Weird Thoughts on Prayer, Part 1

I’ll start by confessing that I don’t feel like I really understand prayer and I don’t really think that I’m very good at it.  Now you can feel free to dismiss what follows since it’s by a guy who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

I’m not trying to be controversial, but it seems to me that people completely dismiss what Jesus says about prayer in an attempt to out-do one another.  I hear people talk about their prayer time and how great it is and how they can pray for half an hour and not realize that it has been that long.  Either they are completely full of it (pardon the expression) or they are way more spiritual than me because I just can’t do that.  The idea of “praying” for 30 minutes just sounds miserable to me.  Before you crucify me, consider what Jesus says in Matthew 6, though.  “And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”   It sounds to me like Jesus is saying, “Keep it simple.  Keep it short.  There’s no reason to be all flowery because God already knows what you are going to ask him.”  Most pastors when they preach on this passage go to pains to say, “Jesus isn’t saying that long prayers are bad.  He’s just saying you shouldn’t try to impress people with your prayers.”  And yet we hear people talk about how much time they spend in prayer and how great their prayer life is and how important it is for us to pray, implying in all of this that they themselves are great praying people.  Isn’t that trying to impress people?

You’ll be quick to quote Paul, of course, as saying “pray without ceasing.”  This proves that we should pray for long times, doesn’t it?  Well, actually it seems to say that we should be praying at all times, not for long times, if you are going to be literal.  I think Paul means we should be prayerful in every aspect of our lives, turning each moment into a God-centered and God-dependant one, not “on our knees” 24 hours a day.  That means a thousand little prayers are more important than some hours long self-flagellant prayer, akin more to a perverse asceticism or paganism than Biblical Christianity.

reflections on a life unlived

Five years ago today I walked into the OB’s office with my 38 week pregnant wife, just as we had the week before, glowing with the expectation of our little girl’s arrival in 2 short weeks.  Following the same routine as in our other visits, we were soon sent to a room for a simple checkup.  It did not take long however to realize that something was wrong.  The doctor struggled to find a heart beat across my wife’s abdomen.  His look of concern told us a story we did not want to hear.  There was no heartbeat.  Our little one had been ushered into the arms of her Lord without the experiences of life on this earth.

Her death meant a death to our hopes and dreams, our plans and expectations.  It also meant a death to my naive optimism and dimwitted theology of cheery colors and happy endings.  I can no longer stomach the “Everything happens for a reason” platitude placed ever before me nor the oversimplistic “promises” of God merely needing to be “claimed”.

It made way for something deeper, something truer, something which encapsulates the whole of human experience in a life lived for God without expectations, something that understands faith means trust more than belief.  So forgive me if I tell you that God can heal you but he may not, that God can bless you but those blessings may not be what you want, that your faithfulness maybe rewarded in the way Jeremiah’s was.  I’d be lying if I said there was no suffering for the righteous, no pain for the innocent, no broken hearts for those wholeheartedly committed, no dreams shattered for the one clinging to a vision of God from days past.  Some day all you may have left is faith, hope, and love.  Perhaps you won’t listen.  Perhaps you’re comfortable listening to the lies of a religion selling itself to you as comfort and happiness.  But I hope today you’ll be willing to listen to all of what God has to offer in this very real life.  Hope for the future, trust for today, love for all time.

The Law on My Side

You may think it strange, but I am quite enamored with the works of Charles Dickens.  I think the turning point was when I read A Tale of Two Cities and fell in love with the story.  Since then, I have endeavored to read all of his works, but only 1 or 2 a year.  Knowing that I will eventually run out of them has given me the incentive to slow the pace of reading.  This year I am reading The Pickwick Papers, which must be one of the silliest works Dickens ever wrote.  As always, Dickens finds ample room for satirizing all sorts of people from all walks of life, not the least of which are those of the legal profession.

I haven’t finished reading the book at the time of writing this entry, so I don’t know quite how it ends, but the hero of the piece, Mr. Pickwick, has been sued by a former landlady for breach of promise.  She claims he had proposed to marry her and has engaged the law offices of Dodson & Fogg to prosecute Mr. Pickwick.  Although Mr. Pickwick is clearly in the right and guiltless in the matter, it is also clear that the landlady has ‘the law on her side’.  Though I used to take that particular expression to mean that justice would be done, after reading of the machinations of the fictional Dodson & Fogg (particularly when Pickwick threatens to physically attack them), I have begun to rethink it.  Having the law on one’s side has nothing to do with justice and righteousness but everything to do with power and, perhaps more pertinently, knowledge/education.  Dodson & Fogg know just how to manipulate the scenario and, indeed, the facts to guarantee a legal victory.  Politically we can see the same effect at work in the language of Washington, as is aptly demonstrated in the piece from the Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124233351737120903.html#mod=djemEditorialPage

