Here's our next sermon on the Book of Philippians.
Philippians 4:1-9 "Practicing for Joy"
Prayers for Illumination
In my last post I mentioned prayers for illumination that I've prayed (after reading the scripture and before the sermon) that are based on, or "riffs on" specific Bible verses. The example I gave there was:
Your word, O Lord, is a lamp for our feet and a light for our path. Help us to see clearly by it today, we pray. Amen.
For the record, and in case you're a preacher and the idea of "praying the word" before "preaching the word" intrigues you, I thought I'd post a few more "prayers for illumination" I've prayed in the past at the FreeWay:
God, your word is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword; we pray that it would be so here today as we turn to it now. Amen.
God, we know that all scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, correcting, rebuking and training in righteousness. We pray that it would be so for us this morning as we look to it now. Amen.
God, just like the rain comes down from heaven and doesn't return to heaven without watering the earth and making it fruitful, so is your word which comes out from your mouth:it doesn't return to you empty but accomplishes your purposes for it. May it water our hearts today and make them fruitful for you. Amen.
God, the Psalmist said: how sweet is your word to my mouth, sweeter than honey from the comb. Amen. May it be so here: give us an unquenchable taste for your word, here today. A sweet-tooth for the things of God, we pray.
God, we know that the man or woman without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them because they are spiritually discerned. We ask, Lord, that this would not be true of us today. Give us your Spirit, so that we may understand and accept your Word and what it would say to us here. Amen.
Praying the Word
If ever you've spent time with someone who's new to this "Faith thing," one of the questions that will often come up is: "How do you pray?" The most common response to a question like this is something along the lines of: "Praying is just talking to God, and you can talk to God just like you're talking to me now. Just talk to him." I fully understand the motive behind this kind of response. It helps people understand that the Christian God is real, and personal, and that he takes us as we are, and that he is so active in our everyday life that we can speak to him in everyday language.
I get all that and I think it is important.
But to be honest, I've always found something a bit unsatisfying about this answer. Because, really, you can't talk to God, just like you talk to a flesh-and-blood human being, and in asking the question, the "newbie" is recognizing that there is something sacred, something sacramental, something other about prayer, and I don't know that it's especially helpful to disavow them of this belief. Prayer is a sacred act and, while it's true that Jesus is always perfecting our prayers in heaven, no matter how imperfect they may be on earth, growing Christians should be maturing in their prayer life, too.
So I've been thinking about all this lately, and one of the things I keep coming back to is how seldom you hear Christians- especially "lifers"-- using the words of the scriptures to form the content of their prayers. This is, I'm becoming more and more convinced, the "lost art" of Christian prayer. Speaking the words of Scripture back to God, and letting them form the content of our prayers.
Some concrete examples may help. Let's say, for instance, I'm praying for someone in crisis. In the past my prayer might have sounded something like: Lord, we just want to pray for so-and-so that you would just help so-and-so and just give them peace about such-and-such.
These days, as I try to let the words of the scripture form the content of my prayers, I pray something like: Lord, you tell us not to be anxious about anything but in everything, by prayer and petition, to present our request to you. And you promised that when we do, that your peace, which transcends understanding, will guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. So that's what we're doing now: we pray for so-and-so, that the peace of Christ which transcends understanding would guard their hearts and minds...
Okay, that's maybe a wordy example, but let's say I'm praying for someone who is having trouble making some life decision. In the past I might have prayed something like: "Lord, we pray for so-and-so, that you would just help them know what they're to do about such-and-such."
These days, as I try to let the Scriptures form the content of my prayers, I find myself praying things like: Lord, you told us that if anyone lacked wisdom, they should ask you because you give generously to all without finding fault. And that's what we're doing for so-and-so, Lord: please give so-and-so wisdom about such-and-such generously, without finding fault, just like you promised to do....
A final example: when preaching, I always try to pray a short prayer for illumination between the reading of the scripture and the sermon itself. In the past these have been impromptu, wordy, drawn out and vague. These days, as I let the words of Scripture form the content of my prayers, I pray something like: Your word, O Lord, is a lamp for our feet and a light for our path. Help us to see clearly by it today. Amen.
I could go on, because such is the breadth and depth of the Scripture's themes, that there really is no life experience we might go through that it doesn't address, and give us words to address God with in return. And that's what's happening, really, when we use the Scriptures as the content for our prayers: we're addressing God's own self with God's own words; we're entering the throne room of heaven with heaven's own "language" (so to speak) on our lips. And that's something sacred, I think.
(A final corollary of praying the scriptures I've noticed: to pray like this, I need to know what the scriptures say. To have memorized them, or, at the very least, to have internalized the gist of them so that they are on my lips, and ready to speak back to God in any given circumstance. I'm not a traditionalist, per se, and I've never decried the fact that "we don't emphasize scripture memorization anymore," like I've heard some old-timers do, but there's something to this. If I'm going to speak God's word back to him in my prayers, I need to have a heart saturated with it. And this won't happen without conscious discipline and intentional effort.)
