Philippians 4:4-7
November 20, 2011
Because of the interactive nature of this sermon, it's difficult to write it out. it is better heard. If you would like to listen to the sermon,
Matthew 6:7-15
November 13, 2011
“When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
“Pray then in this way: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one. For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
You probably already know this because I’ve mentioned it perhaps too many times in my sermons, but I had a hard time in church when I was growing up. Somewhere between my childhood and adolescence, I became very cynical about church. A large part of it was that the seeds of the “I’m spiritual but not religious” movement were being sown at the time, seeds that have now grown into numerous crops. The surrounding youth culture was questioning everything about church, and it made me question.
So I became cynical about the need for church, while also being cynical and critical about the motivations of the people in church. I wasn’t sure that people needed to be in church, but as I looked around I became convinced that so many of the people I saw in church on Sundays were there for the wrong reasons. Looking around at those attending worship, I was convinced that they were there as much to be seen as they were to worship. I’m not sure I was entirely right, but it was what I saw.
My experience, or at least my perceptions as a teen, of people in church wasn’t far off from what Jesus saw in the Jews of his time. When Jesus taught his followers about prayer, he was reacting to something specific to the Jewish faith: they were praying more for prestige than to connect with God. And Jesus taught that praying for the wrong reasons was as bad as not praying at all.
To understand what I mean, it helps to transport yourself back to Jesus’ time, and to see what Jesus saw. First, he was critical of the Gentiles. The Gentiles, or non-Jews, had a faith that revolved both around the Greco-Roman gods, and a vague understanding of one God (depending on what movement you followed). The practice among Gentiles was to offer long, flowery, expressive prayers. They believed that to get the gods’ or God’s attention, they needed to pray in the right way, which meant being wordy and eloquent. So, as Jesus said, “they think that they will be heard because of their many words.”
Second, he was critical of the Jewish way of praying. This passage in Luke’s gospel is critical of the Jewish prayers for different reasons. The Jewish faith of the time was a very rigid faith, especially when it came to prayer. The Jews, to be righteous, were required to recite a number of memorized prayers, which many did in public so that others would see how holy they were.
For example, they were required to say the Shema at least twice a day, and the most righteous would say them three times a day. They were to say them upon rising and before going to bed. Many of the Jewish men would choose to be seen in public reciting their prayers, so they would emerge from their houses in the early morning, stand in the marketplace, and pray so that everyone could see. The Jewish culture was a religious culture, so prestige was heaped upon those who were seen as righteously religious. The Shema, which means “Hear,” as in “Hear, O Israel, The Lord is our God, the Lord alone,” is a recitation of the following three passages of scripture:
Deuteronomy 6:4-9
Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
Deuteronomy 11:13-21
If you will only heed his every commandment that I am commanding you today—loving the Lord your God, and serving him with all your heart and with all your soul— then he will give the rain for your land in its season, the early rain and the later rain, and you will gather in your grain, your wine, and your oil; and he will give grass in your fields for your livestock, and you will eat your fill. Take care, or you will be seduced into turning away, serving other gods and worshiping them, for then the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you and he will shut up the heavens, so that there will be no rain and the land will yield no fruit; then you will perish quickly off the good land that the Lord is giving you. You shall put these words of mine in your heart and soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and fix them as an emblem on your forehead. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, so that your days and the days of your children may be multiplied in the land that the Lord swore to your ancestors to give them, as long as the heavens are above the earth.
Numbers 15:37–41
The Lord said to Moses: Speak to the Israelites, and tell them to make fringes on the corners of their garments throughout their generations and to put a blue cord on the fringe at each corner. You have the fringe so that, when you see it, you will remember all the commandments of the Lord and do them, and not follow the lust of your own heart and your own eyes. So you shall remember and do all my commandments, and you shall be holy to your God. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, to be your God: I am the Lord your God.
In addition, they Jews were required to recite the Shemoneh ‘esreh, which means “The Eighteen.” These are nineteen prayers (one was added later to the original eighteen) that cover a whole variety of topics, many of which repeat the history of Israel. For instance, here is a sample of Number One:
"Blessed be Thou, O Lord, our God and God of our fathers, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob, the great, the mighty, and the fearful God—God Most High—who bestow goodly kindnesses, and art the Creator of all, and remember the love of the Fathers and bring a redeemer for their children's children for the sake of Thy name in love. King, Helper, Savior, and Shield; blessed be Thou, Shield of Abraham"
Many Jewish men chose to recite their prayers in public so that they could be seen as being righteous. In addition, when they prayed they wore their phylacteries, which were two boxes—one worn on the head, the other on the arm—containing tiny scrolls with the Ten Commandments written on them. The latter was wrapped around the arm with a cord that extended down to the fingers.
Jesus wanted people to move away from memorized and wordy prayers to ones that really connect us with God. I believe that what Christ wanted was for people of faith to simplify their prayers, to make it more natural, and to get the focus back on God, not on how we were praying. That’s why he taught this simple prayer to take the place of all the prayers, the Lord’s Prayer.
