Praction

by Bruce Gilberd

(Based on Matt 6:5-15)

Fore-prayer on Parihaka: God of history, God of grace, we give thanks for the faith, aroha and vision of Tewhiti and Tohu.  As leaders of the Christian village of Parihaka, in Taranaki, NZ, they peaceably sought justice.  May we, and all peoples, do the same in our time and place.  Amen.

I’ve invented a new word: “Praction”: Prayer <—> Action.

In today’s Gospel reading Jesus leads into giving his prayer – the Lord’s Prayer – with these words of guidance:

  • “when you pray go to your room; shut the door quietly.”
    I add: switch off all sounds, devices and distractions, and sit in a receptive position.
  • Jesus then says: “Pray to your Father, who is in this secret place.”
    I add: He is beyond us, beside us, and within us.
  • Jesus says: “And your Father who sees you in secret will reward you openly.”

So, I ask two questions:

  • What might be the essential nature of our prayer in secret solitude?
  • What might the public rewards be of our secret prayer?

To help us with these questions, I refer to this little book: Twentieth Century Men [People] of Prayer.  The author, Mark Gibbard, was an Anglican monk – I heard him speak fifty years ago.  I am still incorporating into my prayer the many insights in his pages.

The key insights for all the people covered form a three-fold trinity. They

  • stay connected to life and have broad interests
  • exercise and develop their capacity to gaze on God – contemplate
  • take costly, loving action every day

So … be widely involved in life; pray and act: Praction!

I will now illustrate, from four people in Gibbard’s book, how each lived this way in their varying contexts.

  1. Fredrich Von Hugel:

Von Hugel was the son of an Austrian Baron and a Scottish mother, born in 1852.  The family settled in Devon, England.  He was a scholar, a geologist, and a deep man of prayer, who guided many others.  His guidance could be very direct!
He was convinced followers of Jesus need to have broad and non-religious interests if they, by prayer and action – in praction, were to become mature and integrated human beings.  We must, he said, face our intellectual problems and anchor our faith in community and history.
“When I cease to take in new ideas,” he said, “call the undertaker!”

2. Simone Weil:

Weil was born into an affluent medical family in Paris in 1909.  They were agnostic Jews.  She was a seeker of truth and a woman of prayer.  She incensed her parents by giving her rations to soldiers, working in factories for low pay, and refusing to wear stockings.  She committed herself to share the hardships of those unjustly treated.
Weil fought in the Spanish Civil War for the democratically elected Socialist party, against Franco.
She died, exhausted, at 34.

Prayer led her to just action.  A complex personality who came, in her words, “to adore Christ”.

3. Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

He was born in Berlin in 1905, and executed after two years in prison in 1945.
A Lutheran by upbringing, and with a desire to be a theologian, from fourteen years of age.  Yet … he had yet to be encountered by Christ, and there were years of build-up to that.  Later Bonhoeffer asks the haunting and contemporary question, “Who is Christ for us, today?”
In 1937, when he could have pursued a scholarly career in America, and Hitler’s star was rising, and Germany re-arming, he returned to Germany and led the small “Confessing Church” – the established church had capitulated to Hitler.  This, and being implicated in an attempt on Hitler’s life, cost him his life.

But before this, he, Bonhoeffer, who also liked to dance, hike, play the piano and go to the opera – he wrote key texts for us, not least The Cost of Discipleship, and Letters and Papers from Prison.  Here we discover the essence of this man of prayer: of broad interests, of love, and of prayer, the Psalms his constant companion.

I am tempted to tell you about all the twelve people in this text – but I’ll complete with just one more – our fourth.

4. Dag Hammarskjold:

Was born in a sixteenth century castle in Uppsala, Sweden.  Died in a plane crash in 1961, on his way to try and end the war in the Congo.
He was General Secretary of the United Nations.  Politics and prayer were central to his holy and efficient life.  He was a quiet man, with incredible energy.
After his death, his journal of thirty one years was found in his New York home.  It was published as Markings.  There are one or two insights.

  • Again, the Psalms were very important to him.
  • He wrote, “We need to begin to live in self-forgetfulness.”
  • “The greater the political responsibilities, the greater the need of prayer.”
  • “I don’t know who – or what – put the question.  I don’t know when it was put.  I don’t even remember answering.  But at some moment I did answer Yes to someone, … and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that therefore my life in self-surrender had a goal.”
  • And finally from Hammarskjold, “For many of us in this era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action.”

