Saturday, July 27, 2013

To Pray



Teach us to pray, Jesus. 
You seem to do it so well; God really seems to listen to you.
Teach us to pray, Jesus.
There are things we are carrying and don’t know how to put down.
There are things we are longing for that we can’t seem to find. 
There are things that are broken that we wish we could fix.
There’s so much we need, and we feel kind of alone or afraid.
We want so badly to be able to escape the pain, or solve the problem. 
Teach us to pray.

John taught his disciples; they’ve got their strategy down.
They’re going onto the field prepared. 
We want to feel that way.
Effective instead of helpless. 
Prepared and ready with a solution whatever may arise,
instead of confused, lost or wondering what to do.

If only we had some way to repair things, some way to feel secure.
If only we had an in with the Divine.
Lord, teach us to pray.

But Jesus gives them no formula or a method, not a foolproof strategy to get God to listen or make the things happen that you believe should happen.  
Instead, he invites them into his relationship with God. 
When the disciples ask Jesus to teach them how to pray, he shows them prayer.

When you pray, he says, say 'Daddy, Mommy, one who knows and loves me most and whom I trust, hear me now.'  And then he says simple words about having what we need for each day and keeping us safe and making peace between us and the longing for things to be as God promises they will be. 

And then Jesus gives them a parable.

Say one of you has a friend and you go to him at midnight and demand bread, because a guest has arrived and you have nothing to set before him. You race outside in your slippers and pound on your neighbor’s door, hair askew and pajamas in public; you impose yourself upon your sleeping neighbor and ask for what you need.
I tell you, even though he will not get up and give you anything because you’re his friend, at least because of your persistence he will get up and give you whatever you need.

The Greek word translated here as “persistence” actually means something like, “shamlessness”.  Brazen blurting. Raw request. Freedom to say ANYTHING, no holds barred.  The friend doesn’t respond to your appeal because you ask over and over again, lightly knocking and phrasing it correctly, or politely persistently pestering them with your practiced whining until exasperated, they finally relent. 

You ask, blatantly and honestly, in boldness and full confidence that the one behind the door will respond to you.  Not because you asked so well, or so many times, but because they are trustworthy and you’ve been audacious with them.  You stand there with your need or your desire or your hope, knowing you can ask for anything, and not afraid or hesitant in the least to do so.  And so your friend responds.

Ask and it shall be given, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened.
What about all the times we ask and it isn’t given? What about that?
What about when we seek and seek and seek, for years and decades, and never ever find?  What about when we knock till our knuckles are raw and get no response?  If this is a formula for getting what we want, it’s a pretty lousy one.

Our dog Kirby died yesterday. 
He had been getting sicker, or older, or something, but we did not expect it to come so soon.  And so it was a very sad and shocking and terrible day with tons of tears and lots of emotion and no real equilibrium at all.  He’s been through everything with us, through most of our time as a family.  And now he’s gone. 
And in my house, when anything swerves off the predictable path, theological questions come barreling along, never far behind.
Why, God? Why do people and things have to die? 
Why don’t you do today what you did in the bible? 
Why should we even believe you, God? 
What could we ever pray about and know you will hear us?
What about all those times we prayed for Kirby?

And at the same time as these big scary questions throw their broken bodies against God’s door, we’ve kept holding each other and crying together, and calls and messages of love have kept pouring in.  
We’re praying for your family.  
I know how it feels to lose a beloved pet; I’m holding you in prayer. 
You’re in our thoughts today – we loved Kirby too.

And I have no great answers for any of those questions, my love.
But I can be with you when you ask them. 
And I can’t do anything to make this sadness go away or bring back love that’s been lost. 
But others can be with us when we’re sad.  
And we can tell God how sad we are. 
And perhaps that is prayer.

What is prayer for anyway?
What does it accomplish?
Jesus seems to saying that more than how or what or even why, prayer is all about who we pray to, and who we are.  When we pray, God, like a loving parent, comes near; when we pray, God, who knows what we need and sees us as we are, is right here with us. 