This prayer wasn’t just a short memorized prayer to take the place of long memorized prayers. It was an attempt to get people to pray about what matters. It wasn’t just a prayer, it was an outline for prayer. The prayer wasn’t just meant to be said in one piece, the way we typically pray it, which can lead us to pray it in the way the ancient Jews prayed their prayers—without passion or emphasis. He wanted people to dwell on each facet. Let me go over the prayer and show you what I mean.
Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. What does Jesus mean by this? It’s not just a starting line, something to get us going, by calling God sacred name. Jesus was saying that when we pray, we need to start from a place of humility where we hallow God. What does it mean to say we “hallow” God? It isn’t just saying that God is holy. It’s starting in a place of awe and reverence, where we recognize God’s greatness. It overcomes the tendency to be so familiar with God that we fail to recognize God’s greatness, wonder, and mystery. Jesus was saying that when we pray, we need to stand in awe of how wonderful and great God is, for that sets the context for our surrendering to God. So start your prayer from a place of awe and reverence.
Your kingdom come. Of all the lines in the prayer, this is the one that is most misunderstood. What do you think it means? My guess is that you fall into one of two categories. First, you may think it means that we are asking God to let us into heaven when we die, but there’s a problem with this. If that’s what Jesus meant, he would have said, “Your kingdom be open to us when we die.” It’s speaking about God’s kingdom coming to us here. It’s not about death, it’s about now. This leads to the second thought: that it is asking that Jesus return in what are called the end-times, which so many people think of in relationship to the book of Revelation. They think that what Jesus is telling us to do is to pray for his return. There’s a HUGE problem with this idea, though. Why would Jesus have them pray for his return when he was already there, and before he had even taught about his return? Remember, this is in the beginning of his ministry. He hadn’t even mentioned his going and returning.
Jesus is actually teaching a concept that appears all throughout the gospels, which is the idea that when we are living the right way in complete openness to God, we can simultaneously live in the kingdom of the world and the kingdom of God. Jesus taught that while we all live in the material realm, the realm of the earthly reality, those of faith can live simultaneously in a spiritual kingdom that helps us see and experience God and God’s blessings all around us. When we live in that kingdom, we become open to everything God has to offer us. We begin to see with God’s eyes, love with God’s love, and do what God wills. Which leads us to the next part of the prayer. So in this part of the prayer, pray that you can live always in God’s realm as much as you live in the earthly one.
Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. This phrase flows out of the idea of God’s kingdom coming. It’s the idea that when we live fully in God’s kingdom, God’s will becomes done on earth through us, in the way that it becomes done in heaven. So pray always that you will be doing God’s will in everything.
Give us this day our daily bread. This is a reminder that God’s concerns aren’t only spiritual. God cares about our material needs, and not just bread. God cares about us being healthy physically, and that what we eat, drink, and where we live matters. So pray that God will care for your physical needs.
And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. Several months ago someone asked me why we Presbyterians pray “debts” and “debtors,” rather than “trespasses,” or “sins,” which is what the original translation says. I kiddingly said to them that I believe it all has to do with our heritage. I figure the Episcopalians, being originally English, prayed “trespasses” because they tended to be the wealthy landowners who constantly had trespassers on their property. Meanwhile, the Scottish (who were the original Presbyterians) were always poor and in debt to the English (causing them to trespass), and so they were obsessed with getting their debts forgiven. Really, though, I have no idea why we don’t translate these as “sins.” The point of the prayer is that Christ wants us to pray that we can let go of our sins into God’s forgiveness, but that we would also steep ourselves in God by extending God’s forgiveness onto others. We all struggle to forgive, but when we forgive we live in God’s kingdom. And to forgive we have to be rooted in God’s kingdom. So pray that you will be forgiving just as you have been forgiven.
And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one. This part of the prayer recognizes that we struggle with testings and temptations, and it is a call to remember that we don’t face life’s challenges alone. God is with us. And so we need to pray for God to be with us when we struggle.
Personally, in my prayers, and even in the way I approach leading this church, I strive for Simplicity and Naturality. I realize that “naturality” isn’t a real word, but it rhymes so nicely with simplicity. I believe that when we pray, we need to be as simple and natural as possible, because the combination of the two opens us up the best to God. One of the problems with us pastors is that we are trained to be eloquent in our praying, and this can intimidate people, resulting in them feeling as though they can’t pray properly. God wants simple prayers, not necessarily eloquent prayers.
The point of our whole passage for this morning is that prayer is the foundation of the Christian life—even more than scripture is. Why? Because prayer is the stuff of our relationship with God. It is how we speak, listen, and love God. If you want to learn how to pray, learn from the Lord’s prayer: Keep it simple—Keep it natural—Make it constant.
Amen.
November 13, 2011
“When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
“Pray then in this way: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one. For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
You probably already know this because I’ve mentioned it perhaps too many times in my sermons, but I had a hard time in church when I was growing up. Somewhere between my childhood and adolescence, I became very cynical about church. A large part of it was that the seeds of the “I’m spiritual but not religious” movement were being sown at the time, seeds that have now grown into numerous crops. The surrounding youth culture was questioning everything about church, and it made me question.
