Tag: faith

God the ultimate accepter

~ dwc ~ Leave a comment

I’m in the midst of running a project for work that involves around 50 or so people. It puts me in collaborative partnership with a filming studio, audio technicians, receptionists, just over 40 contributors, station content directors, and producers.

It’s going really well and I’m enjoying the process. No complaints of any real magnitude.

There have been the odd moment of something happening a way that I didn’t expect, didn’t want or didn’t plan for. Perhaps my enjoyment of the process is entirely due to my ability to process these little issues with acceptance.

I’ve been reflecting on acceptance. In my experience it’s easier to accept something when I know that I have absolutely no ability to control or manage it. If I feel even a bit like I can influence the outcome, I start to be a bit less accepting of the outcome being what I do not want. It’s worse when the ‘thing’ is connected to or reflects upon me.

Nobody would suggest that acceptance is the only principle to life one’s life by. If we accepted everything in the most literal sense, we would become entirely passive spectators in life. Never participating consciously, actively, assertively. We would be not living life, but watching life go by.

Too much acceptance can be a problem. But instead I’ve been reflecting on the problem of too little acceptance. It’s a problem when I try to control things that I should not try to control.

As the Ultimate Being who created, oversees and is redeeming all of Reality, God is by definition the most ‘in control’ entity imaginable. Christians, and all other monotheists, believe that not one quasar or quark pulsates without the power and permission of Creator God. And yet, God seems to have chosen to be (at the same time) the most ‘accepting’ entity. Christians believe that although God could force planets, persons and plant-life to do precisely as he wants, he nonetheless has chosen not to do so. God has given various kinds of real freedom to various kinds of created things.

I don’t believe that the shape of scope which the universe has taken is of any surprise to God, but at the same time, I believe that God has, without being in any way detached or distant from nature (I’m not a deist), not micromanaged every microscopic moment. Rather, like a Mother or Father, God loving watches over the thing which he has so lovingly and wisely created. Trees grow according to their genetic code, seeking sunlight and water. Each tree takes a unique shape. And yet each tree is playing by the same rules and restrictions. One doesn’t see a tree suddenly sprout forth a horse’s head.

Humans too, are free to choose, train themselves this or that way, to develop as they wish. And yet, we cannot fly. We can’t survive like fish underwater. We are not as strong as some animals. This freedom is from God.

So God is in control but not controlling.

God is the ultimate accepter.

At times, we try to control others in ways that God doesn’t. We must have convinced ourselves that God requires our help making the world the way he wants it.

And of course this too is not entirely wrong. God does delegate. God works, speaks, heals and rules through humans. But perhaps at times we need to remember to be a bit more godlike in allowing others to be and to do what they wish.

God does this constantly and on a breathtaking scale with humanity. Humans are always violating God’s will. We lie, cheat, and steal. And the God who is constantly speaking and wooing us away from such sins, nonetheless has chosen to be the kind of God who will not step in and force us to do the right thing. We are beautifully and tragically free.

God is the ultimate accepter.

And we too, must learn to mirror God in his longsuffering acceptance of others. Most of all when their choices interfere with my preferences and plans.

It doesn’t mean we never try to influence things. It doesn’t mean we can never have a leadership position. It does mean that, like God, we have to restrain ourselves from pushing others past a certain point.

We must accept as God the ultimate accepter does.

the tempting evil of unforgiveness

~ dwc ~ Leave a comment

In Matthew 6, Jesus gives masterful teaching about prayer. He understands with perfect clarity the way that our egos work as we relate to others in the world.

The usual form of the Lord’s Prayer that most of us know and use is a combination of the versions given here in Matthew 6 and in Luke 11. With this combined form in mind, Matthew’s version seems to end abruptly. And on top of this, the follow up teaching on forgiveness seems a bit late, coming after the final bit about temptation and evil. It can feel like the gospel writers (or Jesus) made a literary mistake and got the order of lines out of whack. Something like:

  • pray this way about forgiveness
  • and finally, pray also about temptation and evil
  • Oh yeah, rewind back to forgiveness, I got a tad more to say on that…

This apparent disorder vanishes when I recall that Jesus (and the gospel writers) were rather intelligent people, and when I recognise that unforgiveness is a very common, tempting, and evil tendency for humans.