I’m reminded of the Pharisees of Jesus’ day.  They, too, had the ‘law on their side’ and were very skilled in squeezing out every last ounce of the spirit of the law in favor of the letter, and hence justifying themselves in their own eyes.  (I wonder how often I do the same thing with Biblical passages, reinterpreting them so that they do not upset my delicate sense of self-worth nor my comfortable lifestyle.)  The message of the New Testament, however, is not one of having the law one my side, but having grace on my side, to the glory of God.

Putting the “Co” in Corporate

This past weekend I co-led an hour-long ‘affinity group’ for college student worship leaders. Basically, it was a bunch of student leaders from different Baptist Campus Ministries who were put in a room together to discuss worship, their responsibility on their respective leadership teams. The discussion was especially focused on corporate worship versus personal worship, a distinction that I’ve been dwelling on since and the subject of this blog post.

One student rightly observed that worship should be everything that we do, in that everything that we do should be a response to God.  From this, I tried to get them to differientiate that from ‘corporate worship’ which is what we do together, and what they are responsible for leading/planning.  In the course of the discussion of what ‘corporate worship’ is and why it is important (even though ‘worship should be everything’) it hit me that much of what the students, and sometimes myself, viewed as corporate was highly ‘personal’ and ‘individual’ and not corporate at all.  We were focused on leading/planning an event that allowed a group of individuals to worship as individuals.  [And perhaps we were equating a certain 'feeling' with 'worship', but I'll save that discussion for another post.]

This line of thinking has caused me to question the model we view as ‘worship’ and its value in facilitating ‘corporate worship.’  Is it corporate just because we are all in the same room?  Should corporate worship somehow be something that we do together rather than something we all do at the same time?  What would that look like?

The Theology of Prosperity and its Link to Proverb and Promise

A belief exists which whittles God down to a function: if I do this, God will do that. Whereas this belief pretends to exalt God’s faithfulness, in effect the belief causes God to be subservient, a reversal of Creator and creature. The belief’s basic form shows up in the form of “If I do right, God will bless me” and its inverse “If I do wrong, God will punish me.” This belief is illustrated biblically in the Proverbs where simple minds reinterpret proverbial wisdom into divine promise. “If God said He’d do it, He’ll do it!” is the guiding logic for these readers. (The logical fallacy here begins in the misrepresentation of the genre of proverb. In other words, because proverb is not promise God did not, in fact, say that He would do it. “Not p” for those logicians who may be reading.)

The more advanced forms of this belief only carry it to its natural end. If God can be manipulated through his “promises” (or, more accurately, His proverbs), then we have only to act upon them through virtuous action (a form of legalism) or verbal acquiescence (name it and claim it). If we fail to receive the ‘blessing’, per se, it is because we have failed in our virtue (point 1) or failed in our “faith” or belief (point 2). This is in essence the argument used by Job’s “friends” to explain his suffering. The dangers in this line of thinking are twofold, first seen in the above response by Job’s friends and secondly by those who elevate the successful as being ‘blessed’ by God. Clearly, however, the righteous do in fact suffer (see Job) and the wicked do in fact ‘prosper’ (Isaiah 2:7-8). These realities require a change, then, both in our hermeneutics and our perspective.

Our perspective is changed when we view from the end of time (the last days) when God makes everything ‘right’ and consequences are inevitably doled out to those who deserve them, both wicked and righteous. More pressing, however, is our hermeneutical understanding of God’s “promises” or God’s “proverbs”. Proverbs and promises should never be equated because whereas the first, by virtue of God’s power and character, should always come true if God exists, the second may in fact not come true, but should more often than not come true. The latter concept is a hard pill to swallow if one does not consider the Bible with a more sophisticated understanding than most do.

“Dwindling Evangelicalism”

I recently read an interview with the author of “The Fall of the Evangelical Nation”, Christine Wicker.  The book’s author seems to imply that evangelicalism is on the decline and makes much of the Southern Baptist Convention’s recent report of fewer baptisms.  As she puts it, “their evangelical passion just is not there” and they “have lost their evangelical zeal.”  She attributes this to a change in the zeitgeist of the culture, that people cannot stomach the idea of there being only ‘one way to heaven.’  “We simply cannot go there anymore.”  Whether this is due to the influence of the dubiously monikered ‘postmodernism’, the bugaboo of many an evangelical, or something else entirely, I do not know.  But, sadly, I think she does have a point.  I think that some of it stems from our seeming self-love, our desire to build big buildings with coffee-shops, gyms, and playgrounds, while the world around us rots.  It’s hard to not to look (thanks largely to modern mass-media) at the suffering in the world today and not feel disallusioned by billboards of nicely dressed people, smiling with overly white teeth, looking at us and saying ‘oh, what a grand time you’ll have here.’  It’s hard for me to send students across the globe to do ‘missions’ and live in meager surroundings and see their disgust with America as they return home to riches, comfort, and indulgence.

