RE:frame Prayer

1 Timothy 2:1-7

I have been asked recently to think about prayer. Our presbytery is beginning a program called Vital Congregations, and in preparation, I was asked to contribute my thoughts on prayer resources, practices, and such. But one of the questions in particular has kept me thinking for days. That is, how has my thinking about prayer changed over time?

The assumption, of course, is that it has changed. This is true. No longer are my prayers as they were in childhood. When I was young, I was taught, as so many of us were, to recite short little rhyming prayers – at the dinner table, at bedtime. We might learn to make up our own prayers within certain frameworks – like thank you, God, for lemonade and hula hoops; and God bless mama, daddy, and Tatters the dog.

But with maturity comes more freedom and responsibility in all things – including prayer. Not only who and what we pray for but how we pray. How is the hardest part of it, because when we turn to prayer we almost always have our own agenda.

So much of the time, spontaneous prayer begins with something like, Dear God, please…

Please make the cancer go away.

Please let him be safe.

Please let me get this job.

Please, God, help me out.

Please, God, make the problem go away.

A very distraught woman called me in tears to tell me her desperate situation. There were practical and concrete steps that could be taken – and would be taken. But in that moment, I suggested that she pray. She said to me, “I already tried that, and it didn’t work.”

When we turn to prayer, we almost always have our own agenda.

When it seems as though our prayers have not been answered, we find ourselves in a difficult place, unsure where to turn or what to think. What is prayer for, if not to help us through the turbulent waters of life? What are we doing other than asking for divine strength to carry us through the rough spots?

Praying for oneself is something almost everyone does, even nonbelievers. Prayer is something that seems to spontaneously arise from our center when we know we are in need. And for people of faith, praying for others comes almost as naturally. We keep lists of individuals, groups, nations, that are somehow in need of prayer. And very often we feel we know exactly how to pray for them. For comfort, for strength, for peace, for safety.

When it seems as though God hasn’t answered our prayers for others, in the way we wanted or expected, what then? We might throw up our hands because there seems to be nothing more we can do. We might even be angry that we fell for what was presumably a trick of some kind.

One Sunday when I offered a prayer for peace in the Middle East, someone stepped up to me after the service and said, “Boy, you are a dreamer, aren’t you?” As if to say, Grow up! Get real.

Yet, we are told, we are assured, that we can make our prayers for anything. We pray for what we need, and God welcomes our prayers. And the truth is that these prayers are good prayers. We may always pray for what we feel we need.

But the truth is, also, that these prayers are not enough in themselves. When we pray according to our own agenda, we are accepting a very limited view of God. God invites us to pray in other ways that involve entering more deeply into the mystery of God.

Hence, Paul urges Timothy to pray for those who hold high power. This is essential, Paul writes, because God desires for everyone to be saved. Everyone. God’s spirit is magnanimous.

And while this might sound like a really nice idea, generally speaking, we have certain objections when it zooms on the particular. God wants our enemies to be saved. God wants people in the other political party to be saved. God wants the people who cheat and get away with it to be saved. God wants the people we love to be saved, but also the people we don’t love. The people who, we know, don’t deserve it.

And this is so hard for us, that God’s spirit is much more generous than ours.

In the Episcopal Church book of common prayer there is included a prayer for elected leaders – for the president of the United States and the Governor of our state. For Congress and the State legislators. If you are in church when these prayers are being made, you may very well hear these individuals prayed for by their given names. For our Governor, Larry. For our President, Joseph. It makes the prayer feel very personal.

But it can be challenging, even for those congregations who make of regular practice of this. If a leader is elected who is very polarizing, if members of the congregation have a strong emotional reaction to the very thought of him or her, there might well be strong resistance to continuing these prayers.

I have seen some of that resistance in Presbyterian congregations. The idea of praying for a high official whom you resent in certain ways can seem a very tall order. We might even reject the notion altogether, thinking, “Let other people pray for him or her. Leave that to the people who voted for them and who actually want them to succeed, not me.”

Still, in this letter, Paul tells Timothy that it is essential to pray for kings and others who are in high positions. This is for the sake of our own godliness and dignity. But it is also for the sake of the ones for whom we pray, because, Paul says, it is God’s desire for everyone to be saved.

When we pray according to our own agenda, we will eventually hit a wall. When we ask God to assist us in our own plans for our lives or other people’s lives, we will at some point be disappointed. But what if we respond to this disappointment by asking God, “What then, Lord, would you have of me?”

Eventually on our walk of faith, we might discover that prayer is much more than making our requests of God. That God is so much more than a divine butler or a genie in a bottle, ready to serve our desires and needs. God is waiting, always, for us to be ready to listen. God is inviting us to change.

