“Always protects…” :: Some Thoughts on Richard Roberts

Early this morning, the former president of Oral Roberts University, Richard Roberts, was arrested on a DUI charge.  He was released on an $1,100 bail just a few hours ago.

Richard, who served as president of ORU for 15 years, resigned his post in 2007 amid charges of corruption and misuse of the university’s assets.  It was a dark season for ORU, but by all accounts it seems the university has responded with aplomb, now healthier than ever.

I graduated from ORU back in the spring of 2003.  ORU was a mythical place to me in my childhood.  Growing up in more or less rural Wisconsin from a more or less pentecostal/charismatic church, “Tulsa, Oklahoma” was to me practically what Jerusalem would have been to a Jewish kid born in Babylon during the exile: a place of lore and legend, with people and institutions that represented the best of our self-understanding.  So it was with a fair amount of enthusiasm that I moved to Tulsa to attend ORU in the fall of 1999.

Disappointment almost immediately set in.  And the disappointment was not so much with the school as such (great classes, great professors, great students), but with the leadership.  I had every reason to believe in the Roberts family, Richard and Lindsay in particular.  As time when on, those reasons eroded.  Before long, trust had been replaced with cynicism.  It was the “skeletons in the closet” stories (stories both past and present, all of which abounded) that created a real sense of disconnect between what I saw of the Roberts family and what was pretty clear was going on behind the scenes.  ”Duplicity” was not a word I used often, but it certainly described my sense of what was going on.  It was clear to me that the unhealth of the institution and the unhealth of the family that led it were intimately connected.

So when the scandal(s) that ultimately led to Richard’s departure hit back in 2007, I remember actually being happy for the Roberts’ family, and for the institution.  ORU is a great place with a lot of potential.  To see a new wave of clear-minded leadership come in was a really hopeful thing.

But even more than that, I was legitimately happy for Richard and Lindsay, for the burden now lifted off of their shoulders.  ”What an opportunity,” I thought “for them to get out of the limelight, lay aside the pressure, and rediscover the simplicity of walking with Jesus, together, among his people, journeying toward health.”

Ministry, after all, can be a pure delight.  It can also be a soul-crushing burden.  More still, it can become a place that aids and abets and exacerbates our brokenness.  And when our health and wholeness (“singleness of heart” is how the prophet Jeremiah might have described it) is not up to the level of (or beyond) the weight we carry, trouble is sure to follow.

So I was happy for Richard and Lindsay back in 2007, and I’m really sad today.  A DUI is not necessarily a sign that a person is finding wholeness.  I’m sure it’s a pretty dark day in the Roberts household.

So, what we do with this?  A few things…

- We refuse cynical commentary.  ”Do not gloat when your enemy falls; when he stumbles, do not let your heart rejoice” (Pr 24:17) says the writer of Proverbs.  Richard is perhaps no one’s “enemy” in the sense intended by the sage, but it applies all the same.  It is a sign of our own sickness that we gloat and snark over things like this.  When the scandal of 2007 hit, predictably I suppose but sadly, much of the ORU alumni community went on the offensive with destructive, cynical, sarcastic commentary.  Paul says that love “keeps no record of wrongs.”  It “does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.  It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres” (1 Co 13).

Love always protects… It is a sign of how unlike our Father in heaven we are that we can’t muster up the will to protect and build up the Roberts family (or anyone for that matter) through this.  Rise to the occasion ORU alumni.

- As a corollary, we refuse to be morbidly fascinated with scandal and failure.  I have observed moral failure both up close and from afar, and what is always true, especially in a society that worships its heroes as much as ours does, that when leaders fail, the public becomes morbidly fascinated.  People can’t stop talking about it.  I’m not totally sure why that is.  I know it’s weird.

Perhaps, I might suggest, it is evidence that we don’t have very robust “selves” that we so easily find heroes to worship, which is why we crucify them when they fail – they threaten the fabric of our self-identity, so we need to distance from them.  Maybe, I might suggest, our longing for transcendence falsely expresses itself in our living vicariously through celebrities and leaders that have seemingly broken free of the earth.  If all of this is the case, then we are guilty of breaking several major commandments (“you shall have no other gods before you…” ahem, ahem), and its effects on our sense of self and our health as a people are palpable.

We need to do better.  Observe failure, pray for restoration, and then move on.  Our addiction to celebrity worship is destructive both to ourselves and to those we worship.

