Lenten Reflections: Luke 11 & 18

"Nevertheless, when the the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?"

I was overwhelmed at the question. All at once my heart cried out, "Yes, Lord, find it in me!" Yet I knew that my practice was in no way an indicator of that faith. You see I falter in prayer more than I succeed. I'm not particularly diligent in prayer. I am usually too busy chasing the rabbit trails of my stream of consciousness. I tend not to focus and reflect upon what God would do and have done in the world. When you don't think about what God is doing, you tend to forget that He does anything at all.

I was sitting in the park reading Luke's gospel as a part of my church's challenge to read the four gospels for Lent when I came across this convicting passage. I had a lot on my heart that day, deep questions and frustrations on that Thursday morning. Fed up with my job, longing for a home not so alien as this Ohio River Valley; I very much knew some changes I needed to make and steps necessary to explore my dreams, but where was the time? Imagine being submerged in a shallow but fast-moving stream headed for dangerous rocks. All you need to escape your skewering fate would be to stand upright for even an instant; the water is too fast for even so simple an act of self-salvation! It takes all your energy just to stay afloat, and this delicate balance would be easily turned to tragedy with even a small additional burden. What I really needed was a rope thrown from the shore.

See, sometimes I live life more like a deist or a stoic. The deist lives life as if God were far off and uninterested in the lives of men. For the most part, God has left us to follow our own path and isn't much interested in us. In its philosophical and theological heyday, this belief was considered liberating. I have to admit that I can't think of much more dreadful. How callous for an uninterested God to create a beautiful world then leave it to its own devices. Yet don't I sometimes live as though that's the God I serve? The stoic believes that by focusing on the things he can control and simply enduring the things he can't, he can achieve happiness in life. He shuns himself from exterior pain because it would leave a weakness. Don't I live this way too? Don't I resist weeping at the genuine sorrows of life? Do the things which pain the heart of God pain mine even slightly, or am I--a mere man--of a stronger heart than God?

Thus prayer is a struggle because my go-to preference is simply to do without it. I don't cry out to God because I think I should just keep a stiff upper lip and deal with the hard things. God doesn't change circumstances, I reason without thought. So really, it doesn't much matter if He's in heaven and sees me. He does what He wants, I just live with His choices. No one is going to throw me a rope. Stand up in the water no matter how much it hurts.

This isn't the same God who told the disciples to pray. He asks them, "What kind of parent, when his kids are hungry, throws a rattler in their faces? Or, when the kids are thirsty, gives him a scorpion?" I can't help but find the scene He describes humorous (who says Jesus isn't funny?). You're not exactly on the fast track to parent of the year if you withhold meals from your kids, much less if you toss poisonous wild life at them. I'm not a frequent viewer of daytime talk trash, but I'm sure I would hear about a story in which Maury Povich confronts that careless mother.

"Please, Momma, I want s'more."

"More whut?"

"Dishwater soup please. Please? I can see all mah ribs."

"Gave it all to the goat, boy. But here's a bag of black widow spiders. Catch 'em with yer mouth!"

Jesus continues, "If you, who are evil, know how to give good gifts, how much more will your Father in Heaven who is good give you good gifts?" Just like there (normally) isn't a single parent on earth who, though all parents are fallen, would abuse their children in such (hilarious) ways, how much more will a good and perfect Father give good gifts! It is this statement which prompts Jesus to ask if there will be faith on the earth when he returns.

When we pray for blessing, and the ultimate blessing of God's kingdom to come, we are showing our faith in God! Elsewhere, Jesus says that God knows what we need before we ask. That normally would lead us to conclude that there is no point in prayer since God knows what we need. Yet Jesus says, "Pray because God knows what you need before you ask." This is because God, in his omniscience, is not angry or offended at our lack. Instead, He already knows! Don't try and fake like you have it together before you go to God. You don't! It also means that our prayer is an evidence of faith. For just as we trust in God's knowledge of all things past, present, and future, so too we also trust in His strength to deliver all those good and perfect things He has ordained for us. Prayer is for our benefit. And in the mystery of Divine Providence and human agency, our prayers bring about are the means by which God carries out His perfect plan.

I wept at the realization that weakness is something we can hide from men but not from God. So why pretend? Why live as though He designed life to suck? Moreover, why think that no rope is coming? Jesus says that God knows you need a rope. Even a wicked, unjust judge would give you a hand if you bugged him enough. How much more will a God who loves you! And I pray so double-mindedly, praying for the best but expecting the worst. Could this be why Jesus asks after his teaching on prayer in Luke 18, "Will I find faith when I return?" Our prayer stems from the confident expectation that we are heard and what we request will come to pass. Quit posing and posturing. Own up to who you are because God is big enough to handle your rawness, answer your impossible requests, and save your soul.

