Sunday, July 28, 2019

Teach us to pray (again)


A Sermon preached on July 28, 2019, Proper 12 at St. Augustine’s, Wiesbaden
Genesis 18: 20-32, Colossians 2: 6 -19, Luke 11: 1 – 13


I learned a new phrase this week while researching for this sermon: Semantic satiation. According to CNN, this “is the phenomenon in which a word or phrase is repeated so often it loses its meaning. But it also becomes something ridiculous, a jumble of letters that feels alien on the tongue and reads like gibberish on paper.”  In their view, and this was in an article following yet another mass shooting, the phrase ‘thoughts and prayers’ had reached that stage of full semantic satiation. It has simply become a catchphrase beloved of politicians, in most cases devoid of meaning, and used mainly as a cover for doing nothing at all to deal with the causes of the tragedies. 

When I am writing to people after a personal tragedy – a death or a severe illness – I catch myself thinking twice about whether to promise that they are in my thoughts and prayers or to try and find an alternative wording as the words are in danger of losing their true meaning. And yet prayer is not the opposite of action. On the contrary, prayer is as important as action, and very often prayer initiates action. We need to rescue prayer and make prayer not only acceptable, but desirable again.

Jesus’ mission cannot be understood without prayer and so our Gospel reading this morning begins with the words, “Jesus was praying in a certain place.” (Luke 11:1) We are not told where but based on the other cases we can assume somewhere quiet – a garden or olive grove, a hilltop, somewhere he could actively seek conversation and connection with his Father without being disturbed. When he had finished, when he returned, we heard that one of the disciples said to him “Lord, teach us to pray.” The text tells us that he adds, “as John taught his disciples.” So perhaps John’s followers had a set prayer, and Jesus’ followers wanted one too. Or perhaps they noticed that whenever Jesus came back from praying, he was newly energized and motivated and wanted to share in this experience in this source of strength and guidance.
Either way, in response Jesus offers a three-part teaching: a model prayer, a parable about prayer, and some sayings about prayer. Let’s look at them one by one. 

What we call the Lord’s Prayer and use in our worship is based more on the version we find in Matthew’s Gospel. The Lukan version is shorter and missing some of the familiar components: No “who art in heaven,” no “thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” no “deliver us from evil.” You won’t find the doxology – “for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever”  - in either version by the way, It’s not biblical – that’s why the Roman Catholics do not usually use it (yes, sometimes the Catholics are more obedient to scripture than the Protestants). At our weekly Bible study, one person said that in Luke’s version she particularly missed theyour will be done,” as this was a good reminder that when we ask for things in prayer, we may not get what we want, but what God wants for us! 

But even with these “omissions,” the prayer is still easily recognizable. It grows out of the mission of Jesus – we could say that it is his mission statement, and one we can actually all remember (which is not the case with every mission or vision statement)!  Jesus prays to – and tells us to pray to – the Father. To call God ‘Father’ or ‘Abba’ is an act of intimacy, it describes a family relationship, it describes someone who loves us. It is the first and most important action of prayer: getting reconnected to the source of our being, our parent, our creator.
But it also recalls the God who liberates, the God of Exodus (4:22-23), who tells Pharaoh “Thus says the Lord: Israel is my firstborn son. I said to you, ‘Let my son go that he may worship me.’” Jesus then invites his disciples to pray that God’s name be hallowed or kept holy. How does this happen? Through our worship and adoration of course, but also by how we who claim to act in God’s name behave - holy, special, and in such a way that God’s name is held in honor. When God’s name is hallowed and God’s kingdom comes, there is daily bread for all, forgiveness is practiced, and God delivers the faithful from the time of trial. Jesus came in God’s name, bringing liberation from the sin of division and hate, providing both physical and spiritual bread for the journey, offering forgiveness everywhere he went and finally for all on the cross, and while many followers had to go through a time of trial, with the gift of the Holy Spirit, he gave us the means to endure.