And finally…

- We refuse to make soul-care subordinate to the other concerns of our lives.  This is perhaps especially important for people in vocational ministry, but it applies to all of us.  The old word for it was “integrity”, which didn’t necessarily refer to “honesty” (though it included it), but to the whole of a person’s constitution.  In architectural terms, if a building has “structural integrity”, we know that it safe to live and work in.  If that integrity is compromised (the foundation cracks, or there’s a termite problem), we know that the building will eventually not support its own weight; say nothing of the weight of others in the building.  It is unsafe.

And so it is with us.  We seek to make sure that our “structural integrity” is sound, and getting sounder.  If and when we fail to pay attention to that integrity, sooner or later our unsoundness will express itself, and chances are, people will be hurt.  This is why intentionality in our own spiritual formation is so critical.

The big trouble with ministry, of course, is that it encourages us to pretend that all is well.  Our ambition for seeing the institutions we lead succeed causes us to subordinate the concerns of our souls to the concerns of our ministries.  That is exactly backwards.  The problem is, oftentimes our gifts and talents (our capacity) outpace our character, which means that we can get away with it.  For awhile.

I remember being on a several week fast back during my college days.  During one of the days of the fast, I expressed in prayer some frustration that it didn’t seem like a lot was happening in my life.  I remember the Lord saying very clearly to me, “Don’t despise the seasons of quietness.  You need to allow my Spirit to do a deeper work of faith in you (during these seasons) so that your character will be able to sustain you in the places your giftedness will take you.”

That has always stayed with me.  I want there to be MUCH MORE to me, my character, who I am, than what anybody sees on Sunday.  But even more than that, I want the capacity of my character to always outpace the capacity of my gifts, otherwise I’ll never be able to hold the opportunities (and challenges!) my gifts bring my way.  Still more, I never want ministry to be something that’s fundamentally separate from who I am.  That is precisely the place that ministry becomes duplicitous.

That is why soul-care, the work of spiritual formation, is so important.  We want “selves” that are “structurally sound”, rooted and planted in Christ Jesus, so that our lives may be a blessing and a strength to the world around us.

My prayer for the Roberts family is that the Spirit would continue to lovingly lead them in the journey towards wholeness… “shalom”… everything in its place, just as God intends.

Make it so Lord God.

 

Praying with Jesus #8: On Eating… (Pt 1 of 2)

Jesus’ prayer thus far has taken us on a journey that radically decentralizes the “self”.  We are called to approach God not first of all in a spirit of “gab”, blabbering on and on to God about whatever happens to pop into our heads, and neither with a laundry list of narcissistic items for our individual lives.  Instead, we are challenged to join with “all the saints” in opening our eyes and souls up to the sheer grandeur of the Story that we find ourselves in… God, his Glory, and his Kingdom.  Jesus’ prayer will usher us into the wide open places of a breathtaking narrative.  We are not the center of the universe.  And it is for our good that it should be so, and that we should see it.

But lest we should think therefore that the concerns of our little lives don’t matter, Jesus instructs us to pray next:

Give us this day our daily bread…

We are called to ask for bread.  Our hungry stomachs matter to this God.

But it is the nature of the bread we are called to ask for that is perhaps shocking to our ears.  We are not called to ask for huge mountains of bread that we can then shove in plastic bags and freeze up so that when times are lean, we’ll have enough.  No, it is “daily” bread.  ”Today” bread.  Sustenance for this moment.  Provision for the immediate future – this coming day, hour, minute, second.  And not beyond.

When we read this talk of “daily” bread we will likely recall the Exodus tale of the Israelites gathering manna – “what is it?” is what “manna” means in Hebrew – on the floor of the desert each morning.  The Lord their God promised them that even in the desolate wilderness, provision would be there.  Always enough.  For each household.  And the recollection of Old Testament writers was that “he who gathered much did not have too much, and he who gathered little did not have too little. Each one gathered as much as he needed” (Ex 16:18). Everyone had just enough.

There was a catch, though.  And the catch was that no one was to store the miracle bread up for the next day.  For if they did, it would immediately spoil.  And some of them did try to store it up.  The result?  The next day the bread was “was full of maggots and began to smell” (16:20).  And Moses was angry.

The bread “began to smell.”  What an apt description of the absence of simple trust.  It smells.  The act of gathering up manna, trying to save it for the next day, was an act of pure, straightforward unbelief.  Yahweh promised bread.  Daily bread.  Miracle provision.  On the floor of the desert.  They got it once.  But some did not trust that Yahweh would be Yahweh-for-them TOMORROW too.  They hedged their bets against God.  I think this broke God’s heart, deeply disappointing him.

