The Bending of the Knee

Some years ago a person came into my office to talk about repentance and forgiveness. Well, he didn't
really put it that way. He said that whenever the river of his wrong-doings get jammed up & he has not
cleared out the dam, he finds that there is no other way to deal with it besides actually and physically getting
down on his knees in prayer.

This struck a chord in me. My own reflections on repentance follow a similar line, though I am slow to
do what this member does. I remember a line from a novel that deals with this most directly. I forget the
name of the novel & the name of the author, but it goes like this, "Anyone who has fallen to their knees while vomiting has discovered, if quite by accident, the position of prayer."

I don't really want to follow that metaphor too exactly, but it is just to this point. There is something about
physically rearranging one's posture that makes an honest & authentic prayer more possible. Especially
when prayer requires humility as it so often must.

The wisdom of all this is actually contained in the Hebrew word "blessed." The word, transliterated as "berakah" literally means, "to bend the knee.” Solomon, the third & most wealthy king of Israel, got down on his knees & stretched out his arms in front of all the people as he offered a blessing to God at the dedication of the great Temple in Jerusalem [II Chronicles 6:13, I Kings 8:54].

I would be willing to give almost anything to see this most wealthy and worldly-blessed of the kings of
Israel, knee-bowed and body-bent in front of God and everyone! It is an odd, almost humorous picture, to
think of Solomon--in "all his glory" as Jesus puts it--down there on his knees, his velvet and jewel bedecked
rump pointing skyward, offering God a blessing.

For Jesus, the most blessed may not be the most materially prosperous. Or, to put it differently, blessings and happiness may come in unexpected circumstances. Those who mourn, who are poor, who are brokenhearted, who are persecuted, who are meek, who are hungry are especially singled out by Jesus as
being blessed [Matthew 5]. Jesus also seems to love the dramatic use of irony. I can imagine that he delighted in the surprised looks on the faces of his listeners when he said, "Blessed are the poor, for yours is the kingdom of Heaven." I'd loved to have been able to hang around the coffee hour conversations following that sermon! For those who thought of blessing as resulting in material well-being, the Nazarene's notions of blessing must’ve been a thought-provoking lesson at best.

So, here we are in another Lent, a season of reflection on our humanity, our poverty of spirit, our brokenness. For those who are able (and that's not all of us, I know), we might consider rearranging our
posture somehow so that an appropriate position of prayer is reached.

And we shall be most blessed.

Salvation is Here!

Sally and I do a "day-old" bread run each Friday morning for the Salvation Army in Waukesha. Last

Friday we parked the truck outside the Cousins on Bluemound and as I walked in, the person at the
cash register called out to the prep area, "Salvation is Here!" I thought, "Wow that certainly puts a lot of
responsibility on me."

I'd be up for it as long as it doesn't involve a cross. Alas, it always does. Maybe not the very one Jesus was on, but he did suggest that each of us must bear our own cross. Bringing in the Kingdom of Heaven always involves some sort of sacrifice, some sort of "cross." Some sort of giving up something in the hope that God will do something with it and make peace possible.

Little contributions here and there. Serving at a meal program at the Hope Center. Driving a truck to
deliver donated furniture for people who have unfurnished apartments. Visiting folks in our
congregation who are unable to make it to church. Praying with all our hearts for folks in difficult
times. All these things mean we give up something. Time, Talents, Treasure. That's how the kingdom
works. And no matter how little our contribution, God works with it to make it powerful.

John Calvin once told a marvelous story about a little girl who saw a beautiful flower in her mother's garden
and picked it and presented it to her mom with all the  joy a child can possess. How could she know that her mother was planning to "show" that flower in the annual flower show in town? But the mother received the
gift from her daughter as if it were made of pure gold.

So does Almighty God.

My favorite prayer from my favorite theologian, Thomas Merton, goes like this:

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.
 "I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you." 

And because of that Salvation is Here and the Kingdom
of Heaven is "at hand."

Come and Go

 I am struck especially by the verbs “Come” and “Go” in this story. It is representative, I think, of the mystical rhythm of our faith in Jesus Christ.

I’ve always loved these lines from Matthew’s telling of the Easter story (chapter 20). It’s a kind of poem when reduced to a focus on the verbs:

 The Angel came and rolled back the stone “Come” the Angel said “and see where he lay.” Go tell the men that he is risen

He is going ahead of you. Jesus met them and they came to him

“Go to Galilee” Jesus said. There they’ll see me.