Endurance – or persistence – is the main theme of the parable that follows. The friend asleep in bed, surrounded by his children is not God. What Jesus wants the disciples to understand with the help of this story is that if even the friend will eventually get up and help in the middle of the night, how much more will God answer our prayers. Jesus is encouraging a kind of holy boldness[1] and insistent asking. Don’t give up, he says, whether you are praying for the world to change or for yourself to change, don’t give up praying, and don’t give up trying. “Pray without ceasing,” is Paul’s admonition to the Thessalonians (1 Thess. 5:16)

And so, Jesus continues: “So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.” (Luke 11:9). This is perhaps the most difficult part of the passage because our experience contradicts Jesus’ words. We have all asked and not received; we have all searched and not found. Despite our most fervent prayers, loved ones have died of cancer or in senseless accidents. Despite the fervent prayers of people around the world, like we do every Sunday, wars and conflicts continue, and daily we hear of tragedies of violence, hunger, disease, and natural disasters. 

I have seen a cartoon where a man was sitting on a bench talking to Jesus. The man says, "So, why do you allow things like famine, war, suffering, disease, crime, homelessness, despair, etc. to exist in our world?" And Jesus responds, "Interesting that you should bring that up as I was just about to ask you the exact same thing."
Or to put it another way, these things happen when we forget the action part of prayer. 

I’m not a fan of the idea that God only acts through us, at least not the God that I believe in, but God certainly also acts through us. In the Prayer Book of the Anglican Church of New Zealand there is a lovely paraphrase of the Lord’s Prayer that makes very clear what our role is in answering prayers:
The way of your justice be followed by the peoples of the world!
Your heavenly will be done by all created beings!
Your commonwealth of peace and freedom
sustain our hope and come on earth.
With the bread we need for today, feed us.
In the hurts we absorb from one another, forgive us.
In times of temptation and testing, strengthen us.
From trials too great to endure, spare us.

If we want to rescue prayer and make prayer not only acceptable, but desirable again, then we must of course pray: as a community, alone, with a prayer partner or as part of a prayer chain, in silence or out loud, in a church or in the middle of nature. But not only that, our prayers and actions must form a unity and be consistent. No snakes for fish, not scorpions for eggs, no evil for good. If we pray for God’s kingdom, then we must act as citizens of that kingdom, if we pray for bread, we must share it, if we pray for forgiveness, we must forgive, if we pray to be delivered from the time of trial, from hardship and testing, then we must spare others from their trials too great to endure .
Amen.



[1] Tom Wright, Luke for Everyone, 134

Sunday, July 14, 2019

No distance


A Sermon preached on July 14, 2019, Proper 10 at St. Augustine’s, Wiesbaden 
Deuteronomy 30:9-14, Colossians 1:1-14, Luke 10: 25-37


This year’s parish Lenten retreat was titled, “Rehearsing Scripture.”  We approached Scripture using acting and rehearsing methods: based on the idea that the Biblical text is a collection of scripts that God has given us to rehearse, in our lives, until something true emerges and we are transformed in the process. Some texts lend themselves to this method more than others of course. Jesus’ parables are particularly suitable, and in fact it was the parable from today’s Gospel – the Good Samaritan – that we studied and used back in April.  We had a lot of fun reading, rehearsing, and acting this text. Everyone really got into character … though I had the feeling that those playing the robbers were having far too much fun! But we also learned from the experience.

We started by looking at the verbs, the action words, of each character. What do they actually do? If we just focus on the parable itself, the man who gets beaten up only has two verbs: he was going down (from Jerusalem to Jericho) and he fell into (the hands of the robbers). These are passive verbs. They tell us that this was not his fault, it happened to him.

The robbers on the other hand are very active, they stripped, beat, went away, leaving him. Presumably they also took some money and goods with them – or was it an entirely senseless attack? The text doesn’t tell us. We just know the results of their action: the man was left half dead.

And then we have our two devout, religious characters, those who we would expect to be the ones most likely to obey the law that the Lawyer had so cleverly summarized for Jesus: the priest and the Levite. Like the man, they were going down or came to the place, they saw the man, and they passed by.  