Inspiration, Imagination, and the Image of God
There's a story from the cradle of humanity that describes God creating human beings by the power of his speech, and it says that he created them in his image, "male and female, in the image of God made he them." There's far more going on in these few simple words from Genesis 1:27 than could ever fit into a 500 word blog post (indeed, they've inspired theological words-in-response at a ratio of something like 1,000,000:1) but what I'm thinking about today is the fact that, in the ancient world, a king who had conquered a land would then set up his image (zelem) in that land, the idea being that the image would effect, extend and continue the King's reign even when the King himself was not physically present. And in the ancient world's framework for cosmogony (stories to explain how the cosmos came to be), creation always happened through an act of conquering and subduing chaos. So in Genesis 1: God conquers the formless-and-void chaos of the world-in-the-beginning, and, once the wild and waste world is formed and filed with verdant life, he sets humanity as his kingly "image" in the newly-conquered-Creation. The implication here (among other things) is that humanity is called to extend, effect and continue the creative work he has begun. And the implication here is that one of the ways we "image God" is through the exercise of our own forms of creativity.
And with this all in mind, I can't help but notice that the words we most often use to describe the human act of "singing/drawing/carving/writing/making original things that didn't exist before" link it to divine things. There's "creativity" itself, but there's also "inspiration" (to be "breathed" into), and there's "imagination" and "visionary" and "musical" (connected, of course, to the Greek Muses). All of these words seem to be feeling around the etymological edges of that spiritual "thing" that happens when human beings act creatively.
I mentioned before that I started doing some songwriting this summer after a three year dry spell. What I didn't mention then is how the dry spell broke. It was the morning I sat down on the edge of the bed in the basement of my father in law's house with my wife's mom's old nylon string guitar (which I always dig out of the storage room whenever I visit). I was lamenting the fact that it had been so long since I'd even felt like really singing, that in three years I'd had neither the time nor heart nor inspiration to say something musically, and that whenever I tried, the words always escaped or the tune eluded me.
I was just kind of strumming over this sadness, and I started muttering some stuff about inspiration having walked out on me. I happened to remember that in Greek myth, Calliope is the muse of epic poetry, and suddenly this image sprang up in my mind of a melancholy lover waiting for his girlfriend (Calliope) to come back to him. Slowly the ice began to thaw.
Here's the song that eventually came out of that morning.
Hey, Calliope
Previously on terra incognita...
I'd mentioned that I am working on a number of new writing projects that are taking up time otherwise dedicated to blogging. Among these is a collaborative theology blog with a couple of other FMCiC pastors that I hope to have up and running in a few months-- stay tuned for that.
Another writing project I've had on the go since August is a new album of music. This summer, as I dragged myself across the finish line and out west for a three week furlough from the ministry, I found myself sitting in the middle of one of those dark nights of the soul that the spiritually wise sometimes talk about. This isn't the best forum to unpack everything that was going through my head and heart then, except to say that in the middle of it, as God graciously and patiently sat there in the darkness with me, he started to give me some new songs. I haven't had a rendezvous with "sister inspiration" in almost three years, and while many of these songs were darker and raw-er than any I've written in the past, this unexpected return of an old friend was a restorative to my soul.
I've been arranging and recording and generaly polishing them up in the last few months, and hope to "release" my new album, called Bridges, very soon. In the meantime, and by way of a sneak-peak, I offer this one here, based (loosely) on the darkest Psalm in the book:
nadir
By the banks of Babylon, that's where we hung our song
Cursed if we forget the tune, cursed if we sing along
They said: when you reach the nadir of the heart, will he be there?
There at the apex of the hurt and the despair?
Trying to write the final page of this tale of emptied hells
Vacant masks and leering laughs, this lie I know so well
And when I reach the nadir of the heart, will you be there?
There at the apex of the hurt and the despair?
Nothing left to hold on to, nothing left to say
Staring down the barrel of night, praying for the day
He said: When you reach the nadir of the heart, I'll be there
There at the apex of the hurt and the despair
Never thought I'd be that guy...
When I first launched myself into the blogosphere two years and a bit ago, one of the things I noticed was the high number of blogs making apologies for "infrequent blogging of late," vowing to do better in the future (often these were stale dated, ironically, by a few months), and/or explaining why they hadn't (usually these included variations on the expression: "busier than a rented mule"). I remember, in those optimistic early days of blogging, committing to never being that guy; and yet, to my chagrin, I notice that a month has gone by since my last meaningful post. Not that I lack for blogging ideas-- I am replete with life-observations that need a good blogging-- but I've also taken on a number of new writing projects in the last few months (some of which I hope to share here at terra incognita in the near future), while the ministry at the FreeWay has entered a whole new chapter that has required much more of my spiritual and creative energy than it has in the past. All of this is my way of acknowledging that this fall terra incognita has been pretty quiet, and my way of predicting that this trend will probably continue for a few more months. I'll still post my sermons from week to week, and I'm not shutting things down altogether-- God willing, a perfect combination of "something to say" and "the time to say it in" will still coalesce-- but I feel I need to ease off the pressure of regular posting for the next few months.
In the meantime, here's the fifth sermon in our series on the Book of Philippians:
Philippians 2:19-30 "Making it Work"
"The Baptism with which I am Baptized"
The other day I came across this stunning example of an ancient baptistry from the Negev (Early Byzantine). Amazing. I've preached four baptism sermons (I am, remember, a realatively green preacher), but this one photograph says a thousand words more than all of them combined, I think.
With what solemnity would we read Romans 6:4-6 ("Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin.") if on the day of our baptism the baptistry looked like this?
It also helps me understand what Jesus must have meant in Mark 10:39, when he asked James and John if they could be baptised with the baptism with which he was to be baptised (meaning the pending agony of the cross). When they claimed they were up to the challenge, he replied: "You will be baptised with the baptism I am baptised with" (meaning, presumably, our union with Christ through baptism and the cross-shaped life we are called to live as his baptized followers).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)