Lord and Daddy of Us All

July 29, 2007
Luke 11:1-13
Context is everything. With that in mind, I read and reread our passage from Luke this morning trying to discern just why it is that the disciples pick this point in the story to ask Jesus about prayer. After all, wouldn’t you think that prayer, being such a central spiritual practice, might have been one of the first things that followers of a spiritual leader might ask about? Why here? Why now?
I also wondered a bit about placing this text in the middle of summer. Why now? Well, I reckon it’s always a good time to pray, so it’s probably not a bad time to reflect a bit on prayer itself.
Perhaps Luke’s narrative strategy has something to do with the beginning of the previous chapter, where we find these words:
“After this the Lord appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go. He said to them, ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest. Go on your way. See, I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves. Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals; and greet no one on the road” (Luke 10:1-4).
Perhaps the 12 are concerned about job security after Jesus sends out 70 others, or maybe they’re all a bit worried about the nature of the call to which they’ve responded – lambs in the midst of wolves; no purse or bag or sandals.
Their experience as Jesus’ followers has become increasingly intense; fear must have become a constant companion. They probably felt like they were in over their heads in a situation out of control. It probably just felt like a good time to pray.
What we often seek in prayer is control, and maybe that’s what the disciples wanted. But I don’t think that’s what Jesus had in mind when he invited his disciples into a practice of prayer that says, “Abba, your will be done here and now in our midst as if the household of belovedness were already realized among us.”
Such a practice of prayer does not seek to give voice to our will, but rather seeks silence in order to listen for and allow God’s will to speak to and through our lives and, moreover, to shape those lives according to that will.
You see, the way we pray reflects deeply the way we imagine God, no matter how or how well we imagine the divine. Thus, the way we pray says a great deal about who we think we are as well; even when – especially when – we are not in a prayerful point in our lives.
About a dozen years ago, when an old familiar tug at the edge of my awareness began agitating me with renewed vigor, I had a conversation with Dana Jones, a pastor who was on his way to becoming a mentor in my life. I told him about my long-standing wrestling match with the notion of being called into the ministry of word and sacrament and he responded by asking, “you know what Bonhoeffer said, don’t you?”
“Uh, no,” I answered.
“Bonhoeffer said that it was never a matter of faith but rather one of obedience.”
I can’t recall the rest of the conversation with Dana. That question stopped me.
First, it stopped me because at that point I only knew the outlines of Bonhoeffer’s life – sort of the back-of-the-baseball-card version: German Lutheran pastor who resisted the Nazis and was executed by them in a concentration camp. It was only after my conversation with Dana that I began to read Bonhoeffer profound theological reflections on call and vocation and the place of the community of faith in the world.
But secondly, Bonhoeffer’s then unfamiliar words stopped me because I disagreed with them. After all, hadn’t I been the one who, a decade earlier, when a friend had asked if I’d ever considered going into the ministry, responded, “yes, but I’ve got too many God questions of my own to pretend to help others with their God questions.”
It was as matter of faith for me – or so I thought. In any case, it was, I was convinced, a matter of belief and, at that point I did not have the resources to draw a careful and critical – indeed, decisive distinction between faith and belief. Belief, after all, is a matter of having the right words, the correct creed; faith, on the other hand, is about a relationship of trust.
Strange, though, how real life interrupts and blurs such distinctions, and comes to shape how we reconsider them.
A few years ago, as my father’s health began to decline and as I reflected on the changing roles and relationships that fact entailed, I found myself considering anew Bonhoeffer’s conviction about belief and obedience.
OK, I’ll confess that most people confronted by such life change might first consider long-term health care and housing for elderly parents and how the adult children are going to share the new responsibilities of the sandwich years. Me? I enter the sandwich years and think about Bonhoeffer!
Like many sons, I have always had a somewhat conflicted relationship with my father. This is not group therapy, so I’ll not drag you through the details of my own neuroses. Suffice it to say, in what will come as no surprise to you, that I have “authority issues.” As with many folks, a lot of that goes back to basic parent-child, and in particular, father-son dynamics.
As I’ve shared with you before, my father has struggled with serious mental illness through the second half of his life. His bipolar disorder became acute when I was 10 years old. While he has lived a rich, full and productive eight decades, the father I have known for the past 37 years was not the daddy I knew the first 10 years of my life. At some level, I have never forgiven him for that loss.