I think we do this all the time.  We pray for provision, but it is not the “daily bread” sort of provision that Jesus calls us to pray for.  Instead, we pray that we’d get “that job” that pays really well.  And even though it is not wrong to pray for such things, yet in our hearts, if we’re honest, the reason that we’re praying for “that job” that pays really well is because we’re hoping to break out into a situation in which we no longer need to trust God for “daily bread”, because such trust is not comfortable.  It is precariously uncertain.

Perhaps you don’t know this, so it is worthwhile to say – God never intends to graduate us from moment-by-moment dependance on him.  We are called to live continually under the canopy of his care, and it is a sign that deep down we don’t really believe his goodness that we are constantly trying to escape that canopy and build our own.  

How ironic that the vehicle of our unbelief so often is prayer.  Prayer that is intended to unite us with the Father for many of us becomes yet one more way our mistrustful hearts find expression…

Would to God that we would be able to pray, in simple trust, like children with their parents, “I’m going to need to eat today, Father.  Please make sure there’s enough for me.”

That is…

“Give us this day our daily bread.”

 

Praying with Jesus #7: The Kingdom

The first “requests” of the Lord’s Prayer are three, set in parallel:

• Hallowed be Thy Name
• Thy Kingdom come
• Thy will be done

Parallelism is a common rhetorical device in Greek.  It is largely to indicate that we are talking about the same thing, but from a variety of viewpoints, each viewpoint mutually enriching the other and filling out the picture.

And with that, many of our “gospels” go on trial.  

There is a “gospel” afoot in our culture that makes salvation all about “the decision for Jesus” and the personal piety that follows.  The goal here is going to heaven when you die.  It is about making sure that you, and others, are “in”.

There is another “gospel” afoot in our culture that makes salvation all about working for “justice and peace”.  The goal here is making the world a better place.  It is about making sure that there is equal opportunity and fair treatment for all.

Jesus will have none of it, and the Lord’s Prayer is a sure indication of it… What he says in another place applies equally here: “What God has joined together, let man not put asunder.”

GOD’S DESIRE IS NOTHING LESS THAN THE RESTORATION OF ALL THINGS.  (See Revelation 21 and Paul, almost anywhere, for more on that.)  That is to say, his desire is for his universal reign to be made manifest throughout the cosmos.

But we must understand the nature of this reality.  There will be no lasting justice and peace apart from the hallowing of the Divine Name… no hallowing of the Divine Name that does not bring with the beginnings of justice and peace.

For when we speak of “the Kingdom”, we are speaking of the King being recognized as King (Hallowed be Thy Name) even as his rule is being made manifest among those who submit to his Kingship (Thy will be done).

“Thy Kingdom Come” is a profound prayer to pray.  On the one hand, it is most certainly a cry for the final “coming” of the Kingdom.  Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15 that a day is coming in which God the Son will “hand over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power” (v 24), the very last power to be destroyed, of course, being Death itself.  And then, he says, “the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all” (v 28).

Do you see it?  Oppression and injustice… Hunger and famine… Rape, neglect, and child abuse… all of it will vanish like the morning mist at the rising of the Sun… when God is universally glorified, the Creation will be universally restored.  With the Church we cry, “Come Lord Jesus!”, “Maranatha!”

But to pray this is not just to pray that “one day” that would happen.

It is to pray that anticipations of that Final Day would sprout up in the here and now.

That is to say, that WE would serve as anticipations, living embodiments, of that Final Day.  And in that same breath it is important to say that when I say “we”, I do not merely mean “each of us in our individual lives”, though that is true enough.  Remember that Jesus teaches us to pray out of and with the Church!  ”OUR FATHER…”  

We are praying much more than personal, individual piety.  We are praying that the communities of faithful brothers and sisters in Christ which we inhabit would increasingly come to reflect the nature and substance of the Kingdom to which they bear witness.  We are praying that we would serve as a SIGN, and FORETASTE, and an INSTRUMENT of the coming Kingdom of God.

People should be able to wander into our communities and feel as though they’ve tasted heaven itself… anything less is a betrayal of our call.