Praction!

These four, along with Tewhiti and Tohu of Parihaka, and millions down the centuries, have been committed to

  • anchorage in the community of faith
  • broad interests in God’s world: in nature and history …. in society and politics …. in justice and mercy
  • silent, receiving, reflective prayer
  • right, loving action in society

These have been their calling, and the source of their maturing.
Which of these – wider interests, reflective prayer, right action – are you – am I – now called to develop?  I hope you will believe me, that this is possible for all of us – proceeding in a way that is true to who we are.

Let us all live this way, all the time.

No Regrets

My blog this fortnight is about Maturity.  So, if its title is misleading, sorry.  I regret it.
The thing is, I have a certain pride (some might call it smugness) in being a man of few regrets.  It’s not that I’ve never done anything wrong.  On the contrary, life has contained plenty of failures, disappointments and embarrassments.  But every decision I ever make, I make with consideration, forethought, and with the best intentions and wisdom and integrity I can amass.  So if a decision backfires or something goes wrong, there is no cause for regret, because I know that given the same circumstances and information, I would make the same decision again.  Any undesirable outcome was not the result of a poor decision.  Recovery or corrective action may be necessary, even healing or apology, and lessons may need to be learned; but regret is redundant.

However, I do have one regret.  Yes, I do.

In my early twenties a close friend was about to marry.  At a pre-wedding function I and a couple of other close friends, fortified no doubt by an ale or two, thought it would be clever to kidnap our mate.  To this day I cannot think why, by any assessment, this was a good idea.  We collared him in a hallway, dragged him away (good-naturedly and with his reluctant acquiescence), and sat in a car eating chips and wondering, what now?  We decided (again, unguided by any rational thought) to go back to the function and take money off the guests – for charity, of course – in order to get their loved one back.  It seemed like such a jolly jape at the time, and bound to be admired by all.

Well, the jape meandered to its deserved anti-climax, but I have regretted that unfathomable act of immaturity ever since.  What were we thinking?

I was reminded of this at a recent ‘fun-day’ in a nearby park.  There was a sausage sizzle and a queue had formed and there were three youths – pre-teens, I would say – who would get their breaded sausage, woof it down in a gulp, and rejoin the queue.  They thought they were hilarious, cleverly managing to secure far more sausages than anyone else and what a great ruse!  Everyone else, of course, only saw them as boorish and immature, and where were their parents?

What is maturity?  When does someone become mature?

No doubt it’s a process.  But I offer my own definition:  Maturity is a function of how much one considers the needs and feelings of others.  Yeah?  Nothing to do with age.  A very young person can be demonstrably mature.  And a very old one immature.   Others in between.
And, a person can be mature at certain times and places, but immature at others. 

A mature person probably wouldn’t even begin to judge pre-teens at a sausage sizzle!

I’ve seen my infant grandson throw a handful of Lego bricks at an infant playmate and laugh with unfeeling delight, looking around at adults in the room expecting them to share his mirth. I’ve watched people in a rugby crowd – ostensibly adult – pulling acts of the utmost immaturity.

I’ve seen my granddaughter make moves to find a third world refugee child to sponsor; and I’ve seen other acts of unexpected selflessness from teenagers.

It’s these latter behaviours we parents, grandparents, teachers, leaders (and formerly immature people, especially kidnappers of husbands-in-waiting) need to foster and encourage.  The former behaviours – the boorish, selfish ones – to be restrained and coached out of our charges, lest they become anti-social, sociopathic, or even criminal.

No, I have no regrets … except … well, there were quite a few instances of immaturity that I do regret.  There, it’s out there now.
But the ideal is to retain our child-like-ness whilst developing our maturity.  And the secret to that is learning to prioritise the needs and feelings of others.

Less of me; more of others –> no regerts.

Ken F

The Pharisee and the Publican

by Ken Francis

(Based on Luke 18:9-14; Ro 5:1-11)

Can you see it?  This scene?  This delightful short drama, painted very economically by Jesus …

I doubt he meant it as comedy, but to me it seems so comical!  Like a cartoon.  We could almost do it as a little drama … a bit of street theatre:
There on your left stands a proud, dignified looking man, pompous and cartoonish, head held high and sneering sideways, telling God how righteous he is!  Not like that sinner over there.
On your right, a bowed, cowed man, kneeling, too ashamed to come near the altar, even to look up, but deeply contrite.  All but sweeping handfuls of ashes over himself.