His illness placed an emotional distance between us – and, of course, between him and everyone else. That distance, that space, became the battleground of my adolescence and its inevitable rebellions and growth toward adulthood. Into the space between us I dumped every resistance to every authority.
Again, none of this is stunning or unique. Lots of folks live through such things and far worse ones. And those travails shape the way we work out the most important relationships in our lives – including, for better and for worse, our relationships with God.
Reflecting back on my own loving but conflicted relationship with my father allowed me to see that, well, Bonhoeffer may have been on to something.
My many years of good, academic, philosophical resistance to the idea of God and to the call of God to a life of service to the community of faith were, to some indistinct but significant extent, simply one more instance of dumping an authority question into that emotional space in my life that opened up years ago.
It was not a matter of faith – nor even one of belief – but rather one of obedience. I was like the Unitarian who dies and sees a sign that says “turn right for heaven; turn left for a discussion of heaven” – and promptly turns left for the discussion. Some folks will put off commitment even to the next life.
My insistence on excruciatingly rigorous intellectual and philosophical honesty and accuracy in naming God for myself grew more out of power struggle than faith struggle. For sure, naming God accurately is important: the way we imagine God decisively shapes so much of the way we understand ourselves, the world and our place in it.
How we pray both shapes and reflects this understanding.
Nevertheless, in either case it can become a far too easy escape to insist more on the content of one’s statement of faith than on the character of one’s life – to insist, that is, on doctrinal precision more than on faithful living and thus to avoid deciding and committing. When faced with a deep sense of call to service, it is far easier to say, as I once did, “I have too many God question of my own” than it is to say, “here I am Lord, send me.”
To say that, to say, “here I am, Lord, send me,” requires more than intellectual ascent to a statement of belief. It requires far more than settling “God questions.”
It requires a trusting relationship. It requires intimacy. It requires an obedience that bridges the emotional gaps we construct out of the fear and brokenness of our own lives.
Standing on the brink of such sending is where the disciples find themselves at the moment they ask Jesus for guidance in prayer.

“Daddy in heaven,” begins the prayer of Jesus. The form of address – Abba, a diminutive best rendered as papa or daddy – tells us all we need to know about the kind of relationship Jesus sought with God and invited his disciples to have with God. When they ask him how to pray, he tells them, to begin with, “be intimate with God.”
In so doing, Jesus reminds us that no matter the mess we may have made of our own human relationships, we can ultimately and utterly trust God and enter a relationship of complete intimacy and honesty in which our obedience becomes simply the mark of this relationship of utter fidelity.
Ultimately, the prayer Jesus taught is about a radical trust. As James Carroll puts it in An American Requiem, “Trust in this life, this process, this history, wherever it takes you. Live without idols. As for religion, go about your eating and drinking and being together, and let that be the ligament binding you to God.”
No matter the marks of love and betrayal that you bear from family and kin and tribe – and we all bear such marks – trust this one life, this history you have been given.
Be bound to God, and be liberated from the scars. Be liberated from the patterns of relationships of domination and fear and healed in and through relationships of grace and hospitality and generosity. Even in – especially in your relationship with God.
Indeed, let go of fear. Let go of the fear of scarcity, and trust the promise of daily bread – a sure and certain indication of abundance, a sure and certain sign of the kingdom that the prayer invokes.
For in God’s kingdom, or better in this context, God’s household, in the community of the beloved, in the economy of grace, there is always more than more than enough.
We do not have to worry about who owes what to whom – the kind of struggle that marks and then scars so many human relationships. We don’t have to worry about who has power and control and who is endebted to whom for the sake of that power and control.
Against those all too human concerns, those all too human desires to control and to come out on top in the economy of debt – whether economic or emotional – against all of that, the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples works instead to form and shape us according to God’s will – which is simply that we live grace-filled lives marked by love.
In other words, it is a prayer of obedience – but obedience to a God who does not demand obedience but rather a God who offers grace. More than the Lord’s Prayer, perhaps these words should be known as the Disciples’ Prayer, for this prayer casts a vision of the Beloved Community into which we are called to live and work and die following Jesus more closely day by day. These words work to create in us an open and yearning place for God’s Spirit to dwell and work. Remember Jesus’ words? “How much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”
This is a Pentecost prayer – it opens our hearts to the Spirit of the living God and creates new space for the wind of God to work within our lives.
Still, I want to ask, right with the disciples, “Lord, teach us to pray.” God, I want to know, what happens when I am enveloped by silence and it falls as a darkness that no light will penetrate, as a veil that no wind will remove? In other words, how can I open myself to the working words of prayer?