“Thy kingdom come” then is a cry OF the Church, TO God, FOR the Church to make manifest in the here and now, the vision of John:

¹ Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. ² I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. ³ And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ⁴ He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

⁵ He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” (Rev 21)

All things new.  Among us.  Today.  Now.

Make it so Lord God.

 

Praying with Jesus #6: Hallowing the Divine Name…

Now that we’ve got the “To Whom” we pray part down (“Our Father who art in heaven”), Jesus begins to teach us the “For What” of prayer.  And it is noteworthy what he calls us to pray for:

hallowed be Thy Name,

Thy Kingdom come

Thy will be done

On earth as it is in heaven

“Hallowed be thy name” – literally, “let your Name be sanctified/set apart as holy.”  The first request is that God’s Name (which discloses his character) would be recognized and treasured as holy.  By us, in us, through us, and throughout the world.

These are not idle words.  This is not flowery language used to butter up God, putting him in a good mood so that when we get to the “real stuff” (our laundry list of narcissistic items for our life), he’ll be more inclined to answer.

No, this is bigger than that.  This is about God’s grand project of redemption.

We are told throughout the biblical narrative that Sin and Death came into the world because Adam and Eve, our first father and mother, turned their backs on God, seeking to be “like God” by eating the forbidden fruit.  The primal turn away from God, this original Usurpation, sent shock waves throughout Creation.

And we are still reaping its effects, for whenever and wherever human beings fail to “glorify God” and “give thanks to Him”, “exchanging the glory of the immortal God” for lesser gods (most often themselves), death, destruction and grief are the result (Rom 1).

Down through history, the Church’s teachers have always taught us that at Fall, the human will, created to submit to God, was warped… turned in on itself… so that instead of willing submission to God, we “will” ourselves, our drives, our passions, and our desires, as ends within themselves, divorcing them from the End for which they were made.

Fallen man does not worship and serve God…

Instead he serves:

• Money
• Sex
• Power
• Greed
• Ambition
• Self-glorification
• Pleasure

And on and on the list goes… it is not hard to see how the warping of the will is the fountainhead of global chaos.

With the result that Redemption, whatever else it entails, entails a BREAKING of the stubborn will so that it can “will” what it was originally meant to will… GOD.  We might say that worship is the first evidence of the soul’s return to God, and hence the first moment that Redemption begins to spill into the world.

Do you see why “hallowed be Thy Name” is first?  TO PRAY THIS PRAYER IS TO DIE WITH CHRIST OUT OF OUR OLD, WARPED, ADAMIC WILL, AND TO BE BORN AGAIN INTO THE SON’S LIFE LIVED TO THE FATHER (Rom 6), for of course the Son, the New Adam, always lives to glorify the Father.

“Hallowed be Thy Name” is call for repentance and rebirth into our true identity as creatures made by and for the Creator.  And when we pray it, we are invited to imagine (for so it is) that in our praying, Creation (we are made, after all, of the dust of the earth) is returning to its Maker.

Thanks be to God.

This is why, in my own devotional life, I do not begin with merely “talking to God” about whatever happens to pop into my head.  I begin by worshiping God with the Church, taking Psalms like this on my lips:

¹ Praise the LORD, O my soul;
all my inmost being, praise his holy name.
² Praise the LORD, O my soul,
and forget not all his benefits—
³ who forgives all your sins
and heals all your diseases,
⁴ who redeems your life from the pit
and crowns you with love and compassion,
⁵ who satisfies your desires with good things
so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s. (Ps 103)

Or this:

¹ Come, let us sing for joy to the LORD;
let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation.
² Let us come before him with thanksgiving
and extol him with music and song.

³ For the LORD is the great God,
the great King above all gods.
⁴ In his hand are the depths of the earth,
and the mountain peaks belong to him.
⁵ The sea is his, for he made it,
and his hands formed the dry land.

⁶ Come, let us bow down in worship,
let us kneel before the LORD our Maker;
⁷ for he is our God
and we are the people of his pasture,
the flock under his care.

Today, if you hear his voice,
⁸ do not harden your hearts… (Ps 95)

Psalms like these invite me to step out of my usurpatious, narcissistic self-centeredness, and into a world in which I find my joy in being a creature made in the image of the Creator, called to live in submission to Him, a reflection of his life and character.

And oh what joy it is… to pray, “hallowed be Thy Name”, and to see that in the praying of that short phrase, the Redemption of the world is underway.  God is getting back what belongs to Him.

Gladly we yield ourselves.

May your Name be treasured and loved today Lord God.