Lenten Reflections: Matthew 1 & 2

I was raised in the Baptist tradition, so low church I think I scrapped the bottom of the holiness barrel. I leaned downright Anabaptist for a long time, so the idea of a Christian calendar with seasons of fasting seemed alien to me. After all, fasting doesn't make you a better Christian. Aren't we free in Christ from the law and its appointed seasons of feasting and fasting? The whole Christian life is a feast, I thought. By the end of high school I was identifying as a Calvinist and in college I was exposed to the deep wells of tradition and theology that pushed me firmly into a broadly-Reformed camp. There I discovered the history of the saints gone by and realized that the Church Universal didn't end with the Apostle John only to restart with Billy Graham (and maybe a blip with Martin Luther). I learned how Lent is supposed to be a time to prepare us for Easter, that the fasting is supposed to deepen our feasting on God. Our hunger for food or caffeine or the internet is supposed to bodily turn our affections toward a deepened spiritual hunger for God. Still I participated in Lent only once and then halfheartedly, forgetting partway through I was even fasting or what the point was. I failed to orient my hunger toward the Lord and fell back into my thoughtless feasting. Praise God that grace abounds to the chief of sinners.

This year I actually attended a morning Ash Wednesday service at Sojourn, a Southern Baptist congregation which manages maintain low church form with high church sensibilities. They have a deep appreciation for liturgy, ritual, art, and holy expression while keeping the last, the lost, the least unalienated with esoteric holy trappings. So this morning I heard the real truth of Lent again for the first time: Man is mortal and we die to something to come alive again with a celebration of Christ's resurrection. Along with that came a charge to read the Gospels this season, so I endeavor to do so as I fast praying that my devotion to the Holy Writ will increase in my temporary death.

Today I read and meditate upon Matthew chapters 1-2. Here we read the genealogy of Jesus. It is filled with the names of men sometimes glorious, but more often inglorious. Particularly Matthew calls to mind the wicked kings of Israel we read about in Kings and Chronicles. These are men like Rehoboam and Manasseh who bow the knee to idols and demons, couching the plans of God with their own expedient safeguards and back-up plans. God can't be wholly trusted, they reasoned, so my Judahite army, Molech, and Asherah will save me if Yahweh fails. There are harlots like Rahab and liars like Abraham. Still God chose to use this pedigree to fulfill His purpose.

Other things could be noted (the Magi, Herod, the Bethlehem slaughter), but I was struck today by the example of Joseph. Here was a man I once heard described as "the manliest Christian outside of Jesus Himself." He first hears that his betrothed is pregnant though he has never had sex with her. Rather than expose her to a public humiliation, we are told that he plans to divorce her quietly. This is a drastic understatement. According to Levitical law, he could have had her stoned for infidelity! Yet even before he realizes what has transpired, he still intends to extend grace and break off the engagement. Now, we know as the reader that had he done these things he would have in fact done something quite unjust. Yet from his perspective and the vantage point of those around him, this would have been reasonable, just, and even gracious.

Then he has a vision of an angel telling him that this child is from the Holy Spirit. And he believes and marries her. In spite of the local gossip around Nazareth, he takes responsibility for a child not his own. Only an unfair modern critic would try to say that he is buying into some mythology to justify himself here. Ancient people may have had a more primitive science, but they certainly knew where babies came from! He knew this wasn't natural, that it defied all explanation. He knew that the community might (and probably did) speak against the character of his future wife. Nevertheless he persevered by faith that God was working something astounding. He doesn't even know that Messiah has come, he just believes!

It is by faith that he takes his family to Bethlehem. His wife is due any day and he still goes, knowing that through obedience to Caesar he is obeying God. He trusts God to iron out all the details. God provides a safe birth. It is by faith that he listens to the angel's warnings and flees to Egypt. Can you imagine? He didn't go back home to Nazareth at all. He brought no effects of home with his young family. Instead, he flees by night to a foreign land--a land of slavery in the Jewish mind--to escape the wrath of a jealous king. Here he shows the great virtue of provision. He thinks again of the safety of his family--a disgraced wife and a child not his own--and leaves everything behind all based on another vision from a divine messenger. He has no natural promise of safe conduct, no tangible guarantee of success. He has his faith and his God, and that his more than enough. He has nothing yet he has everything.

His journey is not so different from ours. We too sojourn by faith, not by sight. We Christians live as a people in-between in a kingdom here but not here yet. The promise of Christ has yet to be fully realized. We have the Word of God, the Spirit of God, and promises of suffering and deliverance. And so we sojourn. We travel through life prayer by prayer, trusting not in the might of our hands nor the strength of our earnings nor the knowledge of our minds. This is the life of a Christian, the life of Joseph. It is one which is folly to the world yet salvation for those who believe. May we endure well this mortal race with our full hope in God the Father, faith in Jesus Christ our Redeemer, by the power of the Holy Spirit indwelling us. May the ash on our foreheads be a reminder that to dust we shall return and from death we shall rise in the glory and majesty of our brother Jesus Christ and our Father God Almighty. May this season of death be a season of life.