Jesus, we must remember, is the one with the most important and accurate information on humanity. He knows precisely how our egos tend to judge others and justify ourselves. He knows this tendency is profoundly common, very tempting, and he rightly uses the language of ‘evil’ directly in the middle of it all. Positively, Jesus knows what how we must think, act, and pray to counter this. With the greatest urgency, we must learn, practice and keep practicing the art of being a forgiving person.

Jesus knows how natural it is for us to point the finger of judgment at ‘them’. Look at what ‘they’ did. He knows how quickly we assume that ‘we’ would not (indeed, could not) ever do what ‘they’ did. Jesus knows that if I insist that I could never do what ‘they’ did (to me or to others), then I don’t think I need the same kind of forgiveness that ‘they’ do. He knows how this self-righteous judgment blocks me from fully savoring – and sharing – the forgiveness that the Father so freely offers me.

So then, I can read these verses more like this…

“Forgive us our various kinds of sins, just as we keep on practicing forgiving others of their various kinds of sins.
After all, do we not all stand in need of forgiveness, and could we not all see ourselves in one another?
Keep us from being tempted away from forgiveness like this.
Deliver us from the evil One who is the source of all blame, finger-pointing, gossip, and discord.
Deliver us into the free and forgiving arms of You, our Father.”
For this is how forgiveness works. It has to be shared to be experienced. Your Father is eagerly watching and waiting for us to get our hearts in a posture that can receive forgiveness and share it. It just doesn’t work any other way.

the disturbing arrival of just mercy

~ dwc ~ Leave a comment

For those of us in contexts with a wealth of technology and media (and a poverty of contentment and patience), many of us are feeling weary, tired and over it. This is an exhaustion that goes deeper than number of hours worked or slept. It is an underlying dissatisfaction with things… something… or maybe everything.

Further Fracturing…

Humans have had their usual military, political and personal dramas for aeons. But something is different. There is growing division and distrust and distance from one another. We are losing hope. Relationships seem more fragile. We have more and more reasons to avoid one another. More and more things are harder and harder to talk about. Discourse is toxic. Extremes widen. We seem strangely eager to uncover wrongs, and understandably terrified of being seen to be affiliated with anything wrong. We are determined to be right, or at least less wrong than ‘them’.

And underneath this, we are slowly waking up to the reality that our greatest boast in the modern world, science, is not the simple saviour we had hoped it was. We are beginning to admit that even an impressively comprehensive collection of accurate factoids cannot itself provide the epistemic basis for meaning, value, justice, human rights, compassion.

Worse still, it seems that our heroic efforts at making a more just world sooner or later take on the broken and fragile characteristics of our individual and collective psychologies. Our demonizing, defensiveness, vengeance, resentment, superiority (so often mixed with inferiority), fear and hopelessness end up pouring fuel on the fires of injustice. Seeking justice, we create more injustice.

As the Psalms frequently invite us to do: “Selah” (reflect on this for a moment)

The God of Just Mercy

The Christmas story, amidst all the consumptive noise, unintentionally exclusive gatherings, Santa hats and holiday ‘meh’, is about the arrival of the God of just mercy.

Luke’s historically-savvy Gospel understood well the reality of Roman oppression of 1st century Israel. Luke captures the song known as Mary’s Magnificat (see Luke 1:45-55), rich with feisty social justice themes of powerful people being cast down and rich being sent away empty, while the humble are lifted up and the poor are filled with good things. Despite what you may hear on streets or screens, the biblical Gospel was never only about individuals going to heaven after they die. God longs for his fair and just rule to be realised here on earth. Now.

To riff off of Isaiah 58, God is the breath in the lungs of the oppressed when they ‘lift up their voice’ (v.1) against oppressors – even (especially!?) religious oppressors (‘my people’ / ‘the descendants of Jacob’ v.1).

The Bible clearly and consistently shows God to despise oppression and injustice, but we should not mistake the Gospel for the kind of popular rage that wants to burn it all down. God doesn’t burn for the sake of burning. Like a farmer burning off a field, the fire is for fresh grass to grow.

The Magnificat ends with mercy.

