“’You Are Not a Winner’ – Don’t Believe It!”

Some time ago, on a day like most other days, I got up and proceeded to make breakfast for myself. Noticing that the fridge was empty of cranberry juice, my preferred breakfast beverage, I grabbed a new bottle out of the cupboard, and with only a minor amount of wrestling succeeded in unscrewing the top. As you know, often manufacturers will try to entice you to purchase their products by awarding prizes to those who are lucky enough to buy one of their products, and evidently Ocean Spray was running one of those sweepstakes at the time, as there was a short message on the inside of the bottle top. This is what it said, in capital letters and a bold font: “YOU ARE NOT A WINNER”!

            Now the cap did not say, “Sorry, this is not a winning cap”, or even “Sorry, try again.” No, it had to make it personal, had to gratuitously rub my nose in it. Not only had I not won a prize, I was not a winner. Ergo, I was a loser.

            Annie Lamott, author of Traveling Mercies, knows what I am talking about here. She knows how easy it is to fall prey to the message “YOU ARE NOT A WINNER”, to fall into the trap of thinking that we are never good enough.

            In one of her essays she writes of buying a used car, of her fear of being taken, of how she hired a mechanic to evaluate the car, of how she waited until it got a clean bill of health. She did everything right. But then, just a few days later, right in the middle of a busy intersection, the car just died. Traffic backed up; no one would help; people were yelling at her. It was, she writes, “my own private New York City.” She goes on,      

“It would be hard to capture how I felt at that moment. It was a nightmare. Bad Mind kicked in. Bad Mind can’t wait for this kind of opportunity: “I told you so,” Bad Mind says. It whispers to me that I am doomed because I am such a loser.” (Page 109).

It was not the car that got the blame here, anymore than that bottle cap took the blame for not being my ticket to some fabulous prize. Lamott blamed herself, Bad Mind told her that she had failed in buying that car, that she was inadequate, that she was a loser.

Where do we come up with this pattern of self-denigration? Where do we get the idea that we only have worth when we are a success, when things go our way? Where do we get the idea that we are what we do?

Is it true that our value, our worth, our identity, consists only of what we do and how well we do it at school or on the athletic field or on the job or in the home?

If you go to work each day for years and years, if you work overtime and put everything into your job, and then one day it happens that there are lay-offs and they let you go – are you a loser?

If you marry the person of your dreams and eight years later they walk out for a newer, more attractive in their eyes model, are you a loser?

If despite all your efforts to reach out to others you look around and see you don’t have as many friends as someone else, are you a loser?

If despite all your cleaning and decorating your house still does not measure up to Martha Stewart standards, are you a loser?

We all want to be winners. We work hard at it, constantly looking for clues on how to be winners. Maybe it’s the right clothes, the right car, the right people to hang with, the right activities to do with them. Because maybe if we succeed and win and keep winning then we will get what we really want, deep down: we will be loved. Because everyone loves a winner.

If there ever was a winner, there’s Jesus. He’s our winner, isn’t he? He is the one we want to pattern our lives on, the one we want to emulate. Wise, loving, courageous, strong, compassionate, he had it all, and we know he was a winner in God’s eyes. God even said so in the reading we had today: “You are my beloved Son; in you I am well-pleased.” (Mark 1:9-11)

And yet, look at the timing of God’s declaration of love and delight. It comes not at the end of Jesus’ life, at the point where he is faithful even to the point of suffering on the cross; it comes not at an earlier time, when Jesus sets his face towards Jerusalem, knowing even as he did so that he was walking to his death; it doesn’t come even earlier than that, after the Sermon on the Mount.

No, God’s declaration of love comes right there at the start of the Gospel, before Jesus has even begun his ministry, before he has done anything to earn God’s love and praise. God’s love comes first.

This is the Gospel message: you are love, accepted, God’s child. As it was with Jesus, so it is with you. God saying to you, you are not a loser, you are my beloved, with you I am well-pleased. God saying to you, I don’t care about anyone’s yardstick, you are my child, and I love you.