Scripture uses the image of a potter fashioning a vessel out of clay to say that we are malleable in the hands of our Creator. Our God desires to mold us into a form that is more holy, and the way this is done is through prayer. When we set aside our agenda and we invite God to show us something new, then we might learn to think the way God thinks.

God’s intention for us in prayer is to draw us closer. We know that when a mother holds her children tightly in her arms, they are not only close to her, but they are close to one another. In this way, we know, God draws us nearer to all of God’s creation. God’s desire for us in prayer is to show us how connected we are to everyone and everything else in all creation because God is our parent who loves us. God wants to open our hearts and our minds.

And so God asks us to pray for everyone – our leaders, those who are in positions of power, whether we like them or not. They, too, are God’s beloved.

God asks us to pray for the neighbor who annoys the heck out of us. They, too, are God’s beloved.

God asks us to pray for the young man who walks into a school or a church or a supermarket with a gun, intent on doing damage. Because he, too, is God’s beloved.

God asks us to pray for the ones who need it. And that is everyone.

God asks us to pray, because God knows that prayer is the way to transformation. Prayer will change our hearts and form us more fully into the image of the one who made us and loves us.

In your prayer life, where are you feeling resistance? Perhaps this is precisely where Christ is leading you.

Photo by Milada Vigerova on Unsplash

RE:imagine Regret

1 Timothy 1:12-17

What do you say when someone asks you if you have any regrets? Some people will say no. I regret nothing, as Edith Piaf famously sang. But is it really true?

When someone asks you if you have any regrets, it feels like they are asking, “Will you tell us about your failures?” But I don’t really want to talk about my failures, do you?

Really, though, don’t you have some regrets?

If pressed for an answer, you may be tempted to turn it around and make it about someone else, such as, I regret that my kids haven’t turned out the way I wanted them to. Or I regret that the people I have tried to help have not been willing to accept that help. Making it all about someone else’s failures. Not helpful.

There is an organization called Failure Lab, which describes itself as being all about taking a deep dive into failure. Sound fun? They do a lot of different things now, but this is how they started. They would invite someone to get on stage before an audience and simply describe something they did that went wrong, some way they failed. They have to do it without any embellishments, without laying blame anywhere else, without telling the audience that it really turned out okay, and that they learned something valuable from the experience. They just have to lay the failure out there in all its fail-ish-ness. 

It is uncomfortable for the speaker. It is perhaps even more uncomfortable for the audience. But people participate in it because it is surprisingly helpful. Acknowledging the failure in this way is surprisingly freeing. 

We can see that the Apostle Paul knows that sense of freedom. He doesn’t even wait for someone to ask him about his regrets. He freely, even joyfully confesses his sins, his failures. He writes it down in these letters, he sends them out to all the churches he knows, he wants them to hear it: I was a total screw-up. An epic failure. And I write to you now as the foremost example of the Lord’s mercy and grace, patience and love. Not as someone who has surmounted his difficulties, but as a beneficiary of the grace of God.

Do you have any regrets? Could any one of us honestly say we have none? But how do you begin to confront them?

There are different ways. In our worship we confess our sin every week. When we do this, we are confessing on behalf of the church as a whole as well as ourselves personally. Sometimes it feels peculiar. People ask me sometimes why they should have to confess to something they didn’t ever do, and I say that we are confessing as the Church for the sins of the Church. But other times it feels extremely personal, and at those times you know it’s about you, intimately.

Yet some will say that the act of corporate confession, which is what we do, is not really enough, because each one of us needs to own up to our personal failures, by telling them to another person. 

Don Miller wrote a book called Blue Like Jazz about his experience of being a Christian at a very secular university. It was a place that felt rather inhospitable to organized religion. An odd place to find a community of Christians, but he did. And this little group began to help one another grow in their faith, holding one another accountable, giving one another space to explore faith and doubts.

From their vantage point, they could see clearly many of the ways the church had failed. And so they decided to do something weird. They set up a confessional booth.

During the college’s annual festival, which was one big bacchanalian party, they decided they would set up a confessional booth. But it would be like this: they would not hear confessions, they would offer confessions. They would speak to the church’s failures to care for the hungry and the poor and the downtrodden, they would confess the church’s failure to be loving in the ways Jesus was loving; they would apologize for the crusades and for televangelists that take people’s money. They would confess to not representing Jesus well. They would make it personal. 

Don describes what happened. A party-goer stumbled into the booth, in very high spirits, we might say. He sat down and grinned at Don, said his name is Jake. Jake says, “So what’s the deal, man? I’m supposed to confess to you all the juicy stuff I’ve been up to here?” 

