernity is that what happens in the world can be explained from within the natural world without the need for supernatural explanations. If we had complete knowledge, there is nothing we could not explain.
And modernity has served us well. It has given us science and medicine.
We discovered germs and viruses because there was someone who believed there had to be an explanation other than evil spirits and hexes as to why we become sick. Thank God.
We discovered how to predict hurricanes and prepare for them because someone believed that weather must follow some natural principles rather than be arbitrary acts of God. Thank God.
Most of the great advances of modern times have been due to people who believed that the operation of the universe is explicable without recourse to the supernatural.
Yet, I have seen and heard too much not to believe that miraculous things happen. I have heard and seen too much not to believe that prayer makes a difference in some pretty amazing ways.
When someone I love gets sick, if you had the power to force me to choose between medicine and prayer, I would pick medicine. Fortunately, you couldn’t force me to make that choice, but if you could, I would pick medicine. I have been to places in the world that do not have much access to medical care and vaccines and medicine. I’ve been to places that did not have access to rubber gloves. Here is the truth … where there is medicine, people live longer; they live less painful and more productive lives. If I had to choose, I would pick medicine. Medicine is an answer to prayer and it is miraculous.
I have seen too much and heard too much not to believe that prayer can accomplish miraculous things.
So here are some things I believe about prayer. I do not want to limit what God can do so I call these “as a rule” principles. They apply as a rule.
First, as a rule our lives and our prayers need to be consistent. We can’t live unhealthy lives and pray for health. As a rule, for God to answer those prayers would be divine malpractice.
I often listen to sermons on my ipod while I am exercising or walking, and I listen to sermons from a wide range of churches from Pentecostal to Unitarian. I listen to a Pentecostal church where the pastor begins his sermon most Sundays by reporting on 4 or 5 miracles that happened during the past week, some of which are pretty remarkable, including a recent report he shared that over half of the rabbis in Israel have secretly converted to Christianity.
Even this particular pastor got upset not long ago because there was a young person in his church who got angry at God because she prayed not to become pregnant and she became pregnant anyway. Even he acknowledged that prayer is not an adequate form of birth control.
I am inclined here to make a statement about a certain candidate for the senate who has some strange ideas about pregnancy but Don Lowe told me recently about a couple who decided to attend another church because they thought Foundry had become too political, so I will restrain myself.
We can’t eat Big Macs and drink Big Gulps every day and then pray for God to heal our diabetes. I suspect God doesn’t want us just to be healthy; God wants us to live healthy lives. We can pray for God to free us from our addictions to fat and sugar but for us to ask God to protect us from the consequences of our own self-destructive actions while we keep doing them must put God in an awkward position.
As a rule, we ought to be willing to do for ourselves if we can what we are asking God to do for us.
Second, as a rule we probably ought not to want God to heal us from what is not a disease. When I did a little survey monkey about prayer a few weeks ago, someone left a comment about having trouble believing in prayer because he prayed for years to become straight and he is still gay. Being gay is not a disease.
Being differently abled is not a disease. I told a friend about another friend who uses a wheel chair, how when she was a child, people prayed for her to walk and, when she couldn’t, they blamed her for not having being “healed” because she didn’t have enough faith. My friend said about the other friend who uses a wheelchair – “She is the healthiest person I know. She is the person least in need of healing I know.”
I believe that we can pray pretty much for anything, but as a rule we should not expect God to heal us from what is not a disease.
Third, as a rule when we are not healed in the way we pray to be healed, we do well to look for a deeper purpose. You remember the Apostle Paul had “a thorn in his side,” which we assume was some sort of pain or weakness. Paul said he prayed three times for God to remove it. But he says God would not remove it. God said to him: "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness." (2 Cor. 12:9) Paul believed the thorn in his flesh enhanced his ministry because it caused him to rely more on the power of God rather than his own strength.
As a rule, when our prayers are not answered the way we want them to be answered, we might do well to ask whether there is a deeper purpose at work here.
I do not believe disease comes from God but I do believe that God has used diseases to help us become more compassionate and wiser people.
I do not believe that God is responsible for world hunger but I do believe that God is trying to use the reality of world hunger to make us a more compassionate and just people.
As a rule, when we do not get what we want from God, we ought to look for a deeper purpose.
Number four, as a rule we should not pray in isolation from others. We should not keep our prayers secret. Much of what God manages to accomplish through prayer happens not just between God and me as an individual but it happens between people.
