Why pray? thoughts for the fifth Sunday of Easter

“If you remain in Me and

My words remain in you,

ask for whatever you want

and it will be done for you.”

–John 15:7

 Is it true?  This passage from John; is it true? If you think about it for any length of time, do you think: Yes. It is confirmed in my own experience. When I pray, I do get what I want! Or, are you like me.  How often have I prayed for strength, for peace, for help, for healing and yet still felt alone, weak, and broken?  How many innocent children have prayed sincerely and desperately for help yet never received it? Or the addict who prayed for help, for courage, even for a cure, but finds himself slipping back into drink, or drug, or self-destructive habit.  Or the parent who prayed for the suffering child? Isn’t even one, proof enough[1]? How many do we have to list to disprove this statement?

And so, I ask myself: Why pray? Why do you pray? Why do I pray? Why should we bother?

“…ask for whatever you want

and it will be done for you.”

            If it isn’t true, then it certainly makes me wonder: isn’t it evidence against itself? Evidence that either the scriptures or the Lord cannot be trusted?   Who can believe a word this “man” says?   

            Certainly, after any number of apparently unanswered prayers, one can understand why a person, even a Christian, would stop praying.  It ends up seeming like nothing more than “magical thinking,” as some atheists have called it.  And how often do we hear people say: Our thoughts and prayers are with you?  As if prayer were just a kind of thinking, equal to daydreaming or wishing or hoping for something.  Is it?  Are they the same?  Or is there more to this question of pray than meets the eye?

            If the Bible is the Word of God, and if –as Christian maintain—it is unerring, then what does it mean, what does Jesus mean when He says: “…ask for whatever you want, and it will be done for you?” So bold a statement, and one so easily disproved… what does it mean? And this isn’t just a weird promise found in John (cf. 14:13; 16:24). It also shows up in Matthew 21:22, and Mark 11:24, as well as passages in all 4 gospels that could easily be interpreted as promising the same (cf. Mt. 7:7; Lk 11:8-10).  Apparently, it was really part of the teachings of our Lord. And if we are supposed to believe it, then what is Jesus really saying? Why is Jesus so bold in His promises about the power of prayer and particularly prayer in His name?

            I can honestly say this: the vast majority of times when I have prayed for help or guidance or strength or will power or courage (this isn’t asking for a new electric football set, or a ninth inning homerun for Jimmy Wynne), I can honestly say that even after invoking the name of the Lord, at the minimum 99.9% of the time I feel no immediate consolation, no more hope or strength or courage or will-power --sometimes I even feel discouraged because nothing changed, nothing miraculous happened. 

            So, why do I continue to pray?

            Because prayer --for me—anymore—isn’t about getting what I ask for, it’s about getting what I need (which is almost always: less of myself).  I have come to believe that prayer isn’t even about getting, but about giving. I give myself to God; put myself in His hands, submit myself to His will; and in doing so, conform myself more to the body of Christ.

            If prayer is really only about getting what we want, and what we want is a new job, new car, easier life, healthier body, win the lottery, then perhaps it really is just magical thinking. Seen in that way God becomes a kind of magical or spiritual vending machine.  I put in my coin (my prayer) and turn the knob (cross myself and mention Jesus name), and out comes a healed wife, a happier child, a more obedient cat, or my name atop the Nobel Prize list[2]. 

But, in my life, that isn’t how prayer works –and not how God seems to work, either.  In my life, prayer changes me more than it changes God.  I have come to think of it like planting a garden; those first desperate pleas and prayers are seeds planted in the dark silent earth –the cold of the grave, one might say—but as with a garden, with time, with some attention and care and nurturing, even some neglect (perhaps most of all this)—little by little tendrils green begin to appear, a tender leaf unfolds, new life appears, and without realizing it suddenly one morning flowers are blooming.

This is why I keep praying –not to plant a seed in God, but that God might plant a seed in me. So, prayer is my way of turning the earth, preparing the soil, stirring in some compost. Ask any serious gardener --pulling weeds is a constant effort.

Instead of thinking of prayer as a vending machine, think of it as gardening; as the original “slow” movement. It’s the original alternative life style.

