Dylan's lectionary blog

Proper 12, Year C

Luke 11:1-13 - link to NRSV text

I was having a conversation the other day with a friend about something I've observed in American Christianity in particular: the tendency to think of following Jesus and Christian faith primarily if not solely as a matter of interior disposition -- of trying to have more kindly attitudes toward some people and perhaps to feel righteously angry toward others, to feel sad about people living in poverty or without "knowing the Lord," to feel warm devotion toward God, to feel humble and grateful, for example -- and that if you've got that interior disposition down, if your "heart's in the right place," and if in addition to that you stay out of trouble, you're pretty much doing what Jesus taught his followers to do.

Our gospel for this Sunday is a healthy antidote for that. It's by no means an isolated case -- you can't read the prophetic books of the Hebrew scriptures, the gospels, or Paul's letters in particular without coming across plenty of such antidotes -- but I hope this Sunday that many preachers will point out that the "Lord's Prayer" as we read it this Sunday includes a petition that very bold indeed for many of us to pray.

Luke presents Jesus teaching disciples to pray that God would forgive our sins "as we forgive everyone indebted to us." This is not the parallelism we use in most liturgical versions of the "Lord's Prayer"; it is in the Greek quite clearly a request to God to treat our sins as we treat monetary debts. The "forgiveness" we are invited to extend to others is not a personal well-wishing; it is changing the material circumstances of the poor such that they and their families no longer teeter on the brink of disaster, but can earn their living by their work. And we as Jesus' followers are taught to ask God to extend mercy toward us in our sin precisely to the degree that we extend mercy toward others with our wealth and our power.

I wonder what would happen if wealthy Christians (and if, for example, you make $25,000 annually, that puts you in the richest 10% of the world's population -- check out where you fall on the "Global Rich List") really made that our prayer.

Our congregations' "success" wouldn't be measured by how many people show up for worship on a Sunday so much as by how much our efforts to educate and encourage one another in discipleship were making a difference for the world's poor.

We wouldn't see getting people to come to church as the fullest expression of "evangelism"; it isn't "evangelism," after all, if it is in no way good news for the poor.

I think that we would find it easier to come together across theological or theopoliticial difference to engage fully and joyfully in mission to end extreme poverty. And I think we would do it with deep and unreserved joy.

We have, after all, been richly blessed by God, and I think our gospel for this Sunday underscores that in a number of ways.

Jesus' disciples ask him to teach them to pray. The "Lord's Prayer" is only the beginning of his response to that request in Luke's gospel. After the prayer, Jesus tells a story of a most ungenerous so-called "friend." The man is blessed with the means to fulfill his community's obligation (a shared obligation) to feed a traveler in need.

How does such a blessed man called pray? With words, certainly, but also with action. How could he ask God to "give us each day our daily bread," and then fail to give that bread to one of those for whom he has asked God to provide?

The man tells his friend no. How is the man's friend called to pray? If he has prayed for the coming of God's kingdom and the messianic banquet, how can he leave one friend without bread when another has it? The friend keeps banging on the door. Luke calls it "shamelessness" in verse 8 (the NRSV inexplicably renders it as "persistence," although that's not a meaning of anadeia in ancient Greek). The shouting friend is in effect conducting a public protest threatening to expose the richer man's lack of hospitality, and it works. The shameless protest is a prayer as well as an answer to prayer; through it each has daily bread.

I find it quite scary to pray that God would treat my sins as I treat debt and other burdens that keep the poorest in poverty. Is that a prayer that I want God to answer? And when I pray that God's kingdom would come, and that we each would have daily bread, I can't help but be a bit nervous wondering whether my prayer will be answered as the rich man's was -- with a friend who, if need be, will expose how shallow my prayers often are if I will not participate in God's mission to answer them.

And I pray nonetheless.

I pray, and I look for opportunities to participate in God's answering that prayer, in God's reconciling the divide between rich and poor and everyone of us breaking bread together at the messianic banquet. I ask and I seek knowing that it feels risky to do so, and as I do that, I find not only friends -- and I am grateful for such friends -- who will hold me accountable to my prayers, but also a God who is generous beyond my asking.

I may pray that God would be generous toward me in the way that I'm generous toward others, and one of the most helpful things I've found in praying this way is that it reminds me again and again just how freely God showers blessings. I acknowledge the poverty of my own expectations, and God astonishes me with mercy -- giving me not only the daily bread I need, but a renewed vision of a world in which bless one another as freely with all we have to offer as God blesses us.

As Jesus teaches us to pray, with our lives as well as our lips, we are invited to see the world as Jesus sees -- the world's wounds as opportunity for healing and reconciliation, the world's needs as opportunity to experience God's generosity afresh by participating in its expression toward the poor, a account of deserving as a measure of just how much God's love exceeds such reckoning.