The reading from James says: “Are any among you weak? [Our translation says sick but the Greek word really means weak.] They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up; and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed.” (James 5:14-16)
To be healed has much greater meaning than simply to be cured. Much of the healing God does happens through the relationship we have with others when we ask others to pray for us and when we are part of communities and small groups that pray for one another.
Guilt and shame can make us sick and most of us need other human beings in our lives to release us from guilt and shame. Isolation and loneliness can make us sick. Too little love and affirmation in our lives can make us sick. God alone, without others, may not be enough for us to appropriate what we need. Jesus himself implied that it sometimes took two or three to be together for his presence among them to be fully realized. (Matt. 18:20)
John Ortberg in his book Everybody’s Normal Till You Get to Know Them cites the Alameda County Study headed by a social scientist from Harvard. It tracked the lives of 7,000 people over nine years. The study found that that the most isolated people were three times more likely to die than those with strong relational connections.
The study found that people who had what we usually consider to be bad health habits such as smoking, poor eating habits, bad sleep habits, no exercise or excessive alcohol use but had strong social ties lived significantly longer than people who had great health habits but were isolated.
In other words, Ortberg says, the study discovered that it is better to eat Twinkies with friends than to eat broccoli alone.
Harvard researcher Robert Putnam notes that if you belong to no groups but decide to join one, “you cut your risk of dying over the next year in half.” [i]
As a rule, we ought to be sharing our prayer requests and praying for one another rather than to keep our prayers private and secret because much of what God accomplishes through our prayers God does between people.
Sharing our prayers with others also holds us accountable and helps our prayers from being too petty. If we are embarrassed to share our prayers with our friends, it may be a reality check that our prayers are either too selfish or too petty.
One more. As a rule when we pray we ought to pray with all of our mind as well as all of our heart. Jesus said “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” (This is Foundry’s key Scripture.) The Message translates it “Love the Lord God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence and energy.” (Mark 12:28-31)
As a rule, we ought to pray with open minds as well as passionate hearts.
This August I have been reading and praying a different prayer from the United Methodist Book of Worship every day. This past week I came across a prayer in the Book of Worship based on some of the writing of John Calvin, who is not my favorite theologian. But the prayer is quite amazing. It is in the section of the Book of Worship of Prayers for Others.
This is what it says:
Strong covenant God, save us from being self-centered in our prayers,
and teach us to remember to pray for others.
May we be so bound up in love for those for whom we pray,
that we may feel their needs as acutely as our own,
and intercede for them with sensitiveness,
with understanding and with imagination.
This we ask in Christ’s name. Amen.
Part of prayer is to pray with imagination. Pray expecting that God may open our minds to new possibilities, and to new understandings and to new ways of thinking.
A pastor friend told me about a woman who began attending the church he served. She brought her two children with her. She never missed a service. She seemed very focused and intense during the services.
After attending the church he served exactly six months she asked to meet with him. She said she wasn’t going to be attending anymore. She said that she had prayed intently for the past six months to win the lottery and since it hadn’t happened, she was leaving.
I wonder how often I’ve prayed that way. Without imagination.
I believe that as a rule we can pray for anything, but we ought to expect God to be as likely to mess with our heads as God is to mess with the world.
Another pastor friend told me about a young man who had started dating a young woman in his church and started attending church with her. His entire life up until that time had been obsessed with Kung Fu. Kung Fu movies; Kung Fu comics.
One day he called up my pastor friend and said something strange was happening to him. His friends would call him up inviting him to go to see the latest Kung Fu movie and he found himself not wanting to go. He was losing interest in Kung Fu and he didn’t know why.
On an impulse, my friend asked him if he had been praying.
He said, Yes. Since he’d started attending church he’d been trying to pray.
Well, he said, I couldn’t figure out what else to pray for so I’ve been praying for world peace.
Don’t pray unless you are willing for God to mess with your head.
[i] http://blog.hartvillehealthandwellness.com/nutrition/it-is-better-to-eat-twinkies-with-good-friends-than-to-eat-broccoli-alone/
Sunday Aug 19, 2012
Sunday Aug 12, 2012
Sunday Aug 12, 2012
Rev. Dean Snyder John 15:10-17
There are lots of spiritual practices. A spiritual practice is any activity that sustains and renews your spirit. Reading can be a spiritual practice. Listening to music can be a spiritual practice. Sleeping can be a spiritual practice.