Don said, “Well, not exactly. Actually – our group – we want to confess to you. We were thinking about all the ways Christians have wronged people over time. You, know, the Crusades and stuff.”

Jake said, “Well, I doubt you were personally involved in any of that.” And Don said, “Right. But it’s just that, as followers of Jesus, we know we haven’t done a really good job of representing him and the things he stood for. We’ve failed at that.” 

As Don was saying these things, Jake suddenly saw this was no game. It was serious to Don. Jake said, “You don’t have to do this.” Don said, “Yes, I do. Actually, in this moment I feel very strongly that I need to tell you how sorry I am for everything.”

And so he began. Confessing that he hadn’t done much to help the poor; that he had not loved his enemies, really, at all; that he had let his own personal agenda influence how he lived his faith. And when he finished, Jake had tears in his eyes and he said, “I forgive you.”

And so it went for the next couple of hours. One by one, party-goers would stumble into the booth not really knowing what to expect. And Don sat across from them and began again to confess the ways he had fallen short. And they listened. Many people wanted to hug him. They were all gracious and grateful.

As much as he had dreaded this beforehand, by the time it was done Don was a changed man. And he felt the ones who heard his confession were changed as well. 

For the many young people who stepped into the booth, people who had perhaps been hurt by the church, who only saw the failures of the church, it was a healing experience. And for Don and the others who confessed truths that had previously been easy to ignore, they were, to their own surprise, changed by it.

For anyone who ever thought they had to get their life together first and then go to church, 

For anyone who ever felt too embarrassed or ashamed to admit their failures, their regrets,

For anyone who ever believed they had to hide the crises of their family and personal life from the people who are supposed to love them most – their brothers and sisters in Christ,

Which is most of us,

Please hear this: 

We are all broken. We are all failures in various ways. We are all full of regrets, every day if we are honest, and in need of love and care and support. We all need to be able to share our stories, as they are, unpolished and unfinished, with someone else who, we know, will still love us.

I said to you last week that anytime there is a barrier between you and a brother or sister in Christ there is a barrier between you and Christ. The same is true of our regrets. When we hold them inside, trying to hide them from the world, we are distancing ourselves from the community of Christ in the way we most need it.

If you are not inclined to confess your regrets to a bunch of total strangers – which I am most certainly not inclined to do – there is another option. 

John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church, believed that Christians all need a small group of fellow disciples, with whom they can feel trust and love, and with whom they can ask and answer: How is it with your soul?

If you take the step, find a group, learn to give and receive trust, perhaps you will find the value, the hope, in sharing your stories, as they are happening, to know the grace and mercy of God when you most need it.

We all know we are a work in progress. I don’t think any of us would say that we have reached perfection. We yearn to be better, in a word, in our secret hearts, but we will always have difficulty with that if we are not able to share our stories truthfully. 

There is a reason this Christian life is set in community. Each of us is incomplete on our own; it is our communion with each other and Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, that makes us complete.

Let this be your invitation for the week: is there someone you trust, someone who loves you? Perhaps this is someone to whom you can confess something that weighs on your spirit. Some way that you, personally, have fallen short. This is a good place to start.

And if you are ready for the next step, perhaps you would consider making a partnership, with someone, or a few, who can ask you, “How is it with your soul?” Someone to whom you would tell the truth. 

When we bury our regrets deep inside, we remain trapped in our past. When we are honest about our condition, we will become free. And when we share it with others, fellow travelers on this journey of life, we might soar.

Photo by Kindel Media: https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-photo-of-crying-woman-8172862/

RE:concile Relationships

Philemon

I have boxes and drawers filled with piles of letters. Some of them may not be worth keeping, but for others there is no doubt. For example, I have a couple of letters my mother received from her father when she was in college. His words of encouragement to her are a part of our family story that we cherish.

If letter-writing is a lost art, that would be a tragedy. Because even though they are set in particular times and circumstances, the subjects of letters are often timeless. I am so glad my mother saved those letters from her father, making them a part of our story. And I am so glad the church saved this letter from Paul because it is an important part of our story.

Unlike most of his letters, this is one that sounds almost like a letter we would write. It is not written to a church, but to an individual, a friend. It is short – only a couple of pages long. It is personal – very personal.

Paul is writing to an old friend, Philemon. He is writing about a third person. Onesimus, a man who has been held in slavery by Philemon.

We don’t know why Onesimus is with Paul. Paul is currently imprisoned – something not all that unusual for Paul. And Onesimus is with him in his prison cell, although not a prisoner himself.