I’m struck by that image in Genesis: walking in the garden with the Lord in the cool of the evening…

And it was good…

That’s why I pray.  To find a piece of that – a peace like that—growing in the soil of my being. That, like the soil in that original garden, the soil we were first formed from, my soil, my being, might bring forth much life. 

That doesn’t mean I don’t pray for what I need, what I want, what I hope for.  I still get on my knees and bring it all to God. Every bit of it. The selfish and the selfless, The mundane and the miraculous, I still ask for it.  I give it all to Him.  It just means I can’t measure the results in a bank book or on a tally sheet.  In fact, I’m not sure I can measure them at all. What I can do, is watch for stirrings of green.  Signs of new life.  And celebrate each and every one.

Dear Lord,

You took a vine out of Egypt,

planted it, cleared the ground,

it took root and spread…

Give me the patience, Oh Lord

to wait for the precious fruit

of that vine, and the courage

to continue to pray, and to wait

like the farmer for the early and the late rains…

And let me walk beside You always

in the cool of the evening, in Your fruitful garden…

           

---

[1] I won’t mention the unsuccessful poet who prays for a poem to be accepted by the New Yorker or the beleaguered football fan who prays for the Oilers to go to the Super Bowl or the struggling student about to take a test…

[2] Or Bum Philips stays in Houston and Earl Campbell wins the Nobel Prize for football.

How is rebellion a sin of sorcery?

Meditation for 4^th Sunday of Easter

23 April 2018

“…How much longer do you mean to go on mourning over Saul,

now that I myself have rejected him?” –1 Samuel 16:1

“What we shall be has not yet been revealed…

when it is revealed we shall be like Him…”

--1 John 3:1-2

Recently my daughter brought me some old college literary magazines she’d come across.  She thought I might like to see them because they included some of my old poems and stories.  She was of the opinion that I might like to see them again.  I was grateful to her for thinking of me, but fearful of what I would find. Afraid of what I would see not only in the words, but behind them –in the young man who wrote them.

So, I let them sit for several days untouched.  Then, a sense of curiosity mingled with obligation and I figured I should at least take a look, so I could give them back to her. At first, I was struck by names of people I had not remembered, but suddenly recalled. It was a pleasantly bittersweet sensation; a nostalgia mingled with regret. I recalled those names; faces came to mind, but also the regret that I had not been kinder or braver. I know I was just a young kid –barely out of my teens—but I wish I had been less self-conscious, more generous toward them.

When I began to read my own works, it only got worse.  I suspect some truths should remain only memory.  By that I mean, being faced with a poem I had long remembered as being pretty good and finding some 37 years later that it just wasn’t… aah, ‘tis a stinging feeling. Like the old adage says of ignorance --it was bliss.  Being suddenly face to face with my own failure was very uncomfortable.  And I would say what was most uncomfortable about it was not that my writing was so mediocre, but that I had remembered it and imagined it so much better.  That feeling of shame at having –it seemed-- lied to myself was very disheartening and humbling.

And this brings me to two things I have read in scripture recently.  My slow walk through the Old Testament has just crossed into the books of Samuel, and I am reading of Saul and his failure at being Israel’s king.  He loses his way by seeking to please the people, instead of God. He is trying to be the kind of king the people want, instead of being the king God has planned for him to be.  And yet after Samuel delivers God’s message of failure, Saul is still concerned with how the people will perceive him.  That is a fascinating little bit of psychological insight on the part of the author, but what is even more interesting to me is the beginning of chapter 16 when God calls out Samuel with that beautifully odd chastisement:

“How much longer do you mean to go on mourning over Saul…”

God is calling Samuel to account. Why is he mourning over something that God has rejected?  What does he hope to gain? What is the point? In a sense, Samuel is rebelling against God’s judgment.  Instead of accepting God’s will, he is mourning over what might have been.  He is refusing to trust that God’s will is always good—even when we don’t understand it.

In the next sentence we learn there is another reason for God’s chastisement.  Samuel has a job to do. God tells him, “fill your horn with oil and go,” because there is another king (David)  to be anointed.  In other words: Why are you sitting here moaning about something you can’t change? Get up and fill your horn and go. I have work for you (cf. 16:1b). 

