Category Archives: prayer

The Original “Lean In”

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Sheryl Sandberg has stolen from Jesus.  As usual, Jesus is pretty gracious, and as far as I know, Sheryl hasn’t yet been struck dead, but you hear the words of Sheryl’s best-seller in our Gospel text for this morning: “if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile” (Matthew 8:41).  Sandberg is the COO of Facebook and author of the book “Lean In.”  Her message is more specifically about women in the workforce and in society, but she’s tapped into something much larger, deeper, and more important than how to narrow the gender gap in Fortune 500 companies.

Part of what made her words so popular is that they don’t quite line up with the messages that we’re used to hearing from secular sources.  She challenges her readers that when doors start to close, you should stick your foot in them before they shut completely, when someone won’t answer you, knock harder instead of walking away.  Women throughout history have been known as the necks that move the heads of state; gaining ground through unofficial back channels–there are plenty of examples in the Old Testament alone.  To face problems head-on and refuse to back down is how Sheryl asserts women should tackle the last hurdles toward gender equality.  This is not the way that most women have been taught to respond to resistance; giving away a shirt is not the way most people have been taught to respond to someone who demands your coat.

Of course her audience is women in the workplace, and the dogged ambition that motivates the message might raise some concern, but I wonder why we don’t approach God’s message with the same ruthless determination.  Through Jesus, God teaches us a new kind of math in this Sermon on the Mount: meant to awake in the hearer the story of Moses and Mt. Sinai, Jesus gives a new summary of the law here in the fifth chapter of Matthew.  You hear again and again the refrain, “You have heard it said… but I say to you…”  Jesus is painting the picture of the Gospel as clearly as he can: when someone wrongs you, lean in.  When someone steals from you, lean in.  When all sorts of evil comes your way, batten down the hatches, turn your face toward the rain, and let it do its worst.

The strength to face these trials comes not from ourselves but from God, through the Holy Spirit.  It is only when we’re leaning on God that we can lean in to the kinds of lifestyle that Jesus is outlining for us in the Gospel lesson today, and that’s what the whole of Scripture is about.

In our Old Testament reading today (Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18), we hear about the ways that God set out for his people, the Hebrews, to behave.  They were to avoid corruption and deception, they were to be generous and fair to each other, to the less fortunate, and to the strangers in their midst.  At the end of each exhortation or law, there is a refrain, “I am the LORD.”  It refers back to the beginning of the passage, where God says to Moses, “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy” (Lev. 19:2).  It’s a sort of shorthand, you see–every line, every law that’s being laid out by Moses to the people on God’s behalf is about holiness.  It’s about living in a way that imitates God, that makes the world holy like God is holy.  That’s what being “sanctified” is–being made holy.

Even back in Leviticus, God knew that we humans weren’t quite capable of being holy on our own.  God says that his people will be holy because of his own holiness–the promise that God made back in Leviticus came true when Jesus arrived on the scene.  That’s part of the reason why Matthew’s gospel draws so many lines back and forth between the Old and New Testaments–he wants his readers to see clearly that God is fulfilling his centuries-old promises in the person of Jesus Christ.

So, how do we live these words that God has given us today?  How do we “lean in”?

The truth that we know deep down, that we see witnessed to in the pages of Scripture, and that we hear in our prayers every Sunday, is that we can’t “lean in” on our own.  We can’t make ourselves do any good thing apart from God’s power through the Holy Spirit.  We’re helpless to our selfishness, our desire to keep our coats, to do the bare minimum required, to ask for our possessions back as soon as we lend them out.

And so, we pray.  We use the words that God himself taught us through Jesus in the Lord’s Prayer, we use words that faithful people throughout time have used in our Book of Common Prayer, we use our own words, offering up our souls and bodies to be used by God.

What does God do?  He sent his son, our Lord Jesus Christ; we disciples take this gift into our own bodies in the Eucharist every time we gather here together.  He sent the Holy Spirit to transform us into holy people, to give us strength to lean in when we have got nothing left.  From the beginning of God’s relationship with people, he’s always told us that he is only as far away as we push him; he’s always standing just as close as we’ll let him, ready to give us the strength we need to face whatever evil may throw at us to try to destroy us.

“You have heard that it was said, `You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:43-45).  No matter how hard evil and violence push, God pushes back with peace and love.  Through his strength, which we gain in prayer and in our sacraments, we can push right back, too.

We have learned through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ that when death–the greatest evil–does its worst, God’s power is still stronger.  Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the living God; this is the truth upon which each of us may stand–and when we do, even the gates of hell cannot prevail against us (Matthew 16:16-18).

Amen.

the liturgy of our lives

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“The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart–an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship.  The humans live in time, and experience reality successively.  To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change.  And since they need change, the Enemy (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable.  But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence.  He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm.  He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme.  He gives them in His Church a spiritual year; they change from a fast to a feast, but it is the same feast as before.”

