Fellowship Gone Awry Rightly
Written by the Panhandling Philosopher
There is a prayer in my circle which
goes “do thou O merciful God, confirm and strengthen us; that as we grow in
age, we may grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus
Christ. Amen.” Sometimes we imagine God answering such a prayer. We imagine a
gently rising road before us wherein we walk always moving forward and uphill.
In our imaginations there are no real obstacles, just mercy and grace and
growing in grace as we gracefully age without sickness or trial or tribulation.
In fact when the slope is no longer a gradual incline but increasingly steep
foothills that must be walked up and then includes valleys to walk down and
instead of aging gracefully there are life threatening diseases and heartaches
in job setbacks, family failures, church splits and commotions we begin to
wonder, “Lord where have you gone?” Sometimes the Lord’s presence is easier to
see even though it remains a humbling experience.
A couple of weeks ago I went to a
conference. I hadn’t been to a conference for a long time. It was a blessed
time. If you are like me, conferences include a lot of information and you walk
away realizing you have heard so much that could be applicable to life. But in
reality we aren’t usually all that good at multi-tasking. So the more we try to
take on, the more we end up discouraged in a short time so that maybe no long
range change comes from all that information at the conference. But for me,
this conference didn’t do that to me. There was a thought shared by one of the
speakers about how so much of what is presented to the Christian in our day is
presented to one who is a habitual juvenile. One of the differences between a
juvenile growing up and an adult life experience is the juvenile is as a child
moving from interest to interest, often learning by playing. A large part of
the wisdom of parenting is the parent learning when a child needs to simply be
allowed to play, and when a child needs to be taught and shaped by structure in
life. The adult settles down in life taking on responsibilities. It is a
beautiful thing for a child to be able to be a child; it is a sad thing when
the adult hasn’t learned to be an adult.
An example is perhaps in order for
how juvenile we can be in our Christian culture. We sometimes accept as truisms
that God wants us to pray from the heart. Then when we get at what that means
what we are talking about is that God enjoys our spontaneity. He loves when we
instinctively react to a moment in life and cry out “Abba Father.” That is
wonderfully true! But there is more to giving God our heart isn’t there? Carefulness,
diligence, ordering our thoughts before God, reflecting on our day to see if
there is any hurtful way in us are all ways in which we deal with God from our
hearts. If all I offer God is my prayers of spontaneity I haven’t yet learned
much about praying to God from my heart. To imagine spontaneity the whole of
praying from one’s heart is really juvenile and not adult. In my job, my boss
doesn’t evaluate me on the basis of my spontaneity. He does evaluate me on how I
show up on time, do the duties I am assigned, and make an effort to be a team
player. The one thing that I realized at the conference is that my prayer life
had become juvenile. I prayed when I felt a spontaneous urge, which in truth
wasn’t often lately. So it was time to adult up. It was time to pull the prayer
book from the table top and begin using it to pray in a diligent methodical
manner, to read the Scriptures assigned from the lectionary readings. If you
are from another Christian tradition you might relate by when you need to pay
really close attention to if you are keeping the ACTS of prayer (Adoration,
Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication) and are doing your readings to get
you through the Bible in a year. We realize we have to be intentional, to plan,
to prepare, to see to it that our prayers are more than spontaneous, that they
are full and are leading us to take everything to God in prayer.
I was thus experiencing a season of
growth, especially in keeping to the forms of prayer. I was experiencing that
walk up the slightly inclining hill. Then there was the Saturday morning Bible
study with a small group of church members. We were talking and then out of
nowhere I said something careless. No, it wasn’t out of nowhere. It was rooted
in my personal bias for one sort of spirituality over another; the imagined
cerebral over the way another spiritual tradition is structured. An older
Christian sitting next to me took exception with a bit of fervency to what I
said. He took me to task. I didn’t want to hear it. Somehow I managed to
listen. I had spoken careless words. I had painted a different Christian
spiritual tradition with a broad and overly critical brush. It was a tradition
which had aided him in a season of great doubt. He had experienced a time when
he could not recite the creeds in church and then visited a church from the
spiritual tradition I had just carelessly maligned. The believers there were
welcoming, and even insisted on his joining them for a meal after their
service. These were the kind of people I was carelessly maligning. I listened
to the reproof and before the end of the breakfast I was thanking him for
giving me that nudge that I needed when I was out of line. My bias was showing.
My tendency towards looking down on others by my mountain top experience was
showing. I was experiencing a high that came crashing down with a single
statement.
This morning I turned to my prayer
book again. I still need to adult up in having daily devotions that are
structured and not left to the chance nature of human spontaneity. The collect
(a prayer) for this week’s devotions said this if modernized: “O LORD, who has
taught us that all our doings without love are worth nothing; send your Holy
Spirit, and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of love, the very
bond of peace and of all virtues, without which whosoever lives is counted as
dead before you. Grant this for your only Son Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.” The
Old Testament lesson focused on showing love to the stranger who by nature is
from a different background than ours. The New Testament reading was from I
Corinthians 13, the chapter on love. The Gospel lesson was about the blind man
making a commotion when Jesus was coming by. Everyone around him was trying to
keep him from making a spectacle of himself; hollering out to Jesus as he
passed by. From yesterday morning’s breakfast I would likely have been
counselling the man to be reasonable rather than being a spectacle that
happened to embarrass me. I might have missed the whole lesson this morning in
my self-satisfaction. But an older believer had pointed out the wrongness of my
careless manner. The Scripture readings and the prayers for the Sunday before
Lent had shown me a greater need than to contain my careless speech. We can
sometimes get professional in our use of our speech around people. We learn to
say less and less things that are not politically correct. But that is not the
measure. My careless speech was wrong not because I said it. It was wrong
because I had not learned love so well that such thoughts were not yet foreign
to me. My careless speech can perhaps be avoided, but that is not the goal –
the goal is to love in such a manner that the thought I expressed would have
been made unthinkable by the concern of love that Christ was teaching me to
have for others.
There are certain seasons when we
decide to focus on learning something. Many a person around New Year’s Day
makes resolutions or decides upon the one word theme for the year. Wednesday is
Ash Wednesday, the day which is the beginning of the Lenten season for some of
us. The Lenten season is a time especially devoted to enter the discipline of
the Lord and to seek to repent of our known sins. This year I have a theme. With
the Gospel’s penitent I will pray “Lord Jesus, be merciful to me, the sinner.” “Lord
Jesus, teach me to love.” An older gentleman at a breakfast was the presence of
Jesus I needed to show me my hurtful way.
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