“When you pray, don’t be like hypocrites. They love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners so that people will see them. I assure you, that’s the only reward they’ll get. 6 But when you pray, go to your room, shut the door, and pray to your Father who is present in that secret place. Your Father who sees what you do in secret will reward you. 7 “When you pray, don’t pour out a flood of empty words, as the Gentiles do. They think that by saying many words they’ll be heard. 8 Don’t be like them, because your Father knows what you need before you ask.
9 Pray like this: Our Father who is in heaven, uphold the holiness of your name. 10 Bring in your kingdom so that your will is done on earth as it’s done in heaven. 11 Give us the bread we need for today. 12 Forgive us for the ways we have wronged you, just as we also forgive those who have wronged us. 13 And don’t lead us into temptation, but rescue us from the evil one. 14 “If you forgive others their sins, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. 15 But if you don’t forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your sins. (Common English Bible)
“The Son of Man: When Poetry Testifies to
Christ,” Week One
Back in
December of last year, just a few days before Christmas, I told a most
remarkable story, a story many of you may remember. It was a story about a young woman of only 19
years of age who, though being diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor, had
managed to still play basketball for at least a few games for the college she
had committed to, Mount Saint Mary’s in Ohio.
Mount Saint Mary’s even received a special dispensation from the NCAA to
move up their season opener in order to give her more opportunities to get into
a game before the tumor became too debilitating (the opener, by the by, was
against the Disciples affiliated school Hiram College, who enthusiastically
agreed in order to give her a chance to play).
She even relearned how to shoot the basketball with her left hand
because of the tumor’s effect on her control of her previously dominant right
hand.
And in so
doing, young Lauren Hill became a powerful inspiration for many, many
people. LeBron James raved about her on
Twitter. Athletes and journalists across
the country wrote to her. And she managed
to raise literally hundreds of thousands of dollars for brain cancer research.
And then,
just two days ago, early on the morning of Friday, the 10th of
April, five months and a week after that monumental season opener against Hiram
College, Lauren Hill died.
But I, at
least, cannot forget her. Nor, I reckon,
could or will a great many other people.
And that is a testament to the profound power that comes from the
unadulterated force of personality and will, something that we have found so
utterly compelling in others for, really, as long as we have existed. And that sheer force of personality, even in
one long gone, is so compelling to us that their words and deeds remain in the
most potent data storage unit ever made: our memories.
And out of
that memory comes, in one man from Lebanon’s life, a vast store of poetry
testifying to the teaching, healing, dying, and rising Christ.
This is a
new sermon series for us, to begin a not too terribly new season...it is a week
old, at least: Easter. Just like
Christmas and its 12 days, Easter is much more than Easter Sunday itself, and
it lasts for much longer: fifty days, in fact.
That’s fifty days of hearing, bearing, and proclaiming the good news of
the resurrection, long after the Easter Bunny has come and gone and the egg dye
has been put back into the pantry for another year.
As a part
of my own work and ministry in proclaiming to the world a risen Savior, this
sermon series will take a new tack for me: talking with all of you about Jesus
as He is revealed in poetry, of all things.
If you’ll recall my sermon series from a couple of years ago that I
centered around several of the writings of C.S. Lewis, well, this series will
be structured fairly similarly, except instead of C.S. Lewis’s books, it will
be around Khalil Gibran’s poetry about Jesus Christ, of which there is a great
amount, in the volume Jesus: Son of Man,
from which this series derives its name.
Gibran was a Lebanese poet during the early 20th century who
was raised Christian but was also influenced by Sufi mysticism, and that
mysticism, much like that of many Christian mystics throughout history, comes
through in his poetry about Jesus. Jesus: Son of Man tells the stories of
the gospels, but in Gibran’s often soaring word choice, through the eyes of
various supporting characters: the individual disciples, the female followers
of Jesus, even some of Jesus’s opponents (although Gibran reserves his best poetry
entirely for Jesus’s adherents).
We begin
this series, then, with Gibran’s retelling of the Sermon on the Mount made
famous in Matthew’s Gospel, and of how Gibran tells the story of Jesus teaching
His disciples how to pray:
Thus spake Jesus, and it was in my desire to
kneel down and worship Him, yet in my shyness, I could not move nor speak a
word.
But at last I spoke, and I said, “I would pray
this moment, yet my tongue is heavy.
Teach me to pray.”
And Jesus said, “When you would pray, let your longing
pronounce the words. It is in my longing
now to pray thus:
Our Father, in earth and heaven, sacred is Thy
name. Thy will be done with us, even as
in space. Give us of Thy bread sufficient for the day. In Thy compassion forgive us and enlarge us to
forgive one another. Guide us towards
Thee and stretch down Thy hand to us in darkness. For Thine is the kingdom, and in Thee is our
power and our fulfillment.
