Whether you know it or not: Prayer and a lover greater than thoughts or words ~ Ephesians 3:14-21

 

Let’s try a thought experiment

What’s your best friend’s or spouse’s birthday?

What city were they born in?

What’s his or her favorite movie?

How much do you love them?

What does it feel like when they walk into a room?

How do you know when they want to do something like leave a party or laugh, or if they’re angry, but don’t say it out loud?

I’m sure the first questions were answered quickly – these are important facts that are unavoidable and significant for growing and deepening a relationship. You can’t have a good friendship or good marriage without them. You won’t cultivate a relationship of love if you forget a birthday or serve a loved one a food they hate or are allergic to. And yet, the later questions, which you most likely struggled to articulate, reveal that facts aren’t enough and that “knowing” goes much deeper. You know these things but you discover that you don’t always know “how” or can’t adequately express them with words. For Christians – the parallel is knowing doctrines about God that are critical for cultivating a deeper relationship. In fact, we’ve been talking about these facts, thoughts, and theologies, throughout this series. All of them are important but facts aren’t necessarily the same thing as “knowing” God, or “trusting God,” or “loving” God. The demons know facts, James says, but that doesn’t mean they have a relationship. And the kind of knowing that Paul is talking about ironically involves a knowing that surpasses knowledge.  

 

To think Christian is to move ever deeper into a relationship that must go deeper than thinking – that surpasses our rational mind. It will move us into a wider and deeper space of love where God is unknowingly at work and in which we need only to say, “Amen!” To think Christian, in other words, must eventually give way to a God who is more loving, than we could ever think. That knowing can only be had in prayer.

Prayer is a kind of silent trust and consent to a God who roots and establishes us in mind-blowing love in order to fill us to the full with love. It’s a surrender, a trust, to a God who is unimaginably good and loving toward us and whose love is so great it baffles the mind. Let’s return to our passage:

Prayer, for Paul, is the deep recognition of God’s contribution and ours to the spiritual life.

God’s contribution (Look for the Green):

1)    

 G  God strengthens us in our inner being through his Spirit so that Christ will dwell in our hearts

 

2)     God roots and establishes us in love so that we can grasp love that surpasses knowledge in order to fill us with the fullness of God

 

3)     God will do more than we can ask or imagine.

So prayer begins with God and works because God is at lovingly work and involves God anchoring us, strengthening us, with love so that we can become like Jesus (the fullness of God, cf. Col. 2:6-9) Prayer is an invitation to be loved by God – fully – no strings attached – and from that love become love in return. 

That’s God’s contribution. Prayer is the like 2^nd grade science experiment showing how plants absorb water by using colored water that colors the plant.

All of that is God’s contribution. And what’s our contribution (Look for the green)? 

 

 

Our contribution is one word: “Amen.” Amen is such a good word: It’s one part “That’s the truth!,” one part “Yes!,” and one part, “May it be so”. It’s affirmation, surrender, and thankfulness all wrapped in one word and the only contribution that we must bring to the endeavor. All that love requires is our consent – because that’s all that love demands.  It’s as simple and difficult as that. But we struggle. The fruit of the tree of knowledge still wants to make us think that life and God are all about what we can consciously know, label, describe, articulate, and argue. It’s hard to trust in a love that is greater than our thoughts.

I want to offer an ancient and simple means of inhabiting and experiencing Paul’s prayerful description of God’s transforming love – called contemplative or centering prayer. It’s a wordless, trusting, opening of self to the divine presence. It’s the kind of prayer that Jesus spoke of when he said: “go to your inner room, close the door and pray to your Father in secret” (Matthew 6:6). It emerges from the natural desire to be with God and say, “Amen” to his loving work within. That’s it. There’s no agenda and no need to ask because you already know what God wants to do and already have been told you can’t even imagine all that God might lovingly do in your inner being.

Steps of centering prayer

1.     Like Paul’s “Amen,” choose a sacred word or surrender.
Choose a word that can draw you into prayer. It’s a symbol of your consent, your “yes,” for God to strengthen you in your inner being with God’s love. It will be like a compass in your hand that helps call you back to interior silence and attentiveness. Paul uses the word, “Amen” but you can use any one or two syllable word or phrase you like, such as “Jesus,” “be still,” “mercy.” The word is not as important as your intent to surrender to what God wishes to lovingly do.