Spiritual disciplines are spiritual practices done as a discipline with some pattern of regularity and intentionality. Reading through the Bible in a year’s time might be a spiritual discipline. Going on retreat once or twice a year might be a spiritual discipline. Going to bed every night at the same time and lying there emptying your mind until you fall asleep might be a spiritual discipline. Worship is a spiritual discipline for many of us. Spiritual disciplines are activities that sustain, strengthen and renew your spirit done with regularity and intentionality as a discipline.
All religions have many, many spiritual practices and disciplines. One of the failings of modern Christianity is that we have so intellectualized faith that we have done a poor job of teaching spiritual practices and disciplines although historically Christianity has had many of them. That’s why so many of us are supplementing our faith with yoga and transcendental meditation and disciplines we learn from Eastern religions that seem to be better at practices and disciplines than modern Christianity is.
Prayer is usually included in the list of spiritual practices and disciplines but it is really something else. It is something different from other spiritual disciplines.
Prayer may sustain and renew your spirit but that is not what prayer is primarily about; if it does sustain and renew your spirit that is a by-product, not the main purpose. And in my experience prayer sometimes does not renew my spirit at all but can sometimes deplete me.
Prayer, as I understand it biblically and within Christian teaching, is not primarily about self-care or self-improvement or mood management or attitude adjustment – although those kinds of things may or may not be byproducts of our prayer lives.
Prayer is primarily about relationship. Prayer is primarily relational within biblical and Christian teaching.
Prayer is what we do to maintain our relationship with someone else … namely God.
Almost all metaphors for our relationship with God in the Bible are based on relationships between people. There are a few metaphors that come from nature but most are based on human relationships.
Parent and child. King and subject. Teacher and student. Master and servant or slave. Employer and employee. Creditor and debtor. Judge and defendant. Business partners. Marriage – the church is the bride of Christ. Friends. Lovers. All of these are biblical metaphors for our relationship with god.
Every relationship has an appropriate means of communication and transaction between the people in relationship.
Prayer is the communication and transaction within our relationship with God and the purpose of praying is to maintain and strengthen the relationship. Everything else is incidental, ancillary. Prayer is all about the relationship.
When you have a Facebook account, Facebook provides certain categories of information that it invites you to share, like who you work for or where you went to school. One of the categories is Relationship Status. People would put things there like married to so-and-so or single or engaged.
At some point someone came with an answer that started spreading and you’ll see it on more and more Facebook pages.
It says—Relationship status: It’s complicated.
Relationships are complicated. And so the way we communicate within our relationships can be complicated as well.
First of all, what is the nature of the relationship? The way I communicate with the president of the United States is different from the way I communicate with my grandson. The way I communicate with Jane at home is different from the way I communicate with the guy from IRS who wants to audit my income tax return.
What do we believe is the nature of our relationship with God? Is it king and subject? Is it judge and defendant? Is it parent and child? Lovers?
What we believe the nature of our relationship with God is makes all the difference in what the communication and transactions between us are like.
It’s complicated.
Here are some more questions -- What is it that we expect and want out of the relationship? What do we suppose the other person in the relationship expects and wants out of their relationship with us?
Does the relationship have any baggage? Are there any unaddressed or unresolved issues or secrets in the relationship?
Relationships really can be and usually are complicated between human beings. Think of our relationship with God.
Our prayer lives will be shaped by the nature and quality of our relationship with God and our relationship with God will be shaped by our theological assumptions about who God is and how God feels toward us and the unresolved baggage we have with God.
All week long as I’ve been thinking about this sermon I’ve been thinking about people in my life and who I would want to be like and who I would not want to be like in my relationship with God. It might be an interesting thing for you to think about.
There is a person in my life who will drop me a note or send me a poem from time to time and every time I see a letter from her, I cannot wait to open it because I know it will be the high point of my day.
Wouldn’t it be great if God looked forward to my prayers like I look forward to her notes?
Wouldn’t it be great if God looked forward to spending time with me the way I get hungry to see my grandson if it has been a few weeks?
Wouldn’t it be great if God got lonely for me the way I get lonely for Jane when she is traveling?
Then, of course, there are other people in my life as well.
There is a person I know. I only see him once a year, maybe or less. He usually shows up here and says he needs to talk with me during the coffee hour.
Every time he shows up I know he will ask me for money for a project he is involved in. It is the only time he shows up. The amount of money he will need for his project will be in the thousands and he will need to know then and there whether I will give it to him or else something dreadful will happen by 2 p.m. that afternoon.