 We come to an encounter with Christ and he bids us go and tell; go and do.

 Imagine how these two women, “Mary Magdalene and the other Mary”, must have felt in that at once terrifying and beautiful encounter in the garden on that first Easter morning. Wouldn't they want to have stayed there where he "walks with me and he talks with me and tells me I am his own?" Wouldn't you?

 This grand and wonderful story is, however, all about going and not staying. After hearing of the empty tomb, the beauty of the garden in that early morning, the lovely sounds of the birds in the trees, the warmth of the rising sun, we would all like to stay.

  But we must go.

 Go and tell others.

 Go to Galilee.

 When we join churches, we make for ourselves a place of delight and comfort and most of us would like to stay here. But the Gospel compels us to go.

 Go to the difficult places; the broken places, in Waukesha, in Milwaukee, and tell of the wonders in store even for the most broken in body, soul and spirit. There is good news for us all even in the darkest of times and places. We all need someone who has witnessed the resurrection to tell us that our broken hearts are not the end of the story but the beginning of newness of life in Christ.

 "Go to Galilee," Jesus says, "for there I have work for you to do."

 This garden has a lovely view, but Galilee has need of you.

 Come and Go. He’s going ahead of us and has promised to be with us even to the end of the age.

 So should we go and tell the Good News of Jesus and his love.

A Quebec Grave

On a trip in 1991 to find our ancestors south of Montreal, my brother and I and our two sons were combing a certain graveyard where we had already found our main ancestors. 

We came across a grave that absolutely stunned us.

There is a certain serenity in looking through graveyards and reading gravestones for what they tell us about life long ago. And it was in this lighthearted manner that we were prowling through these cemeteries. We first found our earliest known ancestors' graves and found also that they had lived to ripe old ages of 83. Certainly a ripe old age for that day.

But then we came across a grave that we will not soon forget. It was a large grave for a great, great aunt (my great great grandmother's sister). But it was the grave next to hers that stunned us. It was a long stone, perhaps 4 or 5 feet in length and only 2 no more than 3 feet in height. And the top was rounded into four curved tops so that while it was one piece of stone, it looked like four little stones in one.

As we walked closer to this oddly shaped stone, we began to wonder what it could be. Then the horror became clear as we read the names and the dates of death. Four children. All died in 1877. All died in June of 1877. All died within 8 days of one another.

A three year old named Ellen died first on June 6th. Her brother Frank died the next day at age 5. John, aged 10 died 2 days later and finally the infant, Philip died on the 13th. He had just turned one.

We began to imagine what could have happened. A fire? No, they probably would have all died the same day. A person gone berserk? Possible but pretty far fetched. Alas, an all too common explanation for those days. Diphtheria. Influenza. Typhoid. Measles.

Childhood diseases that few children die of anymore in our country at least. It is hard to imagine the horror of that June for that family. I have thought a lot lately about that family, the long sleepless nights. The cries of the children. The whimpering. The helplessness of the adults. The wiping of perspiring brows. The pacing. The waiting. The hoping beyond hope. And I wonder, did John, the 10 year old, know when his 3 year old sister and his 5 year old brother died? Or was he mercifully delirious and oblivious of the death that surrounded him?

Then finally came death. Swiftly. In one week all the children were gone. One son survived only because he was in his mother's womb. Thomas Joseph was born in 1877 several months after that bitter June.

We stood and stared at that tombstone which was really four little tombstones. And the two boys, my son Ryan and my brother's son, Brian, who take great pride in standing up to any Steven King or slasher movie ever made, were visible shaken by these stones and the story they told by their silent witness.

As we looked closer we saw engraving on the front of the base on which the grave stones sat. Carved in what looked like a black basalt rock and overgrown with grass making it very hard to read. We pushed back the grass and there were these words, "Goodbye dear mother and father. We go to prepare a place for you in heaven. While we were with you, we did not belong to you but only to our faithful savior Jesus Christ, the Good Shepherd, who cares for us now."

There were many other things to see on our trip to the farming area south of Montreal, but this grave stands out in our memory. For when we speak of the valley of the shadow of death, we rarely imagine a week like my great aunt and uncle had in that awful June of 1877. It is hard for us to imagine a valley so deep and dark as that.

And yet, death is death. And grief is grief. And the good Shepherd is the Good Shepherd.