So I became cynical about the need for church, while also being cynical and critical about the motivations of the people in church. I wasn’t sure that people needed to be in church, but as I looked around I became convinced that so many of the people I saw in church on Sundays were there for the wrong reasons. Looking around at those attending worship, I was convinced that they were there as much to be seen as they were to worship. I’m not sure I was entirely right, but it was what I saw.
My experience, or at least my perceptions as a teen, of people in church wasn’t far off from what Jesus saw in the Jews of his time. When Jesus taught his followers about prayer, he was reacting to something specific to the Jewish faith: they were praying more for prestige than to connect with God. And Jesus taught that praying for the wrong reasons was as bad as not praying at all.
To understand what I mean, it helps to transport yourself back to Jesus’ time, and to see what Jesus saw. First, he was critical of the Gentiles. The Gentiles, or non-Jews, had a faith that revolved both around the Greco-Roman gods, and a vague understanding of one God (depending on what movement you followed). The practice among Gentiles was to offer long, flowery, expressive prayers. They believed that to get the gods’ or God’s attention, they needed to pray in the right way, which meant being wordy and eloquent. So, as Jesus said, “they think that they will be heard because of their many words.”
Second, he was critical of the Jewish way of praying. This passage in Luke’s gospel is critical of the Jewish prayers for different reasons. The Jewish faith of the time was a very rigid faith, especially when it came to prayer. The Jews, to be righteous, were required to recite a number of memorized prayers, which many did in public so that others would see how holy they were.
For example, they were required to say the Shema at least twice a day, and the most righteous would say them three times a day. They were to say them upon rising and before going to bed. Many of the Jewish men would choose to be seen in public reciting their prayers, so they would emerge from their houses in the early morning, stand in the marketplace, and pray so that everyone could see. The Jewish culture was a religious culture, so prestige was heaped upon those who were seen as righteously religious. The Shema, which means “Hear,” as in “Hear, O Israel, The Lord is our God, the Lord alone,” is a recitation of the following three passages of scripture:
Deuteronomy 6:4-9
Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
Deuteronomy 11:13-21
If you will only heed his every commandment that I am commanding you today—loving the Lord your God, and serving him with all your heart and with all your soul— then he will give the rain for your land in its season, the early rain and the later rain, and you will gather in your grain, your wine, and your oil; and he will give grass in your fields for your livestock, and you will eat your fill. Take care, or you will be seduced into turning away, serving other gods and worshiping them, for then the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you and he will shut up the heavens, so that there will be no rain and the land will yield no fruit; then you will perish quickly off the good land that the Lord is giving you. You shall put these words of mine in your heart and soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and fix them as an emblem on your forehead. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, so that your days and the days of your children may be multiplied in the land that the Lord swore to your ancestors to give them, as long as the heavens are above the earth.
Numbers 15:37–41
The Lord said to Moses: Speak to the Israelites, and tell them to make fringes on the corners of their garments throughout their generations and to put a blue cord on the fringe at each corner. You have the fringe so that, when you see it, you will remember all the commandments of the Lord and do them, and not follow the lust of your own heart and your own eyes. So you shall remember and do all my commandments, and you shall be holy to your God. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, to be your God: I am the Lord your God.
In addition, they Jews were required to recite the Shemoneh ‘esreh, which means “The Eighteen.” These are nineteen prayers (one was added later to the original eighteen) that cover a whole variety of topics, many of which repeat the history of Israel. For instance, here is a sample of Number One:
"Blessed be Thou, O Lord, our God and God of our fathers, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob, the great, the mighty, and the fearful God—God Most High—who bestow goodly kindnesses, and art the Creator of all, and remember the love of the Fathers and bring a redeemer for their children's children for the sake of Thy name in love. King, Helper, Savior, and Shield; blessed be Thou, Shield of Abraham"
Many Jewish men chose to recite their prayers in public so that they could be seen as being righteous. In addition, when they prayed they wore their phylacteries, which were two boxes—one worn on the head, the other on the arm—containing tiny scrolls with the Ten Commandments written on them. The latter was wrapped around the arm with a cord that extended down to the fingers.
Jesus wanted people to move away from memorized and wordy prayers to ones that really connect us with God. I believe that what Christ wanted was for people of faith to simplify their prayers, to make it more natural, and to get the focus back on God, not on how we were praying. That’s why he taught this simple prayer to take the place of all the prayers, the Lord’s Prayer.
This prayer wasn’t just a short memorized prayer to take the place of long memorized prayers. It was an attempt to get people to pray about what matters. It wasn’t just a prayer, it was an outline for prayer. The prayer wasn’t just meant to be said in one piece, the way we typically pray it, which can lead us to pray it in the way the ancient Jews prayed their prayers—without passion or emphasis. He wanted people to dwell on each facet. Let me go over the prayer and show you what I mean.
Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. What does Jesus mean by this? It’s not just a starting line, something to get us going, by calling God sacred name. Jesus was saying that when we pray, we need to start from a place of humility where we hallow God. What does it mean to say we “hallow” God? It isn’t just saying that God is holy. It’s starting in a place of awe and reverence, where we recognize God’s greatness. It overcomes the tendency to be so familiar with God that we fail to recognize God’s greatness, wonder, and mystery. Jesus was saying that when we pray, we need to stand in awe of how wonderful and great God is, for that sets the context for our surrendering to God. So start your prayer from a place of awe and reverence.