When Camden was only six months old we took a sort of pilgrimage to a holy place, a place that always had special meaning for me, my grandparents’ farm in the foothills of the Pocono Mountains. My grandmother, Camden’s great-grandmother, was 93 and bed-ridden, at home with round-the-clock nursing care. We had feared that our visit would be too late, but the day finally came when we drove down that old shaded lane and parked beside the barn and walked out of the mid-August heat into the cool of the old stone farmhouse, and there she was. I held her great-grandson, all of six weeks old, out to her, and laid him in her arms. It took most of her strength, but she bent way over and kissed him on the top of his newborn-smelling head and crooned gently, “He’s a good boy. He’s a good boy.”

Camden’s great-grandmother got it. At six weeks of age, no accomplishments behind him, no awards received, no achievements racked up: “He’s a good boy.” Loving him simply because he is.

“You are my beloved .. with you I am well-pleased.”

God’s message for each one of us.

So own it. And live it. 

“Live for Greatness”

“Live for greatness.”     So reads the boldface ad copy on an advertisement from last week’s New Yorker magazine. In the background, a softly-focused photo of the talented and fetching jazz musician Diana Krall; in the foreground, an Oyster Perpetual Datejust Special Edition Rolex watch. “Live for greatness.”

    You may have heard the story of three masons who were working at chipping chunks of granite from large blocks. The first seemed unhappy at his job, chipping away but looking frequently at his watch. When asked what it was that he was doing, he responded, rather curtly, “I'm hammering this stupid rock, and I can't wait ‘til 5 when I can go home.”

A second mason, seemingly more interested in his work, hammered diligently, and, when asked what he was doing, he answered, “Well, I'm molding this block of rock so that it can be used with others to construct a wall. It's not bad work, but I'll sure be glad when it's done.”

The third mason hammered fervently at his block, taking time to stand back and admire his work. He chipped off small pieces until he was satisfied that it was the best he could do. When questioned about his work, he stopped, gazed skyward, and proudly proclaimed, “I am building a cathedral.”

In  the Bible (Haggai 1:1-15), it seems that what God is concerned with, as Haggai brings God’s message to the people, is a building – the Temple. The message is clear, the goal clearly stated: you people have rebuilt your homes, and in a grand style, paneled walls and all; but you have left my home, the Temple, in ruins; so call the contractor, line up the subs, hie thee to Home Depot, and get to work chez moi!

            But a closer reading reveals that it is not just about a building, it is also about the building. It is not just about a noun (a building), but about a verb (rebuilding). And what it is that needs rebuilding is not just a structure, but a Spirit-filled, outwardly focused community which lives as if it were an outpost of the promised kingdom of God.

            For the problem in Jerusalem ran much deeper than a structure which lay in ruins –there was a community which lay in ruins as well. The first was emblematic of the second. God had brought the exiles out of two generations of captivity in Babylon, had restored the people to their former home, had blessed them in abundance. But what is their response?

The wealthy construct for themselves the ancient equivalents of present-day McMansions, homes luxuriously appointed with fine paneling. The powerful, the religious and political leaders, refuse to provide the funds for the reconstruction of the Temple – an expense which would have cut into their pocketbooks. Once this had been a people keenly aware of and dependent on their God, a God who stood with them in time of trial, who had comforted them when they were afflicted, who brought them out of captivity into new life; once they had cherished their covenant with their God, a covenant which called for them to live in response to the blessings they had known – to love God and neighbor, to look after the poor and the widow, to live lives of thanksgiving to God and blessing to others. But no longer.

            And so Haggai’s message to them—and to us – is that it is not just about the building, it is also about the need to be building. It is about the Temple, because the Temple is more than a building – it is the site of God’s life-giving, community-sustaining presence. The call to rebuild the Temple is a call to rebuild the Spirit-filled, caring community as well.

            They were called to live for greatness – to harken back to the story of the three masons, to not just chip away at a rock, not just build a wall, but to construct a cathedral.

             And how can we not remember, on this Founders’ Day at West Parish of Barnstable, Henry Jacob and John Lothrop? Two men who lived for greatness in their day, who despite persecution, imprisonment, and loss responded to God’s call to form the first congregational church, and then brought it over the stormy sea to safety here on Cape Cod.