 

Praying with Jesus #5: Always near us…

“Our Father, who art in heaven…” is how Jesus begins his teaching on prayer.  Interesting that Jesus thinks it’s important that we know the location of the God to whom we pray.  He is “in heaven.”

And with that phrase we find ourselves in a bit of a situation.  Praying the word “our”, remembering that we are in the company of the saints when we pray is well and good; and praying the word “Father”, remembering that we are to relate to God not first as slaves to a master or subjects to an imperial ruler, but as children to their dad… well that is well and good too.

But then… “in heaven”… so we’re like a bunch of kids sending off letters to a guy we are obliged to call “Dad” but who lives in a place totally remote from us?  ”In heaven” sounds so far away for us who are inevitably knit to the earth, made of dust as we are.

The trouble of course is in the translation.  What in English we translate “in heaven” in the Greek text of Matthew is actually a plural – “en tois ouranois” – in the heavens…  For many of us, the word “heaven” conjures up images of streets paved with gold and naked babies holding harps, but for the Bible writers, “heaven” was no such “place in the sky”… it was instead everything that was “not earth”; that is to say, it was everything from the immediate atmosphere surrounding our very bodies (in Genesis, the birds fly “in heaven”) to the “highest heavens” – the planets and stars and beyond.

For Matthew, the God we call “Father” dwells in and fills “the heavens”…

That is to say, He is near.  As Paul will later put it, “in Him we live and move and have our being.”  He is both IN our immediate atmosphere AND, to put it one way, IS OUR ATMOSPHERE.

He is near.

It was Dallas Willard in his book “The Divine Conspiracy” who first opened my eyes to this translational problem.  Of viewing God as “up in heaven” (= “out there” somewhere), he wrote:

The damage done to our practical faith in Christ and in his government at-hand by confusing heaven with a place in distant or outer space, or even beyond space, is incalculable.  Of course God is there too.  But instead of heaven and God also being always being present with us, as Jesus shows them to be, we invariably take them to be located far away and, most likely, at a much later time–not here and not now.  And we should then be surprised to find ourselves alone? (p. 71)

The mental image most of us conjure up when we say “Our Father in heaven” is exactly the opposite of what Jesus intends.  He intends for us to picture God as a Father who is fundamentally near us, with us, and closer to us than we are to our very selves.  After all, Jesus, who reveals the Father, is called “Immanuel”–God With Us.

Which changes how we pray.  I grew up in a tradition that taught me to invoke the Presence of God in my prayer life.  We would “wait on God” until the Presence fell.  ”Come with your Presence” we would pray.

Years later, I see that prayer as exactly backwards, coming out of a warped view of how God relates to his World.  He does not stand outside of it like a man standing outside of his fish tank, anxiously wondering what’s going on within it.  Instead, he is more like the water in which the fish swim.

Maybe we need our view of God healed.  And maybe the result of that healing will be an increased ability to pray, “Help me remember that I’m always in your Presence”, which, after all, the Psalmist said we “cannot flee” from (Ps 139).

Or better yet, maybe we could just pray, “Our Father, who art in heaven…“

May you know God’s nearness today and always.

 

Praying with Jesus #4: “With the whole communion of saints…”

The rabid individualism of our culture infects and spoils our lives in a myriad of ways, not least in the life of prayer.  We are told that we need to “have a personal relationship with God”, which is true enough, but does not tell the whole story.  And if our prayer life is only seen through the lens of our own “personal relationship with God”, more will be lost than gained.

Every word of the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9-14) is crucial.  Most people I think would agree with this.  Most Bible teachers would even agree with this.  Yet a pivotal word of the prayer is often overlooked.  It is the first word of the prayer in English, the second in Greek:

“Our”

Jesus does not counsel us to pray, “MY Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name”; he counsels us to pray “OUR Father who art in heaven…”, and this is important, for it conditions us to see that (as a friend of mine recently put it) while we are called to know the God Jesus called “Father” FOR ourselves, we are at the same time not called to know him BY ourselves.