2.     Sit comfortably with eyes closed
Find a comfortable place where you can sit with a straight back and your hands open on your lap. You should be poised to receive but not rigid, relaxed but not slouching. Close your eyes as a sign of letting go of the world around you and making yourself available to God – attending to God’s presence within. I use a Centering Prayer app on my phone which shuts off notifications. The average sit is 20 minutes but start with what feels comfortable.

3.     Introduce your word
When thoughts and distractions arise that steal your attention, very gently introduce your sacred word in your mind, let the thought go, and return to a loving, attentive surrender to God. Persist in this state of openness to God until your alarm draws you from prayer. When your alarm alerts you, thank God for what God has done and let your mind, spirit, and body reacclimate to your surroundings. You can also finish with a reading of Scripture or the Lord’s prayer.

4.    Trust God to love you in your prayer
It’s easy to worry that your centering prayer was a waste of time. Did I do it correctly? Should I have done something else? Why did I get so distracted? These are all temptations. When looking back at your centering prayer, keep three things in mind. 1) Read Ephesians 3 and remember that you already know, can’t know, and don’t possess the capacity to know, what God’s love is doing in your life. Amen! This prayer doesn’t demand effort or intelligence only trust. You don’t have to know or understand what is happening any more than you have to understand how the sun moves to experience a sunrise or how a computer works to be able to surf the internet. 2) Discover that being distracted twenty-thousand times becomes the gateway for twenty-thousand blessings. You may be overwhelmed at times with the monkey mind experience of thoughts jumping around in your brain, distracting you from a loving attentiveness to God. If at the end of your time, you’ve said your sacred word twenty-thousand times, consider that you have consented and surrendered, offered an “amen,” to divine love twenty-thousand times. 3) Give your brain a rest. God knows what God is doing and love never fails. It’s tempting to want to analyze what’s happening, to think about the myriad thoughts that pulsate through your mind.  But remember Paul’s words  - God’s love surpasses knowledge and is immeasurably more that all we can ask or imagine – so drop your tape measure. What goes on in those silent depths during prayer is no one’s business, not even your own; it is between your innermost being and God; that place where, as St. Augustine says, “God is closer to your soul than you are to yourself.” Your own subjective experience of the prayer may be that nothing happened – except of letting go of thoughts. But in the depths of your being, in fact, plenty has been going on, and things are quietly but firmly being rearranged. You trust from Scripture that God is rooting you in love and filling you with all the fullness of God – whether you know it or not. All you need is to make room. All you need is to say, “Amen.”

 

A Merciful Levelling: Thinking about Humility with Jesus ~ Luke 18:9-14

 

Humility returns us to the beginning of our series – the life of Jesus, because his life is to be the model and shape of our life. The Apostle Paul reminds us:

Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:” -Philippians 2:3-5 NIV

So to think Christian is to look to Jesus in order to think like Jesus and Jesus’ thinking always humbly valued others above himself. And friends that’s the thinking of God. So Jesus thinking (humble thinking) appears to be parable thinking, seems to demand no comparison only mercy, and suggests not so much a reversal but a merciful levelling.

I wonder. Jesus thinking (humble thinking) seems to be parable thinking.

Perhaps one of the more important elements to truly understand and engage humility is to recognize and wrestle with the most common way that Jesus taught us about God – parables; these funky, little, short stories that resist easy explanations, clear answers, or simple moral summaries. Stories that are both humble and humbling, they lie somewhere between allegorical fable and dead-pan joke, they are messy, puzzling, sometimes infuriating, and yet Jesus’ way of teaching and engaging us and inviting us to think. And let’s be honest, they often hold little resemblance to the teachings of churches who often tell us exactly how to think – with a blow-to-the-head-kind-of-clarity. But Jesus’ way is not some heavily starched theology always neatly laundered and pressed. No, it’s gently teasing and humbly confounding. Let me say this in a way that seeks to honor Jesus’ own humble thinking: When you think of Jesus in order to think like Jesus always remember that Jesus invites YOU to think. Now say that ten times real fast – just kidding.

