waiting

I’ve been listening to a well-known worship song that says strength comes from waiting on the Lord. What does it mean to wait on God?

This particular song has a pretty catchy hook that’s driving and upbeat. It implies that waiting on God is an exciting experience and even a bit cool. Drums and electric guitars can do that to words: they’ll make anything seem hip. But waiting on God isn’t always something that you do while tapping your toes or beating out a catchy rhythm with your fingers. Sometimes it’s dreadfully boring and seems to stretch on forever. Sometimes it’s painful to the point of agony and you just want the waiting to end. All the time you wonder where God is. Instead of tapping your toes you want to scream at God for not showing up, but you can’t because he’s not there.

Over a third of the Psalms are prayers of lament or anger (67 of the 150, according to one list I’ve seen). But it’s pretty unusual for us to acknowledge in our worship that we are sad or angry. What sort of music would you use for an angry psalm, a prayer that expresses the deepest heartache of someone who feels that God has forsaken her/him?

I don’t have a good answer for this, other than to say that we need songs of sorrow and anger as well as songs of praise and joy. And praise and anger aren’t necessarily mutually opposed. Sometimes we’re angriest at the ones we love the most, because they’ve made us wait when we didn’t want to. But they often have their reasons, and our anger becomes a phase, a season that helps us get to know ourselves and our loved one better.

conversing with God

What is prayer? The simplest answer is “talking with God.” But what sort of conversations do I have with God?

I have a tendency to think about my conversations with God as if they were business meetings. Business meetings need to have an agenda and some sort of productive result. But is God a high-powered businessman with a very full schedule and very little time for small talk? Is prayer like a board meeting with Donald Trump? And if I’m not effective enough will he say, “You’re fired”?

When I’m hanging out with friends, on the other hand, there’s no pressure to have a resulting action item. I’ve never had a friendly chat end with, “So what’s our takeaway from this time together?” The conversation meanders and is about anything that we find pleasing to both of us. Or the topic may be something that’s important to one of us, and as a result it’s important to the other person, too.

I often begin my prayer times by repeating to myself the phrase “your quieting love”, taken from Zephaniah 3:17: “he will quiet you with his love.” God loves to have me spend time with him, not because he has an agenda for me to accomplish, but because he loves me. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t think that I need to change or that there aren't things he wants me to do. But what can be more life-changing or empowering than spending time with God and baring my soul to the transforming power of his Spirit? Prayer can be a conversation between friends that encourages, heals, and challenges. The shorter the business meeting, the better. But “pray continually.” (I Thessalonians 5:17)

about Pharisees

Jesus tells a story about a tax collector and a Pharisee who go to the Temple to pray. In Jesus’ day, all of his hearers wanted to be accepted and honored like the Pharisee. Tax collectors were thought to have turned their backs on any effort toward religious respectability. So Jesus’ hearers were stunned when Jesus said that God was more interested in what the tax collector had to say than in the Pharisee's prayer.

But now we hear this story very differently. Preachers hold up the Pharisees as the enemies of Jesus and examples of how baldly legalistic the religious establishment of Jesus’ day had become, making the Pharisees fair game for youth pastors everywhere. We think that we can now see through the Pharisees’ religious game-playing and power-grabbing. No self-respecting American evangelical would aspire to be like a Pharisee.

So maybe we need to re-cast this story. Instead of the Pharisee and the tax collector, we could call the story “the good Christian and the Pharisee”. And we’ll all be surprised that God is more interested in listening to a Pharisee who has a change of heart than in a good Christian who is locked in her/his ways.

Easter faith

It’s early on Easter morning and still dark outside. Appropriately, I’ve just read the words from John’s Gospel: “Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb…” (John 20:1) Why did Mary get up so early? She didn’t have a clock radio waking her up, she couldn’t flick a switch to turn on the lights and get out of bed, there were no streetlights to guide her way, and the tomb wasn’t a tourist attraction yet with signs pointing to the site. She went because it was a matter of life and death: someone she loved dearly had died and she couldn’t sleep.

I haven’t been to a sunrise service in years. Whatever motivated Mary isn’t motivating me. And it doesn’t motivate most people who celebrate Easter. Some kids get up early because they’re excited that the Easter Bunny has left them a basket. Some women are motivated by the opportunity to dress up and show off new clothes. Some people go to church because they feel guilty if they don’t go: they hear their mother’s voice in their heads. For others there’s a desire in their hearts to be involved in a tradition and a culture that’s bigger than themselves.