It is possible that Onesimus has been sent there by Philemon. Perhaps to care for Paul. Prisoners in the Roman empire were sometimes permitted to have servants. It is also possible that Onesimus was sent with a message, and then didn’t want to return to Philemon. And it is possible that Onesimus had run away and came to Paul looking for sanctuary. In fact, Paul hints in the letter that Onesimus may have wronged Philemon in some way. Indeed, running away would be considered a grievous wrong.

But whatever the circumstances are that brought Onesimus to Paul, it is quite unimportant. The letter Paul has chosen to write to Philemon is concerned with looking not backward, but forward, to reconciliation.

And the shape of this reconciliation Paul wants is for Philemon to regard Onesimus as a brother in Christ, equal and free.

His request of Philemon is peculiar for the time and place. Slavery was so common. It was not restricted to one particular tribe or race. It was simply what powerful people did to powerless people.

We know that the people of Israel were enslaved by the Egyptians for hundreds of years before they were led out of slavery by Moses.  And we know that the people of Israel, once they were established in their own land, also practiced slavery.  We know this because the law of Israel addressed it – not as a question of “if” it was acceptable, but “how” it was acceptable.  

We know that in the Roman Empire slavery was normal.  Some of the stories in the book of Acts talk about it, such as the woman who had a spirit of divination and was used by her owners quite profitably.  Some of the epistles have instructions pertaining to how the enslaved should behave, and from this we see that at least some Christian households “owned” other people.  All of this seems far away and strange to us.  And that is why it seems odd to us that Paul treads so delicately around the question.

But treading lightly and artfully was probably the only way for Paul to approach the matter if he wanted to be heard. 

He chooses his words carefully.  He is complimentary; he is encouraging, humble, and threatening, all at the same time.  Paul is using whatever he has at his disposal to bring about the result he is bold enough to ask for.

It would be easy for him to ignore the problem, like so many others have done. Slavery was so much a normal part of life, they failed to notice that it is in glaring contrast to the gospel of Jesus. It was a convention so ingrained in their day-to-day activities that they chose to remain blind to a problem that would be so very, very hard to change. 

We don’t have to go back too far to know this is true. In our nation, founded on principles of freedom, slavery was a critical part of our culture and our economy for a long time. Most Christians were comfortable enough with the contradiction between slavery and gospel. Some helpfully identified scripture verses that could be used to support the institution of slavery.

In recent decades, in the fight for equality for the LGBTQ community, we have become familiar with the term “clobber” verses, a small set of scriptural citations that some folks have used to argue against equal rights. Back in the days of legal slavery in our nation, supporters of slavery had a set of such verses, too, that they could use to clobber the enslaved into submission.

And most of the rest of us remained silent. Because we have decided conflict is not nice, perhaps not eve the Christian thing to do. In its stead, we have been placated by a false sense of peace.

So there’s outright conflict and there’s false peace. A tough choice. But reconciliation usually requires something else – a third way.

Listen to the way Paul speaks to his friend Philemon. He speaks with authentic love – for both Philemon and Onesimus. He does not shy away from truth – even though it will provoke Philemon to anger. He states clearly what he would wish to see Philemon do – while he never presumes to force it. If Philemon is going to take any steps toward reconciliation it must be done freely.

But the most profound move Paul makes is one that we might not even see. He is asking Onesimus to go back.

Paul is asking his dear friend, new brother in Christ, Onesimus, to freely walk back to the man who claims to own him, and has the power to oppress him, to enslave him.

And when I see this I don’t know what to think. I am shocked that he would ask such a thing. I am angry that Paul would do this to his beloved brother. I am afraid for Onesimus, that he might be in grave danger. I am wary and suspicious of Philemon’s intentions, for we know absolutely nothing about where he is in his faith and his thoughts about slavery. Will he be able to hear his brother Paul with an open heart? Or will he allow this matter to become a barrier between him and the gospel of Christ?

When it comes to reconciliation, Paul is showing that everyone must be willing to take a risk. Philemon will have to take a risk – possibly to be impoverished, if freeing one person leads to freeing all the persons he might hold in slavery. Paul will have to risk his reputation and friendship with both Philemon and Onesimus because of what he is asking. Onesimus, even, will be asked to take a risk, the biggest risk of all.

In reconciliation there is always a risk of losing something. But in reconciliation there is the gain of everything.

As Paul wrote in another letter, “Whatever gain I had, I count as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”

It’s like this: Any barrier between you and a brother or sister in Christ is a barrier between you and Christ. Paul is calling on you and me to reboot, to reconcile for the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus.

Photo: ChurchArt.com