One scholar says, “While at other places in Scripture we are told that God knows our needs without being asked (Mt. 6:8), here we are invited to make them known, to speak them into existence in the confidence that whatever may happen, this relationship can bear hearing these things and may actually even depend upon hearing them.”    (David Lose)

Maybe it’s not about asking for the right things or asking often enough, or in the right way.  Maybe its just about asking, period.  

Because in throwing all our questions and pain and need at God we risk being known, we open ourselves to being loved, we demonstrate that we are really in this with God, who is really in this with us.  And then come what may, we are not alone.

So how do you pray?
Just Ask.  Simply Seek. Merely Knock.  
Do what is right there inside you to do, say what is pressing to come out, and don’t hold anything back.
Come shamelessly, with your need, your hopes and your worries, your desires and your doubts. Just blurt them right out there without holding back.
And then trust. 
The one you come to will hear your voice and respond.
And if it doesn’t seem to happen, don’t back down.  Stand there and wait.

And even when the prayer is over, and the asking has died down, when the seeking dries up for a spell and the knocking goes quiet, God is still present. 
How much more than all our broken human care, and messages of love and support will this faithful and loving parent give the Holy Spirit to we who ask, no matter what it is we are asking for?

 So when the need is past, or when it’s unfulfilled and there’s grief and frustration and loss, still you’re not alone.  You’ve invited God into it with you, whatever it may be, and God is, and will, continue to be there. This relationship that prayer puts words to is ongoing and without end.  Even when the praying ends the relationship continues.
So, Lord, please,
teach us to pray.


Sunday, July 21, 2013

Drowning, deep breaths, and who defines reality




The story of Mary and Martha almost always leads to some kind of polarizing assumptions about how we should be and what we should do, that tend to begin with, So, are you a Mary or a Martha? In other words, Are you a doer? Or a thinker? – (and before you answer, serene thinkers are clearly better than busy doers). 

EXCEPT that nothing gets done without the doers, so don’t say it too loudly.  Who’s going to get the food on the table if everyone is sitting around at the feet of Jesus? What would happen if we all stopped doing? Nothing. That’s what would happen. A whole lot of nothing would get done.  And then where would we be? 

Martha is muttering all of this to herself while she slams the pots down on the stove and glares into the living room, trying to catch Mary’s eye, while Mary is apparently casually on purpose ignoring her.  And the dinner starts to burn and the table isn’t set and the other guests are approaching, finally, driven to desperation, Martha tattles.
 And you know it has to be bad when the quintessential host of a welcoming home tattles to the guest.  Her stress is through the roof and she has blown a gasket.
Lord, don’t you even care that she’s left me to do all the work alone?  Tell her to help me!

But before we judge her too harshly, or, as has always been the case with me, sympathize with her too completely, before we try to make this some kind of lesson in how to be better at whatever, I want to notice the way she says this.  It’s urgent. It’s panicked.  This woman is overwhelmed.

And, while it couldn’t be a more different story, still, it reminds me of another time friends of Jesus said, “Lord, don’t you even care… that we are dying! It was when the disciples were caught in the middle of a terrible storm, and the boat was going under, and Jesus was asleep ASLEEP in the stern.  And they shook him awake in terrified panic and said these same words, Lord, don’t you even care… Don’t you even care that we are drowning here?

And for as much as that is NOT where Martha is, it is where she feels like she is. I am drowning here! Tell her to help me!  I am alone! Do something!  Jesus, don’t you even care?

It is said that in this day and age we live in this heightened flight or fight state of stress much of the time.  And from time to time, on an otherwise ordinary day, I find myself here – when the chaos and noise start to build, drama is escalating, little people are arguing, the house is messy, the dogs are barking, and I look around and notice that my husband is off somewhere minding his own business, blissfully relaxing or something, and I suddenly feel desperate and alone. I get more and more worked up until I yell out- Hey, don’t you even care - ?
That I am drowning! That I can’t take it anymore? Do something!