So I’ve been thinking all week, what if God feels about hearing from me the way I feel about hearing from that guy?
Then there are all of the people out there who think they know me and what I think when they find out what my occupation is. They presume to know what I believe and value and think because I am a Methodist minister. I hate those conversation where I have to explain that I am not their superficial assumptions about what ministers are like.
What if God feels that way toward the assumptions I carry around about what God must think? What if God feels toward me like I do when a person sits next to me on a plane and asks me what I do?
If we understand that pray is primarily and first and foremost relational, there are four important ways this helps us with our prayer lives, I think, and I want to just rattle them off quickly.
First, I know it is not theologically correct these days according to the seminaries, but I believe in progressive revelation. I think God’s self-revelation becomes clearer and clearer over time from the beginning of the Bible to the end. I know whether that is because God gets better at revealing God’s self or whether we get better at understanding what God is trying to tell us but I think God’s revelation is progressively clearer over time in the Bible.
As a rule, the metaphors for God’s relationship to us become more and more intimate over time. The Bible starts in the early literature with metaphors that are distant and formal – king, sovereign, law-giver, and judge – and over time they become more and more intimate, culminating in Jesus’ abba – daddy, mommy, and Revelation’s image of the church as the bride of Christ.
I think God has been persistently trying to communicate that God wants an intimate relationship with us rather than one based on power or position.
When we pray our goal should be greater and greater intimacy.
There is a scene I like in the old movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. God appears to Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. They get off their horses and bow down with their heads on the ground. God says, “Oh, don’t grovel. If it is one thing I can’t stand its people groveling.”
I believe God’s purpose for God’s relationship with us is intimacy … friendship … companionship … knowing and being known.
Here’s what I think is an indication of a healthy prayer life – if you find yourself laughing during your prayers.
The second thing is this: In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, after God says to Arthur, stop groveling. Arthur says, “Sorry.’ God says: “And don’t apologize. Every time I try to talk to somebody its sorry this and forgive me that ...” Stop apologizing.
I do not believe that God is as nearly obsessed with our sins and failings and shortcomings as we are.
I think the reason forgiveness is such a big emphasis in the Bible is because God doesn’t want to spend a lot of time listening to us reciting our sins and failings and shortcomings. I think God is much more interested in the future than the past. I think God is always ready to get on with it.
OK, you sinned. What’s new? Is there anything you can learn from it? Okay, what should we do together now?
The last thing God wants …I believe… is for our obsession with our own guilt and our unwilling to let it go get in the way of a relationship with her.
Say, “I’m sorry I hurt you. Thank you for forgiving me. Here’s what I’m thinking about doing. What do you think?”
Number 3. God wants to know you and God wants you to know her. God knows you but God doesn’t know what it is like to be you unless you tell her. We might know God theoretically but God wants us to know his inner heart and mind.
The reading from John for today is very interesting. Jesus says to his disciples that he is not going to call them servants anymore but friends. The way he defines friendship is the interesting part. Jesus says: “I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.” (John 15:15)
Our greatest desire in praying is to know the heart of God and to share what is in our heart with God. God wants us to know her heart.
Number 4. Real relationships affect both persons in the relationship. Real relationships change both persons in the relationship. Our prayer lives … our relationship with God … changes us. Our prayers also change God. The reason prayer changes things is because prayer changes God’s heart and mind and, however you believe God acts in the world, God changes things.
Hear My Prayer, O Lord...
Hear my prayer, O Lord, though all I do all day is watch
old black-and-white movies on TV. Speak to me
through William Powell or Myrna Loy, solve the mystery
of my sloth. Show me the way to take a walk or catch
a cold, anything but read another exposé
of the Kennedys. Teach me to sing or at least play
the piano. For ten years I took lessons, and all
I learned was to hate Bach. Shake me up or down. Call
me names. Break my ears with AC/DC—I deserve far
worse. Rebuke me in front of my ersatz friends. Who cares?
They don't like me much anyway. Make me fat in lieu
of thin. Give me a break or don't. I'm a hundred million
molecules in search of an author. If that's you, thank you
for my skin. Without it I'd be in worse shape than I'm in.
Sunday Aug 05, 2012
Sunday Aug 05, 2012
Rev. Dean Snyder Psalm 46:1-11
We are beginning a series about prayer.