Yes, the immediate focus is on mercy to the ancestors of Abraham, but those who know Scripture will recall that Abraham (Genesis 12:1-3) and his people had a vocation not simply to burn with judgmental finger-pointing at the nations forever, but to be a channel of blessing to them. The prophet Jeremiah knew that even in exile among their oppressors, the victim mentality that so often justifies violence would do them no good. Before Christ ever said “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”, he told the captives to “seek the peace of the city…” Even in Babylon, a city continually reminding Israel of their oppression, Jeremiah wants them to have a different stronger memory of his words that “in its peace you shall have peace.” (Jeremiah 29)

God is not revealed as a tyrant in the thunderclouds, who gets a real kick every time he gets a chance to topple, expose, shame or punish someone. Yes, God is angry at oppression to be sure. But God knew the familiar patterns of injustice long before we did. God knows that oppressors often justify their oppression with their own claimed (or maybe even real) experience of oppression. God knows the cycle. Nobody’s hands are really clean.

Justice – and Mercy – for Everyone?

God knows that justice has to be mixed with mercy and hope – for everyone.
Obviously the oppressed… but even oppressors.

The Oppressed are offered hope that oppression will not go unpunished in the end, and practical real-world assistance as the God of justice empowers down-to-earth help from their neighbours, allies and prophets.

As for Oppressors, yes they are summoned to repair the damage they’ve done as best they can, but they too are offered the hope of renewal and new life. For Israel who “oppresses all [their] workers” and more, they are challenged to change, for sure.

But… they are also told of the life they can have if they do.

“If you do away with the yoke of oppression,
    with the pointing finger and malicious talk,
10 and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry
    and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
then your light will rise in the darkness,
    and your night will become like the noonday.
11 The Lord will guide you always;
    he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land
    and will strengthen your frame.
You will be like a well-watered garden,
    like a spring whose waters never fail.

And that is at least one ingredient that missing in our world. A justice that is merciful and vulnerable. A justice for all. Hope for all. A God whose compassionate justice – whose just mercy – is well described from the times of Exodus:

The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, 7 maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished…”

Punishment and Forgiveness.
Justice and Mercy.
Consequences and Restoration.
Held together in redemptive, transformative tension.

This God does not leave oppressors to oppress. The consequences of injustice are firm and full punishment. But nonetheless, even the “wickedness, rebellion and sin” of oppressors can be forgiven and overcome.

The author of the persistently profound hymn extolling the wonder of a Grace that “saved a wretch like me” is none other than an oppressor – the former slave-owner John Newton.

This is a merciful justice that may disrupt our popular rage or political resentment. But it just may be the one solution to injustice that actually works. If we would have the courage, and yes the mercy, to give it a try.

Have a merry and merciful (and just) Christmas.

sword & shield v. cross & towel

~ dwc ~ Leave a comment

All humans carry a sword and a shield.

We strike out at and critique others with our verbal, philosophical, political, social or literal swords. We block and defend ourselves from criticism with our good intentions, mimising excuses, self-justifying reasoning. Our shields.

It’s not that we should never defend ourselves, and I don’t know if we should be surprised that people and nations frequently want to have at least some kind of readiness to respond to violence. It’s just that the sword and shield become a way of being. They shape us into people whose tendency is to critique others and defend ourselves.

This even happens within ourselves, psychologically. We divide ourselves into parts: parent / child, good / bad, the rebel / the law, or what have you… One part of us critiques the other part, and the other part defends itself. We don’t have to suffer from multiple-personality disorder to relate to the experience of feeling simultaneously innocent and righteous on the one hand and victimised and full of self pity on the other hand. It’s the sword and shield again. Just directed inward.

Christianity offers a way of life where we trust God to be our sword and shield.

We don’t need to take up the sword against others and sort them out. (Or ourselves.) God is just. (And merciful.) The biblical wisdom is that God almost always does this in his usual way – by delegation. Natural law, imperfect human governments, communal or relational systems. Injustice has its day, but eventually gets toppled. When we try to rush the process with our swords, we end up becoming what we hate.

We also don’t need to overly defend or protect ourselves from critique. God is our fortress, tower, shield, and defender. The great irony is that when I live in the freedom of not worrying what might happen to me (gossip, violence, theft, you name it), those things don’t have any power over me. I trust that God will deal with them as he will, and when he will. Ultimately, the biblical narrative promises a final justice that will heal all wounds and restore all things. I can choose to take comfort in that.