And when he hears me and wanders into the situation, one of two things happens.  Either he calmly speaks normal voice words into my chaos, Kara, this is you.  You’re pretty stressed right now.  Take a deep breath.   And I’ll be honest, at first this is annoying, but just a single deep breath later and I gradually realize that I am not really drowning after all, and it’s mostly in my interpretation of things, and we all calm down and approach things differently. 
Or more likely, the alternative happens, which is that he buys my interpretation of things and jumps into the chaos along with me, which at first feels satisfying, but quickly becomes unhelpful because now we are both drowning, yelling, overwhelmed and out of sorts, ratcheting up the stress for everyone.

Jesus doesn’t get sucked into Martha’s interpretation of things.
She is not drowning.
And just like the disciples, tossed about in the little boat in the big storm, Martha has lost sight of who is sitting in her midst.  She has allowed the elements, the demands she feels and the situation around her to tell her what reality is.   
But again and again, in every moment with every person, Jesus is inviting us to interpret reality differently.

Jesus is inviting us to live in the truth that in life or in death we are held in the love of God. To take a deep breath and set it all down once in a while to come back to that truth. 
That nothing can separate us from the love of God.
That life is a gift. 
That God made this whole thing in all it complexity so that we could enjoy it together with God, together with each other, together with all that lives and breathes and grows and dies and buzzes and chirps and flows and rumbles and sits silent and majestic and unmoving in the background and crawling and bawling and snoozing and snorting in the foreground.

People keep forgetting this, in every time and place and every way imaginable. People keep finding all sorts of new and creative ways of cutting ourselves off from each other and from God, defining reality by all sorts of false and demanding standards.  Acting as though we are alone, as though it is all up to us, as though we are against one another instead of in it together.

And so God comes right among us to remind us again, in walking alongside, talking alongside, living alongside, suffering alongside.  But even with Godwithus in the living room, we still slip into worry and distraction and forgetting.

The saddest thing ever said to me by my children, the most poignant and piercing moment I’ve had as a mom so far, which felt like a kick in the gut, was when my three year old daughter said to me one day, “Mommy, play with me!  Please play with me, Mommy. You can bring your computer.”
And I looked up from the screen into her pleading little face and I began to cry.  How could I have so lost what’s real? 

Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things.  There is need of only one thing.  Mary has chosen the good, and it will not be taken away from her.

What would it look like to let Jesus define reality instead of the relentless demands and overwhelming threats of the world?  Those messages that tell us who to be, and who to fear, who to hate, and who to admire, and what to do to make ourselves worthy, important, good enough, what to avoid to keep ourselves righteous, what is powerful and what is weak and how threatened we are at any given urgent moment.

The word for distracted in the Greek has a sense of being pulled in many different directions.  We are pulled in so many different directions that we miss the meaning; we lose what’s real.
We worry so much about the hypothetical and the correct, get so distracted by the urgent and the important, become so focused on the job to be done and the cause to be fought and the service to be offered and the duty to be done that we sometimes miss the human beings right in front of us, and we sometimes miss the opportunity to be a human being ourselves.
It is here that we meet Jesus, always here, with and for each other.  God is present in our lives. Participating in life.  We can be too!

Come to me all you who are weary and heavy-burdened and I will give you rest, Jesus said. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and I will give you rest for your souls.

Whether the storms are around us, between us or inside us, they are never bigger or more powerful or more real than the God who enters in and calls us to do likewise. 
We’ll forget a lot, and we will need reminding, like Martha did, that we aren’t really drowning.  That the one who made and loves us all is right here in our midst. That there might be a different, more real way to see and exist in reality than the one that we’re buckling under at the moment.
We don’t have to live as though we are alone, as though it is all up to us, as though we are against one another instead of in it together.

And the promise is that we will be reminded, when we get brave enough or desperate enough, frustrated enough, or scared enough to ask the question Martha burst out and the disciples cried out, Lord, don’t you even care?

Because Jesus can’t get sucked into our interpretation of it all, no matter how real or overwhelming it feels to us.
Instead, the one with the power to quiet the storm reminds us again, I care about you.  And I care about your sister.  And I am right here.  You are not alone.

So come, weary ones, heavy burdened ones. Come workaholics and worriers.  Come thinkers and doers and fighters and doubters, and bring your own real self and your own real versions of the question, whatever they may be.