–The Screwtape Letters

Here’s (above) how I ended up Episcopalian.  Just as our days have rhythm–wake up, eat, go to school or work, exercise, eat, socialize, sleep–and our weeks have rhythm, experiencing both new things and The Same Old Thing, so why not our worship, too?  Most every church has a liturgy, whether that’s what they call it or not.  Growing up, I went to a church where we’d gather on folding chairs every Sunday at 10am in an elementary school cafeteria.  We’d join in singing together to the words projected on a video screen (this was new technology–no overheads with copied transparencies for us!).  Afterward, we’d sit, and hear the three-point sermon our pastor had prepared.  We’d pray, and then we’d pack up the cafeteria.  This order of service is a liturgy–it’s what we did every Sunday.  In its basic form, it’s exactly what people who worship God have been doing for centuries–millenia, even–when they gather together to worship the Living God.

Near the end of college, I stumbled into a Roman Catholic Church.  It wasn’t totally foreign, I’d been to plenty of services growing up, but this time was different for another reason–there was something about the prayers we prayed together that made me realize that Christians had been praying that prayer to God for thousands of years.  Far from such a prayer seeming worn out or prosaic, somehow, its age gave it great power.

I wonder if some of its power is because it was The Same Old Thing.

Everybody goes to weddings; and everybody–especially lovers of The Princess Bride–knows the first words that are said, “Dearly Beloved…”–right?  When we hear those words, sometimes they sound worn out, but even when they do, we minds can’t help but jump to other times we’ve heard those same words–when Grandma and Grandpa renewed their vows, 50 years on; when you were a flower girl or ring bearer and noticed that you were at your first wedding; perhaps, when you yourself were married.

It’s almost as if all those different celebrations and different moments stacked up in time one on top of the other, so that in a way, all of them were happening again in your mind’s eye.  I think that’s a little bit of what Screwtape means when he says that humans experience reality successively–we think of those events as having happened on May 17, 1999 ,or April 20, 2004, or July 2, 2011–but in another way, a spiritual way, all those moments when those words align all happen at the same time.  It’s not just the family members at Grandma’s and Grandpa’s renewal of vows, it’s all the people who were there the first time round and all the people who were at their parents’ weddings when those same words were said.

I became part of the Anglican Communion because this messy, passionate group seeks to pray together, not only with each other, but with others around the world and throughout time–that all our prayers may, in a way, stack up on top of each other and allow us to see God more clearly by our communion.

Healing Breath

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In practicing mindfulness and yoga, the breath is our anchor–when our minds try to tiptoe away toward distraction, we smile and gently remind our brains that our lungs are taking over for the present.

In our lives, we try to let the Holy Spirit take over.  We focus on God’s presence, God’s love surrounding us–just like the air we breathe–and we accept and let go of the other things that swirl up around us, tempting us away from the breath, distracting us from God.

Part of the breath’s power in yoga is how, during challenging poses, we imagine that as the breath and the heat it creates is being sent throughout our bodies–especially to those places that are in need of some loosening or some clearing out, allowing a deeper twist or a more complete bend.

The Holy Spirit is the Breath of Life that comes into our bodies, eager to brush out the stinky, dark bits inside us that are holding us back (or maybe that we’re holding on to).  God’s breath is the loosening, healing, heating agent of our souls.

Today, walking with my dog, I was practicing some deep breathing, and as I sometimes do, I was forcing the breath out, contracting my stomach to really squeeze out all the air–mostly because I love the energizing rush of air that rushes into my lungs afterward.  It occurred to me all at once that perhaps, just like our literal breath (and just like so many figurative, spiritual applications as I’ve found and shared above), the Holy Spirit is most ready to come in and fill us up with God’s presence and power when we’ve gotten the emptiest.

As Thomas Keating puts it, “The Gospel teaches that Christ is present in the storm, not just in emerging from the storm.”

Maranatha!

Bended Knees – On Which To Chew

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Reading Screwtape Letters* for the first time in perhaps 10 years; how salient it continues to be decades after its release is a testament to the un-changing-ness of human nature, the problems, vices, and struggles that face every person throughout time.

“One of their poets, Coleridge, has recorded that he did not pray ‘with moving lips and bended knees’ but merely ‘composed his spirit to love’ and indulged ‘a sense of supplication’.  That is exactly the sort of prayer we want; and since it bears a superficial resemblance to the prayer of silence as practised by those who are very far advanced in the Enemy’s service, clever and lazy patients can be taken in by it for quite a long time.  At the very least, they can be persuaded that the bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget, what you must always remember, that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls.  It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.”

*a satire by C.S. Lewis, comprised of letters from one demon, or tempter, to another younger and less-experienced tempter; “the Enemy” in the quotation above then, is God.