Christ – at Christmas and at all times – comes to us asking for an exchange.
He wants our swords and shields, and offers us a cross and a towel.

I am offered a cross. An instrument of death and violence to myself. I am not expected to do what Jesus alone could do – atone for the sins of the world. I am invited, expected or even commanded to follow his way. To ‘take up my cross and follow’ him. To live sacrificially is not the way of self-loathing – constantly criticizing, punishing and judging myself. As the cliche truth goes, it’s not “thinking less of myself, but thinking of myself less.”

And this leads to the towel. I am to become a servant. Not a show off servant. Not “Hey everyone, I’m just going to pick up this piece of rubbish… aren’t I a great person….” Not “Hey everyone, look how pissed off I am about social injustice… I probably hate oppressors more than anyone I know…” Not this. Real service. Service that can go unnoticed. Uncelebrated.

The world is full of divided politics, communities, families and selves. If we’re honest, we’ll be able to see how we participate in wleding the sword of criticism, and raising the shield of self-justification.

The world needs more cross bearers and towel servants.

That is precisely what Jesus taught and modeled. It is his plan to bring his kingdom where needs are provided for, sinners are forgiven, and humans live in grateful peace.

justice with mercy

~ dwc ~ Leave a comment

Mercy must be joined by Justice & Justice must be married to Mercy.
Let’s consider, simply and briefly, what happens when they get disconnected.

Unjust Mercy & the Enabling of Injustice

Simply put, we enable injustice to continue when, in the name of ‘mercy’ we fail to critique, resist, prosecute, report, vote, petition, march, speak out, inquire about or act against an injustice. The oppressed are justified in resisting injustice, and allies are ethically bound to critique oppression. Ironically, more and better ‘standing against injustice’ is needed, even in a culture where ‘standing against injustice’ is trendy and can win you a reputation as a ‘good person’ who ‘hates injustice’. Yes allyship can be performative. But we need more allyship and better allyship.

Letting injustice go unpunished and uncritiqued in the name of ‘mercy’ is not merciful. It’s obviously not merciful to the oppressed. And less obviously, it’s not merciful to oppressors who are also harming themselves by harming others.

Merciless Justice & the Escalation of Injustice

Just as being ‘soft’ on injustice in the name of ‘mercy’ is not truly mercy; so also justice is distorted when we go beyond the truth or to abandon the facts. We do this when we go beyond critiquing an oppressor to demonising them or misrepresenting their injustice.

Performative allyship is again the culprit here. I, wanting to be seen as a ‘good person who hates injustice and protects the world from it’, take self-serving pleasure in declaring how bad ‘they’ are, leaving it obvious to everyone how righteous ‘I’ am. An oppressor can easily ignore such distortions, claiming that they are being misrepresented. Ironically, an oppressor usually feels victimized already, and such demonizing only adds to this, confirming their sense of victimhood. What’s more, when victims go beyond resistance and engage in retaliation or revenge, they unintentionally perpetuate a cycle of violence. The oppressed become oppressors. Justice becomes Injustice.

Just Mercy & the End of Injustice

Only when the persistent pursuit of justice is tempered by mercy is it truly effective. Instead of a ‘good person’ dethroning or locking up a ‘bad person’, everyone retains their human dignity. Justice means consequences – stepping down from leadership role, imprisonment, fines, reparation, whatever is ‘just’ for that situation – nothing less and nothing more. But justice must be merciful – avoiding excessively shaming labels, sticking to the facts and rightly scaling the actions committed.

When mercy is wedded to justice, everyone in the triangle (oppressor, oppressed, ally) is human. Not heinous (villain), helpless (victim) or heroic (ally), but human. And justice, after all, is for humans. It stands to reason that the actions we take to pursue it must therefore be humane.

the human connection between anger & temptation

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The sermon on the mount is the best teaching on human living. It lays down the patterns for full and complete humanness. After the Beatitudes and opening statements, the first two issues that Jesus deals with are a) anger leading to murder, and b) lust leading to adultery. It won’t do to simply label murder and adultery as unlawful, immoral or wrong. Jesus knows we have to get to the heart of these matters and deal with our anger and lust.

The early chapters of Genesis are also profound in their statements about humanness. Every human is like Cain, who gets ‘very angry’ and is tempted into taking actions that violate the humanity of his ‘brother’. In chapter 6, we see the moral devolution of humanity is so degraded that the beautiful daughters of men were being treated like sexual property. The Creator is grieved to the point of being willing to uncreate the whole creation.