Lord, don’t you even care?
Lord, don’t you even care– about a teenage boy being shot and his killer going free?  We’re broken, it’s bigger and deeper and sadder than we can grasp. 
Lord, don’t you even care that the church is so messed up? That people get hurt and lies get spread and judgment and hatred define us instead of love and mercy? 
Lord, don’t you even care that the cancer is back?  And it is winning?
That the gulf between us is widening? And I can’t seem to find forgiveness or even words?
That there doesn’t seem to be a way out of this situation, and I am not sure how we’re going to make it?
That I am overwhelmed and sleep-deprived? That my stress is through the roof?
 
Lord, don’t you even care that we are drowning here?

And then, may the one whose love holds us all, in life and in death, God incarnate in our midst, raise gentle eyes to your anxious face, and in compassion and understanding, speak the voice of calm into your storm, My child, you are pulled in many directions and worried about many things. But there is need of only one thing. 
And at first it’s annoying – because we’d prefer he jump in and agree with us that it’s all too much.  
But after one deep breath it becomes hope, peace, a lifeline, as we are invited to set down our many worries and sit, for a time, at the feet of Jesus, and find rest for our souls.

Jesus, draw us into the one thing, bring us into your love, that we may know we are not alone, and that as real as our troubles are, and as necessary as our work may be, chaos and fear, anger and hopelessness, worry and distraction may not define our reality.
Jesus, speak peace to our turbulent hearts and awaken our joy, that we may recognize you and join you where you are, right here in this holy life with us, right here in this ordinary life with each other.
Amen.

Friday, July 12, 2013

Freedom, well lived




Summer is a wild ride when you’re a kid.
You’re used to waking up early, getting dressed right away, packing up your homework from the night before and heading off to eight completely structured hours, with clear expectations, a system of grades and accountability, a sense of progress and strict guidelines.  Evenings are shaped by homework, hockey practice, piano lessons and regimented ritual. 

Then one day in June you wake up and all bets are off.

 The sun rises to 14 glorious wide open and unaccounted-for hours.  What will you do? What wont you do?  Please!  
And at first it is spectacular.

You don’t feel like getting dressed? Then don’t!
You forgot to brush your teeth? So what! 
Inside, outside, games, tv, bikes, neighbors, sprinklers and sidewalk chalk and bare feet and sudden bouts of boredom (who even remembers what that feels like??) It’s an absolute dream come true.
What if you could do whatever you wanted – begs the tantalizing question of summer, all day, every day, for 96 days? (My kids counted it out.) 
Well, easy, it would be AWESOME, my children quickly answered. 

But eat that whole box of popsicles, my friends, one right after another, and after a few days it’s not so awesome.  Something shifts, and you begin craving your veggies and your daily morning announcements. 
What does 5 hours of screen time in a row feel like? Gross, that’s what. 
What happens to your room if you don’t clean it?  Your teeth if you don’t brush them?  Your psyche if you start staying up late but continue waking up early?  It’s not pretty, people.  Pretty soon it’s meltdown city. And not only the parents. Pretty soon, you start to find that you need something more than absolute freedom.

But this year we stumbled onto something surprising in our household.
A few days in, we scraped ourselves off the floor and hung a list on the fridge entitled, “Summer Weekdays.”
Now every day Owen and Maisy have certain things they need to accomplish, such as: read, play, 1 hour of time alone, 1 chore, tidy their room, take a shower – you get the gist. 
And at the end of the list each day are four questions:
Did you remember to:
brush your teeth?
limit screen time?
practice kindness?
take responsibility for your own actions? 

And as soon as that list hit the fridge things changed.  We didn’t tell them when they had to do what, just that by bedtime, they need to have completed the list.  But a spark was lit inside them and they rallied to its light. Stopping in throughout the day, their lists gave them purpose, enough structure to feel human again, but enough freedom to feel unrestricted.  They started paying attention to how they were existing in their body and mind, in their space and relationships, and this compass helped their self-guided days to be much more fun than the 14 straight hours of rudderless freedom had been.