And how can we not remember, on this Founders’ Day, Elizabeth Crocker Jenkins? That same Elizabeth Crocker Jenkins who lived for greatness in her time, who  over the course of three decades, laboring not to build a cathedral, but to restore this Meetinghouse to its original glory – not just for its own sake, although that would have been enough, but as the keystone towards the revitalization of the West Parish Congregational Church.

            I’m not so sure that many of us find it in ourselves to live for greatness these days. Maybe it has a lot to do with the tough economic times we have known over the past decade. Maybe it has something to do with the entertainment-saturated culture we live in, when the media glues its attention on trifles like cable celebrity Kim Kardashian and her shocking (!) decision to end her 72-day long marriage. Maybe it has something to do with our culture’s move away from that foundational understanding on which this nation was founded, the idea of community and covenant and being in this together, and towards the sort of radical individualism which constricts our view of the good life to what is good for me, period.

            Mary Oliver’s poem (Magellan) is a call to live for greatness, lest, she warns, “we go down in comfort and despair.” Thank God that in the time of the prophet Haggai, at a time when the community was going down in comfort and despair, God’s call came to the people to live for greatness, to work together and give together and sacrifice together for the good of the entire community – and that, as they together risked the wildest places, they experienced a community reborn. And thank God for God’s call to us in this day as well, a call for us to live for greatness; thank God for the gracious invitation to us to be partners with God in that most holy of tasks, that of building, one person and one heart and one community at a time, the kingdom of God.

            Come, Lord Jesus, and be with us, for we would be a-building; we would risk the wildest places, and live for greatness. Amen.

“Souls Made for Community”

     I want to let you all in on a little known fact about myself. I share this with some reluctance, because I don’t like to brag, I don’t want anyone to get the idea that I am all puffed up on myself, but facts is facts, as they say, so I’ll just spill the beans and let the chips fall where they may. Here it is: I am a GREAT golfer.

            I know, I know, you might object. You might say, ‘But Reed, you don’t even own a set of golf clubs!” You might say, “But Pastor, the closest you come to golfing is watching the Masters on television.” You might even add in, “Reed, you never practice golf, why you have never swung a golf club since you were in high school anywhere except on a miniature golf course.”  All true, yes.

But let me tell you – I am a great golfer because in my head I know I am. I don’t need to practice to be a great golfer, because in my heart I believe I am.

Lots of folk think they are great Christians. Now they don’t own a Bible, and if they do it is gathering dust on a bookshelf. They might on occasion turn on the TV to watch a televangelist. They may even have a bracelet with WWJD on it – what would Jesus do. And they have not seen the inside of church since they were back in high school. They are Christians, they insist, because they believe they are.

In the same way that I am a great golfer.

            The Rev. Mary Luti, who is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ and preached at my installation here some years ago, tells of a wonderful person who came to see here one day and said that she had been coming to church for quite some time, but had not been raised in the faith, and wanted to become a Christian And then she asked where to begin.  Mary reflected on this. Perhaps reading the Bible – always a good thing – unless you get bogged down in the boring “begat” sections. Perhaps reading a book on theology – again, always a good thing, but the Christian faith is about more than head-stuff. But she said instead, “Keep on coming to church, become part of our community.” Because what better way to learn it than to live it, and to live it in its rich, living, organic form?

            Which is, of course, the problem for anyone of us of sound mind. It is why so many people in all sincerity say, “I am spiritual, not religious.” Because being spiritual is something we think we can do on our own, without all the other stuff that comes with being part of a faith community – including, of course, all those problematic people. The personality conflicts, the power plays, the insensitive remarks, the enabling behaviors. As one theologian once put is, “Church is the place where the one you can’t stand always is.”

            Sounds a lot like a family, doesn’t it? Like a family, and not one of those idealized old-time Leave it to Beaver type families, but the messy kind we all pretty much end up in, with Uncle Frank who tells the same boring jokes and dozes off in the easy chair, and grandma who can’t resist pinching your cheeks and telling you how much you have grown, and the little sister who can’t let go the grudge now forty-year old, and on and on.

            But then there is the other side to family, families they stay together by keeping in touch, by being there for one another, offering support and encouragement, providing  comfort in times of trouble or loss, showing up for each other, and so much more.