When we pray, we pray in the company of the faithful, across space and time and down through history.  ”The whole communion of saints in heaven and on earth…”

This has at least three important implications, as far as I can see it:

1) We never pray alone.  When we bring ourselves to God in prayer, we are not simply having private intimate conversation with Jesus, like two lovers (though that will sometimes happen).  We are joining with the people of God who are lifting up their voices day and night to their Lord and Maker.  The life of prayer, then, is less like an isolated act that we do every so often, schedule permitting, and more like a river, a chorus that is constantly being sung and said before God, which we occasionally join with, adding our voices to.  The Church was praying long before we arose for prayer, and long after we finish.  She carries it.  We join it.  This is why the Psalms have always been treasured among the People of God.  When we lift our voice through the Psalter, we are praying “in the fellowship of the saints.”  Following from that…

2) We are called pray out of the Great Tradition of the Church.  It has been an IMMENSE help to me to use, for example, the Book of Common Prayer in my own personal prayer life.  It saves me from wandering around in circles with my speech and prevents my prayer life from devolving into a laundry list of narcissistic items for my life.  It shapes my devotion (and hence, it shapes me) to embody the beliefs and concerns of the People of God down through history.  The Great Tradition teaches me to address God as Trinity, to run to Christ Jesus as the Great High Priest, the Mediator, and the Last Adam, and to walk in the illumination and power of the Holy Spirit.  It teaches me that I am to pray for “city to which I am sent in exile” (America), which includes its leaders, something I would simply not do on my own.  It calls me, on a daily basis, to remember in prayer the poor (“let not the needy O Lord be forgotten, nor the hope of the poor taken away…”) and those around me who have not yet touched or tasted the kingdom.  It teaches me that the first and most appropriate response of the creature to the Creator is worship and gratitude, and not bellyaching about my crummy life.

In short, when I pray with the Church out of her Great Tradition, it molds me in ways that smack of the Kingdom of God, and it makes that molding far less haphazard than it would have been otherwise.

And finally…

3) We pray in, with, and through Jesus.  Paul wrote in Galatians 4:6 that “God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, “Abba, Father.”  The Spirit who resides in us is the Spirit of the Son who leads us – all of us, his people – through his own Sonship into fellowship with the Father.  Through the Spirit we all are caught up into and shaped by the Son’s life, a life that he lives forever to the Father.  The “our” of the “Our Father” finds its Christological grounding and fullest meaning in Jesus and in our participation in his Sonship.

That is to say, the energy of our devotion is the energy of the God the Son’s love and obedience to God the Father.

“In him we live and move and have our being.”  And even pray.

This also has been an immense help to me.  I do not always want to pray.  But the Spirit draws me to prayer.  And when I come, the opportunity that stands before me is the same as it always is – to die and rise again with Christ, into Christ, and then to live and pray and worship THROUGH Him… to let his life and energy animate my life of devotion, making it warm and rich and robust.

“I have been crucified with Christ” Paul wrote, “and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me” (Gal 2:2).

May you find yourself praying in the company of all God’s people, in, with, and through Christ Jesus today.  And may you be strengthened in so doing.

Grace and peace…

 

Praying with Jesus #3: As to a Father…

What is your view of God like?  Austere, remote, distant?  Unapproachable, unimaginable, vague?  Micromanaging, autocratic, tyrannical?  Petty, fault-finding, judgmental?  Angry, ill-tempered, irascible?  Disinterested, dispassionate, impersonal?

How we see God will condition how we pray, for better or for worse.  Jesus knows this.  Hence, he does not assume we know to Whom we speak when we begin to pray.  In other words, he does not say, “Prayer is just talking to God.”  We will have to know who this God is and what he’s like if we’re going to make a good start into prayer.

And so the first word of the Lord’s Prayer (in Greek), is Pater.  Father.  For Jesus, the controlling concept for God, which should condition our life of prayer, is fatherhood.  God is Father.

Let us pause for a moment and consider that.

Jesus could have began his teaching on prayer in any way he wanted.  ”Father”, after all, was not a typically Jewish way of beginning a prayer, especially in the first century.  God was so high and holy that many Jews dared not utter the name, instead choosing roundabout ways of addressing or talking about God (“circumlocution” is the technical word for it).  ”May heaven help you…” (instead of “may God help you…”) would be a modern equivalent to it.

And so here is Jesus, a Jew, a first century Jew at that, calling us to address God directly… and not just directly, but with a term that implies a stunning degree of intimacy: “Father.”

He could have had us begin…

• Our Intergalactic CEO who art in heaven…
• Our Cosmic President who dwells in the heavens…
• O Great Autocrat of the Universe, who dwells in the heavens…

But he does not.  It is not sovereignty that Jesus wishes to emphasize, but intimacy and familial nearness, as we shall soon see.