Parable thinking is more question-thinking than answer-thinking, more narrative-thinking than propositional-thinking. If you found yourself asking, “Which one of these two am I?” Or pondered, “That little prayer by the tax collector is all it took?” You’re on the humble path. If you listened to this being read and found yourself saying, “Got it. Heard it. No questions.” Or if your first response was to send a text that says, “Hey, the preacher is talking about humility and I thought of you” then you are in danger of being on the wrong path. The certain, the arrogant, the prideful, have no use for parable thinking. In their minds, faithfulness is always clarity, salvation is always knowing the right answers to the right questions, and morality is uncovered with mathematical precision.

Parable thinking or humble thinking requires investment, self-awareness, and a real desire to listen, see, and repent [or, “go beyond the mind that you have”]. If as a Christian you can’t think parablicly, can’t wade into messy situations, won’t allow yourself to be questioned or your wisdom to be challenged then it’s a good sign that you have a pride problem. After recently talking with Clyde Ohta, I realized that parables are like Torii gates. 

 

Torrii gates are a feature of Japanese gardening and architecture where you encounter a gate without a surrounding fence. It oddly creates a welcoming entrance and transition point into a new space without any clear boundary. They are symbolic portals for borderless spaces which invite you to enter and think about a new area or experience, without boxing you in. That’s what a parable does – it has definition and weight, asks you enter, and beckons for you to walk through it without imprisoning you. Friends, parable thinking should humbly remind us that people rarely fight over doors but certainly get tweaked about fences. I love pet videos and a common one is a video with two or more dogs barking and growling at each other through a fence. At some point, however, a door or gate is opened allowing the dogs to see each other face to face with no fence separating them. When that happens, the dogs cease growling and barking at each other and begin to wag their tails. When the gate is closed, however, the barking begins. We’re not that difference.  So parable thinking is a humble doorway of thinking that demands our fullest attention without always clear answers and no barking or growling.

I wonder. Jesus thinking (humble thinking) seems to demand no comparison only mercy.

Let’s walks through this Torrii gate and see what it asks us to enter and see. Notice the similarities: two men, both going to the temple, both standing to pray and within proximity to each other (that’s real important). What about the differences? The first is a Pharisee and now we get – a Greek of the Week. The NIV states that he “stood by himself” but the consensus is that something else is being conveyed. The phrase “pros euton” [to/about himself] never means “by himself” or “alone” in biblical Greek. No, in Jesus’ story the phrase provocatively holds two possible translations/connotations: 1) “prayed to himself” but not necessarily silently because people often prayed aloud. So is he praying or simply talking to himself?; or, 2) “prayed about himself” with the understanding that he is praying his moral resume aloud to advertise his own righteousness as far exceeding the tax collector who he actually has the gall to mention negatively in the prayer itself, which means he could hear him.

So pride seems not so much the idea that “I’m awesome,” or “I matter” but what Dante Alighieri, defined as “love of self, perverted to hatred and contempt for one's neighbor”. Here the word “haughty” best captures the meaning. In vss. 9 and 11 we discover that pride glories in competitive spirituality. It’s the belief that love is a is trophy only given to winners and awarded through competition. It’s the idea that to be worthy of God’s love is determined by some metric of comparison in which someone has to be lower than and less than. Someone has to lose. To deal with pride then is not to imagine that you are terrible but simply to realize that you are loved like everyone else – your boss who cheated on his wife, your cousin who can’t seem to shake that drug addiction, the parents who can’t seem to handle their kids. It’s to recognize that you are loved and broken the same as everyone else. I don’t think that Jesus is saying that the prideful aren’t heard by God. Rather, he’s acknowledging that the prideful never truly pray because they imagine that they have no need.

 

A monk at a monastery tells another monk, “I have been praying, fasting, and studying Scripture for 20 years. I am truly a nothing.” The other monk nods gravely. “I too have spent my life meditating and serving God. I am also a nothing.”