            Paul the Apostle (Ephesians 2: 19-22) reminds us that we are part of a new family, a Christian household of faith, part of God’s family. Which is a great thing these days, because while it was once true that we lived in a Christian culture, that is just not the case these days. We are in a very real way aliens in the society we once created. So how much more important it is that we are no longer strangers and aliens from God, but have joined a new family, a new household.

            So getting back to the golfing analogy, the question is not merely an intellectual one: “Do you believe?”, or “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?”, or “What would Jesus do?” It is also the political and social question: “Will you join up?” And, more importantly than that, will you come to practice? It is like that cartoon going around the internet, with Jesus speaking to a young man kneeling at his feet, and saying “No, when I said follow me, I did not mean on Twitter.”

            We are souls –spiritual beings --  made for community.

“God’s Place of Business”

Jacob is a fugitive on the road, with only a stone for a pillow on a bitterly cold night in the wilderness. Jacob lays down to sleep, alone and without a friend in the world, without even so much as a rote prayer before bedtime. (Genesis 28:10-19a)

            And right there, at the strangest, loneliest, most apparently God-forsaken moment in his life, God comes to Jacob. As if often the case in the Old Testament, God comes to Jacob in a dream.

            In that dream, there is a stairway to heaven – but it is not a stairway that Jacob buys or even builds, and it is not a stairway that he climbs to meet God somewhere up in the clouds high above. It is a stairway that reaches down from heaven to earth, and upon which angels are going up and, more importantly, down. Angels, in Jacob’s time, were thought of as spiritual beings who were God’s messengers.

But then Jacob realizes that the Lord God is standing right there beside him, and the next thing you know Jacob is being given the same blessing and promise that had been given to his father before him, and to his grandfather, Abraham, before him: a blessing of land, and a future of untold generations who will in their turn be a blessing to the world.

And then there is even more: a promise that this fugitive, alone and on the run, would never again be alone, for his God would be with him, guiding and protecting and bringing him back safely to that very place.

            The claim of this account of Jacob and the stairway from heaven is this: that God’s place of business is right here, and that we are God’s business. We all – even the ones who grasp and trick and steal from our brothers and sisters and who flee like fugitives and even forget to say our prayers or come to church – we all are God’s business, right here, right now.

You may have come to church this afternoon because you thought you were about reaching out to God, reaching up to God. But the account of Jacob and the stairway tells us that God is just as busy reaching out to you, that God’s place of business is not up there somewhere, not on the 964^th floor of a skyscraper whose top lies nestled in the clouds, but right down here,

on the shop room floor,

 in the cubicle with you and your laptop,

in the kitchen at dinner time,

in the bedroom as you discuss the events of the day with your spouse.

In each and every one of those places, you might accurately echo Jacob’s astonished gasp, “Surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it!”

 This is the meaning of the account of Jacob and the ladder from heaven – this is God’s place of business.

And more than that, just as Jacob, with all his faults, with all his lack of faith, with all his flawed life and wrong choices, was God’s unfinished business, so too we, with all our varying degrees of faith, with all our pasts of wrong choices, with all our flaws and defects of character – so too we are God’s unfinished business.

It is the meaning of the incarnation, of our Christmas celebrations – that God came to us as Jesus to save the world and everyone in it; and it is the meaning of Pentecost, that God sent to us the Holy Spirit to help us in our journey. Because we are God’s unfinished business.

You may have the recently released film “Soul Surfer”, which is based on actual events. Brittany Hamilton, a teenager living in Hawaii, was a successful surfer who was on the cusp of dominating the professional surfing circuit when one day a shark took off one of her arms. Surfing was her life, and so she believes there is nothing left for her. But after recovering, she learns to surf with one arm, and determined to make a comeback, enters a surfing competition – where she is thoroughly beaten by her rivals. Devastated, on a whim she goes off on a mission trip with her church youth group to Thailand, where to compound her despair she learns that her lack of an arm makes her pretty useless on the construction site. But then, on a day off from the work, she finds herself down at the beach, and learns that she has a gift for teaching – she finds a surfboard, and teaches a young child to get over his fear of the ocean through learning to surf.

