prayer cuisine

Each morning when we wake up Winnie and I say a prayer together from the family devotions in the Book of Common Prayer. We’ve done this for over a year now so it’s well-memorized. Of course, there are the occasional brain glitches that result in stumbling over a word or phrase, but generally it pretty much trips off the tongue. It’s a good way to start off the day since it’s a better prayer than I could come up with at 6:30 in the morning, especially if I’ve had to comfort a crying kid at 2 am the night before. In fact, that particular prayer has been a source of comfort and strength for me at other times of the day, and it's rich enough to be an almost inexhaustible fountain for meditation.

Prayer can be as simple as “help!” or “thanks”. If I’m asked to pray aloud without prior preparation, I usually put together a combination of riffs based on prayers I’ve heard before. This isn’t to say that a prayer composed on the spot isn’t sincere. It’s just that composing a well thought-out, meaningful prayer isn’t easy.

So I’ve come to value prayers that have had a lot of thought put into them by people who are masters of Christian spirituality and of the English language. The question is, how do I pray them? In the world of prayer cuisine, “help!” is fast food and a prayer from the Book of Common Prayer is haute cuisine (and I suppose an extemporaneous prayer is leftovers). Unfortunately, it’s easy for me to gulp down a rote prayer as if it were fast food. But if I really want to get the most out of it, a previously written prayer is meant to be savored, chewed slowly so that my soul can access its full flavor and nourishment.

thoughts on faith

Today I heard someone say, “The longer we have something, the less we think we need to trust God for it.” That goes for everything: money, intelligence, health, safety, whatever. With the economy going downhill fast and many losing jobs, homes, and savings, our trust in ourselves is being severely shaken. But maybe that’s a good thing: it’s time to start trusting God again.

This is the third week of Advent. Advent is about preparation, a time of increasing our awareness of how much we need God. This morning I read a prayer from an Advent prayer calendar: “Mary put all of her trust in God without having to know why. Help us Lord to trust even when we don’t have any idea of how things will work out.” Mary reminds me that I tend to put things in the wrong order: I think “I’ll wait to do more of what God says when I’m more settled” when the best time to “practice my faith” is exactly when things are unsettled. I'm supposed to be waiting for God, not waiting to get my life in order.

I had a great conversation with the leader of my men’s group last night about stretching my faith, about doing things that I may think I don’t have enough time or money or ability to do and then trusting that God will show up. Things like tithing (giving an actual tenth of my pre-tax income) or taking time out of my busy schedule to help out at a homeless shelter or going out on a limb and volunteering to teach Sunday School or lead a growth group. He challenged me to exercise more faith.

That last thought might surprise you: “A pastor needs to learn about exercising faith?” A couple weeks ago I had a conversation with the pastor of a new church plant about the difference between leading and controlling. Maybe the difference is faith: who do I think is in charge, me or God?

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him and he will make your paths straight.” Proverbs 3:5-6.

Grace __________

The name of our church reveals something about us: we place a high value on community, on the “together” in “becoming like Jesus together.”

I was recently reminded of a phrase I’ve used a lot in the past but haven’t mentioned much in the near past: “It’s more important that we do things together than that we get things done.” It’s not that I don’t think results are important. It’s that I think that ends are not more important than means. As I’ve said more recently, “The journey is the destination.”

It’s easy to get impatient trying to get to the destination. And I hate it when other people point out my impatience! But that’s the point of traveling together. As it says in Proverbs, “iron sharpens iron.” Conflict is a part of being together. So learning to handle conflict well is important to any group that wants to be productive. In his book “Organizing Genius”, Warren Bennis gives many examples of teams of very disparate people that have given us world-changing products.

When are we in relationship? Mostly in growth groups and ministry teams. Being gathered for Sunday worship doesn’t really count because it’s too easy to breeze in and out and not really relate to anyone personally. On a Sunday morning more relating probably goes on in the parking lot than in the sanctuary.

So in our growth groups and ministry teams do we really believe that it’s more important that we do things together than that we get things done? How well do we celebrate or play together? How well do we listen to each other? How well do we support and encourage each other? Without these elements, group Bible study becomes dry, people start looking for reasons to skip meeting together, and ministry becomes merely a time-suck.

One of my jobs as a leader in the church is to help us travel well together. My prayer is not just that each of us will find our unique place in the church community and make a contribution to the whole that is far greater than the sum of the parts. I pray that we will connect with the life-giving joy of being with God and each other.

pain and words

In my through-the-Bible-in-a-year reading plan I’ve just finished Jeremiah and have started Lamentations. Jeremiah has been called “the weeping prophet” and Lamentations is his lament over the fall of Jerusalem. In my NIV Study Bible it mentions how Lamentations is used in both Jewish and Christian worship. Of course, the NIV is used mostly by American evangelicals so the idea of using a 5-chapter book of poems of lament in worship is a pretty foreign notion, which is why the practice has to be explained.