Anger and Sex are connected. We need not illustrate all the ways that this interrelation plays out through rape and pornography.

Their interrelation also shows up in another text that is likewise profoundly awake to the realities of human nature: The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, written by Bill Wilson. The Step 4 inventory (see chapter 5, ‘How it Works’) of ones own life invites an addict to reflect on a) Resentments, b) Fears, c) Sex conduct and d) Harm to others.

Anger and Fear can be understood as a natural pair, just as Sexual dysfunction and Harm can be. For example, consider Resentment and Fear. When I resent another person, I am looking down on them in judgement (perhaps sometimes justified judgement); and when I fear someone, I am looking up at them. When I process my resentments (and fears) properly, I discover that I need not look down on (or up at) others. I can look them in the eye as equals. This humane equality is a profoundly disturbing idea for someone whose identity is dependent on feeling superior to others.

The same is true for the Sex and Harm pairing. Healthy sexual relations is a mutually helpful matter of freely giving and freely receiving. Literally ‘intercourse’. Harm, by nature, including sexual harm, is the opposite of giving and receiving. Instead of giving it forces itself on someone. “You will have this whether you want it or not.” Instead of receiving it is taking. “I’ll take this whether you’re giving it or not.” It is violent and violating.

So therefore, according to Jesus, Moses and Bill, it seems to be a human reality that when we feel resentment towards someone who we feel has wronged us we sooner or later are tempted to some kind of violence or dysfunction.

This connection between anger and temptation, finally, is seen within The Lord’s Prayer, which is – not surprisingly – the humane prayer in the structural centre of the humanising Sermon on the Mount, preached by the one Christians see as the True Human. I am instructed to link my own forgiveness from my Father in heaven, with the forgiveness I am continually working at with others who have ‘transgressed against’ me. Immediately following (and linked to) this, is that I must be on guard against being led ‘into temptation’.

Whether our resentment is justified or irrational, political or personal, sharply focused or a foggy haze; we are reminded of an important moral human truth. The longer we allow anger to fester and burn the more tempted we can be to find our way into a fix, escape, or treat. This could be in the form of a verbal insult, a preachy self-righteous Facebook comment, some form of sexually energising daydream or exploration, or any other drug of choice (working late hours, over-eating, gambling, numbing myself with drink).

And so, the journey to full humanness must include humane prayers where we lay our vulnerability to anger and temptation before the Lord.

Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the Evil One.

Or, we might paraphrase…

Lord, help me to so savour your mercy towards me that I too flow with mercy towards others, especially those I am likely to point the finger of superior judgement towards, whose wrongs I feel the most burned up about. The ones who threaten me and interfere with how I think the world should run. Those who make my blood boil. The ones who, like me, do not deserve mercy.
And keep me far away from letting my anger drive me into some kind of tempting and ultimately self-serving power trip. Deliver me from the fleeting and temporary soothing ego trips of violence of any kind to myself or another.

Amen.

praying to move the Mover

~ dwc ~ Leave a comment

In Luke 18:1-8 we get the “Parable of the Persistent Widow”. It focuses on her persistence to win justice against her adversary. All parables of Jesus have a point, but here we are told the point of this one from the start: to show disciples that we “should always pray and never give up.”

I’ve been saying for years that when we pray we shouldn’t think of God like a vending machine. The differences should be obvious. A vending machine doesn’t care about us. It doesn’t make decisions about what we need. It is created by something other than itself. It will eventually wear down and fail to work, operate, provide, give or respond.

But here I’m going to explore at least one characteristic of vending machines which bear at least some kind of likeness to God. That characteristic is that (provided they are not defective) they work. They operate. They provide. They give. They respond to our requests.

Vending machines move. You put the money in (coin, cash, card, or

Aristotle, observing that objects in the world are in motion, rightly reasoned that (pardon the redundancy) there must be a necessary being that is a) not itself in motion, but b) is itself responsible for all of the motion in the world.

Some would at this point want to jump in and point out that this leads to (or is) a ‘deistic’ view of God. A God who kicks off all the motion in the world and then sits back and does nothing else ever again. Just one big shove, and done.