On her return to the states, she finds that her home is snowed under my mail – fan letters from around the world. She cannot understand it at first – she had failed in her comeback attempt at competitive surfing. But then she starts to read the letters, and finds that her attempt had inspired other-abled folk around the world, inspiring them to find ways to make new lives despite the setbacks that had been visited upon them. Far from being a failure with nothing to live for, Brittany discovers that she is a gift that gives hope to countless others who face their own struggles with disabilities.

Brittany Hamilton had thought her life was over when she lost that arm, but God had unfinished business with her.

And God has unfinished business with you as well.

No matter what your past, no matter what your faults, no matter the catalog of excuses and lists of back-sliding, no matter the bad habits and the repeated failures – God has unfinished business with you.

God loves you, and God loves you just the way you are – but God also loves you too much to leave you that way.

Thanks be to God, you are God’s unfinished business.

The Gift of Rules

         

My generation – those of us who came of age in the late Sixties and early Seventies – did not have much time for rules. Rules – laws, regulations, even the unwritten customs that governed how our parents lived – were viewed as mere legalism at best, oppressive totalitarianism at worst. We rebelled against dress codes, hair length, the draft, drug use laws, sexual mores, the unwritten rules about the proper roles of women and men in society, and more. A popular song summed it up for us, with its refrain, “Signs, signs, everywhere there’s a sign, blocking up the scenery, breaking up my mind, do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign?” We rebelled against everything in the name of freedom.

            So of course we – well, at least speaking for myself – have never been big fans of the Ten Commandments, the original engraved in stone set of rules. And a close corollary of this denigration of the Ten Commandments is the tendency to view the Old Testament as all about law, the New Testament all about grace, to think that Jesus was all about freedom, his Jewish tradition about a binding, legalistic ritualism.

            But when I understood the context of the Ten Commandments, I came to see them in a whole new light, and to understand that far from being an oppressive list of “thou shalt nots”, they instead are gifts from God, gifts designed to help the community thrive and flourish.

            Try to imagine what life was like for the enslaved Hebrews. They had no laws of their own – they were subject to Pharaoh’s rule alone.  Where they lived, what they did, when they woke and when they slept, all were dictated for them by their overseers.  Who was their god, the one who exercised total domination and control over everything in their lives? – Pharaoh. What was their sole task? – to obey unquestioningly, and to fulfill the work quotas.

            And then, suddenly and without time to prepare, they find themselves with more freedom than they know what to do with, a wandering group out in the wilderness, with no history of self-government, no law books, no rules or regulations or even ingrained customs by which they might order their society. All they know is the old way, a way of totalitarian control by an autocrat, where the chief values are unquestioning obedience and meeting production quotas.

            Which is where God steps in. With a set of rules, yes, but first, with a reminder. A reminder that this God is all about freedom.

            “Then God spoke these words: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery….”

            It is as if God starts off by saying, “Before we begin, let me remind you about who I am – I am the one who heard your cries when you were enslaved back in Egypt, and the one who acted on your behalf to bring you to freedom. No longer are you Pharaoh’s – now you are mine. No longer are you chattel to be brutalized and exploited by an Egyptian overlord; now you are mine, and I am all about giving you what you need, as a community, not only to live, but to live abundantly. So listen up….”

            When we get the youth group together each year, one of the first things we do is sit down and together come up with a set of rules by which we agree to live with each other. Rules like “no put-downs”, and “we will treat each other with respect”, and “no drugs or alcohol”, and so on. Everyone knows that these rules help us to live together as a youth group, they help prevent the kind of splits and divisions which can ruin a group. Do they restrict our freedom to do things – sure. But in the name of helping us build a life-affirming community.

            It is, of course, the same with those Ten Commandments. Far from being an arbitrary set of legalisms designed to hem us in, they instead are God’s vision for us of a flourishing, life-affirming community. And because those Commandments are linked to the Exodus, to God’s bringing the Hebrews up out of the brutality and exploitation of Pharaoh, they can be seen as a vision of an alternative reality, God’s reality, which God hopes we will we embrace.