We’ve done some new things to prepare for this series. One of our leaders called together a diverse group of people from the congregation to do a brainstorming session about the issues they’d like to hear talked about during a series on prayer. The leader provided me with an anonymous list of ideas, questions, personal reflections. It was fascinating. Fair warning, we are not going to be able to address every topic raised.
Then we did a little survey monkey this past week that we emailed out and posted to our Facebook pages that 100-some people responded to.
Here is one observation from this informal research we’ve done – Lots of us feel guilty about prayer. There are lots of guilty feelings connected –for many of us—with our prayer lives.
Some of us feel guilty because we don’t pray regularly or because we think we don’t pray enough. Some of us feel guilty because we pray but we worry that we are maybe praying for the wrong things. Some of us feel guilty because we can’t really bring ourselves to believe that prayer makes a difference. Some of us feel guilty because we are uncomfortable praying, especially praying publicly and out loud. Some of us feel guilty because we think we might not be doing it the right way. Some of us feel guilty because of who we pray to.
Here’s what I was thinking as I read this -- If people had this much guilt about their relationship with me, I’d find it really depressing. I would.
If we are representative of most church people … if most Christians and seekers have this high a level of guilt about prayer, it must really be a bummer for God. God must really be bummed. If I were God I’d hire a new PR firm. I’d get me some new Madmen and women.
Part of the problem, I think, is that the clergy –people like Dawn, Theresa and Kevin, the clergy as a whole—we tend to talk about prayer very piously. We present an image that it is normal for people of faith to pray comfortable and easily and to connect with God, and to trust, and to get our prayers answered.
We clergy misrepresent our own prayer lives out of a desire for folk to think we are pious and holy. Then we make everyone else feel inferior and inadequate by comparison.
It happened to me once a few years ago. I had been serving a congregation where I was very, very happy, when the bishop called to say he wanted to send me to another church. It was, he said, an important and strategic congregation but it had been in decline in people and mission for a number of years and he believed I was just the one to turn the church around. He flattered me and I went.
It was a congregation that was hard work … the hardest work I have ever done in my life.
We had a preaching series similar to the outstanding preachers series at that church. One of the speakers I invited was the pastor of a brand new megachurch in that particular city. As we were socializing in the green room before the service, I asked him – “How do you manage to lead and administer a church with a couple of thousand people worshipping in it. I am giving it all I have and I can’t manage a church with less than a couple hundred people worshipping in it.”
This was his answer. He said to me, if I pray for an hour a day, my church is impossible to lead. If I pray for two hours a day, it gets easier. If I pray for three hours a day, it gets even easier. And (he said) if I pray four hours a day, the church runs itself.
I was very impressed. I thought about it. I decided to start praying four hours a day.
I told our secretary that I wasn’t going to be in the office until noon for the foreseeable future. I got up, had breakfast, read the newspaper, and went down to a little study in the parsonage basement at 7 AM. The first morning I did what I usually did. I read the Upper Room. I prayed about the things that I would usually pray about. Looked at my watch, and I had 3 hours and 56 minutes left to go. Filling that time was almost impossible. I could have easily sat and read theological books but that didn’t seem to me what the megachurch pastor was talking about.
So I prayed some Psalms from the Bible. I prayed the words to some hymns. I looked at my watch and I had three hours and 36 minutes to go. I tried to sit and listen. I started to write out my prayers like St. Augustine did. Over the course of a couple of weeks, I wrote out a 60-page single spaced prayer.
After three weeks of trying to pray four hours a day, Monday through Friday, weird, unpleasant things started happening in my head. I started having strange dreams. I did not sense myself becoming a better person or a more effective pastor. I went to talk to a pastoral counselor and he wisely advised me to cut back. He advised me to learn to walk before I tried to run. Maybe 10 minutes twice a day would enough to begin with.
Here’s the punch line to this story -- Sometime later I was talking with one of the associate pastors on the staff of that megachurch. And I told him the story about my conversation with the pastor and trying to pray four hours a day. The associate pastor looked at me with a strange expression. He said, “You didn’t really believe Pastor prays four hours a day, did you? He spends most of his time in his office trying to figure out how to pay down the mortgage and dealing with unhappy parishioners and unhappy staff. That’s just a sermon illustration he uses to make a point about the importance of prayer. I’m sure he didn’t mean you to take it literally.”
I almost messed up my head because of a pious sermon illustration.
So this is part of the reason this series is called “Getting real about prayer.” Prayer is a difficult thing for a lot of us. Prayer comes naturally to some people. I love having those people in the churches I serve. I am not one of them.