Perhaps here we encounter the limits of Bonhoeffer’s distinction – as such. For in the silence of prayer as we are shaped in obedience to the will of a God in whose loving embrace we dwell and move and have our being we discover that faith and obedience become the same thing. We trust the one who calls us and sends us forth, and that trust deepens and envelops us even as we go forth in obedience. At that point, to remain within the language that Jesus used, we discover God as lord and daddy.

Plumb Line and Fruit Baskets

July 22, 2007
Luke 10:38-42; Amos 8:1-12
Sometimes we don’t know what we’ve got when we’ve got it, as the prophet Joni Mitchell sung. We don’t know what’s right in front of us even when we see it; we cannot read the writing on the wall even by the noonday sun.
Amos must have felt that way. I love the conversation that Amos reports: “God showed me a plumb line and asked me what I saw. I said, ‘hey, that looks like a plumb line.’ And God says, ‘plumb line? Look again! I see the high places of Israel made desolate and the sanctuaries laid waste.’ And then God showed me a basket of fruit and asked me what I saw. I said, ‘hey, that looks like a basket of summer fruit.’ And God says, ‘summer fruit? Look again. I see dead bodies cast out in the street.’”
How can it be that God’s vision is so spectacularly different than what Amos sees, and what can that possibly mean? How is it that where Amos sees the tools of construction God sees temples laid to waste? How is it that where Amos sees the fruit of a functioning agricultural economy God sees the needy trampled and the poor of the land brought to ruin?
Of course, we’ll cut Amos a great deal of slack here; after all, he reports the discrepancy in vision. Clearly he does so in order to show the people the fundamental injustice of the social order of their day, and to call them to account concerning that injustice.
We’ll cut Amos some slack here, and hope that we might see with new eyes what God lays before us. Then again, would-be prophetic vision often turns out to by myopic.
Let me show you what I mean.
God showed me a newspaper and asked me what I saw. “Well, I see that the Braves are only one game out of first place in the National League East. Cool!”
“Uh, wrong section,” God said. “Try the Metro section.”
“Oh,” said I. “Now I see: Mayor Fenty has endorsed Obama. Are you trying to tell us something, God?”
“No. No. Look at the back page.”
“Hm, nothing there but the weather.”
“Now you’re getting there. Read your own church’s confession – that line about ‘threatening death to the planet entrusted to your care’ ring a bell? Think about it. Look beyond the forecast for this week and ponder the long-term. Consider the lilies of the field, if you can find a field. My eye is on the sparrow, but your eyes seem glued to the bottom line. Your economies are out of balance, and now the ecosystems I created for you are out of balance, too.”
Then God set before me a remote control and asked me what I saw. “Oh, I get it now,” I said. “It’s a remote control so I can check out the Weather Channel, right?”
“Oy,” said God. “You are one of the dense ones,” she muttered under her breath.
“You are entertaining yourselves to death. You ignore the real violence that you do to one another and to my creation while passing time with fake violence. The myths you televise make violence seem redemptive, and then your national budgets reflect the mythology. You who see yourselves as a city on a hill – your Capital Hill spends more money on weapons of war than every other nation on the earth combined. I see your high places made desolate, and weep at your spiritual death.”
“All that from a remote control?” I asked.
“Wait till I get started,” God said, and then placed before me a bottle of pills.
“What do you see?”
Not wanting to outdrive my headlights again I was afraid to say anything more than, “a bottle of pills.”
And God said,
the great house shall be shattered to bits,
and the little house to pieces.
Do horses run on rocks?
Does one plough the sea with oxen?
But you have turned justice into poison
and the fruit of righteousness into wormwood—
“Uh, you lost me there, God,” I said.
“Oh, that’s just how Amos responded when I told him the exact same thing.”
“Yes,” I said, “and what did it mean to Amos, and what does it have to do with the pills?”
“Amos got it pretty quickly,” God said. “He understood that it was about the way you organize your lives – individually and socially. Do horses run on rocks? Not if you want healthy horses. So why do you keep running on empty, into the wind, blind and not even sure what you’re hoping to find? By the way, that’s what Jackson Browne said when I posed the question to him. Do you plough the sea with oxen? Of course not! So, why do you pursue fulfillment with that which does not fill you up?”
“It’s like that story Luke told about Junior and Mary and Martha.”
“Junior?” I interrupted.