            And so the first commandments remind us never again to submit to false gods, to the Pharaohs who would enslave us, either through military might or, as more often is the case, through the seduction of promises of wealth, or fame, or security, or a life of ease. And the latter commandments seek to enhance human community by putting limits on the acquisitive capacity of members of the community – the power individuals have to take by might or cunning from more vulnerable members of the community. As Old Testament theologian and preacher Walter Brueggemann reminds us, “”the protection of property is to be understood in the first instance not as a rule of property, but as a defense of the weak against the rapacious capacity of the strong.” (Theology of the Old Testament, p. 185).

            The Ten Commandments are, at base, not just law, but law rooted in God’s amazing grace, gifts freely extended to us, gifts embodying God’s wisdom, gifts setting out God’s vision for us of a world where God’s love is lived out by God’s people, in community, together. An amazing grace, not just for individuals who once were lost, but for the entire human community, that together we might truly see.

So this is the question for us.  Is it enough to just live by the rules, to “shalt not” when the Bible says “thou shalt not”? Or does God call us to do more, to not only see into the vision of a good life lived in community, but also to strive to make that good life in community a lived reality for all its members?

“On Holy Ground”

In the reading we just heard we had about Moses’ encounter with God (Exodus 3) – the same Moses that would go on to challenge Pharaoh and his army, the same Moses that would lead the Israelites through the parted Red Sea waters, the same Moses that would accompany them on their 40 year trek through the wilderness on the way to the Promised Land.

            It reminds of that story about President Bush’s trip to the Holy Land. Israel Prime Minster Ehud Olmert and President Bush had a scheduled meeting. Olmert arrived late, and Bush let him know in no uncertain terms that he did not like to be kept waiting.

            Olmert replied, “I am sorry Mr. President, I was meeting with someone more important than you are.”

“Who is more important than the President of the United States?” Bush demanded.

            Olmert replied: “Moses; I was meeting with Moses.”

            “You know Moses?!”, Bush exclaimed. “Get him on the phone. I want to talk to him.”

            Olmert picked up the phone, dialed, listened, and then hung up. “He doesn’t want to talk to you,” he told Bush. “He said the last time he talked to a bush it cost him forty years in the wilderness.”

You gotta love this account of Moses and the way in which God comes to him. Moses, who was raised in Pharaoh’s court and knew just how oppressive the Egyptians were to the Israelites they had enslaved, is going about his business as a shepherd when one day he is walking up a mountain and saw something amazing – a bush. A bush on fire. A bush on fire with a flame that did not consume it. And then he hears a voice calling him, saying “Moses! Moses!” And when Moses answers, “Here I am”, that voice tells Moses that he is in a very special place, a holy place, and so he should take off his shoes.

            We aren’t shepherds, and we don’t often find ourselves on mountainsides surrounded by bushes which might catch on fire, so maybe we should not expect God to speak to us through a burning bush on Mt. Sinai. But still, we might well ask, what are the common things in our lives through which God’s message might come to us?

Maybe in the text messages and tweets and Facebook postings that fly across our digital world;

maybe in a conversation with a troubled co-worker over break;

maybe in the car pool to soccer practice,

or in a walk on the beach, or on the morning news,

or even in a wooden building some almost 300 years old.

Maybe holy ground is not just over there, in what is often called “The Holy Land”, maybe holy ground is everywhere and anywhere that God might speak to us, if we had ears to listen and eyes to see.

            But if we were on holy ground, if God were indeed calling to us, what might we expect to hear? I think we can take three clues from the account of Moses and the burning bush.

            First, just as Moses’ call was linked to the cries of his people crying in captivity, so too our call will likely be linked to the cries of those in need in our time and place – the suffering of the unemployed, the homeless, the bereaved, the ill.  Those televised purveyors of the Prosperity Gospel will tell you that God’s call to you is all about you, you, you – about making you richer, you more successful, you increasingly insulated from the pain of the world. God’s call to Moses reminds us that we are called to be a servant people, to partner with God in caring for our neighbor.

            Second, we can expect that God’s call to us will not be a welcome one! Like Moses, we will have plenty of reasons that we just don’t want to belly up to the task placed in front of us. I am not faithful enough. I am already over-committed. I don’t have the training. The job is too big for me. It’s all rather vague – I think I’ll wait until I get more of the details. It’s too hard.