That list is like the law had been for the Israelites.  
Released from soul-crushing slavery in Egypt that dictated every move and prescribed their very being, they are suddenly faced with complete freedom.  And God gave them the law – here is what freedom looks like well spent. Here is how to be in relationship with one another, yourselves, and me as free people.  Given who you really are, here is how you are now free to live.

In this freedom from slavery, where you belong to me, Yahweh says, not to Pharaoh, your worth is not determined by what work I can get out of you or how much you produce, or even how well you obey. 
It is determined by my love, my having made you, my knowing who you were meant to be all along and asking you to live now freely into that identity. 
So, as free people, you won’t steal from each other, because you will all have enough and you will share what you have with each other. You wont harm or kill each other, because you will value one another deeply and work out your differences even when it’s hard, and you will forgive each other and restore right relationship between you.  You wont live in consuming jealousy of each other’s lives, you will live in gratitude for your own life, joyfully contributing your voice and your experiences to the whole, to the benefit of others.  You get the picture.  The law was an incredible gift.  It helped them to be truly free.

And then, gradually, sin - that ravenous instinct toward self-preservation and self-determination, over-against each other and ultimately God as well - crept in, and people began to use the law as some kind of template to personal security with God, a way to get ahead, to manage their own fate and earn a relationship with God that was already theirs.  And for some, the law morphed into a straight up to-do list that got bigger and longer, (because after all, if everyone gets Pokemon cards at the end of the week for doing these things, then shouldn’t I get MORE cards if I do even MORE things?  After all, if we keep the standards too low, ANYBODY could get in, and then how will we know who’s the best)?

And when this sort of thing happens, inevitably competition and jealousy breed, and judgment and self-righteousness grow, and then on the flip side, those who can’t compete give up, and sacrifice their humanity to their desires, which goes something like, Well, I blew it and lost the reward anyway, so what does it matter what I do? I’m going to get in trouble anyway, so what’s even the point?  I’ll do what I want when I want.  Forget your stupid list.  Nobody can tell me what to do. 
And if my behavior hurts you, or myself, if it disconnects me from those around me, or stifles and silences my creativity, contribution and capacity to share, that is of no concern to me, or feels too obscure to even consider.  You said I’m free.  So I’ll do what I want.  Which really means, this all feels impossible and I give up.

And then that nasty drive for self-preservation also breeds gaping division.  We tear each other down to prove our points, we label and dismiss one another, summing up others with snap judgments and easy assumptions.  We make others less than human in an effort to have our own humanity upheld.

STOP!!! Paul screams into this chaos. Stop it right now!
Who do you think you are? You are freed for freedom in Christ. Freed!  Freed to live as real humans, as image-bearer of the Divine! Freed to live for each other, to live in the love you were created for to begin with! 

This is our fourth installment in Paul’s mad letter to the church in Galatia, where a group of original Christians, that is, Jewish Christians, had arrived among the new baby gentile Christians and brought their refrigerator list with them, the extended version, no less.  And while this list had clearly been meaningful for them, it was nothing less than a barrier to God for the Galatians, who had come to Jesus with completely different versions of slavery, and different abuses of freedom, and a different experience of salvation altogether. The paradigm didn’t translate, and the list they brought became lifeless shackles. The Galatians’ fridge needed some different reminders hung up.

Here’s the thing: The temptation to either avoid or to abuse our freedom, to live as slaves to our own quest for self-preservation, is so deeply ingrained, in our very dna, that we feel the pull all the time.  It’s a battle, Paul says. Like a war within ourselves.  Literally his words are, Don’t make self-indulgence your “base of operations.” Don’t let your identity rest in the quest to satisfy yourself.  Instead live from the freedom you have been given.

We’ve seen what happens when the law is distorted by sin’s self-preservation, separating us from God and each other in a kind of burdensome slavery, now Paul shows us what happens when freedom itself is distorted by sin’s self-preservation, separating us from God and each other in a kind of trapped slavery.

And here it might be helpful to turn to a different translation – a modern paraphrase.