Some will of course object that that was a bad move on Jesus’ part.  ”Most people’s dad’s are self-centered slobs.  Morons.  Abusive and/or disinterested.  Why on earth would he choose Father as the first metaphor for God?”

Maybe because that’s simply the best description for God.  That we have warped and defiled the concept of “Father” does not deter Jesus.  He will bring us to a place of knowing God as Father aright, for that is what He is, and that is how He longs for us to know him.  Not as an angry tyrant, or a distant landlord… but as “Dad.”

Jesus is the Son of the Father, and he will lead us to know the God he called Father, for we will know the Father through the Son’s sonship.

Ah, but I anticipate a later move… stay tuned.

 

Praying with Jesus #2: “Do it like this…”

Very often, when folks are learning to pray for the first time (as little kids, or as new believers, or as longtime believers relatively new to the life of prayer, etc), you will here this line, uttered in good faith and with the best of intentions:

Prayer is ‘just’ talking to God…

“Just” talking to God, eh?  About what?  The weather?  My sore back?  Politics?  And what of the “to God” part?  We have no real analogy to “talking to God” in human experience that even gets us started in the right direction.  Is “talking to God” like “talking to the President”?  Like “talking to the IRS”?

“Just talking to” an invisible, all-powerful Deity is not all that straightforward an exercise if you ask me.  Which is why most people’s prayer lives are vapid, shallow, confused, or non-existant.  ”Prayer is just talking to God” seems to me to be fabulously bad advice.

We can breathe easy knowing that Jesus is smarter than to give us that kind of non-directive direction:

In this manner, therefore, you should pray… (Mt 6:9a)

He has just gotten done telling us about the hypocrisy of some who pray merely to have folks think they’re spiritual, and also of the babbling of pagans, who think that perhaps in the “muchness of their speech” (6:7) they will get what they’re asking for, if for no other reason than they wore the deity out.  So Jesus says, “Do it THIS WAY!”

“Prayer is just talking to God” fails to take seriously the nature of our situation.  On some level, we’re like feral dogs… or better, ORPHANS who have been adopted into the home of a wealthy nobleman or aristocrat.  To be able to fully enjoy the new situation (which is ours by right as adopted sons and daughters) is going to require that old habits and patterns of thought die as new habits and patterns of thought are embraced and formed.  We can stay as we are, and God will love us all the same.  But to take full advantage of the situation, to “live into” our new identity, we’re gonna have to apply ourselves.

In this manner, therefore, you should pray…

Jesus is going to teach us how to live into our identity as sons and daughters of God, and he is going to do so by giving us “language” that will help form and develop habits of thought and mind.  Left to ourselves, our prayer lives would surely devolve into mindless babbling or simply telling the all-powerful, invisible Customer Service Department about the laundry list of narcissistic items for our life.

But with Jesus, we learn a better way.

In this manner, therefore, you should pray…

Our Present Teacher is with us to make joyful, faithful prayer possible.  We have a lot to learn.

Before ending, I’d like to add one thing.  There is a profound hypocrisy at the root of much North American Christian spirituality, and that is this: we rarely, if ever, go to a worship service that is purely, 100% spontaneous.  We sing more or less carefully crafted songs, so that our worship doesn’t become haphazard.  We plan it out.  And it is for our good that it should be so.  Carefully crafted songs and liturgy keep noxious forces at bay.

YET – much of the world of (mostly Protestant, evangelical) Christianity is biased AGAINST the use of prayer books, many of which contain well-crafted, beautifully written prayers and “orders” for conducting a private devotional life.  These are dismissed as “rote religion.”

Weird, huh?  Maybe that’s something we need to get over…

Just a thought.

 

Praying with Jesus #1

I love to pray.

When I was a kid, I started praying by compiling a prayer list – names of folks who I desired to see know Jesus (family and friends mostly, and ome celebrities).  I prayed through the list each morning.  Then when breakfast came around, I prayed for breakfast.  When lunch came I prayed for lunch.  When dinner came I prayed for dinner.  When bedtime came I prayed for good dreams.  Occasionally I would pray for other things too: nice weather the next day, health, and so forth.

The important point here is that prayer for me was MOSTLY, if not exclusively, about “the ask”.  Thus, while I enjoyed praying and was a pretty consistent pray-er, there was a measure of anxiety built into the system.  ”Will God come through for me on all these things I’m asking him for…?” I would nervously wonder.