            And finally, we can expect that when God calls us to a task, God will equip us for it as well. The same God who gives Moses what surely must have seemed to him to be an insurmountable task, also promises to be with him, with power, every step of the way.  It may look to the casual onlooker that Moses stands naked before Pharaoh, on his own, unaided and powerless. But the person of faith knows that this is far from the truth, that when Moses stands before Pharaoh, God is with him, fully engaged in the struggle.

            It is the same with us. When God calls us to a task, that call comes with the assurance that we will never be left alone or unaided. It is not for nothing we have that adage, “One plus God makes a majority.”

Who was Moses to lead his people up out of slavery to the Promised Land? Only a man called by God to do so and gifted with the resources to make it happen.

Who was Nelson Mandela to lead South Africa into a post-apartheid era of racial harmony and reconciliation? Only a man called by God and then gifted with the patience and wisdom and ability to embody extravagant forgiveness  so as to transform a nation and inspire the world.           

                       

Who were Lauren Abraham, Sharon Minehart, Dianna Henson, and Bobbie Jordan,  to do something new in a 400 year-old church, worshipping in an almost 300 year-old Meetinghouse, to start up a new worship service on Saturday afternoons? Only regular folk called by God and then gifted with the inspiration and enthusiasm and will to do the work to make that new thing a reality.

Friends, we stand on holy ground. So let’s roll up our sleeves, get to work, and rejoice!

“We Don’t Know How to Pray – Get Over It!”

I think most pastors find it astonishing – as do most folk in the pews – that the Bible is full of folk who just don’t know how to pray. We just assume that they wouldn’t even be in the Bible unless they could nail something as elementary as prayer.

            But look at those disciples who followed Jesus around for three years. If anyone should have picked it up it was those folk, who hung on Jesus’ every word as he traipsed the length and breadth of the countryside. But then they come to Jesus and say, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” (Luke 11:1). Jesus responds by giving them a prayer, one we now know as The Lord’s Prayer.

            And here we have Paul the Apostle, the same guy who founded churches throughout Asia Minor and Greece, confessing that “we do not know how to pray as we ought.”

            All of this I think is great news for all of us who tend to get anxious when it comes to prayer. We often tend to think prayer is all about technique. For instance:

 – that we need to breathe deeply, and slowly – never mind that whenever I am intentional about breathing deeply and slowly my heart rate picks up and next thing you know I am panting like a dog.

-- or that we need to empty our mind of all our cares and worries. My spinning instructor is big on this one. She will say, “Okay, for the next two minutes I am going to stop coaching you, I just want you to have two minutes of uninterrupted silence, a time when you can just let go of all the things on your to-do list, all your worries about your health or loved ones, all the things waiting for you back at the office.” So of course while I previously was very happy just thinking about my bike riding, now she has me thinking about that to-list, health worries, loved ones, and the work back at the office!

--  Or that we need to walk the labyrinth, or find a secluded glade up in the mountains, neither of which is ever around when you need on!

            So what happens for a lot of people is they just figure since they will never get prayer right, never master its techniques, they should just forget about the whole thing.

            But friends, Paul reminds us that we don’t know how to pray, but that is alright, because the Spirit intercedes for us “with sighs too deep for words.”  When we cannot find the words, there is the Spirit filling in for us, but not with words – because often our deepest concerns are simply just beyond words – but with sighs. The same God who loves us so much that he came to us in Jesus Christ, taught us, walked with us, suffered for us – that same God is not some sort of cosmic red-pen-wielding essay editor just ready to reject every petition that crosses her desk, but instead is right there alongside us, right there deep within us, supporting us in our deepest yearnings.

            So no, you don’t know how to pray as you ought – so get over it!

            But maybe you are still expecting to get your money’s worth out of this sermon, and so are expecting some instructions on how to pray. Instructions I have none, but I do have some stories to share about prayer as I have experienced it. Not because I am an expert at prayer, mind you, and not that what works for me will necessarily work for you, but in the hope that my stories might help you with this spiritual practice we call prayer.