In a way that’s what I was doing as I looked through those old Laurels magazines. I was mourning over Saul. I was regretting choices I had made, but also promise that had not been fulfilled, dreams that had not been realized and all that might have been.

Of course, there are times when we should look over our lives with remorse and regret and that’s why some of us go to “Confession” and why other might go see a therapist.  We see that things haven’t always been right or good and maybe even that there are patterns of behavior that we want to change.  That’s healthy and good. 

But sitting and bemoaning what cannot be changed is a form of rebellion.  It is not just a refusal to accept the truth, but a kind of challenge to God.  Lurking beneath that moaning is the unhealthy suspicion that if God had left things up to us, we would have done a better job.

“Rebellion is a sin of sorcery,

presumption a crime of idolatry.”

–1 Samuel 15:23

Sitting there, ruminating over old hurts or even old failings, we become like a sorcerer stirring our pot, adding a pinch of spite to a dollop of indignities and then stirring in dash of unfairness and suddenly… voila! A bubbling cauldron of heart hardening stewed egotism ready for a bowl full of Saltines.  

And we can sit there stirring it all up and ladling it over and over until it is boils over, or we can hear that distant voice calling us from somewhere so close it seems to be whispering in our ear:

Why are you still moaning over that? Get up. Fill your horn with oil. There is work to be done.

And that is what I heard at mass this past Sunday. In the second reading from the first letter of John, I heard God calling:

Why are you dwelling in the past? Why are you moaning about what might have been?  That is not who you were made to be.  Who you were made to be has not yet been revealed.  But when it is…

The message of Easter is a message of new life. Yes, we all have made mistakes and yes we all have regrets, but to live in those regrets and to cling to the hurt of those mistakes or hard feelings is to live in a tomb. It is to rebel against the glorified Christ who destroyed death, who opened the tomb that it might be empty.  Why on earth would we want to go back in? To pull the stone back over us and hide in the cold and the dark?

It's not about who you were, or what you did or even who you wanted to be.  You are not the sum of all your mistakes, all your hurts, not even of all your successes; thanks to Christ, we are something new. Something more.  Something made in His image.  We can’t really know what it is, but we know it is something glorious –because it is like Him. So, Mr. Sutter… it is time to put away childish things. Fill your horn (get out your pen), there is anointing to be done.

An Easter meditation on funerals and empty tombs

“…weakness is sown, strength rises up…”

1 Corinthians 15:43b

 

I went to a funeral Saturday.  Often when I tell someone I am going to a funeral they will say how sorry they are.  But –I have to say—I’m never sorry to be going.  Though I am often sad for the loss of a friend or for the family who mourns a loved one, I am almost always touched by a kind of lightness of spirit when I am dressing for a funeral. Something about it, lifts me up –oddly enough. 

This funeral was for a friend: Norma.  A widow in her 80s, she was a woman filled with life.  She had been married and had several children, yes, but more than that, Norma was a life-bearer. She brought life with her wherever she went; into whatever room, or situation she entered there walked a breath of life, an exuberance that felt contagious.

I did not know Norma particularly well, but I truly considered her a friend. We first met when I brought Holy Communion to her homebound husband.  Her husband (Ernesto) had suffered a stroke and needed almost constant care at that point.  Their home was one of the first houses I visited when I began working in that ministry.  I remember going to the door and feeling nervous about entering someone’s home, their privacy, and about what I would do or say,,, But I needn’t have worried. Norma welcomed me in and treated me like I was a dear friend.  She wanted to know about my family and when she found out I had three daughters, she was eager for me to bring them to visit her some time.  It was close to Christmas and she had decorated her house with her collection of Santas and wanted me to bring the girls to see them.  I left her home touched by her kindness, her warmth, her generosity of spirit and feeling like we were friends. 