It is the
Lord’s Prayer, as rewritten and remembered by a poet. One of the greatest contributions by one of
the most powerful and compelling personalities ever to grace this globe, put
into words that are not merely the ones we can recite, rote, from memory, about
guiding us from temptation, as though we were filling out the prayer on a
triplicate form for God’s heavenly bureaucracy; no, there is an added dimension
to this.
And that is
maybe a bit weird for me to say…after all, this isn’t the first time I have
preached on the Lord’s Prayer with you, so it makes it feel like I have maybe
left something out the first time around.
But the
truth is, that is really just a part of preaching and teaching. I can’t cram everything I feel and believe
and know about God into one 20-minute sermon, I have to, as Russ, my senior
pastor in California always strove to emphasize to me, break this Bible thing
up into bite-sized pieces.
Which is
what the Lord’s Prayer does. It breaks
all our many needs up into bite-sized pieces that we can understand, so that we
can pray for them properly. We recognize
God’s wonder and power, we recognize our own need for even the most fundamental
of necessities, and we recognize our own inherent limitations and weaknesses in
the twin faces of temptation and evil.
The Lord’s
Prayer is a prayer, but it also interprets the practice of prayer itself. Jesus says not to be showy about our prayer,
to come up with all manner of empty, fluffer-nutter sayings the way He says the
hypocrites do.
And of
course He is right to admonish us to not do that. But it similarly is as easy and tempting for
us to bolt for the other end of the spectrum, where our prayers contain no passion
or profoundness at all, but instead carry a rote style akin to reading out of
the telephone books that none of us even use anymore. Kevin Roose, a writer who, during his time in
college at Brown University spent a semester at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University
and wrote a book about it, recalls in it his memory of his grandfather saying
grace around the dinner table, which “he rattled off so quickly that it sounded
like one long word: BlessolordthisfoodtoouruseandustothyserviceinJesusnameamen.”
God doesn’t
ask for long and flowery phrases, but God does ask for meaning in our prayers.
Because a
prayer that is short and said without emotion is as empty as a long and flowery
prayer.
Emptiness
isn’t what our faith is supposed to be about, and I know you all know this. But if our faith is meant to endure, and our
practices of prayer are meant to be remembered, well, our memories are pretty
self-selecting in that way. We don’t
waste our limited hard drive space between our ears on any ordinary thing.
So let’s
approach our praying to God with similar care and selection—which isn’t to say
we should be selective about praying in general, but selective in ourselves
about how we pray. We should hold our
praying to higher standards than we used to, because in truth we know better. We—and that includes me—have all uttered up
the silly sort of prayers on occasion for Russell Wilson to not throw a
goal-line interception, or for whichever mediocre Mariner to get a base hit and
score a run, because, God, if they win that game, we won’t ask you for anything
ever again! We’ve all done that.
The kicker
in all of this is that this is really for our benefit—yours and mine—and not
for God’s or for Jesus’s. Jesus says as
much in this passage: God knows what you need before you even ask for it. But I also quote Soren Kierkegaard on this: “Prayer
does not change God, it changes the person praying.” I mean, if we could change God via prayer…well,
God would be quite schizophrenic, especially during every Super Bowl, World
Series, and NCAA tournament!
No, prayer
is meant to change us, and change us it shall.
Not because we want it to, but because we desperately need it to. And this, ultimately, is how it can change
us: it changes us in the way that Gibran writes as he closes out this poem from
Matthew’s vantage point, as the famed Sermon on the Mount is now over, and he
is stuck trying to put Jesus’s command to pray into practice. And Gibran’s Matthew does so, and in the
process realizes this:
…and all of us followed Him. And as I followed I was repeating His prayer,
and remembering all that He had said; for I knew that the words that had fallen
like flakes that day must set and grow firm like crystals, and that the wings
that had fluttered above our heads were to beat the earth like iron hoofs.
Jesus’s
words can flutter over our heads and beat the earth like iron, because like
wings they make us soar, and like iron, they can endure forever so long as we
allow them to.
Which, in
the end, is likely precisely as it should be.
We end up remembering those words, and how they changed everything.
Do we
remember a young woman and how she died of brain cancer? Sure.
But do we also remember how she set the world on fire for her
cause? Absolutely.
And do we
remember how the homeless carpenter from Galilee was crucified and died? Yes.
But do we
also remember how His words and deeds changed the world forever? Without a doubt.
Thanks be
to God. Amen.
Rev. Eric
Atcheson
Longview, Washington
Longview, Washington
April 12,
2015
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