Unfiltered

When I was 18 or 19 I found myself in the midst of a spiritual crisis.  At the time I had no real belief in God.  I was living in France far away from all that was familiar to me.  In the critical moment of that crisis I said to God, "I need to know that you exist.  Not in a week or a month or even in an hour, I need to know now."  Two friends, walking slightly behind me, unaware of either my crisis or my silent prayer ultimatum, began to sing a hymn I remembered from childhood:

God sees the little sparrow fall

It meets his tender view

If God so loves the little things

I know he loves me too.

My prayer in that moment of crisis was real, immediate and unfiltered.

I have since learned to filter my prayers.  And all for the sake of "good" theology.  I understand that God is sovereign and that his sense of timing is perfect.  St. Peter says that a day is like a thousand years to God and a thousand years like a day. (2 Peter 3:8)  What seems to me to be an interminable delay is but a moment to him.  The "I need to know now" prayer was impudent and cheeky.  To ask God to do things on a quicker schedule seems presumptuous.

And so our prayers become couched in provisos like, "if it is your will," and "I know that you understand what is best."

But read the psalms.  They are prayers unfiltered.  There are request that God save and do it quickly.

As part of the daily office from the Book of Common Prayer we pray:

O God make speed to save us

O Lord make haste to help us.

These are taken directly from the psalms.  Examples are 38:22 and 70:1.  Here there is an immediacy of prayer.  Unfiltered by what he "should" say, the psalmist speaks what is real and immediate in his heart.  And in the midst of trial and crisis what is in my heart is: Lord, make haste.  I think my way out of praying this prayer for all sorts of good theological reasons – the Sovereignty of God chief among them.  But again the psalmist keeps it real.

The truth is that God is under no obligation to speed up and his picture of quick may differ wildly from mine.  I get that.  But knowing that does not diminish my longing for speedy aid.  I acknowledge the sovereignty of God.  But my prayer will be real - what is in my heart.  It is sanctioned in the psalms.

My prayer in that moment of crisis was real, immediate and unfiltered.  And answered.  Speedily.

I know that this is not always the case, but I will still pray:

O God make speed to help us.

O Lord make hast to help us.

Thirsty?

I can remember a time when I was rather confused by the presence of appetizers on restaurant menus.  Having been brought up in a dogmatic "don't eat that now, you'll ruin your appetite for supper" environment, I felt the offering of such pre-meal snacks to be inappropriate.  The things I wanted to eat before supper as a child were sugary and nutritionless - edible food-like substances, to quote Michael Pollan.  My parents' desire was that I would eat the real food, the healthy stuff that would be served up at the dinner table.  I did not always listen to my parents and would often find myself disinclined to eat the nutritious brussel sprouts staring at me from my plate.  (Perhaps the sprouts were the problem, not the snacking...bad example.)   But when I was hungry I would hoe in and, especially in my teen years, eat prodigiously.

Being hungry enhances our experience of food, as being thirsty does of drink.  When our appetite is spoiled or our thirst is sated, the good food and drink in front of us are unappreciated if not unconsumed.  

He said to me: "It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End.  To the Thirsty I will give water without cost from the spring of the water of life.  Revelation 21:6

I find it hard to imagine reading this text and texts like it (Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! - Isaiah 55:1) and not knowing hope and thankfulness.  This is such good news.  If you are thirsty.

A great spiritual malaise of our time and culture is that we are not thirsty.  Having blunted our thirst and appetite by edible God-like substances, we have no further desire for the real food and drink of Jesus himself.  I am aware of this myself.  I fill my time with distractions and entertainments - television and Facebook are among them.  Accumulated stuff makes the list as well.  These things take the edge off my hunger and thirst.  They fill my anxieties which are most in evidence when I am still and there is nothing to do.  I am eating sugary and nutrition less fillers and, when the real meal is before me, I am no longer hungry.

The proclamation that He fills the hungry with good things, that He satisfies the thirsty with living water is thrilling only when I am aware of my hunger and thirst for Him.  

Blow the trumpet in Zion, declare a holy fast.  Joel 2:15

Lord God, make me hungry and thirsty that I may be satisfied.

Hopelessness

A few weeks ago a friend and I went on a late-season cycle through Smuggler’s Notch.  It was a reasonable nice day when we started out but became cooler and a little damp towards the end of the ride.  As a result I was anxious to get back to where we had parked the car.  I knew approximately how far the whole ride would be and had some idea how far we had gone from the readings on my cycle computer, but it was all approximation.  Towards the end I was looking expectantly around every bend and at the top of every hill hoping to see my car.  I was eventually rewarded.

This is what it is like, I think, to travel in hope, eagerly looking toward the goal. The experience of hope here is an active anticipation.   I was pedaling and looking.  It was not just a passive wishing for my car to be where I was.   Christian hope is the same sort of thing.  I think this is a little of what St. Paul was saying when he said:

Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 3:12-14 ESV)

My goal – my car- was there but I had not yet obtained it.   I pedaled in some discomfort, but in hope.

