The Park Road Pulpit

He was raised a Midwestern Catholic, nominal at best, in a blue-collar family and a rough-and-tumble world. After a failed marriage, he found commitment in a wonderful Southern woman, who was a little rough around the edges herself and from a family made of Birmingham Steel. Now, if you know the south, you know this means she had been blessed with more than a touch of hard-earned money, and just the expected amount of raised-right-religion.[1] When my friend crossed the Mason-Dixon Line, much to his nominally-Catholic, Midwestern chagrin, he moved in right next door to a Baptist minister! Through a growing friendship with that minister, though, through some not-so-subtle pressure from his wife, and through a great deal of implicit expectation from his newfound culture of “compassionate conservatism,”[2] my friend (not so surprisingly, and not so life-changingly) “got saved.” And when he came up out of the water, finally soaking wet, some child spoke the no-true-than-have-ever-been-spoken words, “Look, he got Baptistized!”

When we moved to Birmingham, Mark and I, the new Associate Pastor, coincidentally, also became neighbors. And we were colleagues, too, as I supervised his part-time maintenance work through my Associate Pastoral role in our church. Given that relationship, Mark and I spent a good bit of time together, and I came to appreciate his friendship, his generosity, and his newly acquired Southern Baptist faith (which was actually not-so-southern, and not-so-Baptist!)

Mark was opinionated, and freely outspoken, but not so much about religion. Those conversations came after time, though, carefully, subtly. No one would call Mark an eloquent spokesman of the faith, but I came to find a certain eloquence in his quiet struggles, a deep understanding in his simple belief, a tremendous example in his faithful consistency.

A little out of the blue one day, he volunteered, “Sherry fusses at me about the way I pray with the children at night.” When I inquired, he said, “She tells me, ‘Those are Catholic prayers!’” Mark spit the words in imitation, and sort of shrugged, a look somewhere between embarrassment and offense, and then he said, “But I don’t know how else to pray.”

I’m convinced that Jesus would not have shared his wife’s complaint about Mark’s example. In fact, I can even hear Jesus paraphrasing the commendation he lauded on old Nathaniel,[3] “Greater faith have I not seen, Mark Lemier, Baptist father, Catholic pray-er, in all of Alabama!”

Do you hear what I’m saying? How many “Mark Lemier’s” do you know whose children have actually heard any words of prayer cross their lips?

How about you? What did you learn about prayer from listening to your parents pray? And, what are you teaching your kids about praying?

Prayer is regarded as one of the central disciplines of religious life, Christian and otherwise, and yet perhaps no other discipline is accompanied by so much frustration and confusion, or shrouded with so much misunderstanding. Like my recent inquiries concerning the meaning of “resurrection,”[4] I suspect if you asked most believers about their prayer life you would also be returned with looks of pain and confusion!

We begin this summer series, “Praying with Jesus,” with one, simple assumption. It is this: prayer is a discipline that is essential to faith -- to come to see the God above us, to come to relate engagingly with the world around us, to come to know the heart within us, we must learn to pray.[5]

The disciples of Jesus came to him, experiencing no less difficulty in their prayer lives than we often experience. And they came seeking: “Lord, teach us to pray.” Their request brings us to a corollary assumption for this summer study: (Prayer is essential to faith), then praying The Lord’s Prayer is essential to Christian faith. I say this because I believe that prayer reveals the heart of the one who prays in its most honest form. (If you want to know what someone really believes, listen to her pray!) If this is true, then, Jesus’ own prayer is our best tool for knowing his heart. And in knowing his heart, those who seek to be followers of his Way will have their firm foundation.

In what is regarded as perhaps the definitive study of the Lord’s Prayer, the German theologian, Joachim Jeremias says,

The request [teach us to pray] therefore shows that Jesus’ disciples recognized themselves as a community… and that they requested of Jesus a prayer which would bind them together and identify them, in that it would bring to expression their chief concern. As a matter of fact, the Lord’s Prayer is the clearest and, in spite of its terseness, the richest summary of Jesus’ proclamation which we possess.[6]

If following Jesus is the aim of our faith, not mindlessly memorizing scripture or callously conforming to doctrine or adamantly adhering to some supposed absolute truth, no, if following in the Way of Jesus is the aim of our faith (and it must be), then there is no place to begin except in learning to Pray with Jesus.[7]

A week ago Amy and I had a strange experience. We went on a date! It was not a church meeting. Not even a church-related social function. It was a date, our favorite date, to be exact: dinner and a movie. Carabas was serving, and Bruce Almighty was selling at the box office, and Amy had read the reviews of both. We loved the movie, and commend it to you, but I was not at all surprised to see a strong critique in the next Monday’s Charlotte Observer. “Are movies reshaping our image of God?” a syndicated editorial asked. Tom Schaefer’s beef with the motion picture is that “Films like ‘Bruce Almighty’ lose the majesty, mystery and beneficence of the Supreme Being.” [8]

Let me give a very brief movie review to make one point: Bruce Nolan (Jim Carrey) is a television broadcaster who, for a number of very good reasons, gets overlooked for the just-opened Anchor job on the news desk. In a fit of rage, though, Nolan curses the heavens, blaming God for all of his misfortune. This is not so Hollywood, actually – sounds much more like the Bible, but in a very Hollywood way, Bruce soon gets an invitation from The Almighty, himself. Much to Mr. Schaefer’s dislike, however, the “almighty,” here, looks a lot like an aging, black man, a janitor (Morgan Freeman), complete with mop and bucket.