Which is too bad. If anyone can identify with the pain of losing a homeland it should be many of the Asian ethnicities that are now resident in the US. Chinese Americans called themselves “sojourners”. Japanese Americans have lost their Japanese-ness in the eyes of Japanese nationals. These are examples of how the Asian American church should be able to identify with Jeremiah and find a sympathetic voice in Lamentations. But I can’t remember a single sermon I’ve ever heard on Lamentations 2:11: “…I am in torment within, my heart is poured out on the ground because my people are destroyed…”

I find that it’s hard to imagine reading Lamentations regularly and allowing the pain that’s expressed to become my pain. I’d rather follow the American evangelical tradition of skipping to the nice parts (like 3:22-24 “…great is your faithfulness…”). I don’t want to deal with pain. I'd rather ignore it. And the Jewish notion of the word as sacred in itself is very different from modern evangelicalism’s view that what we really want is the essential meaning. We don’t have the patience to listen to or read whole books of the Bible (albeit short ones) as part of our worship. We want the bullet-point version (even Cliff’s Notes are too long) that can be put up on a PowerPoint slide. Yet the words of the Word are meant to take our time, to occupy an important part of our lives. We need to learn to read the Bible for transformation, not just information. I remember praying with a Jewish friend who would say, “Help us to understand Your words” as we discussed the Bible together. It sounded odd to me because I’m so used to thinking of the Bible as “Your Word”. But now it makes sense to me: it’s the very words that are transforming when I give them time.

I’ve grown up in evangelicalism so I appreciate the honor that’s given to study and proclamation of the Word. But I also want to learn from other Word-centered traditions. I don’t want to become just a student of the Bible. Somehow I want to allow the Word to speak into my humanity and form me and to form us as a church community.

growth: systematic or organic?

At a meeting of local Covenant pastors yesterday we talked a bit about some of the latest thinking in church leadership. One person mentioned that it’s important for us to set goals so that “we can know how to make people into what we want them to become” (or words to that effect).

I know that the intention wasn’t to conceive of the church community as a factory that mechanically produces mature Christians, but it’s easy to fall into that kind of thinking. If we just define the goal and then design the program we’ll be successful.

But it’s not true that growth is simply a matter of letting whatever happens happen. One pastor mentioned John 3:8, that the Spirit is like the wind that blows wherever it wants and we can’t control it. It’s true that those born of the Spirit may be propelled by forces that aren’t always visible, but that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to judge their spiritual vitality.

Jesus gave us a better gauge (kinda makes sense to see what he thinks, eh?). He said that if we pay attention to the conditions for growth we will bear fruit, even up to a hundredfold. And he clearly outlined the conditions. Check out Dale’s sermon on Luke 5 to find out what the conditions are (September 7).

So how much is under our control? And how much is up to God? Someone has said, “Pray like everything depends on God, work like everything depends on you.” In other words, we don’t know. That’s a formula for trust and humility. It’s also a formula for frustration at times. But it’s also a formula for wonder and gratitude.

internet v. incarnation

I had the privilege today of hearing Os Guinness speak, a prominent evangelical Christian social critic and author. During his talk (on how the Church can maintain integrity while engaging our modern society) he related how a young person had said to him, “Why didn’t God just wait for the internet?” The topic was how to best communicate the Gospel, the Good News that is at the core of the Christian message, that God offers a relationship to us through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

This brought up an interesting comparison between the internet and the Incarnation. To modern thinking, the Incarnation was terribly inefficient. The internet is much better at spreading information. But the Incarnation was not just about information. That’s why God used a human being to communicate with us. God is interested in relationship not just information. So he became a human being. That action has said so much that the full meaning of it will take eternity to unpack. You can’t boil the Gospel down to a few bullet points.

temporarily abled

“All of us are only temporarily abled.” Al Hsu, an editor for InverVarsity Press and author of “Suburban Christianity” made this statement in the latest issue of Christianity Today. He was reflecting on the experience of having a son with Down syndrome.

As my fiftieth birthday approaches the phrase “temporarily abled” really hit me. For most of my life I’ve been trying to become more abled. When I was in grade school I was a runt, smallest in my class, last one chosen for sports teams, getting by on my meager charm because of a lack of physical prowess. I barely survived my junior high years at one of the roughest schools in the City, next door to a high school that had been the scene of race riots only a couple years before. Ironically I finally started to get some height when my parents (at great sacrifice) put me into a private Christian school for high school (possibly for my own survival).

But now the temporal nature of my physical abilities is catching up to me (and a lot of my friends: you know who you are!). It gets harder and harder to maintain, let alone increase, my “abled-ness”. Not that I’m giving away my elliptical trainer! We shouldn’t disregard the physical abilities that God gives us. These are gifts, and gifts are meant to be enjoyed and used well in gratitude to the Giver. But they are temporary.

We all long for the day when “this mortal shall put on immortality” and there will be no more pain or tears or sucking wind in the middle of a fast-paced basketball game. But that’s a hope that’s not yet realized and will be realized only in God’s time. While we’re stuck with the bodies we have now, let’s allow them to be a reminder of what Joan Mahler of L’Arche USA told Al Hsu: “All of us are abled in some ways and disabled in others.” One way that the world will know the love of God is by how I treat the disabled around me while I remember that I am only temporarily abled.

On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. 1 Corinthians 12:22-23