2018-09-19
Brooke Strong
Scripture: Mark 12:28-34; Phoenix Affirmations II
When Jesus is asked what the greatest commandment is, each of the four gospels has its own distinct take on his answer. Because we are focusing on the gospel of Mark this year, we have just heard it in his version: “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength’” (Mark 12:29-30). At the heart of a Christian’s life, in other words, is love of God. Our central responsibility as followers of Jesus is to love God.
Basic as it sounds, though, as fundamental as it is to a faithful life, I confess I’m not sure exactly what that means. If I love Mary, I show it with a hug and a kiss; I try to listen carefully to her; I spend time with her; I do some chores that help in the household routine (though never as many as she does!); and I give her gifts for Christmas and her birthday—though some fall wildly flat, as when, for her 40th birthday, I gave her the most selfish gift I have ever given, a cookbook called Death by Chocolate (“Here, Honey, this is for you!”)! To show my love for Mary, I try to show affection and to share tasks.
All fine and good, right. And I try to do the same thing, in particular ways, with our children and our grandchild and people in the church and friends. You know what I’m talking about: we show love for any of these people with our actions and our helping and even our buying or making of gifts.
But how do we do that with God? How do we show our love for the Creator of all things, the Giver of all blessings, the One who needs nothing? I can’t buy God a pair of earrings, or share in making dinner, or help in hanging pictures in the living room. There’s nothing I can do for God.
If we’re to love God, I suspect the only thing we can really do is offer God our time and our presence. Having a seven-month-old granddaughter makes this clearer for me. I can buy Allie some clothes to wear and some furniture for her nursery. But my guess is the best thing I can do for her is to spend time with her. To hold her in my arms and to play peekaboo with her and to sing to her and smile at her—this is the currency of my love for our granddaughter. And isn’t it the same with God? It’s my presence and my attention that reveal my love for the Holy One. My love is revealed with my time and my focus.
And this, of course, is what prayer is. To give time and attention to God is to pray. And while many here see prayer as central to their lives, I’m guessing that others have neglected it, and still others may well be suspicious of it. What a waste of time! What an unproductive task! I’ve got to make dinner, I have to pick up the kids, I have a huge work project due tomorrow. So why pray?
We pray because that’s what connects us to the Source of our lives. Prayer is what lets us show our love for the One who showers us with monarch butterflies, the One who gives us the towering Rockies, the One who births magical life here on this tiny little planet in an obscure corner of the universe. Prayer is what lets us show our love for the One who gives us peace in our anxiety, the One who holds us in our grief, the One who gives us direction and mission to make a difference in the world. To take all that for granted would be a travesty. It would betray the wonders of grace.
So let’s think together about prayer. Some of you no doubt know “ACTS” as an acronym for prayer. Adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication are the basics of our prayer life. That’s a somewhat formal way of putting it. Lifting up those same four elements of prayer in a less formal way, a friend of mine puts it this way: Wow, Oops, Thanks, and Gimme.
My guess is most of us aren’t shy about the Gimme prayers, the prayers of supplication. “No atheists in foxholes” names the reality. When we’re desperate, when we crave something, we say it: please God, heal Jimmy, make my biopsy be negative, keep Hurricane Florence from devastating the Carolinas. We’re quick and forthright with these heartfelt desires, these Gimme prayers of supplication. We want God to know what we care deeply about.
Many of us make a regular habit of giving thanks, as well. Mary and I always say a grace before dinner and we express our gratitude for the blessings of that day. If you haven’t tried it, a regular practice of giving thanks at the end of the day—sometimes called an “Examen”—can attune us to the simple wonders of our lives. Prayers of gratitude can move us off those places we’re stuck, the resentments and frustrations that sometimes dominate the monologue in our heads. Instead of obsessing about a worry or a slight, we stop to say, “Thank you, God.”
The other two forms of prayer, confession, or “Oops,” and praise, or “Wow!” may not be as much a part of our daily relationship with God. Confession has come upon hard times in this culture, as seemingly fewer and fewer people say, “I’m sorry.” A recent article highlighted the difficulties Jewish rabbis were facing this year in preparing for Yom Kippur and the High Holy Days. Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement, and rabbis, in preparing their sermons, were having a difficult time finding examples of atonement in daily life. What they see is public figures seldom confessing to any misjudgments or wrongdoing. Rarely do people own up to their mistakes. So why confess, goes the thinking—I haven’t done anything wrong! All of which ignores the fact that we are imperfect creatures, who let each other down and fall short of expectations and make mistakes. Prayers of confession are not so common. But they could stand a revival.
The other form of prayer that may not get its due is the prayer of adoration, the “Wow!” prayer. Prayers of adoration are not unlike prayers of thanksgiving. But a prayer of thanksgiving is a prayer uttered in gratitude for a particular blessing or gift: “Thank you, God, for my spouse, or my job or the satisfying conversation I just had with my child.” That’s gratitude.
Praise, or adoration, or “Wow!” is slightly different. It just says to God, for no particular reason, “You’re amazing. You’re stunning. You fill my heart with joy.” Adoration is like general esteem or respect or adulation: God, you are astounding! It, too, could stand a revival.
These four models can give a kind of structure to prayer. Another way of thinking about prayer may be to remember that it is less about talking than it is about listening. The talking is important: it lets God know what we want, what’s on our hearts and minds. At least as important as God knowing what’s on our hearts and minds, though, is our knowing what’s on God’s heart and mind. Silence and listening are crucial for discerning the presence and leading of God.
There is what may be an apocryphal story told about an interview with Mother Teresa some years ago. “In response to a remark [she’s made] that she prays every day, a reporter asks her, ‘What do you say to God?’
“‘I don’t say anything,’ Mother Teresa responds. ‘I listen.’
“‘Then what does God say to you?’