This second guy – the King James Version calls him a ‘publican’ (which, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica, was the label given to an “ancient Roman public contractor”), and seems to be, in Jesus’s telling, a tax collector – is hardly a cartoon though.  That wouldn’t do him justice, poor man.  But the question is, as we look at these two guys, which one is you?

Which one do you identify with?

Or, let’s say … if he is at one end of the continuum and he’s at the other, and you were asked to position yourself somewhere between the two, to indicate your disposition, where would you stand?

I’m ashamed to say that I’d be much closer to the Pharisee than the publican.
Because the inclination of my heart is to think I’m pretty good.  I pay my tithe – I pay my taxes – I try to think of others, I … I’ve never murdered anyone – honest!  I never – well, hardly ever – tell lies … or miss church on Sunday.  Yes, God I’m pretty good.  Thank you that I’m so righteous!  Not like all those sinners … out there!  Actually, I’m so pleased with myself, it’s hard to be humble.  I’m proud of my humility!  Like the old saying, I used to be conceited, but now I’m perfect!

But, where would you stand?

And … which of these two guys is the greatest sinner, do you think?

I suggest that they’re both equal sinners.  Because, is any one sin greater or worse than another?  Was Adolph Hitler any worse than … Queen Elizabeth?  We humans – we’re the ones who rank sin.  We’re the ones who say genocide is worse than … lying; or murder is worse than … theft.  But in God’s eyes, sin is sin.  It’s not ranked.
And, don’t forget, there is good in the worst of sinners, just as there’s sin in the best of us … so, let no one cast stones at anyone else, right?

In fact, what is sin?

Judaism regards the violation of any of the 613 commandments as a sin!  (We’re left to guess which of the 613 the publican had breached. He was loathed, of course, as a tax collector.)

Well, we’re not Jews, so …

Here are three slightly different views of sin:
In one sense it’s things we do.  Our sinful acts, our sinful behaviour.  Breaking the rules!  The Ten Commandments list some of them.  Murder, theft, adultery, coveting.  Things we actually commit.
A second way of understanding sin is this:  Sin is turning away from God’s purposes, from his call on our lives.  (Like sheep, we have all gone astray, wrote Isaiah.)  So, when we abuse someone, when we deny someone mercy or justice, when we watch or read something we shouldn’t, when we assassinate someone’s character, when we fail in some way to love our neighbour … we are turning away from God’s purposes.  That’s sin.  There are sins of omission, of course, just as there are sins of commission.
In another, perhaps even more telling sense, sin is who we are.  It is embedded in our very nature.  The human condition.  We were born sinful, it says in Psalm 51; Jeremiah says the hearts of people are desperately wicked. [Jer 17:9: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”]  Many think humanity is inherently good, but … can we honestly say that?

St. Augustine said sin is “a word, deed, or desire in opposition to the eternal law of God.”  And therefore, needs to be redeemed (that’s a metaphor for paying for someone’s release or deliverance): the death of Jesus is the price that is paid to release the faithful from the bondage of sin.

So, I put it to you that these two men are equally sinful, but … it’s their attitudes that truly distinguish them.  One of them (the Pharisee), like me, says, how good I am, that I am not like other men.  But the other, the publican – also like me – says, woe is me for I am a sinner.  God, forgive me.  God, save me.  For if he doesn’t, I am lost.

Commentator Matthew Henry writes, “God sees with what disposition and design people come to him.  The Pharisee seemed to be a good man, in some respects.  But he was boastful, in apparent expectation that God would affirm him, admire him, be in his debt!  Moreover, he thought meanly of others, particularly of the publican.  The Pharisee claims merit; the publican mercy.”  That is the difference that Jesus was emphasising.  The difference between the self-righteous and the mercy-seeker.  The publican’s disposition is, “Justice condemns me; nothing but mercy will save me.”

We all need to acknowledge this same truth.  No matter how good we try to be, it is only through God’s grace, through what Jesus did for us on the cross, that we can have eternal hope.  It’s important to recognise this, acknowledge it consciously, confess our sinful nature to him, and cast ourselves on his mercy, like our brother there (the penitent).  It’s kind of taking responsibility for who we are in our hearts.