Your kingdom come. Of all the lines in the prayer, this is the one that is most misunderstood. What do you think it means? My guess is that you fall into one of two categories. First, you may think it means that we are asking God to let us into heaven when we die, but there’s a problem with this. If that’s what Jesus meant, he would have said, “Your kingdom be open to us when we die.” It’s speaking about God’s kingdom coming to us here. It’s not about death, it’s about now. This leads to the second thought: that it is asking that Jesus return in what are called the end-times, which so many people think of in relationship to the book of Revelation. They think that what Jesus is telling us to do is to pray for his return. There’s a HUGE problem with this idea, though. Why would Jesus have them pray for his return when he was already there, and before he had even taught about his return? Remember, this is in the beginning of his ministry. He hadn’t even mentioned his going and returning.
Jesus is actually teaching a concept that appears all throughout the gospels, which is the idea that when we are living the right way in complete openness to God, we can simultaneously live in the kingdom of the world and the kingdom of God. Jesus taught that while we all live in the material realm, the realm of the earthly reality, those of faith can live simultaneously in a spiritual kingdom that helps us see and experience God and God’s blessings all around us. When we live in that kingdom, we become open to everything God has to offer us. We begin to see with God’s eyes, love with God’s love, and do what God wills. Which leads us to the next part of the prayer. So in this part of the prayer, pray that you can live always in God’s realm as much as you live in the earthly one.
Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. This phrase flows out of the idea of God’s kingdom coming. It’s the idea that when we live fully in God’s kingdom, God’s will becomes done on earth through us, in the way that it becomes done in heaven. So pray always that you will be doing God’s will in everything.
Give us this day our daily bread. This is a reminder that God’s concerns aren’t only spiritual. God cares about our material needs, and not just bread. God cares about us being healthy physically, and that what we eat, drink, and where we live matters. So pray that God will care for your physical needs.
And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. Several months ago someone asked me why we Presbyterians pray “debts” and “debtors,” rather than “trespasses,” or “sins,” which is what the original translation says. I kiddingly said to them that I believe it all has to do with our heritage. I figure the Episcopalians, being originally English, prayed “trespasses” because they tended to be the wealthy landowners who constantly had trespassers on their property. Meanwhile, the Scottish (who were the original Presbyterians) were always poor and in debt to the English (causing them to trespass), and so they were obsessed with getting their debts forgiven. Really, though, I have no idea why we don’t translate these as “sins.” The point of the prayer is that Christ wants us to pray that we can let go of our sins into God’s forgiveness, but that we would also steep ourselves in God by extending God’s forgiveness onto others. We all struggle to forgive, but when we forgive we live in God’s kingdom. And to forgive we have to be rooted in God’s kingdom. So pray that you will be forgiving just as you have been forgiven.
And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one. This part of the prayer recognizes that we struggle with testings and temptations, and it is a call to remember that we don’t face life’s challenges alone. God is with us. And so we need to pray for God to be with us when we struggle.
Personally, in my prayers, and even in the way I approach leading this church, I strive for Simplicity and Naturality. I realize that “naturality” isn’t a real word, but it rhymes so nicely with simplicity. I believe that when we pray, we need to be as simple and natural as possible, because the combination of the two opens us up the best to God. One of the problems with us pastors is that we are trained to be eloquent in our praying, and this can intimidate people, resulting in them feeling as though they can’t pray properly. God wants simple prayers, not necessarily eloquent prayers.
The point of our whole passage for this morning is that prayer is the foundation of the Christian life—even more than scripture is. Why? Because prayer is the stuff of our relationship with God. It is how we speak, listen, and love God. If you want to learn how to pray, learn from the Lord’s prayer: Keep it simple—Keep it natural—Make it constant.
Amen.
What Do We Make of Miracles? Finding Miracles in the Mundane
Psalm 104:1-18
October 30, 2011
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Bless the Lord, O my soul.
O Lord my God, you are very great.
You are clothed with honor and majesty,
wrapped in light as with a garment.
You stretch out the heavens like a tent,
you set the beams of your chambers on the waters,
you make the clouds your chariot,
you ride on the wings of the wind,
you make the winds your messengers,
fire and flame your ministers.
You set the earth on its foundations,
so that it shall never be shaken.
You cover it with the deep as with a garment;
the waters stood above the mountains.
At your rebuke they flee;
at the sound of your thunder they take to flight.
They rose up to the mountains,
ran down to the valleys to the place
that you appointed for them.
You set a boundary that they may not pass,
so that they might not again cover the earth.
You make springs gush forth in the valleys;
they flow between the hills,
giving drink to every wild animal;
the wild asses quench their thirst.
By the streams the birds of the air have their habitation;
they sing among the branches.
From your lofty abode you water the mountains;
the earth is satisfied with the fruit of your work.
You cause the grass to grow for the cattle,
and plants for people to use, to bring forth food from the earth,
and wine to gladden the human heart,
oil to make the face shine,
and bread to strengthen the human heart.