“‘God doesn’t say anything,’ she replies. ‘God listens.’
“Confused, the reporter asks, ‘How can you pray when both you and God do nothing but listen?’
“‘Explaining this,’ Mother Teresa responds, ‘would take far longer than you have time for’” (Eric Elnes, The Phoenix Affirmations, p. 26).
Prayer may be more like an immersion than anything else. I swim in God, and God swims in me. God delights in me, so I can delight in God. I live, and it’s God’s gift. I will unquestionably die, and that death will be to fall gently into tender arms, arms that will never let me go. To be a Christian is to trust in something sublime beyond the stuff of this life.
So to love God is to pray. It’s to celebrate life’s wonder. It’s to be still and to listen for God’s sweet and insistent whispers. The Phoenix Affirmations make clear, though, that there are also other dimensions of loving God. It’s vital that we declare some of those affirmations. To love God, says the first affirmation, it’s crucial to remember that we Christians have a distinctive and beautiful path on which we are walking towards what’s holy, but that that path is not the only path.
In saying that Christianity is not the only path, there’s a fine line that we’re walking. On the one hand, we want to avoid the impression that, in matters of faith, anything goes. Not anything goes. Money is the object of faith of countless Americans. That won’t do as an object of faith. Gambling and alcohol and pornography are the object of faith for untold others. Uh-uh. In apparently more benign manifestations of devotion, for some people their spouse is the object of faith, or a cottage on Lake Michigan, or some vague notion of human goodness. No. These are all great and wonderful things. But they are not the rock on which we stand. They will not sustain us when the cancer strikes or the abuse is recalled or one’s beloved dies. Not anything goes. If we’re to survive and thrive, we need to put our trust in deep wells, wells that will sustain us in good times and bad. Myriad imposters are incapable of bearing that load.
That said, though, it is also true that Christianity is not the only way to approach what’s holy and true. It’s my way. And I trust it’s the way for most of you. But others will find light in Buddhism or Hinduism or Islam or Judaism. Despite the popular wisdom, these various religions are not all identical. They have distinct and irreconcilable differences. But it’s fair to say that each of those paths provides a unique and profound path up the mountain that leads to God’s light. They are different paths, with their own distinctive challenges and vistas, but they each lead to what we Christians call grace. While not anything goes, we affirm “the legitimacy of other paths that God may provide for humanity” (Affirmation 1).
Another of the Phoenix Affirmations is the third one, that we celebrate God’s glory in every dimension of life and death. It’s not that some areas of life are sacred and others secular. It’s not that some activities are within God’s purview and others are outside of it. It’s rather that all of life is sacred and God is intimately involved in it all.
This may not sound like anything significant to say. But when life is segregated in some quarters between sacred and profane; when some people dismiss the natural world as somehow less than the human world; when Christians too-often assume themselves to be better than those of other religions—when life is split into dimensions that are special and set apart, on one hand, and dimensions that are ordinary and of little worth, on the other, then we have bifurcated God and denied the grandeur of the whole earth, indeed the whole universe. To love God is to celebrate that God made it all and that every bit of it is enchanted. Every single bit.
The Phoenix Affirmations declare that the great historic expressions of faith all have deep merit. They affirm that all of life is filled with the Spirit of God. They call us to a life of prayer—“Wow, Oops, Thanks, and Gimme.” And one more thing. They remind us of the importance of this thing we do together here on Sunday morning. This holy thing. This imperfect but remarkable and grace-filled thing. Those Affirmations affirm the importance of “Expressing our love [for God] in worship that is as sincere, vibrant, and artful as it is scriptural.” Sincere, vibrant, artful, scriptural.
Worship needs to be sincere. Here we bring our whole selves to God. We bring both our certainties and our doubts. We bring the parts of us of which we’re ashamed, as well as the parts of which we’re proud. We bring our despair as well as our hope, our injuries as well as our healing, our failure as well as our success. Worship is nothing if it’s just artifice and pretend—if it’s a painted-on smile when the tears are yearning to come out, if it’s false bravado and confidence when all we’re feeling is lost and alone. Our worship has to be sincere.
Along with the Phoenix Affirmations, we also seek to let worship be vibrant. We look for what gives it life and energy. This vibrancy is not something we can create or manufacture. It’s only something we can be open to. For us worship leaders, vibrancy means putting everything we have into preparation, into listening for God’s voice in scripture and song, into an openness to being surprised. I fail at it as much as anybody. I fall short of the best hopes we all have. But it matters to me.
For you who come here, I hope that vibrant worship means that you bring your whole selves. I think vibrant worship means singing even if you don’t particularly like to sing or if you don’t warm to the particular music selected. Sadly, there’s almost no place else in this society where we sing together. Most families don’t do it; most of us don’t go to Irish pubs; and the National Anthem is almost invariably performed now rather than sung as our common anthem. When you come to worship, sing as if your life depends on it. It doesn’t matter if you’re good. It matters only that you sing joyfully.
You may not know it, but it also matters that you listen to scripture and sermon and prayers and music and even announcements with a sense of vibrant expectation. Preachers can sense when congregations are attentive, when they care about finding a measure of God’s grace in their lives. The story is told, perhaps apocryphally, of the congregant who said to the preacher after the worship service, “You didn’t preach particularly well today.” To which the preacher replied, “That may be. But at least part of the reason for that was that you didn’t listen particularly well.” This act of preaching and articulating holy grace is something we engage in together. For vibrant worship to happen, we all have to do our parts and to bring to it a sense of expectancy and hope. Along with being artful and deeply scriptural, we seek to let our worship be sincere and vibrant.
So the word comes to us today to love God with everything we have. May we do that in worship, in prayer, in honoring that all is sacred, and in valuing other traditions, filled in it all with a sense of wonder and grace and hope.