The last two are both a part of the reason I go to Easter worship (and because it’s my job!). But which is better: to be compelled because it’s a matter of life and death or to go because it’s part of the faith tradition to which I belong? I already know that Jesus is alive, so I can’t really be compelled by the first reason. Or can I? I can go to worship on Easter because I love Jesus and also because it’s an expression of my trust in him as the source of my life. His resurrection is the sign that God’s salvation has arrived. My trust in him is how that salvation is realized in me. And as I renew my trust through Easter worship, I become a messenger of that salvation for this world, heralding the future day when “the kingdom of this world” will become “the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ.” (Rev. 11:15)

Hallelujah! He is risen, he is risen indeed!

good news

Why is that most people think highly of Jesus but not so much about people who say they are followers of Jesus? If you want a cinematic treatment of this question, I recommend the movie, “Lord save us from your followers” (lordsaveusthemovie.com). But a better approach would be to ask someone what s/he thinks. Yesterday I went to a meeting of pastors from all around the Bay Area. We broke up into groups of 3 so that we could say the things to each other that we know we’re thinking but can’t tell the people in our churches. It’s very cathartic. But I still got a bit of a surprise.

One of the guys in my group said that he wasn’t working in a church at the moment, but was working in a grocery store. He even admitted that he was considered the wine expert by the rest of the staff. As we talked I found out that he was doing this by choice because he’d been a pastor in 2 different churches and had “burned out” both times. In fact, he isn’t attending any church currently, although he’s still a professor of religion (professor as in teacher, not someone who is professing).

I won’t go into the details (although they’re pretty entertaining) because I don’t want to give away his identity (and because I don’t want people from Grace Community getting any ideas), but the gist is that he is still following Jesus but isn’t very happy with Christians.

So I asked him: how do you explain the gospel to your co-workers? To be honest, having to go to church and act like a good person doesn’t sound like good news to me, anyway. But I’m not going to answer the question here. I’d rather leave the question open: how would you explain the gospel to your co-workers?

slow fast

What’s the benefit of fasting? The temptation is to fast from food (there are other kinds of fasts, but that’s the traditional one) for purely physical reasons: to lose a little weight or to purge the body. I’m fasting for 24 hours one day a week for Lent, and it’s nice to have those physical benefits, but what I really want is a way to remind myself of what Jesus went through for the sake of his mission. He took on the limitations and irritations of a physical body, giving up the privileges and glories of his pre-incarnate experience. Giving up food for a little while is a small way of identifying with him.

But I’ve found that fasting does something else: it slows me down. Maybe it’s the lack of caloric intake that gives me a little less energy (probably not, though: I have plenty of reserve energy jiggling on me in embarrassing places). But my mind has one less thing to occupy it. I don’t have to worry about preparing food or getting to a lunch date. I’m surprised how many times during the day I find myself thinking about food (maybe more so when my stomach is grumbling about the lack of attention). It’s become a prompt to stop and remember that I’m fasting and why. As a result, I have a little more space in my day, time for pondering or praying or just slowing down. I take in a deep breath, not in preparation to gobble down a bite of food, but so I can slowly exhale. I’m actually more in tune with my physical world by not eating, at least once in a while.

So if you're having trouble slowing down to pray, try fasting.

why pray?

Why pray? In Philip Yancey’s book on prayer he tells how he has spoken to Christian leaders in Burma and China who have been imprisoned and treated in unbelievably inhumane ways. Yet these are people of spiritual power. Some have led hundreds to follow Jesus in spite of the risk of imprisonment and torture. When he asked them how Christians in other parts of the world could help, they have answered the same way without exception: pray for us. Why didn’t they say something about appealing to the UN or getting their story to Amnesty International or organizing a human rights watch? Because sometimes it takes being without access to earthly power to make us realize that we have access to a greater power through prayer.

Who are the meek? The usage of the term in Jesus’ day referred to the poor and those without social status or access to earthly power. And yet Jesus said that the meek would inherit the earth. The conventional wisdom is that the earth belongs to those who are strong enough to take it by force. Yancey’s account underscores the point that Jesus is making. Prayer is how we get to know our Father, the one to whom this world really belongs. And prayer is how we ask our Father for things. Lord, teach us to pray.