The trees of the Lord are watered abundantly,
the cedars of Lebanon that he planted.
In them the birds build their nests;
the stork has its home in the fir trees.
The high mountains are for the wild goats;
the rocks are a refuge for the coneys.
When I was eight years-old, I had a miraculous event happen to me. I’m going to tell you about it, and I think after I tell it to you, you’ll be tempted to say, “Oh,… that wasn’t all that miraculous.” But that may be because you tend to think of miracles as being much like fireworks. They’re only good if they’re spectacular. Sometimes miracles aren’t spectacular. They’re subtle. They pop like firecrackers.
At the time of my miracle, I was living outside of Philadelphia. We were renting a small house on the grounds of an old estate. Fields and woods surrounded the house. I loved the place. It was filled with natural wonders for an eight year-old boy. Various trees were my forts and spaceships. There were three ponds and a stream nearby where I could look at the fish, search for salamanders and crayfish, and skate on during the winter. I saw squirrels, rabbits, deer, turkeys, skunks (from a distance), and every once in a while, a small little pink hedgehog. I loved that place because I felt close to nature there, and to God—in an eight-year-old way.
My little miracle happened one day while climbing a particular beloved tree. It was a skinny little tree that was perhaps 12-feet high. I would shinny up the tree as far as I could go before it started to sway, bending under my weight. On this particular day, I went up about eight feet, and paused to look around. I could see the stream, the little mill house built in the 1920s where I would see the hedgehog, the old oak tree that I often dug peat moss out of. I then prayed to God: “God, please help me to always be kind to animals, trees, and everything else.” It was a simple prayer. What helps me remember it was that I felt as though God was profoundly with me in that moment. It was almost as though I could feel God hugging me. Not quite, but also not not quite,… if you get what I mean.
This experience has always stayed in my mind because it was the moment that I first recognized the miraculous in the mundane. It wasn’t like fireworks. It was like smelling flowers. I had an experience of oneness with God, with animals, with nature, and at some level it made me deeply aware that God is often found best in the mundane. I wouldn’t have said it that way when I was eight. Back then I just felt it. What this experience taught me for the first time was that too often we look for God’s miracles in big events, but where God is most often found is in the ordinary, the everyday,… the mundane.
Like everyone else, I’ve gone through all sorts of changes in my sensitivity to God over the years. I’ve had to struggle to find God in the ordinary. The fact is that all of us struggle with spiritual sensitivity. I believe our grappling with sensitivity begins as adolescents. That’s where we begin to lose a bit of our child-like innocence, and thus our ability to naturally sense God. There’s something about first becoming adolescents, and then adults, that makes us increasingly insensitive to God all around us.
As teenagers, we lose the sensitivity because we get caught up in school, which makes us more sensitive to what other people think of us, and less to what God is doing with us. Adolescences is a time of trying to figure out who we are, and so we spend an inordinate amount of time obsessing about how we either do or don’t fit in. We’re not thinking much about how we fit in with God. We’re thinking much more about whether he likes us, she likes us, what our parents are doing or not doing to/for us. Our brains undergo a tremendous amount of change, and we start developing the ability to think abstractly and philosophically, but that ability is spotty. Sometimes we flit into this more adult way of thinking, sometimes we snap back to childish ways of thinking. That’s why your teenage kids drive you nuts. You don’t know whether to treat them like adults or children.
What this does to us spiritually is that it causes many, many teens to put God on the shelf. You see evidence of this in the church. What typically happens to teens once they become confirmed? Often they stop coming to church. They may still see themselves as spiritual, but they put a halt to activities that are designed to help them grow spiritually. This isn’t true of all teens, but it is true of most. Adolescence through college age is the time of lowest church attendance.
Then, in adulthood, we get caught up with work and our careers, which makes us sensitive to how we’re going to make it in the world. Our focus becomes on our career, relationships, friends, and activities. In the process our sensitivity to God in the everyday gets lost, to the point that many people, when they struggle, have a hard time finding God. They look all around, but can’t find God even though God has been there all along. The problem isn’t that God is absent. It’s that they’ve taken God for granted, and have lost sensitivity to how we find God in the ordinary and mundane.
I’ve been reading a remarkable book lately that celebrates seeing God everywhere in a time when God seems nowhere. The book is The Life Journey of a Joyful Man. It is the memoirs of Adrian van Kaam, who died three years ago. I studied with van Kaam at Duquesne University for my Ph.D., and he’s probably the closest I have to a spiritual mentor. He was a brilliant man who probably understood as much about Christian spirituality and the spiritual life as anyone who’s ever lived, other than Jesus.
The first third of the memoir deal with his life in Holland during the Nazi occupation between 1939 and 1945. When the Nazis invaded Holland, things became difficult, but not radically. The Nazis saw the Dutch as being somewhat German, and therefore somewhat akin. But at the war progressed, and as the Dutch resisted German occupation and began hiding Jews from them, they oppressed the Dutch people more and more. Beginning with the Allied push after D-Day in 1944, life became truly oppressive. The southern part of Holland was liberated from Nazi control, leaving the northwestern portion in desperate straits while the Allies pushed on toward Germany. Van Kaam had been attending seminary in the south, but it was liberated while he was home visiting his family in the northern city of The Hague, leaving him trapped behind enemy lines. That’s when the devastation really began.