Despite this being perhaps where our minds may go first, it doesn’t mean we have to imagine things like that. As in a pool or billiards table, instead of imagining God as the white cue that is hammered at the other balls and (we might imagine) immediately removed from the table after that first contact, we might also imagine God as the cue stick, or better yet as the player who is active both beyond and on the table throughout the whole game. The one calling all the shots.

Theologian C.H. Pinnock proposed that God is not just an ‘unmoved’ Mover, but rather the Most-Moved Mover. Unlike a deterministic deity with a fixed plan like clock-work, Pinnock had an ‘open’ picture of God’s sovereignty which we won’t go into here. Suffice to say that the Bible does not portray God’s sovereignty in such a way that conflicts with our experience of God ‘changing his mind’, feeling sorry that he made humans, or responding to prayers.

This brings us back to the teaching of Jesus, using the example of a pleading widow to teach us to “always pray” and “never give up.”

According to biblical theology, God has chosen to be the kind of God who wants to relate to us, and wants that relationship to be one of asking. Jesus, as a master teacher who knows human nature completely, clearly knows that we will get tired of asking and want to ‘give up’.

The short parable ends with Jesus concluding that God, who we should understand is very unlike the ruler who “doesn’t fear God or care what people think” is the kind of God who will, in his own time and own way, “bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night.”

I don’t naturally want to cry out to God day and night. Not for anything. I find the deistic view easier. God has determined it all. Down to the last detail. No need to give him instructions. Just trust and wait until the end, when it will all get sorted out.

But no. This parable shows God to be the kind of God who wants us to be – at least a bit – impatient and persistent with him. He wants us to “keep bothering” him, like the widow did to the unjust judge. God wants us to ask for at least a little of the ultimate future in the immediate present.

This will take practice, and getting over our pride which doesn’t want to look like a fool asking God for stuff all the time and it seeming (at least some of the time) to make precisely no difference.

If we go to the Psalms, the prayer book of the Bible, the prayer book that shaped Jesus’ prayers, we immediately see this kind of view as they call persistently on God for all things, all the time, in all kinds of ways.

In prayer, I have the shameless audacity to be trying to move the Most Moved Mover.

the birds helped me to pray

~ dwc ~ Leave a comment

Today the birds helped me to pray.

My slowness to rise after my short six hour slumber was gently challenged by the relentlessly positive chorus of glad chirping from the other side of our bedroom window.

(The contrast between this happy throng and the pair of brutally barking dogs a few weeks earlier could not be overstated.)

They helped me pray my regular daily ‘Our Father’ at my dedicated place and prayer kneeler.

Our Father, who art in Heaven,

Yes, you are beyond this world, and also in it. You’re in the throat of those glorious birds.

Hallowed by Thy Name…

Yes, may we honour your name as freely and ornately as these simple creatures are.

Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.

Yes, the celebratory proclamations of these winged friends is an earthly echo of angelic praise in the heavenly realm beyond our sensory comprehension.

Give us this day our daily bread.

Yes, you “feed the ravens when they call to you.” Feed us too, and may we not fight over the crumbs as these little friends are sometimes known to.

Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

Yes, these animals are not worried about anything. Childlike, they watch, explore, hop, flutter and gladly receive nourishment. They do not hold grudges, despair over the sad state of things. May I not miss such simple gratitude in the midst of all my serious political philosophy.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the Evil One.

Yes, it is only when I think of myself as more important, larger then others that my Ego is warped and wooed into wrongdoing, harming others, exaggerating how wrongly I’ve been treated. How dare they not recognise my greatness. The birds just do not care about such things. They are not so easily tempted.

For Thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.

Amen, help me live like a bird today. A happy citizen of your domain. A glad participant in your power. A humble reflection of your glory.

three postures about prayer

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It seems to me that there are three different postures one could take towards the activity of prayer.

One is an essentially negative posture. This posture rejects all prayer as useless and ineffective. This posture would fit most comfortably within a naturalistic worldview. “No being that hears prayer is either true or real. Ergo, prayer is pointless.” Interestingly, this posture also fits one particular type of theistic worldview: deism. Deism accepts a ‘first cause’ or ultimate being as true and real, but does not believe that this ‘god’ interacts with or intervenes within our world. Thus, again, prayer is wasted effort both the Naturalist and the Deist.