After her husband died, I didn’t visit the house any longer, but I would see Norma at church or occasionally at a local concert (we apparently had a shared interest in baroque music). Wherever we would run into each other, she would make a point of giving me a hug and asking me again about the girls.  When my wife was with me, Norma’s joy and exuberance would overflow to her as well. (And though she may have treated everyone this way, she made each of us feel special.)  At some point Norma even began calling my wife on her birthday every year.  And I have to say, the first time it happened was pretty strange.  I (of course) assumed Norma was calling me, because she was my friend...  Last year (I think) she was on vacation in Colorado with her family, but still called with birthday wishes.  For me, that is Norma: oddly, delightfully, joyfully generous and caring.  And so, to go to her funeral was not a duty or an obligation–but a pleasure. There was nowhere else on earth I would have rather been that morning. 

When I learned of her death, I prayed the Office of the Dead and as I was reading it, I stumbled upon those words from Paul:

“…weakness is sown, strength rises up…”

And I thought for a moment not of Norma but of her husband.  Wondering what his stroke had done to their marriage, to the life they had planned, and wondering about the life that unexpected and life altering change had forced upon them… What had it done to Norma?

Had she always been so kind? So generous? So full of life? I don’t know.  But I do know this: clearly it had not driven the life out of her. It had not embittered her, or devastated her in the way that we see depicted so often in books and movies. 

            During the homily, I was struck by the aptness of Norma’s death coming in the Easter season.  Looking around at the people near me, I could see that some were very uncomfortable; uncertain what to do, where to look, when to stand or kneel, and also uncomfortable with the fact of death –I imagine. The looks on their faces made it clear they would rather have been somewhere else. But, that’s the point. We come, despite what we would rather be doing. We come to stand (or sit, or kneel) and gaze into the great tomb that we all face –death. And part of what makes a funeral so uncomfortable is the not knowing. We all sit there, praying, hoping, trusting even –but often (maybe most of the time) not really certain… Is that it? A coffin and some incense and a few prayers… And then what? Coffee and sandwiches in the church reception center?

           

“What is sown is perishable, but what is raised is imperishable;

what is sown is contemptable but what is raised is glorious…” (cf.15:42-43)

We sow our weakness, our imperfection, our brokenness; we plant it in the earth that is our life, in the day to day of living, and from this broken, imperfect, weakness, God raises up something imperishable, glorious, strong.  But in our weakness and fear and anxiety and imperfection we wonder: does is really work that way? Or is it just some words on a page?  Is it just magical thinking, as some people say? 

Maybe we can’t know for certain, we can’t find concrete proof, but we have an example.  Our Lord was quite literally sown in weakness at conception.  He became flesh, submitting Himself to the care of a human mother, to the frailty of a human body, the need for food, for warmth, for attention and care, diapers and tears, to hunger and sickness, bruises and scrapes, splinters and stubbed toes; vulnerability, insecurity.

            And submitted to it willingly: Not mine, but thy will be done (cf. Luke 22:42).  In that submission we have the example of Jesus dying to His power and authority, letting go of His glory; in other words –dying to self. And we are told that Jesus lived not in fear, anxiety, and insecurity, but in faith, in hope and in charity. God became flesh, submitted himself to the care and authority of His creation --even to the point of being put to death on a cross--- yet it is through that “weakness” that He revealed His glory and His strength.  

            And I wonder if Norma didn’t reveal her true glory as she let go of her dreams and plans and tenderly cared for her husband after his stroke.  Certainly, that was not the life she signed up for when she married Ernesto, but she submitted to it, accepted it and from all accounts I heard –only grew stronger and more joyful through it.  She was sown in weakness, but raised up in strength.

As the mass ended and they took Norma’s body from the church, it occurred to me: it is the finality of the tomb is what we fear. The finality of death. The fear that we will be trapped forever in that cramped tomb (or urn) stuffed full of our unfulfilled dreams, unachieved goals, unspoken words; trapped forever in that box with all our regrets and remorse and sins and fears and memories of what we did and what we wished we had done….

We’re afraid of the tomb of our mortality; but we don’t have to be afraid.  As the disciples learned on that first Easter morning— thanks to Jesus, the tomb is empty.  We have nothing there to fear.  

Isn’t it appropriate when Mary first sees the risen Jesus, she thinks He is the gardener.  Why that odd detail? Maybe because it’s true.  And maybe the tomb is empty, not just for Jesus, but for all of us --because the harvest has begun. How beautiful this Easter season has become thanks to a friend’s funeral.