The Nazis, who were slowly losing the war, reacted by tightening control of the north. And as they did, they became more and more barbaric. It started with the Nazis demanding more and more food from the Dutch farms. They had to feed their armies, and they really didn’t care if the Dutch starved. As van Kaam wrote, the average person’s calorie-per-day quotient dropped from 2500 to 1300, then to 950. By winter of 1945 they were living on 450 calories a day. There was no meat, no fresh vegetables, no fruit. They lived on root vegetables at first—potatoes, carrots, turnips. When those were horded by the Nazis, they were left to eat sugar beets, which have no caloric value, and tulip bulbs, which were toxic when eaten in larger quantities. Van Kaam suffered the effects of that toxicity for the rest of his life. Then the Germans demanded that the Dutch population turn over their winter coats and blankets in order to give them to the German Army. The Germans also cut off electricity, coal, and oil. The Dutch people had no choice but to basically deforest most of the north to burn for heat, as well as burning siding from houses, shingles, window frames, furniture, and more. Anything that could be burned was. The Germans even confiscated pets and horses to use for food.
As the Dutch resistance persisted in their call for a nationwide labor and railroad strike, the Germans responded by killing men at random. Van Kaam writes about walking through the streets of The Hague one day as it sat eerily quiet and empty. Two women in an alley nervously motioned for him to come to them. When he walked over to them, they rushed him inside because the Germans were grabbing every tenth man off the street and shooting him in reprisal for Dutch Resistance activities.
Van Kaam went into hiding in general, while also being part of a network that hid Jews, anyone accused of hiding Jews, anyone caught speaking against the German government, or anyone who refused to cooperate with the Nazis. During this time he started an underground newsletter to speak words of faith and hope during the winter and spring of 1945. He would have been shot if he had been found out. The Germans, faltering on both the front lines and in Germany, posted announcements demanding that all men, ages 16-40, had to report to be conscripted to be shipped to German factories, to clean up German cities ravaged by Allied bombing, or to build German defenses on the front lines. Many men were taken. Many more went into permanent hiding. The women, in most cities, were left to do almost everything because the men were either gone or in hiding. Millions of Dutch were starving, freezing, plagued by diphtheria and dysentery, conscripted, slaughtered, and left to struggle for survival.
Still, despite of all of this, van Kaam discovered God’s grace everywhere. The Germans, exercising their God-bestowed free will to choose evil continued through their atrocities, did not kill van Kaam’s ability to sense God everywhere. In fact, the worse it got, the more he found Christ in the acts of thousands of self-sacrificing Dutch people, Protestant and Catholic.
Ultimately, his experiences under the Nazi occupation actually opened him more to the miraculous in the mundane. He sensed Christ’s presence in the simple acts of the Dutch people sharing their scarce food with each other. He sensed God’s presence in his increasing awareness of beauty of grass, trees, plants, flowers.
Van Kaam wasn’t alone in his discovering God in the mundane under German occupation and atrocities. Many other books chronicling events of the same era wrote about their authors’ sense of presence. Elie Weisel, the renowned Holocaust survivor and writer, tells in his book, Night, of a man being hanged in the center of the Auschwitz concentration camp where he was a prisoner. As the Jews all stood in formation, looking at this hanging from the branch of a tree, a man yelled out, “Where is God now?” Another yelled out, “Hanging on the tree!”
Victor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist and concentration camp survivor, spoke of how they discovered God in the profound beauty of a sunset while standing in the court of the concentration camp. Corrie ten Boom, whom I’ve mentioned many times before, discovered God in dinners shared with the Jews they were hiding, in Old Testament Bible studies with them, and in the concentration camp with the small little miracles that happened everyday to bring beauty to their devastation.
For a number of years I’ve been fascinated with a phrase I hear people speak on occasion: “God is nowhere.” So many people think this is the case, that God is absent, whether because there is no God, or because God doesn’t care. What fascinates me about the phrase is that if you change your perspective on the phrase just a little bit, the phrase is transformed from
GOD IS NOWHERE
to
GOD IS NOW HERE
The difference between the two is adding a little space to sense God’s miraculous presence.
If we really want to see miracles of God, it doesn’t take much. It just takes the willingness to cultivate the ability to look for God’s work in the mundane, the everyday, the ordinary; because it’s in the ordinary that we begin to lay the groundwork for seeing the extraordinary.
Amen
October 30, 2011
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Bless the Lord, O my soul.
O Lord my God, you are very great.
You are clothed with honor and majesty,
wrapped in light as with a garment.
You stretch out the heavens like a tent,
you set the beams of your chambers on the waters,
you make the clouds your chariot,
you ride on the wings of the wind,
you make the winds your messengers,
fire and flame your ministers.
You set the earth on its foundations,
so that it shall never be shaken.
You cover it with the deep as with a garment;
the waters stood above the mountains.
At your rebuke they flee;
at the sound of your thunder they take to flight.