At that moment a janitor passes by, holding his mop. Overhearing the conversation, and feeling quite moved, he interrupts, “You know what, I am also a nothing.” The first monk says to the other, “Who does he think he is to be a nothing?”

Prideful people want a religion of clear comparisons: winners and losers, right ones and wrong ones, the in and the out, the good and the bad, the know-it-alls and the know-nothings and believe that they always know where they stand or at least believe they stand a better chance than you (whoever you are, you loser!)

The humble, the prayerful tax collector, however, have no such delusions. They are those who know themselves, know their weaknesses, don’t pretend, and want only a religion of mercy.  Notice that there’s no long sinner’s prayer, no theological test, no concern about the rightness of belief. The tax collector’s prayer is so simple: “Have mercy on me.” By the way, “sinner” doesn’t mean “the worst, unlovely, or totally wicked.” And sinner can’t mean separate from God because God seems all too aware and so quick to forgive.  We have made sin wrongly synonymous with being unlovable when we should often come to think of it as being incapable.

In the Catholic Mass each week, Catholics all around the world join in a Latin prayer that anchors deep within the Gospels and the earliest church’s worship. They pray or sing: Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison (Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy). This, of course, comes from our text today. But what do we mean when we pray, “Lord have mercy”? Some may think we’re asking God to not punish us for our sin, to not rain down fury on our lives. But I think that sin is less about offending God and more of a reality that is destructive toward others, harms our world, and must not go unchecked. God doesn’t seem so much perturbed and the Pharisee himself seems unaware of any problem. So perhaps it’s more correct to think that asking for God’s mercy is like saying: We beg you for your mercy to be with us, because ours is not enough. We ask for your wisdom to be with us, your loving-kindness to be with us, because we just don’t have enough of our own. And we keep messing everything up. We beg for mercy because we need help, because we’re broken much more so than we’re bad. And we beg for others because we remember how much it hurts to hurt.

I wonder. Jesus thinking (humble thinking) seems less of a reversal and more of a merciful levelling.

There is a way of reading the parable in which the point is that the tables are turned and the down-trodden get to lord over the ones who brag about their own self-righteousness. The previously humble now get to look down at others. But that seems like an odd ending and hardly in keeping with Jesus’ own teachings about God, reconciliation, and enemy love.

The point of the Pharisee doesn’t seem to be that justice is served by his failure to receive justification, as if that’s being withheld. It’s more of a sadness at failing to understand what justification is – a gift of mercy. The Pharisee’s failure to receive it isn’t so much punishment as it is the result of a failed posture – it’s hard to receive a gift that you don’t understand, don’t think you need, and won’t ask for. Comparing yourself to others, competitively engaging spirituality and seeking to be better than others, creates its own harsh reality. It leaves you without a safe-place to call “home.” Did you notice that in the parable?  Both have the temple but only one has a “home” to go to (vs. 14). What is a home but a place where we are loved without conditions, with all our flaws, where we can be ourselves, even when we are at our worst. The world system wants to make love and God a competition, a worthiness algorithm, a contract, that is won by having the best moral resume. But you should never need a resume for “home” You should never have to get all As to earn a parent’s love. Mercy is what makes a home. So if I were to offer an explanation about the ultimate fate of the prideful and the humble it would look like this. For all who exalt themselves by thinking they’re better than others will one day recognize how foolish and lonely that is, and they will be mercifully confronted with how that spirituality hurt them and harmed others, They will painfully recognize the need for forgiveness and mercy and in doing so will be brought down in order to find a home. And the humble will discover that they are so much more than the worst of their deeds, so much more lovely than they thought or imagined. They will come in their need and be delightfully surprised by an ever-giving and merciful God. They will speak to those who have been prideful, who hurt them, and will tell them of their hurt and receive an apology, and be able to offer forgiveness in return. They will be raised up, stand eye to eye and toe to toe with those who thought themselves better and discover that they always had a home. Each would discover that we’ve heard this story before, we know these two guys, they’re brothers in the same house. Each, in other words, will discover the deep truth about humility, taught by Jesus, that he humbled himself so that we might all stand together. Jesus humbly announces that God wants a house of mercy for us all.