This negative posture has the appeal of being clean cut, tidy and simple. “I just don’t waste any time on that stuff.” But for me, naturalism and deism have always seemed closed minded, based on ultimate negative assumptions, and thus intellectually and spiritually unsatisfying. It also does not (indeed by definition it cannot) take seriously even one of countless stories of answered prayer. It is the quintessential example of a sweeping judgment. “Nope, it’s all B.S.”

Another (yes, at the other extreme) posture is essentially positive. This posture accepts basically prayer ‘works’ all the time. One might think that this posture is the ‘Christian’ or ‘religious’ one, but it really doesn’t sit comfortably at all within a worldview shaped by the Bible. This posture, unlike the Bible, cannot cope well with death, suffering, struggle, doubt, questions, and pain.

This positive posture is well-meaning, hopeful and at times inspirational, but can be harmful in setting up people for disappointment with life, with others, or themselves.

The posture that we will have if we are shaped by the Bible will be an essentially relational one. This posture sees prayer, not as a mechanism, but an act of relationship. And relationships are dynamic and living. Not easy or comfortable. The Bible contains a breathtaking spectrum of relational speech toward God. On the one hand, you have prayer that is so gushing and sappy it sounds almost romantic. On the other hand, you have prayer that sounds so hostile and critical toward God that it sounds atheistic to our ears. But to address God at all is to acknowledge the Great Reality behind, over, under, and active within our reality. In this sense, a relational posture can transcend the positive-negative distinction.

The Bible also transcends a hard natural/supernatural distinction. The same God who raises the dead is the same God who made the world regulated by natural laws and ‘holds all things together’. The God of miracles and resurrection is also the God of science and rationality. The Spirit who some times acts or speaks in powerful surprising ways is the same Spirit who most of the time acts or speaks through nature, law, conscience, reason, quantum mechanics and intuition.

Relational prayer, then, is not just about whether it ‘works’ or not. It’s simply what a person does in relationship to God. Whether frustrated shouts at God, passionate prayers of adoration to God, or humble sitting in the shame with God; we pray. Whether we say Wow, Help, Thanks (the more familiar ones) or Why or Sorry (the ones that balance the others out); we pray.

entirely devoted

~ dwc ~ Leave a comment

The King James version of 2 Chronicles 16:9 reads like this:

For the eyes of the LORD run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to shew himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him.

It’s a famous little verse, wrapped in the middle of a critique that the prophet Hanani issues to king Asa for relying on human strength instead of divine strength. Asa had a heart problem.

But what about that little word ‘perfect’? What’s going on there? Does God require ‘perfection’ in matters like this, or in general? Why would someone with a perfect heart need God to be strong for them? Aren’t they already perfect?

We could rightly point out that this is not some kind of unattainable Greek, mathematical, mechanical ‘perfection’ that is in view here. It is instead the complete, total and absolute orientation to God. Like when an Olympic athlete, skilled woodworker, tailor or electrician puts aside all distractions and focuses ‘entirely’ on the difficult task they are doing.

There are three components to the verse: The searching eyes of the Lord, the state of human hearts, and the resulting strength from God. Other translations swap out the word ‘perfect’ for ‘fully committed’, ‘blameless’, ‘fully devoted’, ‘loyal’ or ‘completely his’.

Some things in life are a spectrum like a dimmer switch, and other things are either/or, like a on/off switch. When a carpenter strikes a nail with a hammer, they either hit it or they miss (note: a miss also includes hitting it wrongly and bending the nail!). Careful, diligent focus on the nail head is required for the nail to be driven. With that kind of ‘perfect’ focus, the power of the hammer can be effective.

So then, this is less about some kind of ‘make sure you’re good so that God will love you’ kind of moralism or legalism. This is about the spiritual law that there is no transformation without our participation.

The 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous touch on this principle in step 6: “(we) Were entirely ready to have God remove from us all these defects of character.” For God to do the removing of the defects (discovered through the inventory of step 4 and disclosed to God, self and another in step 5), I must be ‘entirely ready’; and my actions must show this. God moves mountains, but I must bring a shovel.

God’s power to protect or transform is never forced upon us. It is released when we position ourselves in alignment to God and his loving purposes for his world. As Augustine said, without God, we ‘cannot’. But God ‘will not’ without us.