They rose up to the mountains,
ran down to the valleys to the place
that you appointed for them.
You set a boundary that they may not pass,
so that they might not again cover the earth.
You make springs gush forth in the valleys;
they flow between the hills,
giving drink to every wild animal;
the wild asses quench their thirst.
By the streams the birds of the air have their habitation;
they sing among the branches.
From your lofty abode you water the mountains;
the earth is satisfied with the fruit of your work.
You cause the grass to grow for the cattle,
and plants for people to use, to bring forth food from the earth,
and wine to gladden the human heart,
oil to make the face shine,
and bread to strengthen the human heart.
The trees of the Lord are watered abundantly,
the cedars of Lebanon that he planted.
In them the birds build their nests;
the stork has its home in the fir trees.
The high mountains are for the wild goats;
the rocks are a refuge for the coneys.
When I was eight years-old, I had a miraculous event happen to me. I’m going to tell you about it, and I think after I tell it to you, you’ll be tempted to say, “Oh,… that wasn’t all that miraculous.” But that may be because you tend to think of miracles as being much like fireworks. They’re only good if they’re spectacular. Sometimes miracles aren’t spectacular. They’re subtle. They pop like firecrackers.
At the time of my miracle, I was living outside of Philadelphia. We were renting a small house on the grounds of an old estate. Fields and woods surrounded the house. I loved the place. It was filled with natural wonders for an eight year-old boy. Various trees were my forts and spaceships. There were three ponds and a stream nearby where I could look at the fish, search for salamanders and crayfish, and skate on during the winter. I saw squirrels, rabbits, deer, turkeys, skunks (from a distance), and every once in a while, a small little pink hedgehog. I loved that place because I felt close to nature there, and to God—in an eight-year-old way.
My little miracle happened one day while climbing a particular beloved tree. It was a skinny little tree that was perhaps 12-feet high. I would shinny up the tree as far as I could go before it started to sway, bending under my weight. On this particular day, I went up about eight feet, and paused to look around. I could see the stream, the little mill house built in the 1920s where I would see the hedgehog, the old oak tree that I often dug peat moss out of. I then prayed to God: “God, please help me to always be kind to animals, trees, and everything else.” It was a simple prayer. What helps me remember it was that I felt as though God was profoundly with me in that moment. It was almost as though I could feel God hugging me. Not quite, but also not not quite,… if you get what I mean.
This experience has always stayed in my mind because it was the moment that I first recognized the miraculous in the mundane. It wasn’t like fireworks. It was like smelling flowers. I had an experience of oneness with God, with animals, with nature, and at some level it made me deeply aware that God is often found best in the mundane. I wouldn’t have said it that way when I was eight. Back then I just felt it. What this experience taught me for the first time was that too often we look for God’s miracles in big events, but where God is most often found is in the ordinary, the everyday,… the mundane.
Like everyone else, I’ve gone through all sorts of changes in my sensitivity to God over the years. I’ve had to struggle to find God in the ordinary. The fact is that all of us struggle with spiritual sensitivity. I believe our grappling with sensitivity begins as adolescents. That’s where we begin to lose a bit of our child-like innocence, and thus our ability to naturally sense God. There’s something about first becoming adolescents, and then adults, that makes us increasingly insensitive to God all around us.
As teenagers, we lose the sensitivity because we get caught up in school, which makes us more sensitive to what other people think of us, and less to what God is doing with us. Adolescences is a time of trying to figure out who we are, and so we spend an inordinate amount of time obsessing about how we either do or don’t fit in. We’re not thinking much about how we fit in with God. We’re thinking much more about whether he likes us, she likes us, what our parents are doing or not doing to/for us. Our brains undergo a tremendous amount of change, and we start developing the ability to think abstractly and philosophically, but that ability is spotty. Sometimes we flit into this more adult way of thinking, sometimes we snap back to childish ways of thinking. That’s why your teenage kids drive you nuts. You don’t know whether to treat them like adults or children.
What this does to us spiritually is that it causes many, many teens to put God on the shelf. You see evidence of this in the church. What typically happens to teens once they become confirmed? Often they stop coming to church. They may still see themselves as spiritual, but they put a halt to activities that are designed to help them grow spiritually. This isn’t true of all teens, but it is true of most. Adolescence through college age is the time of lowest church attendance.
Then, in adulthood, we get caught up with work and our careers, which makes us sensitive to how we’re going to make it in the world. Our focus becomes on our career, relationships, friends, and activities. In the process our sensitivity to God in the everyday gets lost, to the point that many people, when they struggle, have a hard time finding God. They look all around, but can’t find God even though God has been there all along. The problem isn’t that God is absent. It’s that they’ve taken God for granted, and have lost sensitivity to how we find God in the ordinary and mundane.
I’ve been reading a remarkable book lately that celebrates seeing God everywhere in a time when God seems nowhere. The book is The Life Journey of a Joyful Man. It is the memoirs of Adrian van Kaam, who died three years ago. I studied with van Kaam at Duquesne University for my Ph.D., and he’s probably the closest I have to a spiritual mentor. He was a brilliant man who probably understood as much about Christian spirituality and the spiritual life as anyone who’s ever lived, other than Jesus.