            So we are driving down to the Jersey shore on the Garden State Parkway a month ago, about 9:00 on a Sunday evening, the car loaded up not only with our bags but also with all the paraphernalia that Julia is taking with her to college, five of us crammed in together, when all of a sudden I hear a high-pitched whine coming from the left side of the vehicle. Definitely not from the engine, from the left side. So I pull over to the breakdown lane and, one eye on the traffic whizzing by, I try to see if there is anything going on with the two driver’s side wheels. Of course I see nothing.  Hoping against hope that I was just imagining things, I climb back in and we start off again, but once we get back up to speed there comes that high-pitched whine once again. So nothing else to do but get off at the next exit and look for a service station. We found one pretty quickly, but of course it is Sunday night and there is no mechanic on duty. The two men working the station, each with accents that seemed to indicate that they were recent arrivals to the States from perhaps Portugal, could not have been nicer or more helpful, even calling a mechanic and urging him to come help us out. But to no avail. A call to AAA produced no better results – they could only offer us a tow, but no mechanical help. So there was apparently only one thing to do – well, actually, two. As I pulled out my smart phone to look for a nearby hotel, where we could spend the night before trying to get the car fixed the following morning, I muttered a silent prayer. Nothing complicated, nothing eloquent like you might find in The Book of Common Prayer, just more along the lines of “Oh God, help us out here!”

            The next thing you know Christie is talking to a guy who had stopped to get his car filled up, who also seemed to be of Portuguese extraction, and who had overheard the attendants talking about our problem. So he comes over and tells us his sister-in-law has the same make car, and had the same problem, and that what she learned was that the cause was a pebble jammed between the wheel and the brake, and that the thing to do was to put the car in reverse, go forty feet, and then hit the brakes hard, and the pebble may fall out. With nothing to lose, I gave it a try, out popped a pebble, problem solved, and we were safely on our way.

But prayer is not always about happy endings, or getting what you want when you want it. Sometimes it is just all about being honest about how bad things really are. Ellen F. Davis, in her book “Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament,” tells of the minister who visited a parishioner in a nursing home. The parishioner would not speak to her or look at her, simply glaring ahead all the time.  Realizing that making chit chat was not going to help, she went straight to the Bible, opening the psalms and reading psalms of comfort. But they elicited no response, still the same stony stare. At last she turned to the psalms of lament, reading Psalm 102:

I have become like a vulture in the wilderness,

like an owl among the ruins….

I eat ashes like bread and mix my drink with tears

because of your indignation and anger,

because you have picked me up and tossed me aside….”

And for the first time that stony face softened, for the first time he looked at his visitor, for the first time he spoke, saying, “Finally, somebody who knows how I feel.”

            And prayer often is not even about us, or by us, or up to us. It turns out that on that same vacation as the car trip I told you about earlier I developed a blood clot in my left calf, which turned out to be a big deal, and very, very painful, for a couple weeks at least. All the time. 24/7. It made me quite grumpy, as chronic pain can tend to do to people, but it also made me feel just too bad even to pray for relief.  It was like just as I didn’t have much time for inter-personal relationships because of the pain, I just was not in the mood for that relationship with God which we often think of as prayer. Reaching out was the last thing I wanted to do – I just wanted to crawl inside myself and be left alone. But that is not to say prayer was not important to me. It was. It is just that I knew, that a member of this faith community, this church, I had a whole lot of people, starting with the chair of the Board of Deacons and some members of the choir who were in the know, praying for me. They were picking up the ball for me when I was just in no shape to run with it myself. And I have to say this was a great comfort to me, so much so that it got me to thinking about all those folk who do not have a church or faith community that can hold them in prayer in the tough times, and made me think how terribly lonely that must be.

            Paul the Apostle was right. We don’t know how to pray as we ought. But the good news for us is that it just doesn’t matter, because the Spirit is right there with us in our lack of knowing, our lack of diligence, even our lack of wanting to pray, interceding for us with sighs too deep for words.

So pray at all times, pray free from anxiety about whether you are doing it right, pray in the confidence that you have a divine prayer partner close at hand, praying with you, and for you. Amen.