If we are to save ‘evangelicalism’, it won’t be by forsaking our committment to Biblical truth and authority or by saying ‘there are many roads to heaven.’  But there must be a change: in our message (not the Gospel), in our commitments, in our priorities.  Too long has our evangelism focused ‘have a good time with Jesus’ or ‘have a lovely eternity in heaven’ or ‘come be a good person with us’ instead of the life-changing realization of life lived not for self but for God.  Perhaps the reason we have not a ‘stomach’ for evangelism is that we have evangelized our stomach, preaching a full belly of self-satisfaction instead of denial of self (Luke 9:23).  Perhaps our evangelistic zeal would be more evident if we could honestly look over our land and weep as did Jesus over Jerusalem (Matthew 23:37).  We must demonstrate our weeping through our sacrifice, through our time, through our wallets, not to build the newest edifice of worship, but to build up the kingdom of God within the hearts of those around us, not through fancy sales pitches, but through earnest compassion.

Book Review: “The Shack”

The Shack, by William P. Young, is one of those books that seems to spring out of nowhere and become the topic of conversation amongst the trendy in Christian circles.  “Have you read The Shack yet?”  “You’ve got to read The Shack” are the intial word-of-mouth promotions, followed quickly by the backlash from the cynical and conservative (not necessarily the same person).  “Have you heard about The Shack?” comes the disapproving tone.  Usually those of us in this category have indeed ‘heard’ about it, but haven’t read it ourselves.  Having found myself too often being the ‘hearer’ and not the ‘reader’ (and consequently finding myself often misinformed), I decided to read The Shack for myself.

In brief, the book is not as bad as some of you may have heard.  It is usually attacked for its depiction of the Trinity.  I have heard the charges of ‘modalism’ and ‘monarchianism” thrown at this book, but neither of those accurately describes the way the Trinity is portrayed.  Both of those heretical views over-emphasize the oneness of God, the former by saying God takes different forms or modes and the latter by saying God the Father is God while Jesus and the Spirit are not God (I know this is an extreme oversimplification of these views, but this is a blog after all).  Neither does the book fall into the other extreme of Tri-Theism (or 3 Gods).  After reading the book, I can say that it does about as good a job of portraying the Trinitarian view of God as could be done in human language.  (Surprising I know.)

The second issue that people have with the portrayal of God is not theological as much as it deals with how we view God relationally.  (Skip this paragraph if you don’t want to have part of the book ‘spoiled’ for you.)  To have “God, The Father” portrayed as a woman is disturbing to many, not to mention the portrayal of “God, The Spirit.”  (I admit being forewarned about it helped me ‘get over’ this issue.)  People who get hung up on this point are likely to miss what the book is really about, which I believe is theodicy (the technical term for a defense against the problem of evil and suffering in the world.)  Many of us struggle to answer the question of ‘if God is all-powerful and all-good, why do people (innocents in particular) suffer?’  If you just read the subtitle of the book you get a clue that this is where the book is heading (“where tragedy confronts eternity”).  Speaking as someone who has experienced loss first-hand, I believe this book could be helpful in working through that pain.

Now, on to the criticism.  I have 2 chief issues with this book.  First, although I am not bothered by the book’s view of Trinity, I am troubled by its soteriology (that is its view of salvation.)  I’m afraid the author plays a little too loose with the cross (the Father has nail-scars, which gives credence to the modalist charge) and what it accomplished.  Though he does not say it in so many words, he implies a universalist approach toward salvation (meaning everybody gets saved) and does not really deal with the reality of a ‘hell’.

Secondly, the author seems to make God out to be the great psychologist (rather than the great physician) in the sky.  God counsels the main character in a kind of psychoanalytic fashion, helping him work out his unresolved issues.  The underlying presuppositions this brings to the table are staggering to me, though in our pop psychology culture they will likely seem perfectly natural.  And that’s just it.  God uses pop psychology to help someone who is hurting.  Take it or leave it, that’s what it is.

