praying for courage instead of comfort

If our prayers so often don’t get answered, why do we continue to pray?

Since most of us can cite those instances that seemed to indicate that prayers don’t get answered and those that convinced us that they do, is it just a numbers game?  Do we just toss up a high volume of pitches in hopes that God might bat about .300? Are “believers” just people conditioned to interpret the occasional fluky fielding error as a line drive to the gap?

The problem is that the question itself—“Do prayers get answered?”—limits our imagination for how God might be at work. Whatever the response (and there are only two choices), God can only come off as a ‘cosmic butler’ who can solve a few, but not all, of our problems with good-willed, if bumbling, incompetence or a disinterested sovereign who will occasionally deign to be our benefactor if it reflects well on the crown. The question assumes that requests often don’t get answered because God is either incompetent or indifferent but doesn’t question whether getting requests answered is the primary value of prayer.  

But in our better thinking, we know that the primary image of God does not come to us from a bellhop’s luggage rack or a sovereign’s crown but a convict’s cross. The cross represents God’s refusal to coerce events, for better or for worse, with a snap of the divine fingers.

The creator likely has the ability to micromanage the spin of particles and the dance of galaxies, but the cost of doing so would be that creation would no longer have independent existence so much as it would be an extension of God. And our God isn’t narcissistic like that. If God’s intention for creating in the first place was that there be an arena where spontaneous, reciprocal love of the other could exist, then it’s not that God simply can’t answer prayers that request such dictatorial intervention; it’s that God can’t. To concede even the smallest request—to take over the wheel and redirect a car or suspend an avalanche—would be to give up the project of creation altogether.

While this often makes creation a risky and unpredictable enterprise, we should think long and hard as to whether we would prefer the alternative. Hitler experimented with that, attempting to solve the problems of creation by much more expedient means, progressing us along by force and eliminating that which he believed shouldn’t be.

The cross evidences nothing if not God’s ultimate refusal to solve all potential problems with this sort of force. It’s the result of God’s fierce commitment to creation, all of it, without remainder. But also, it’s God’s insistence that no one should suffer the consequences of an unpredictable creation by themselves.

And this is where prayer comes in.

Completing creation nonviolently and non-coercively is by far the longer route. Jesus has the scars to prove that (resorting to a military legion of angels must be a constant temptation in the divine life).

We, on the other hand, are a power-hungry people with grand visions of how we would have it could we muster the power to ‘fix’ creation through forceful means.

Prayer is where we give up these visions and re-align ourselves with God’s chosen means.

Prayer is both saying to God and hearing back from God, “I recognize that we have chosen the more difficult path, so I trust that we are in this thing together whatever stones may be thrown our way by a world that doesn’t yet get it.”

We pray, then, because those who walk the harder path need to lean on each other. Beneath the cross, it makes no more sense to speak of whether a prayer was “answered” than to speak of whether a step or a breath was answered. Perhaps any decent response to this kind of question should be evaluated not in whether it is “right” or “satisfying” but in whether it gives one the courage to go on walking the path and praying.

This answer may sound unsatisfying at first blush because we humans don’t often think to ask for courage. What we really want are answers. We don’t desire that our mettle be tested or that an unsettled world challenge us to act with more valor, more compassion, more life than we’d previously thought ourselves capable. We want settled stability and ease of mind. Unanswered questions imply that something is unsettled and unstable, that there are loose ends that haven’t been tied off, unspeakable entropies spiraling into oblivion.

So it’s true that aligning ourselves with God’s means of making creation fruitful is unlikely to result in a life that is comfortable and assured. But there is more at stake here. We’ll still certainly want to avoid suffering and won’t seek it out arbitrarily, but how differently we might be able to interpret the grief, and suffering and ultimately death that we face if we have spent our time praying:

Lord, give me a lifetime not of assurance but of yearning,

not of ease in my mind but of fire in my bones,

not of comfort in myself but of joy in my neighbor

And if you will reassure me,

Reassure me that I’ve fought the good fight for something that matters.

If you will put me at ease,

Ease my fear of a lukewarm life devoid of passion and purpose.

If you will comfort me,

Comfort me that I will not find my repose while my neighbor still suffers.