We are not told why they passed by. I have heard and read many theories. One is that they were concerned about ritual defilement if they touched a dead body, for they would then be unable to carry out their religious function for some time. The only problem with that idea is that the man was not dead, just half dead. Another possibility is that they were afraid. The road from Jerusalem to Jericho was dangerous, the robbers might have been hiding nearby (though having been to this place when we visited the Holy Land, I can tell you that there are no bushes or trees to hide behind!). In his last sermon on this parable, Dr. Martin Luther King too wondered why thy did not stop to help. His conclusion was that, “the first question that the priest asked, the first question that the Levite asked was, ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’”[1]

There is no question what the Samaritan thought. His question was: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?” The Samaritan gets the most verbs, and so we learn more about him. He was travelling, came near, saw, was moved by pity, went to the man, bandaged, poured, put him, brought him, took care of him, took out money, gave, said, and promised. His story starts passively – he was travelling – but soon becomes active. If he is afraid, he doesn’t let it influence him. He crosses the road and removes the distance between him and the man. Then, from that close proximity, from that intimacy, he was moved by pity and all the other actions taken to save the man result from that familiarity, that contact.  

Finally, we have the innkeeper. He gets no verbs at all; he is silent but accepting. One thing we identified at the retreat, which I had not noticed before, is that the innkeeper is also one of the “good guys,” he is trusting and willing to take on responsibility in caring for the man just based on the promise of the Samaritan that he will come back and repay him. That’s a big deal when we remember that Samaritans were a small, hated minority. But I think the innkeeper was influenced by the example of selfless love the Samaritan had already shown.

If we step back from the parable to the conversation between Jesus and the lawyer, it is interesting to see how Jesus answers his questions, or often how he doesn’t. To start with, he answers the lawyer’s questions with questions of his own. “What is written in the law?” (Luke 10:26) he asks as he wants to find out what the lawyer believes. The lawyer’s answer is a sound one, love God and love your neighbor. But will he act out his faith, will he do this and live a life of love as Jesus tells him to? It appears not, for our good lawyer has yet another question. Who is my neighbor, he asks, and what he really wants to know is, who is included in God’s love, and who isn’t, who am I supposed to love and in extreme cases help, and who can I leave by the side of the road? 

Jesus’s answer is all about turning abstract faith into action. Jesus’ reply not about who to help, but who helps. The neighbor is not just the one being loved, but also the one doing the loving, the one who showed the injured man mercy or loving-kindness. And by taking an extreme example of a total religious and ethnic outsider, Jesus is making clear that God has no interest in the barriers we set up and the distance we try and keep from one another. You can’t be a neighbor from a distance. The priest and Levites distanced themselves from the man and were thus able to ignore his situation and his need. The Samaritan came near him and then went directly to him. He no longer saw an object, but a fellow human being in desperate need, someone who just would not survive without him.

We could so easily retell this parable today using the current refugee situation. That’s why Jesus so often taught by using parables, because they are so easily adaptable to other situations. We try and keep the refugees well away from us.

In Europe we close our harbors and we prosecute and demonize the real neighbors, those who quite literally come alongside the refugees in their boats to rescue them. We prefer the refugees to be far away: in camps in North Africa or Turkey or Mexico. One reason is to discourage people from coming in the first place, to make escaping a less attractive option. But we know that doesn’t really work, not when even the risk of drowning is better than staying at home! 

Another reason is if the refugees are not where we can see them, we don’t experience their need and their plight and treat them as some abstract concept, as some “other” rather than as fellow human beings. We don’t want them to be our physical neighbor, or that pesky command to love our neighbor might apply. Martin Luther King was right, we are afraid, afraid of what might happen to us. I don’t mean the risk of injury, of getting hurt, though that happens too. Refugees are human beings, and not all good. I am thinking of the fear that we will be changed, that like the Samaritan we will be moved with pity, that we will have no choice but to show loving-kindness. That observing the law will become a matter of the heart and a labor of love. 

That is what Moses is saying in the first reading from Deuteronomy, God’s commandment is not abstract or distant, it’s not in heaven, and it’s not beyond the sea, but instead very near “it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.” (Deut. 9:11-14) “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and love your neighbor as yourself.” Not only does your life depend on observing this commandment, but the lives of everyone you touch and encounter when you do.
Amen.


[1] https://www.biblegateway.com/blog/2012/04/why-didnt-they-stop-martin-luther-king-jr-on-the-parable-of-the-good-samaritan/