This reminds me of how, as a school teacher, I sometimes found myself having to get to the bottom of teenage conflicts of various kinds, and meting out disciplinary consequences. I might ask some antagonist what happened, and they’d start saying something like, “Well, he tripped me” or “she stole my homework”, or …
Typically, I’d interrupt with, “Ok, but what did you do?” They might say, “Well, I wouldn’t have … if they hadn’t …” And again I’d say, “But what did you do?”
It was commonly difficult to get an adolescent to own his or her own actions – to take some responsibility for what had happened!

The publican was accepting responsibility for his sinful behaviour or nature.

Yes, we are all equally guilty.  But it would be a mistake to hold all of this in a solely negative light.  At the end of this brief street theatre, Jesus sums up with God’s view of all this.  Both of these men are sinners, but only one is “justified”, he concludes.  That’s the word he uses, not me.  We cannot shed our sinful nature, but we can be confident of being justified if our attitude is right.  The Romans reading talked about justification.  Martin Luther joyously latched onto the idea of justification at the outset of the Reformation.  He described the concept of justification as “just as if I’d never sinned”, which is cute, but actually a very helpful way of thinking of it.  “Just as if I’d never sinned.”

All our own righteousness “is as filthy rags” (the prophet Isaiah says), but if we turn to God, we can be ‘counted’ righteous, it says in Romans.  We take upon ourselves His righteousness – Jesus’s righteousness.  Yeah?

The words righteous and righteousness – we don’t use them much in modern parlance – we use the word ‘sin’ even less – actually occur 72 times in Romans!  Ro 4:5 says: “to the one who … trusts God who justifies the ungodly, their faith is credited as righteousness.”
We can’t tell God about how righteous we are!  Like this guy.  How arrogant.  God laughs.  But He credits us as righteous, if we come to him as the publican did.

A delightful little parable.  Spoken, it says in verse 9, to some who were “confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else”.  Actually, it’s not a parable at all – a parable is a superficial story with a deeper meaning.  This is a straight out narrative of what’s what around approaching God.  A contrast between how to be and how not to be.

Friends, let’s get closer to the publican’s end of the spectrum …

Concluding prayer:
Father, help us to see merit in the publican’s approach to your throne.  Help us to find humility as we approach, and true regret for our sinful inclinations.  Then to receive, by faith your credit of righteousness, based on what you have done, not on our own efforts.  Then to find true gratitude, that you have taken the initiative to rescue us from whatever sin has made us.  We are enormously grateful even this morning as we reflect on these things.

Help us to walk our walk this week, with intent and integrity, and may our walk of faith please you. Amen

Wrestling with God

by Sharon Marr, channelling a Debie Thomas essay

(Based on Luke 18:1-8; Gen 32:22-31; 2 Tim 3:14–4:5)

In this week’s Gospel reading, Debie Thomas (of Journey with Jesus) recounts how Jesus tells a parable about a bothersome widow who seeks justice against her oppressor.   Day after day, the judge refuses to help her.  But she persists, tirelessly bothering the judge until he’s sick of her very presence: “I will grant her justice,” he says to himself, “so that she may not wear me out.  (In the Greek, “so that she won’t give me a black eye”! Don’t you love that? These are the gems you get when you dig a little deeper sometimes.)

“At the outset,” writes Debie, “the Gospel writer tells us that Jesus’s parable is about ‘the need to pray always and not lose heart.’  But this is troubling.  Are we really supposed to harass God until we wear him down?  Is that what prayer is — bothering a hard-hearted God until he gives in?  When I receive an answer to prayer, is it only because God is sick to death of hearing my voice, and wants me to shut up?

“In case we’re inclined to think of God as the unjust judge, Jesus explains that the parable works by way of contrast: Unlike the heartless judge in the story, God ‘will quickly grant justice’ to those who cry out to him. 

“But this explanation raises troubling questions, too, because our lived experiences contradict it.  Too often, God does delay, and our most fervent prayers — for healing, for justice, for protection, for peace — go unanswered.  Too often, our struggles with prayer lead us to experience God very much as the judge, turned away from the urgency of our requests for reasons we can’t begin to fathom.

“So what are we to make of this parable?  Well, for starters, I wonder if the story is less about God, and more about us.  I wonder if it’s about the state of our hearts, and about the motivations behind our prayers. Maybe what’s at stake is not who God is and how God operates in the world but who we are, and why we need so desperately to be people of persistent prayer.