“Joshua – you know him as Jesus. His dad and I always call him Junior. Hm, I can see I’ve confused you with the gender references and personification. I forget that you never remember what I always told Isaiah: my ways are not your ways. You always get hung up on gender and names for me. Do me one favor: remember I’m beyond gender and that I respond to various names. Use what you’re comfortable with; it won’t offend me. Anyway, about Jesus and Mary and Martha: the point was that Martha was too busy with the wrong priorities. The truest dream – the ultimate reality – the authentic human being was right there in her midst and she missed it because she was chasing down someone else’s dream, living into someone else’s expectations.
“So human. You live your lives chasing down dreams that were never authentically yours to chase.
“It’s not that different today. You want I-pods and I-phones and I-thises and I-thats – never we, always I. You define your national life by the pursuit of happiness, but seem mostly to define happiness in the first-person singular. Why not the pursuit of community? Or justice? And when you cannot find happiness – because you so often define it in terms of things that you do not yet have or own – when you cannot find it, is it any wonder that so many of you are so depressed and so many turn to pills – prescribed or otherwise – to medicate your unhappiness?”
“You remember what I finally said to Amos?
I hate, I despise your festivals,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt-offerings and grain-offerings,
I will not accept them;
and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals
I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
“I’m not sure that’s what I’d say to you. It’s not anything like antipathy that fills me as I watch my children these days; more a deep sadness. Oh sure, I hate, I despise your violence and warfare, and I take no delight in the ways you turn your faces from the truth. Even though some of you still offer all kinds of worship in my name, I’m not impressed. You know what I’d like? The same thing I told Amos: let justice roll down like water, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”
“Well,” I said, “that last bit will preach.”
“You have my permission to use it,” God said, “just remind folks that it’s not you speaking there, but me.”
And then God said, “one more thing.” And God showed me a newspaper again and asked, “what do you see?”
I pretty much figured I was onto God’s ways this time, so I focused on one of the big news stories from the week – the Senate refusing to vote on withdrawing troops from Iraq, and I said, waxing as prophetic and poetic as could be, “the great house is trapped between Iraq and a hard place; the waters of peace have run dry” and, stealing another line from Amos, I added, “In all the squares there shall be wailing; and in all the streets they shall say, ‘Alas! Alas!”
I felt pretty good about that answer – I knew I had her … or him, whatever. But then God said, with what must have been a Godly twinkle in the divine eye:
“Wrong section. I meant the sports page. Look, it’s the middle of baseball season. I love baseball!”
“Huh?” I sputtered.
“Remember what Augustine said? ‘The glory of God is a human being, fully alive.’ Augie missed some things, but he nailed that one. Life is a gift for living, for enjoying fully. I may take no delight in your solemn assemblies, but I love your games, your play, your life. Live it fully, the way I intended from the beginning, with laughter and delight, and someday justice will roll down like a water slide!”
“Oh, one last thing,” God said, “that last image – justice like a water slide – why don’t you go ahead and take credit for that.”
And then God said, “I think I’ve showed you enough for the day.”
And I said, “Amen.”

Like Cool Water on a Summer’s Day

July 8, 2007
2 Kings 5:1-14; Psalm 1
You can find Paradise … in at least 25 American states. That little bit of trivia, courtesy of Google, struck me as an appropriate subject for quick research several years ago upon singing – for probably the 500th time – the chorus to this John Prine song:
“Daddy, won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County,
Down by the Green River, where paradise lay.
I’m sorry, my son, but you’re too late in asking.
Mr. Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away.”
I wondered if there was, or had been, an actual town named Paradise, in Kentucky. Turns out that there once was just such a town but it was removed, in 1967, by the TVA to make room for a coal-burning power plant along the Green River.
Some years later, driving past a sign pointing out Paradise, Pennsylvania, I wondered what it took to move settlers to name a place “Paradise.” Did people walk over a hillside or out of a forest or through a gap in the mountains and ask, like in Field of Dreams, “is this heaven?” What is it, I wonder, that we think of as “paradise”?
Let me turn that around as an open question to you this morning: what do think of as “paradise”?

“Paradise,” “heaven,” and the like, no matter how we consider them, are tied up with notions of “salvation” no matter how we consider that; and all of that is related, some how, to its flip-side notion of “hell.” One of the finest sermons I’ve ever heard was delivered by my friend and colleague, John Lentz, on the Sunday following September 11, 2001. He called it, “Living Hell,” and in it he reflected on the multiple hells we create here on earth.