Thanks be to God!

Proper 25, Year B

Psalm 13 - link to BCP text
Mark 10:46-52 - link to NRSV text

People often ask me how they should pray. I'm happy to answer, but I think the way the question is most often put shows some assumptions about prayer that are worth considering before buying into them. I particularly have in mind the "should" part of the question, which seems to me to imply that there are right and wrong ways to pray, a kind of prayer etiquette that's important to follow.

That's not something I see in scripture, though. This Sunday's gospel is an excellent case in point. Jesus and his followers are traveling when they encounter Bartimaeus, who shouts, "Son of David, have mercy on me!" It's not a demure, "if you're not too busy" request. There's no "if you want to do this," or "if you think it's best."

Bartimaeus shouts out a demand -- "have mercy on me!" -- that presumes a relationship between the two of them: Jesus as "Son of David" and therefore king of Israel is obligated to Bartimaeus, an Israelite and therefore his subject. Jesus heals him. He doesn't heal him because Bartimaeus has used the "right" title for Jesus. In Mark, Jesus' preferred title isn't "Son of David," but "the Son of Man." In calling Jesus "Son of David" and therefore king of Israel, Bartimaeus is treading in effect into territory that brought a stern "shut up" (the "charge" there is not the wording of a warm "you're right and I'm glad you said so, but please be discreet") from Jesus just two chapters before, when Peter called Jesus God's anointed (Mark 8:29-30).

In other words, far from being healed as reward for saying the right thing in the right way, Bartimaeus is healed despite his addressing Jesus loudly, repeatedly, and presumptuously before a great crowd in a way Jesus would rather not be addressed in public, if at all.

And Jesus not only answers him, but also heals him. Jesus is not one to hang back waiting for us to get it "right" before responding with compassion. And in any case, who said that the "right" way to ask for what we need would be demurely? There are other ways to read the parable Jesus tells of a persistent widow who gets justice from an unjust judge who "fears neither God nor humankind," but Luke clearly reads it as a model of how we should pray, with the widow's relentless tenacity as a model rather than a cautionary tale (Luke 18:1-8).

But really, should we be surprised by this, if we've read the ancient books that Jesus and St. Paul called the scriptures? The Hebrew bible is full of godly people arguing with God. When God tells Abraham that God is judging Sodom, Abraham bargains with God like a haggler at a flea market or boot sale. When God calls Moses, Moses whines and explains just why God is mistaken. When God calls Jeremiah, Jeremiah protests that he's WAY too young.

And have you read the Psalms lately? I've been spending some quality time with them of late, in part because I think that too many of us have taken in a rather silly idea that God is a very, very delicate being who can only stand us when we're feeling Holy and Meek in a cheerful if rather passive way, and I'm writing music to express some other things we often feel and are invited to bring to God. Psalm 10 is a good one for grief and anger. I just wrote a musical setting for it, though it doesn't appear in our Eucharistic lectionary. What would it feel like to pray that on a Sunday? How will it feel this Sunday to pray Psalm 13, which clearly (especially clearly for those who've read books like this one on cultures of the ancient Near East) is trying to SHAME God into acting ("everyone's calling you chicken, God!")? Can we really enter into that space of being angry with God as we all stand their in our Sunday best?

However we dress, though, when we do it, I think it's wise to practice coming to God with our anger, our grief, and our frustration. God doesn't care whether we're "justified" in having those feelings when we do -- as if feelings were something that needed "justifying." God gave us those feelings -- not to control, but to experience -- and we don't have to experience them alone. There is no more appropriate place to bring our anger and our grief -- not only our questions, but our frustrations when our questions aren't answered, or are unanswerable -- than to God; and when we gather as Christian community, we gather together not just as people who rejoice in our experience of God's blessings, but to bring before God the wounds of the world, including our wounds.

As I've preached about before, most of us will one day experience a grief that seems to turn the whole world upside-down, and when (not if) that happens amongst our families, our circle of friends, our communities, and our communities of faith, as people of faith we bring those to God. When we are angry, we rail at God. When we are sad, we weep before God. When we can't hear God or feel God's presence, there is nothing, in my experience, more potentially healing to do than to bring who we really are and what we are really experiencing in that moment to God.

That will sometimes mean railing at God for being absent -- and sometimes, that will be the most powerful way we could experience God's presence. The past is memory, an imagining of what was but isn't. The future is not here; it's our imagining what may be. The present is here, and when we need to experience God's presence, we do it in the present, with our present hopes and fears, our present longings and frustrations, our present feelings and thoughts. Whether we judge them to be acceptable or not, we can have confidence that God is not threatened by them as we are, and can accept them even when we can't. However we come, with whatever words and whatever wounds, in blindness and recognition, in peace or in anger, and whatever else God wants of us, God wants us to COME.

Thanks be to God!