We travel in hope.  Unless, of course, we do not.  Hopelessness is a serious soul-sickness and there are two kinds. The first is despair, the attitude of soul that has decided, “It ain’t gonna happen.”  Translated to my bike ride it is the statement either that I’m not going to make it to my car, or more irrationally, my car isn’t there.

I think that we understand despair and its problems.  It truly feels like hopelessness.

The other flavor of hopelessness is presumption.  St Paul is not presumptuous. “Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect.”  Presumption says, “I’m already there.  It has already happened.”  Pushing the cycling motif, it is to stop pedaling because we are already arrived.  If I had done that, I would still be cold and wet, and by now, quite hungry as well.

Presumption is hopelessness because it forgets that we are still traveling.  There is no place for hope if we are already at our destination.  I think we can see it in the spiritual life in two ways.  The first is the presumption of the Pharisees,  “I am following the rules and being basically a good person, I have arrived.”  I am not pedaling now because I have pedaled enough. 

The other kind of presumption is that of the Israelites, as we read it in the book of Nehemiah.  There people of Israel and Judah has made the assumption that, since they were God’s chosen people, there was no more pedaling needed.  Speaking of the Israelites who has come our of Egypt, Nehemiah says, “But they and our fathers acted presumptuously and stiffened their neck and did not obey your commandments.” (Nehemiah 9:16 ESV)

I think that happens to many Christians today.  We have made our decision for Jesus and are assured of our salvation (of the goal at the end) and therefore there is no need to try to change or grow.  We can continue in our broken patterns of relating because, well, we’re saved!  We need not be self-reflective or examine ourselves because we have already made the goal.  Not only is this presumptuous, but it tends to make us jerks.  It was Jesus who reminded us that not everyone who says, “Lord, Lord” will enter the kingdom of heaven.

“I press on,” says St. Paul, “to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.”  If you are still breathing, there is more pedaling to do.

There is only one place where there is no hope.  Dante knew it and in his picture of hell the words, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here” are inscribed above its entrance.  It is fair to say that our experience of hopelessness is a hint of the flavor of hell.

But to travel in hope, even when the going is hard or wet or cold, is to anticipate heaven.  And heaven has a way of reaching backwards to meet us.

The wrath of God

I have been thinking about the wrath of God, which is a curious thing.  Curious for a number of reasons.  For example, have you noticed that the sound used for the "a" in wrath and the "o" in God seems to be the same, regardless of which side of the ocean you come from.  There is the very American pronunciation, "wraath of Gaad" and the British "wroth of God."  One wonders whether we might not get along with just four vowels instead of five.

Curious also because one hardly ever thinks seriously about it.  The daily office lectionary has been going through Revelation recently and one cannot evade notions of God's wrath once seals start getting opened, cups poured out and grapes tread upon.  For some, the notion of such an angry God is laughable.  He seems unsophisticated and backward.  Not the sort of person you would want at an elegant dinner party.  Imagine the polite conversation, "So, God - that was your name wasn't it?  What have you been working on lately?"  "I've been inflicting bad people with sores and scorching them with fire."  Awkward pause.  "Joe, tell us about your new building project!"

Our focus as we think about God tends to be his grace, mercy and forgiveness, not his wrath.  And, I would say, rightfully so.  The central message of Jesus and the New Testament is gospel - good or happy news.  Could we not dispense then with God's wrath and be more civilized persons?

Not if we want to maintain justice in any sense.  Most of us have a sense of justice which is offended if justice is not served. Most of us also have a belief, sometimes unarticulated even to ourselves, that there are things which are truly atrocious.  Atrocities - using the noun which has a starker connotation than the adjective.  (Children's behavior might be considered atrocious, but rarely atrocities.)  Obvious examples include the holocaust, but also the other genocides that have plagued various parts of the world in the past century.

As much as a God of wrath who punishes real evil might make us uncomfortable, a God who turns a blind eye to real atrocities, who overlooks the horrific things humans do to each other, is simply a disappointment.  We live with imperfect justice today - like an episode of Law and Order where there is an obviously guilty perpetrator who is convicted on a lesser charge because the greater one won't "stick." But is there no final justice for these things?

God's wrath is the final and unchangeable end he makes to evil.  That is an end, I think, we all long to see.

But there is one other thing I find curious as I consider the wrath of God.  It is always reserved for others. I am very good a minimizing the seriousness of my own evil but maximizing the seriousness of others'.  I wonder if the perpetrators of atrocities think the same thing.  Wrath is reserved for really bad people.  It makes one wonder where the line of "really bad" begins.  I am forced to ask the question, "When is my behavior truly atrocious?" Perhaps I should worry first about the evil in me, before I get upset by the evil in others.  Jesus suggested this approach when he advised removing the log from our own eye before we remove the speck from our brother's.

O God of wrath and mercy, bring a final and unchangeable end to evil, beginning with me.