The Job Question

Not the question facing the Obama administration and the Romney candidacy. Not "Jahb" but "Jobe". The good guy that has bad things happen to him. The question goes, "Why would a good and all powerful God allow evil to prevail and the innocent to suffer?"
Never mind the oddness of the story. If I were not a believer, this piece of scripture would be altogether easy to ridicule. Satan makes a bet with God that he (Satan) could get his most righteous servant to denounce the almighty God. God agrees to the bet (oh good Lord--are you kidding me? Who wrote this, Aaron Sorkin?).
God takes everything away from his righteous servant Job (not Steve). The list of what Job loses is almost endless. And then he and his buddy Satan sits back to see what happens. What they are waiting for, of course, is for Job to curse God. He doesn't of course, but along the way, he makes some serious accusations, Job 10:8-10:

“Your hands shaped me and made me.
    Will you now turn and destroy me? 

Remember that you molded me like clay. 
    Will you now turn me to dust again? 

Did you not pour me out like milk
    and curdle me like cheese,

I'm a Wisconsin guy, so the idea of God curdling me is interesting if not out-right affectionate.
 Aren't you "in charge" Holy God?" If so, why must we put up with this contradictory nonsense about the good suffering and the evil getting all the good stuff?
So, God responds to Job's temerity with a juggernaut of a response out of the whirlwind. "who is this that darkens counsel without knowledge?

Forgive me, but this sounds too much like "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" from the Wizard of Oz"
Brace  yourself like an man and I will answer you.
Wow!
Well, what is the answer to this bedeviling question about God's responsibility for evil?

Tom Are Jr. has this quiet and moving resolution from his own experience

I took my four-year-old daughter to the emergency room. Sarah had fallen and needed three little stitches in her bottom lip. The nurses strapped her into a velcro blanket they called a "papoose." it wraps around a child so that she cannot move. Sarah cried. they placed the sterile filed over her face with the hole over her bleeding lower lip. I searched for her hands to hold. They were plastered to h er side, unable to move. She looked through a little hole in the sterile sheet while the instruments darted in and out. She cried, "Daddy make them stop. Make them stop Daddy, please. Daddy it hurts!" "Be still sweet heart. It will be alright," I said, feeling anything but alright myself. "Hold on. Daddy's right here. Daddy's right here." "But Daddy it hurts. Make them stop!" It was accusation. It was plea. it was prayer.

Eventually the process was over and the medical staff took off the papoose. Then Sarah jumped into her father's arms. Her petitions to "make them stop" went unanswered. Her father hadn't stopped them. But now she just "clung to me with an unwavering trust." She didn't cast her father aside as one who was not capable of fulfilling the most simple of promises. She didn't walk or run away. She clung tightly to him because she believes that he is the one who will be there for her beyond the evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.
Suffering is a reality and God's place in it is just trustworthy if we are stubborn enough to believe that.

While I sit drinking my Wittenberg Beer with Philip and Amsdorf, the Gospel runs its course and overthrows empires. -- Martin Luther

Karl Barth connects this Martin Luther quote to the Gospel lesson for tomorrow, Mark 4:26ff Unlike Jesus Kingdom parables about building houses, this parable makes clear that the Kingdom of God will come whether we work at it or not. Building buildings needs stone masons, carpenters, joiners, roofers and on and on. The growth of the Kingdom of God as progress from seed to plant will happen whether one "sets hands to work or folds them or even lays them in [our] lap [we] can only be a spectator and affirm that it takes place "He knoweth not how" (Mark 4:28)--in a process which continues both when he works and also when he does not, but is perhaps, in the words of Luther, while, "Drinking beer with Philip and Amsdorf" (Philip Melanchthon and Nicolaus von Amsdorf)
Barth goes on (Book IV, vol 2 pp632 ff) to contrast these two parables of building and sowing

It is a matter of their [Christians] spiritual growth, and not therefore of a growth which they themselves can direct. It will continually have for them the greatest of surprises, sometimes glad and sometime bitter. In moments when [the church] is resolved to offer "reasonable service," the plans and efforts of Christians will have to be ruled by it, and not the reverse. To their own astonishment it will continually exalt the lowly, enrich the poor, give joy to the sad and make heroes of the feeble.... And as it grows spiritually, there is no compulsion but it may grow in the first way, extensively and numerically. (p. 650.)