“The parable begins with an exhortation not to lose heart.  What does this mean?  What does it look like to ‘lose heart’ in our spiritual lives?  The words that come to mind are weariness, resignation, numbness, and despair.  When I lose heart, I lose my sense of focus and direction.  I lose clarity, and begin to doubt God’s intentions.  I get irritable and cynical very quickly.  My spiritual GPS goes haywire, and all roads lead to nowhere.

“In contrast, the widow in Jesus’s parable is the very picture of purposefulness, precision, aliveness, and clarity.  She knows her need, she knows its urgency, and she knows exactly where to go and whom to ask in order to get her need met.  If anything, the daily business of getting up, getting dressed, heading over to the judge’s house or workplace, banging on his door, and talking his ear off until he listens fortifies her own sense of who she is and what she’s about.”

She is persistent.  I remember a story my grandmother Bebe told.  As a child she was one of seven, and food was not under any circumstances to be wasted.  One breakfast, her younger brother said to his mother, “Do I have to eat this egg?” Their mother quickly retorted, “That’s enough of that. Eat it up” … and then probably mentioned the starving millions in the world. 
“But Mum,” he said … and she responded sharply, “Eat it up and eat it now”.
“But …”
And an angry glare was given. … Silence …
Then his small voice said, “But do I have to eat the feathers?”

Persistence on his part paid off, and the egg was removed.

“What happens when we pray like the widow?” Debie asks.
Then answers, “I can only speak from experience, but I know that when I persist in prayer — really persist, with a full heart, over a long period of time — something happens … to me.  My sense of who I am, to whom I belong and what really matters in this life.  My heart grows stronger.  It becomes less fragile and flighty.  And sometimes — here’s the biggest surprise — these good things happen even when I don’t receive the answer I’m praying for.”

And maybe I am learning what it is to live in ‘your will be done’, and trust Him.

Debie continues.
“I don’t mean for a moment to suggest that unanswered prayer doesn’t take a toll.  It does.  It hurts and it baffles.  Sometimes it breaks my heart.  But maybe that’s the point of the parable, too: the work of prayer is hard.  The widow’s predicament is not straightforward; she has to make a costly choice every single day.  Will I keep asking?   Can I be patient?  Am I still capable of trusting in the possibility of justice?

“Prayer is, finally, a great mystery.  We can’t know — it’s not given to us to know — why some prayers are answered quickly and many others are not.  We can’t understand why our earnest pleas for justice (or healing, or peace) hit the wall of God’s silence and sometimes remain there for weeks, months, years, or lifetimes. And yet, from the heart of this bewildering mystery, Jesus asks, ‘Will I find faith on the earth?’  Which is to say, will I find men and women like the bothersome widow?  Will I find such ferocity?  Such tenacity?  Such fortitude?

“The widow’s only power in this story is the power of showing up.  The power of sheer grit.  But the story suggests that this power is not to be taken lightly.  Which is to say, prayer is not to be taken lightly.  We can’t always know what gets shaken, transformed, upended, or vindicated simply because we show up again and again in prayer. 

“Not coincidentally, all of our lectionary readings this week are about persistence.  The widow persists in her belief that good things will come to her, even when the odds look wretched.  Jacob, wrestling the angel in total darkness, persists until the blessing of a new name and a new future are granted to him. The writer of 2 Timothy encourages persistence again and again, “whether the time is favourable or unfavourable.”  And the psalmist reminds himself — and us — that the reason we can be persistent is … because God is. Our persistence can never be in vain, because it is rooted in God’s.  

“What all of these readings suggest to me is that God delights in those who dare to strive with him.  To contend with him.  To wrestle with him.  Wrestling, as it turns out, is not a bad or even a scary thing, because it’s the opposite of apathy, the opposite of resignation.  It’s even the opposite of loneliness.  To fight with God — to show up day after day in prayer, to wrestle with our resistance in the darkest hours of the night — is to stay close, to keep our arms wrapped tight around the one who alone can bless us.  Fighting means we haven’t walked away. 

“When the Son of Man comes, Jesus asks at the end of the parable, will he find faith on the earth?  Faith that persists, faith that contends, faith that wrestles?  This is the question that matters. Will he find such faith in us?”