I think that most people’s prayer lives – if they exist at all – are probably stuck in neutral in exactly that place.  Prayer is a semi-anxious exchange between people and a mysterious Deity who sometimes delivers what we ask for and sometimes does not.  It is not hard to see why prayer does not hold much joy for most people.

My conviction is that the life of prayer is central to the work of spiritual formation.  We are told in the New Testament that the Spirit’s work is to remake is in the image of the Son, Christ Jesus, so that our lives should be on an increasing trajectory of conformity to our Elder Brother.  As my own prayer life has matured, it has not left behind the “ask” necessarily, but has come to incorporate practices and habits guided by the intuition of what the Eastern Orthodox would call theosis–that God’s desire for me is that I would die and rise again with Christ daily, with the result that my being is increasingly shot through with Divine Light, Life, Love, and Power.

Fortunately for us, we don’t need to journey so far as the Eastern Orthodox to learn how to pray in this way.  Sitting and learning at Jesus’ feet will do just fine, for Jesus, the Son of the Father, teaches us to pray as Sons and Daughters of the Father.

In the next couple weeks I’ll be blogging through the Lord’s Prayer (Mt 6:9-13) in a series of posts called “Praying with Jesus”, the goal of which is open up pathways for understanding prayer that are deeper and richer than most of us are typically exposed to.  I hope you’ll join me.

Andrew

 

 

Into the New Year, Against the Horizon of God’s Beauty…

When I was a sophomore in college, after the turn of the New Year, I decided that it would be a good thing to set some goals for the upcoming 12 months.  After breaking my life down into every conceivable category and subcategory, I proceeded to set those goals.  Seven journal pages of goals later, I was exhausted, and the rout was on.  (Or so I felt.)

Perhaps you have had this experience.  You enter the new year with zeal, make a bunch of resolutions, set a bunch of goals, and watch them vaporize days later.

There must be a better way.

In the years since then, my approach to the new year has changed substantially.  I do not look at the upcoming year through the lens of “goal-setting” (though some goal-setting invariably plays a part in it).  Rather, I look at the upcoming year through the lens of continuing to journey into the horizon of God’s beauty.

What do I mean by this?

I mean simply that we are made for God.  Our time and talents, our intellect and resources, our “selves” and our relationships… all of these are made to be developed and stewarded in such a way that they reflect and contribute to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful… all of which come from God.  Further, they are not mine.  They are His (see Mt 25:14ff.), and will one day be returned to Him.

In what shape will I return them?  Will they be broken and battered?  Abused and squandered?  Or will I – with joy – be able to present to God everything entrusted to me.  ”Look, Lord!  Here is what belongs to you… and more!”

That can be a really daunting thought.  But the good news here is that the Scriptures teach that as our “selves” are increasingly healed by the love and grace of God, we are moved more and more to a place of eagerly and continually presenting “our bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God–[which is our] spiritual act of worship” (Rom 12:1), for that is what love does–it gives oneself, and gives utterly.  As the love of God is poured into our souls, seeping down into each and every crack and healing our resistance, it rebounds back to Him as an answering love through which, like the Beloved before her Lover, we unhesitatingly give ourselves away to Him.  Which means, I take it, that the Day of reckoning for many of us will hold no surprises.  We’d been giving Him everything all our lives.  The Day will be joy beyond imagination.

How beautiful is that?

So when I approach the new year now, I don’t set goals (exclusively).  I think about the love of God rebounding in my heart as an increasing self-giving as I journey further and further into his Beauty and Love.  I think about my life moving more and more towards the deep integration of Heaven… asking myself how and in what ways that which has been given to me has stalled out on that journey, and what I might do to restart it.

• My self… am I becoming a self increasingly alive to all that God is, and to the world around me, or am I moving in the direction of chaos and disintegration?
• My intellect… is it growing and broadening and being sharpened for the good of men and the glory of God, or is it being squandered and used on foolish things?
• My talents… see above
• My resources… likewise
• My marriage… is it moving in the direction of a deepening friendship, trust, and intimacy that reflects that “naked and unashamedness” of Genesis, or is it becoming something else?
• My parenting… is it moving in the direction of respect, humility, wisdom, and thoughtful shepherding, or is it haphazard, sloppy, and lazy?

You get the idea.

God’s beautiful Kingdom is coming.  May your life move ever more in the direction of it… may it become this year a clearer and more compelling anticipation of it.

Grace and peace to you.

Andrew