 It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a rotten accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; the worship of possessions and power; cults of personality; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community. I could go on.
And then Paul describes true freedom, living as we were meant to live, in a list we’ve written in sharpie and hung up in grapes, apples and oranges in Sunday school rooms throughout the decades, aka, the fruit of the Spirit, which could sound something like this:

 But what happens when we live God’s way? The Spirit brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard—things like affection for others, exuberance about life, serenity. We develop a willingness to stick with things, a sense of compassion in the heart, and a conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people. We find ourselves involved in loyal commitments, not needing to force our way in life, able to marshal and direct our energies wisely.   (The Message)
Here’s the thing: lists of rules on our fridge, if they were simply imposed on our kids arbitrarily with absolute obedience demanded, would produce nothing but fighting, bribing and shaming our kids, trapping them in meaningless drudgery.  
And, wow, if our kids were told their acceptance in our love was dependent on their ability to perfectly follow all the rules we’d hung up there, it would change how they saw us, and themselves, and their life in our home and connection with each other.  The list would become a crushing weight, and they would become slaves to their own ongoing attempts to earn our love.  Or they would throw in the towel and live wild, feral lives.

So how would we live if we believed God loves us? How would we live if the list we were given was an invitation to remember who we are and how freedom looks when it’s lived out with each other fully and joyfully?

This life is holy. This life is a gift. 
These people around you? They are amazing. 
Each one different, each one knowing something you don’t, bringing something into the world that you can’t. You need these people.  And they need you.  When you let yourself live by the Spirit that calls you to your true self, in true relationship with God in the bond opened up by Christ, you will find a different kind of living pouring forth. 

From time to time You will find Love. 
Your heart will well up and overflow onto others, the desire to reach out and know them, to be known, will guide you.  Instead of drawing back and buttoning down the hatches of your soul, you will find yourself extending toward others. 

And honey, there will be joy! Delight in life, and gratitude and awe at the sleeping child whose lashes rest on her warm cheek, and the bursting of the sweet ripe berry in your mouth, and the shock of deep color in the single petal of the spectacular flower in your quiet garden, and body shaking laughter, deep and hard. 

And you may taste Peace, sensing now and then beyond the fear and the chaos, underneath the manic frenzy, that deep cool place where you and your God dwell in simple silence.  That brief pause, when everything else doesn’t matter because you know you are going to be ok.  And between us as well, despite conflict and tension, underneath it all, it’s going to be ok. 

Patience will grace you, and occasionally you’ll find yourself seeing through the furious temper tantrum and the maddening whining to the tired little soul splayed out at your feet, or past the traffic jam to the precious stranger in the car beside you, somewhere important to be, a life of her own she is living, or under the volatile conflict into the longing to be heard and to hear, to be seen and to see, that is pulsing within each of you. 

You can live Kindness, not niceness presumed by affection, or politeness earned by status.  Simply My humanity sees your humanity and I choose to meet you. I can help with that, let me get the door, I brought you this, I thought of you, how have you been, my friend?
And risk Generosity –you don’t need to horde and hide, to scavenge and scrimp.  You are valuable to me, your needs are my needs. We can share what we have and care for one another.

Faithfulness is now a possibility, I will keep my commitments, you will keep yours. We can be taken at our word; we can be consistent and trustworthy.

And Gentleness opens up between us, life is hard and we can tread lightly in each other’s fragile places and handle one another with tenderness.  

And you can breathe the clean, fresh air of Self-control, that you can choose to participate in a way that upholds your being and respects the being of others, and this can characterize our life together.

This is the freedom for which Christ has freed us.  

And since we live by the Spirit, and this is what that looks like, let’s not keep this picture of freedom as an idea in our heads or a sentiment in our hearts, Paul implores, let’s work it out in the details of our unique and varied lives, as we are bound together in Christ.  

Let’s practice it, and check in with ourselves throughout the day, and let it be our compass, to guide us in this glorious, holy, gift of a life.
Amen.

How to Repent (It's not how you think)

Psalm 46 ,  Jeremiah 31:31-34 When I was in college, I spent the large part of one summer sleeping on a 3-foot round papason chair cushion o...