I don’t want us to be pious as we think together and hopefully talk to each other about prayer during the next few weeks. I want us to be real.
I did not go into ordained ministry because prayer was easy for me. I went into ministry because I loved the Bible and I loved working with others for a biblical vision social justice … and I felt called. I loved to study and I loved to do. I did not love to pray. I’m not sure I still love it all that much. I love to pray the way sort of the way I love to go to the gym.
So I want to admit that I do not pray because it comes naturally to me. I do not pray because it makes sense to me. I do not pray because I understand prayer intellectually or theologically. I do not pray because I ordinarily feel a strong sense of intimacy with God.
Frankly, I pray for two main reasons. I pray because there are people and things I care about more than my intellectual doubts. And I pray because I have learned through trial and error that my life is better when I do.
Here is what I want to suggest this morning about prayer to start out this series. Prayer is as much an attitude or a posture toward life as it is an act.
Sometimes you will go to church and the person up front will say, Let us be in an attitude of prayer.
Prayer is an attitude or posture and it is an act. And the two reinforce one another.
Without the attitude, it is hard to practice the act. Without the act it is hard to maintain the attitude.
Prayer has lots of variations. There are many, many ways to pray… many, many prayerful activities … some very esoteric practices.
But behind prayer, I want to suggest today, there is one basic posture. But the posture has three aspects… three chords.
The basic posture of prayer is a posture or attitude that says: “I am not God.” Prayer is based on and develops within us the attitude or posture of living in the awareness that I am not God.
Psalm 46:10, speaking in the voice of God, says, “Be still and know that I am God.” This is the posture of prayer. Be still and know that God is God and I’m not.
Prayer is a posture of awareness that I am not God. The act of praying develops that awareness within us.
This awareness has three aspects or chords.
The first is this …. I am not God. I am not omnipotent. I am not almighty. I have limited capacity.
A few years ago an aphorism went viral in church circles. I don’t know who to credit it to. It suddenly just appeared and it seemed everyone was quoting it. The aphorism was: “Pray as though it all depends on God; work as though it all depends on you.” Cute. I get the point.
But to live as though it all depended on me would be hell.
I only have so much energy. I am not God. I cannot save the world. I am not the savior. It does not depend on me alone. I am not omnipotent. I am not almighty. I am not God. And I don’t need to be.
The second element is this – I am not God. I am not omniscient. I am not all-knowing. I am not all-wise. I have limited understanding. I have limited comprehension. I have limited wisdom.
Prayer is an attitude and act that honors mystery.
One of the reasons prayer has become more important to me is because I am a child of the age of modernity. The predominate metaphor during the age of modernity is the machine. The posture of prayer reminds me that I am not a machine. Nature is not a machine. The universe is not a machine. God is not a machine. We are not merely the sum of our parts. I am a soul. Nature is a soul. The universe is a soul. God is a soul. We are mystery.
I am not omniscient. I am not all-knowing. I am not all wise. I am not God. And I don’t need to be.
The third element. I am not God. I am not omni-present. I am limited by time and place. I have only one lifetime here.
Prayer is an attitude and act that says that I am part of something that transcends my time and place. Prayer is a posture and act of community … a community that spans space and time; distance and generations.
Let me put it this way – if my vision for the significance of my life were limited to what I could accomplish in one lifetime given my limited intelligence and energy, I would have a very small vision for my life.
I want to be part of a movement in human history that began before I was and will continue when I am not here anymore. The posture of prayer is a posture that recognizes that the vision for truth and justice and inclusion existed before I got here and will continue after I am gone, and my goal is to align myself as best I can with that movement of the Spirit of God. I am not God.
If my vision is limited to what I can accomplish in my lifetime that is a very small vision and likely to be a selfish one. Anything that we could completely accomplish in one lifetime might not really be worth doing.
Prayer is based on a posture that says “I am not God.” The act of praying reinforces and develops that posture. Without the act of prayer it is hard to maintain the posture of prayer. Without the posture of prayer it is hard to do the act of praying.
Be still and know that I am God, the Psalmist sings in God’s voice.
Next week we are going to talk about prayer as relational.
This week all I want to say is that I now find that it can be a great relief to pray … to know it is not all up to me by myself, that I can offer my life –inadequate as it is for something greater than me to use, that I am not alone.
In the midst of my self-centered business, it is good when I can stop and be still and know that I don’t need to be God.
Sunday Jul 29, 2012