“Since you think I’m doing such a poor job,” God says to Bruce, “I’m taking a vacation. The job is yours.” After the bequest of all of the “powers of heaven,” the audience becomes the beneficiary of some very entertaining use of these “powers,” now in Bruce’s hands, including a very dramatic parting of the “Red Sea” of a bowl of tomato soup. The laughter not withstanding, however, Nolan proves completely incapable of using such powers productively. (This is itself a deeply theological statement.) The broadcaster ends up back with the janitor, asking for help. They talk, and in the best scene from the movie, holding his mop, God says to Bruce – “Parting the sea of your tomato soup is magic, Bruce, but when a young, single mom works all day and then comes home and still has time and energy to cook supper and to read to the kids before putting them to bed – now that’s a miracle.” God begins climbing a ladder, disappearing into a bright light in the ceiling, and he says to Bruce, “You are the miracle, Bruce.” But Bruce, still missing the message, cries out to the majestic, mysterious, beneficent Supreme Being above, “But, God, I need you, God!” The janitor disappears with these final words, “That’s the problem, Bruce, people are always looking up.”

Is Hollywood reshaping our image of God? May it be so! It is precisely because the common image of God meets Mr. Schaefer’s description of some beneficent, majestic, mysterious Supreme Being in the sky, with supernatural power as his signature, that the idea needs to be reformed. If we are to learn to Pray with Jesus, this is a reformation that will be necessary.

A God, distant and autonomous,[9] a Deity who is deemed to have the powers to literally part a bowl of tomato soup, if he so chose, is hardly a God who could have any interest in love, sacrifice, suffering, death. We will begin our study of the prayer by looking at Jesus’ significant, and almost exclusive, address of God as “Abba.” What should it say to us of the popular notion of God as a Supreme Being, with unlimited “powers,” that Jesus’ called God his “pappa”?

It is precisely because the image of God so needs reshaping, that prayer itself is so misused and misunderstood. If God is the great power in the sky, who can literally control my future and my fortune, by acts of divine caprice, then prayer will become only a channel for individuals to harness that power – for themselves.

All the classical things that have been said about prayer are true – petition, praise, adoration, communion, conversation. But one’s notion of God… has to be sufficiently empty, [God’s] mystery sufficiently accounted for, or else prayer becomes exploitation of the divine.[10]

Do you hear this? Prayer is not a process whereby I seek to get what I want from a distant God who could give it all if only God chose to do so.[11] (If we learn to truly Pray with Jesus, we will not pray for “me” or “my” even a single time!) Praying with Jesus will teach us to dismiss such a fearful idea of God and to disavow such a selfish notion of praying, for such understandings can never lead us to a life of prayer, only to a life characterized by paranoia – that fearful, timid, cowering approach to a distant Supreme Being that sounds more like fear-filled obligation or down-right begging. Prayer is relationship.[12]

Paul encouraged the young Timothy, and us, “Rekindle the gift of God… for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline” (2 Timothy 1.7). And so it was that the early church introduced prayed Jesus’ prayer with the liturgical formula, “We make bold to say, ‘Our Father…’”[13]

In the course of these ten weeks together, we are praying, and we covet your prayers, that as a community of faith we might come to have our image of God reshaped, by Jesus, and that we might journey in faith from paranoia to prayer.

Let me encourage you, this week, to join my friend, Mark Lemier, Baptist father, Catholic pray-er, in praying one of his stale, memorized, ritual, “Catholic prayers.” It is called the “Lord’s Prayer.” I urge you to say it at least once a day, every day this week. And let us take our discipline seriously, for if Jesus’ followers could learn to pray his prayer, we would change the world.

[1] In one of his novels Ferrol Sams refers to his Southern and Southern Baptist upbringing as being “raised right”!

[2] This is the phrase George W. Bush has used to characterize his political philosophy.

[3] “Here is a true Israelite, in whom there is nothing false” John 1.47.

[4] In my Easter sermon this year, “Nothing Can Separate Us,” I suggested that, though resurrection is perhaps the central event of the Christian faith, many believers are uncomfortable to know what it means to “believe in resurrection.”

[5] I refer here to the God “above us,” intending the tension with my suggestion later in the sermon that one of the problems with the popular image of God is that God is made to be too far “above us.” The three-fold reference is somewhat Trinitarian: God “above,” God “around” (Spirit), and God “within,” (The Incarnation). See my sermon, “Trinity – Math or Myth?”

[6] Jeremias, p.04, emphasis added.

[7] I have repeatedly emphasized the necessarily active nature of faith. Faith is not just “believing,” in a cognitive sense, but “be-living” in an active sense.

[8] Tom Schaefer, The Wichita Eagle, printed in the Charlotte Observer, June 2, 2003.

[9] Here I allude to my argument for a Trinitarian formation of theology, namely, that a Unitarian God is too “alone,” and only a Trinitarian God adequately defines the Christian understanding of the God revealed in Jesus, and continually manifest by the Spirit. For the Trinitarian God, , community, not autonomy, is the most important characteristic. See my sermon, “Trinity -- Math or Myth?”

[10] Moore, Meditations, p.69.

[11] I frequently refer to Dr. Frank Tupper’s assertion, “God always does everything God can do.”

[12] “There’s a larger God out there. He’s not just a celestial cleaner-up and sorter-out of our messes and wants. He is God… And he is our Father. If we linger here, we may find our priorities quietly turned inside out. The contents may remain; the order will change. With that change, we move at last from paranoia to prayer; from fuss to faith” ( N.T. Wright, The Lord and His Prayer, p.7).

[13] Jeremias, p.85.

[14] Joachim Jeremias considers this “presumably the oldest wording” of the prayer given by Jesus. The Prayers of Jesus, p.94.