 What are the marks of such growth? Barth lists them nicely:

• growth in faith (2Cor 10:15)
• increase in love (2 Thess 1:3)
• increase in the knowledge of God (Col 1:10ff) with strengthening endurance and joyful patience.
• growth in the fruits of righteousness (2Cor 9:10)
• growth in grace (2 Pet 3:18)
• Incrase of comfort (2 Cor 1:5)
• Thanksgiving (2 Cor 4:15)
• the grace for every good work (2 Cor 9:8)
• Hope (Rom 15:13)
• enrichment of love in knowledge and understanding (Phil 1:9)

And then he summarizes by saying that the increase of growth for the Christian Community is "both horizontal and vertical" and is the spiritual progress of the sancti in their relationship to the sancta.

Back in the day, Paul Tillich was the most liberal of all theologians. Well, not entirely true, of course. There was John A. T. Robinson (not to be confused with the Mayflower's pastor) and, of course, our good friend Rudy Bultmann. But in the mainstream, Tillich was pretty liberating for this twenty-something guy who wanted to go into the profession of pastoral ministry.

He was, after all, a "religious socialist" and while I wasn't too sure what that meant exactly, I did like the turn of phrase. It made him a radical on this continent, his adopted home, and I liked the idea of being his intellectual friend but certainly not his equal.


But now, when I sneak back into the Tillichian territory, I find him marvelously orthodox even confessional. In preparing for tomorrow's sermon on Romans 8 I find myself in his debt in marvelous ways. First of all, he uses the Revised Standard Version rendering of "sighs too deep for words." The RSV was the only "mainline" option in those days. Published in the mid 1940s it was all we had then besides the King James Version (or as so many of my parishioners say, the "Saint James Version.") But on this particular phrase, the RSV gets it just right. 

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for word. And he who searches the hearts of men knows what is the mind of the Spirit , because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

The King James version has "groanings that cannot be uttered." Not bad, but this most poetic of all translations misses the poetic mark while, as always, remaining most faithful to the Greek: στεναγμοῖς ἀλαλήτοις Groanings that cannot be uttered. Groanings is just not the right word there, it seems to me. 


Luther's translation uses "mit unaussprechlichem Seufzen" --unspeakable sighings. Just right.


Back to my friend Tillich.


He notes the marvelous contradiction in Paul who certainly knew how to pray--he was trained as a Pharisee, who can pray better than they? But because of that he knew that he did not know how to pray and found himself in need of the Spirit of God to help him "pray as we ought."


I'm a professional who does a lot of praying in public. If I'm in a public space and there is need of a prayer, I'm always asked to pray. I am, after all a professional and I always oblige. I say, "Let us pray" and then launch into some sort of formulaic prayer that I have likely prayed many times. 


I pray publicly pretty well. I get compliments on my prayers. But they are all pretty self-conscious.


Tillich in his book The New Being has a marvelous chapter on this very passage from Romans 8. In it he notes that there are two kinds of prayer. The fixed liturgical prayer and a free spontaneous prayer and both are important but lacking in a certain way. 


The first is lacking because while poetic (the best prayers are written by poets) they become "mechanical or incomprehensible or both." Even the "Jesus Prayer" or the "our Father." Jesus said, "Pray like this" not "Pray this." And yet this may be our only universally memorized prayer.


I have a good friend who is an Episcopalian priest who confesses that he doesn't know how to pray spontaneously. All the prayers he is confident about are written out. He is suspicious of prayers that use the phrase, "Oh Jesus we just come to you..." He calls them "wejus" prayers. The Evangelicals pray in this way. It is an attempt at humility and while they have the gift of spontaneity, they often lack poetry. "We are not better off" Tillich says. Spontaneous prayer is a prayer addressed to someone called God but seems more addressed to someone "who is actually another man to whom we tell things, often at great length, to whom we give thanks and of whom we ask favors." Such prayers don't prove we "know how to pray as we ought."

The liturgical Churches which use classical formulas should ask themselves whether they do not prevent the people of our time from praying as they honestly can. And the non-liturgical Churches who give the freedom to make up prayers at any moment, should ask themselves whether they do not profane prayer and deprive it of its mystery.

This is the day of Pentecost--the day of the Spirit and perhaps we should allow the Spirit to do the Spirit's work.
In a deep humility we ought, Tillich says, confess that we are in need of a most holy help in the art of prayer.


Prayer is humanly impossible Tillich says! 


We are having a conversation with somebody who is not our buddy nor ourselves, but someone who is nearer to us that we are to ourselves. We pray to someone who knows us better than we know ourselves. God knows "all the unconscious tendencies out of which our conscious words grow." Prayer is humanly impossible. We all have ulterior motives in our prayers and God, fortunately, knows them all.


Prayer must always begin with the confession that we don't know how to pray. Then and only then can real prayer begin.