So, in summary, read the book yourself.  Don’t take someone else’s word on it (half the time they haven’t read it, either).  It’s not all that bad and it might be helpful, too.

Blog Deficiency

Yikes!  I just realized how long it’s been since I’ve posted.  That’s what the first few weeks of class do to a guy in my position.  You stay really busy and drop things like blogging and working out at the gym.  Then you forget you did them in the first place.  Well, that’s my excuse, anyway.  It took a friendly reminder from a friend (‘blog more’, he said) to get the ball rolling again.  Hopefully I’ll get some things posted this week.  (I still have a few ‘in the bank.’)

capital

I’ve discovered something in the past few years.  I like writing in all lowercase letters.  I do this most often in emails and facebook messages.  There’s something subdued or soothing to me about it.  Perhaps you’ve heard of someone writing an email in all caps who didn’t realize that this was the 21st century way of SCREAMING.  In the same vein, all lowercase, though not a whisper, communicates softer tones.

I find it funny because I have always been a somewhat softspoken person (insert ‘thequietman’ joke here).  I don’t just mean the volume of my voice, either.  I have the tendency to insert ‘hedge words’ into almost any statement.  (If you don’t believe me, just skim through some of my posts and you’re sure to find them.)  ‘Hedge words’ are words added to a claim to soften it’s blow, or lessen it’s certainty.  Words like ‘probably’, ‘possibly’, ‘maybe’, etc., are hedge words.  I’m not sure why I do this, whether it was my upbringing or genetics or a desire to not mislead anyone by making untrue claims.  (Hedge words give me an ‘out’.)  They wouldn’t be much of issue, either, were it not for their tendency to convey a lack of confidence.  Confidence is a hot commodity in our society.  We expect our leaders to be confident, and some would claim that all leaders must exude confidence whether it is warranted or not.  There is a natural sort of truth to that claim if one looks at human nature.  It’s the sort of observation that inspires all manner of manipulation, very easily seen in modern advertising and marketing techniques, not to mention politics and punditry.

So what is someone to do if they desire to lead but their integrity will not allow them to misrepresent the veracity of their statements simply to convince others of their own confidence (and, consequently, their competence)?  I wish I had an answer.  My temptation at present is to attempt a more confident presentation of my self in order to better lead those under my authority.  (I’ll let you know how that turns out.)

Civil Cynicism

I’ve just been reminded of my own cyncism.  As much as I may try to strike it down or pluck it out, my cynical nature arises again from the depths of my soul like so much dust or gunk in room you thought you cleaned.  The occurance leading to such a reminder was my expressed disgust (dare I use such an ugly word?) with a ‘praise song’ sung at my church.  Whether I was actually ‘disgusted’ or merely irritated, I expressed disgust.  The song was one of those excessively peppy and overly repetitive little numbers that seems to go on way past its usefulness for directing our hearts toward God, which is probably what drew my ire to begin with.  But its chirpy chorus exclaiming ‘every day with you, Lord, is sweeter than the day before’ is where my cynicism came in.  I commented to a fellow church member, in no uncertain terms, that I found that thought to be false.  Everyday is not, in fact, sweeter than the day before.  Her shocked reply was that whether it was or not, it should be, implying that if each day was not in fact sweeter than the day before, then the individual who did not have a sweeter day must have a problem.

Her good-intentioned reproof served to remind me once again of the difference between what pop-Christianity tells us we are to be and what is often the reality of our lives.  In the past, I was often afraid that I was ‘missing out’ on the real Christian life (a thought that still creeps in when I encounter the hyper-spirituality of some Christians).  If I struggled, if I hurt, if life wasn’t smiles and sugar cookies, “praise the Lord” “I’m blessed, how about you?”, then I must be doing something wrong.  What’s worse, this fear often hampered my ability to evangelise because I felt like a liar to say “just give your life to Jesus and everything will be great” (an over-simplification of a common evangelistic message; evangelism will have to be a topic for another day).  I am encouraged, however, when I look to the Scriptures and see no such ‘happy-go-lucky’ Christianity.  It encourages me because it affirms that my reality is not so distant from the reality of those times (of course they probably had it much worse!).  The Psalmist cries out in his distress.  Job sits in anguish though refusing to curse God.  Even the New Testament church struggles with sin and doctrinal heresy.  Things were not ‘sweeter’ each day, though they all looked for a day when things would be made right, as do I.

Still, we must balance our embrace of the ‘real’ with a hopeful optimism of the future.  We must understand and accept the sometimes harsh reality that surrounds us (not looking through rose-colored glasses) but be unashamed in our proclamations of the glory that lies with God.