In the same way, there exists the possibility of living into something of paradise here and now, as well. As Paul put it, “we are working out our own salvation day by day in fear and trembling.”
And yet, we are so much better at creating our own hells. Just look at our story from 2 Kings. Salvation – healing and wholeness – is just a dip in the river away, and yet the commander of the king’s army is so tied up in his own ideas about what salvation involves that he misses what stands right in front of him.
Elisha, the prophet, says simply, “take what is as near to you and as common as water; wash in it and be made whole.” Salvation is not a million miles away; paradise is not 600 virgins in an afterlife of bliss. Wholeness, healing, communion with God is right in front of us. As to what comes after this life, I am happy to leave that to a God who is good all the time and in the time beyond time itself.
But what of this time? This time of which we have so little and yet so often treat so carelessly as to make of it a living hell?
The question that presses in upon us is not so much, what is paradise, as it is, why don’t we live into it here and now while we have the opportunity?
Jesus told his disciples that the kingdom of God was at hand, it was within them, within their reach if they would but reach.
But so much stands between us and our own reach. Like Naaman, we may imagine that true communion with God, true healing and wholeness, must be so complex as to be way beyond our limited reach. I just read a biography of Robert Oppenheimer, and I’ll readily admit that I don’t understand much at all of the science behind his thinking – and sometimes salvation, paradise, wholeness, healing, shalom – all of which I take to be intimately related – seem to me as complex as quantum physics. And I confess, there’s a part of me that loves the complexities.
At such times, like Naaman, I look for more and deeper complexities, and am frustrated at my own inability to comprehend. And yet, when I turn to scripture to deepen my understanding of the complexities of the universe I am regularly confounded – not by the complexities but rather by the simplicity of it all.
As you probably recall, I spent the early part of last week out at Meadowkirk, the Presbytery’s beautiful new camp and conference center. Bud, Martin, Hannah and I were lucky enough to be part of the very first summer camp group in Meadowkirk history. I was theologian-in-residence for the family camp session, and as I wandered parts of the more than 300 acres of woods, meadows and streams of the site it felt like God was trying to remind me of something quite simple:
“The kingdom of God is among you,” a voice whispered in the wind.
“You are not far from the kingdom of God,” came a word from the wood.
“The kingdom of God has come near,” sounded a voice like a child’s laughter.
“The kingdom of God has come to you,” said a voice in song.
Now, of course, those are all words of Jesus straight from the gospels. Jesus came preaching good news, and the good news is this: what God desires for us all is like cool water on a summer’s day, and it is no more difficult to gain than that.
For sure, there are times in each of our lives when we experience the desert; when we are parched and there seems no water to be found. When our hearts are broken and our minds numbed by the pain of grief, the struggles of disease, the ache of depression, the despair of solitude – at such times we long for shalom as the deer pants for water.
At such times, the comfort of community is so important, and it is to us, the church, to be that community.
But much of the time I find myself more like Naaman. My need is chronic more than acute. My heart is not broken by any particular grief, but is broken open by the human condition of alienation from that heart that beats for love at the center of all that is; broken open by separation from community; broken open by my own faults and failings; aching for reparation. Yes, I want salvation, but I want it on my terms.
And yet it is offered as a gift as simple to accept as wading into the water.
What keeps us from stepping into that water?
For me, I know, it is fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of losing control, fear that my agenda may not be God’s agenda, fear that if I truly give myself completely to serving the gospel call of justice, mercy, and praise that I might look foolish in the eyes of the world; fear that the simplicity of it all may not measure up to the complexities expected in the academy; fear that the material rewards will not measure up to the market’s expectations of success; fear that it entails powerlessness in a culture that worships power. And, at a more basic level, despite deep theological convictions to the contrary, a fear that I might just not be good enough.
But what is it that the Bible teaches over and over and over again: “perfect love casts out all fear.”
We are loved. Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. It is as simple as that. The kingdom – paradise, shalom, beloved community, healing, wholeness, communion with God and with one another – however you wish to imagine it – it is right here in our very midst. We are invited to trust that fundamental truth; and to live every moment as if there was no other truth in the world than that.
To live as those who are loved; to love as those so living: that is paradise.
If you are thirsty, take a drink. It is like cool water on a hot summer’s day.
You need do nothing; simply drink, be satisfied, be gratified. Give thanks, and then join your voice in song: let all things now living, a song of thanksgiving, to God our creator triumphantly raise! Amen.