The first third of the memoir deal with his life in Holland during the Nazi occupation between 1939 and 1945. When the Nazis invaded Holland, things became difficult, but not radically. The Nazis saw the Dutch as being somewhat German, and therefore somewhat akin. But at the war progressed, and as the Dutch resisted German occupation and began hiding Jews from them, they oppressed the Dutch people more and more. Beginning with the Allied push after D-Day in 1944, life became truly oppressive. The southern part of Holland was liberated from Nazi control, leaving the northwestern portion in desperate straits while the Allies pushed on toward Germany. Van Kaam had been attending seminary in the south, but it was liberated while he was home visiting his family in the northern city of The Hague, leaving him trapped behind enemy lines. That’s when the devastation really began.
The Nazis, who were slowly losing the war, reacted by tightening control of the north. And as they did, they became more and more barbaric. It started with the Nazis demanding more and more food from the Dutch farms. They had to feed their armies, and they really didn’t care if the Dutch starved. As van Kaam wrote, the average person’s calorie-per-day quotient dropped from 2500 to 1300, then to 950. By winter of 1945 they were living on 450 calories a day. There was no meat, no fresh vegetables, no fruit. They lived on root vegetables at first—potatoes, carrots, turnips. When those were horded by the Nazis, they were left to eat sugar beets, which have no caloric value, and tulip bulbs, which were toxic when eaten in larger quantities. Van Kaam suffered the effects of that toxicity for the rest of his life. Then the Germans demanded that the Dutch population turn over their winter coats and blankets in order to give them to the German Army. The Germans also cut off electricity, coal, and oil. The Dutch people had no choice but to basically deforest most of the north to burn for heat, as well as burning siding from houses, shingles, window frames, furniture, and more. Anything that could be burned was. The Germans even confiscated pets and horses to use for food.
As the Dutch resistance persisted in their call for a nationwide labor and railroad strike, the Germans responded by killing men at random. Van Kaam writes about walking through the streets of The Hague one day as it sat eerily quiet and empty. Two women in an alley nervously motioned for him to come to them. When he walked over to them, they rushed him inside because the Germans were grabbing every tenth man off the street and shooting him in reprisal for Dutch Resistance activities.
Van Kaam went into hiding in general, while also being part of a network that hid Jews, anyone accused of hiding Jews, anyone caught speaking against the German government, or anyone who refused to cooperate with the Nazis. During this time he started an underground newsletter to speak words of faith and hope during the winter and spring of 1945. He would have been shot if he had been found out. The Germans, faltering on both the front lines and in Germany, posted announcements demanding that all men, ages 16-40, had to report to be conscripted to be shipped to German factories, to clean up German cities ravaged by Allied bombing, or to build German defenses on the front lines. Many men were taken. Many more went into permanent hiding. The women, in most cities, were left to do almost everything because the men were either gone or in hiding. Millions of Dutch were starving, freezing, plagued by diphtheria and dysentery, conscripted, slaughtered, and left to struggle for survival.
Still, despite of all of this, van Kaam discovered God’s grace everywhere. The Germans, exercising their God-bestowed free will to choose evil continued through their atrocities, did not kill van Kaam’s ability to sense God everywhere. In fact, the worse it got, the more he found Christ in the acts of thousands of self-sacrificing Dutch people, Protestant and Catholic.
Ultimately, his experiences under the Nazi occupation actually opened him more to the miraculous in the mundane. He sensed Christ’s presence in the simple acts of the Dutch people sharing their scarce food with each other. He sensed God’s presence in his increasing awareness of beauty of grass, trees, plants, flowers.
Van Kaam wasn’t alone in his discovering God in the mundane under German occupation and atrocities. Many other books chronicling events of the same era wrote about their authors’ sense of presence. Elie Weisel, the renowned Holocaust survivor and writer, tells in his book, Night, of a man being hanged in the center of the Auschwitz concentration camp where he was a prisoner. As the Jews all stood in formation, looking at this hanging from the branch of a tree, a man yelled out, “Where is God now?” Another yelled out, “Hanging on the tree!”
Victor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist and concentration camp survivor, spoke of how they discovered God in the profound beauty of a sunset while standing in the court of the concentration camp. Corrie ten Boom, whom I’ve mentioned many times before, discovered God in dinners shared with the Jews they were hiding, in Old Testament Bible studies with them, and in the concentration camp with the small little miracles that happened everyday to bring beauty to their devastation.
For a number of years I’ve been fascinated with a phrase I hear people speak on occasion: “God is nowhere.” So many people think this is the case, that God is absent, whether because there is no God, or because God doesn’t care. What fascinates me about the phrase is that if you change your perspective on the phrase just a little bit, the phrase is transformed from
GOD IS NOWHERE
to
GOD IS NOW HERE
The difference between the two is adding a little space to sense God’s miraculous presence.
If we really want to see miracles of God, it doesn’t take much. It just takes the willingness to cultivate the ability to look for God’s work in the mundane, the everyday, the ordinary; because it’s in the ordinary that we begin to lay the groundwork for seeing the extraordinary.
Amen
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