Give me courage to live out the desire deeper than my desires—

the desire of my deepest self—

that would be with you on a cross before it would be alone in comfort…

until there are no more crosses.

jesus responds to violence by dying

As if the event itself weren't painful enough, little bits of theological lunacy always seem to cling to days like that of the Sandy Hook Massacre. I'm thinking of two right now, though there are always more. 

The first should be easily dispelled by any thinking person of faith. The second seems more difficult to shed.

Following a similarly dark day years ago, I can remember the date and time that I rejected this nonsense that “everything is part of God’s plan.” This blasphemy images God like some sort of callous puppet-master who manipulates the course of these horrific events in order to “teach a lesson” to some sinners whose lives are, apparently, more valuable than those sacrificed in order to teach them. The strength of this theological worldview is its convenience. Its weakness is its god. Any god for whom this constitutes a “plan” is not a god worth worshipping.

If you haven’t already done so, please dismiss any thought of this calculating, puppet-master god quickly and unceremoniously.  But when you do so make sure you have access to another image of God to fill the void. I fear that much of our culture has rightly shed the puppet-master god but at the expense of any thought of God whatsoever. It’s much easier to unthink God than to rethink God.

I say I fear this not because I’m silly enough to think that the “secularization” of our culture is the problem (whatever that means, exactly) or that all human brokenness could be fixed if we’d just “allow God in schools” by posting the ten-commandments in the hallway or some other nonsense. Such a sentiment assumes, in the most theologically naïve way, that the human heart can be changed by what, in Lutheran theology, we call Law. Most of the Bible’s thickness is devoted to the fact that this doesn’t work. The Law would be great if it truly cured what is ailing humanity, but it doesn’t. Something else is needed, namely Gospel…namely Jesus, God’s rash and irresponsible message of unconditional love to the world.

It’s because of Jesus that I’m only still learning, myself, to shed another common explanation for the perversity of human evil, one that is equally false but even more convenient and, for that reason, even more difficult to shed. A succinct version of it was given to me by a trusted elder at a time when I was younger and much more naïve. He said, “You know, there are two kinds of people in this world: those who litter and those who clean it up.”

I was quite attracted to this worldview. Who wouldn’t be? I, of course, must be one of the litter cleaner uppers, if not on a global average, then certainly when compared to some of the worst litterers that come to mind. Right?

And that’s why this explanation isn’t going away anytime soon, because it’s just so darned convenient. Bad things happen because that other half of humanity is bad. If I’m feeling optimistic, maybe the bad portion is just a small fraction of humanity and most of us are basically good. If pessimistic, maybe just me, “my church,” and a few of my closest family and friends are good while most of humanity is going to hell in a handbasket. The size of the groups doesn’t really matter. It only matters that this clever aphorism allows one group, mine, to distance itself from the other and avoid any implication in the darkness and violence that so obviously plagues the world.

It’s convenient to think that only the one or two most immediate culprits are to blame for such horrific days as we experienced last week—that, for instance, this event is completely disconnected from my support of an entertainment industry and media culture that cheapens life and glamorizes violence, or the laughable fraction of the money I earn that goes to the mental health system as compared with weapons development, or that I personally have spent a lifetime not reaching out and showing Christ’s love to individuals who are at risk for violent behavior.  

Of course, I can think through all of this in my head…but in my gut…before long, a few images from the last week flash before me once again, and here comes that visceral response I know so well. My face gets hot, my own blood-thirst wells up inside of me. Forgiveness is a nice thought. But this is real life. Forgiveness? Not for this. Not for this. For this, the only solution is the oldest law known to humanity, the rudiment of all Law. One eye for one eye. One tooth for one tooth. Show me the sicko. I’ll do it myself.

…And there it is. That darkness that has plagued humanity for millennia has crept into my very own soul. Of course, like Saul the murderer before he became Paul the preacher, I’ll try to confuse the issue. I’ll justify myself and continue to distance myself and will even convince many that my own inner violence is of a completely different kind, perhaps even an admirable kind. “Well, that monster is a cold blooded killer. I’m simply executing the wrath of God.”  

What eye for eye logic has going for it is at least the semblance of perfect justice. What could be more equitable than identical recompense for any violence committed? And, theoretically, it seems quite possible that the threat of equal and opposite retribution should deter future violence, right? What it has going against it is that it has never worked, and it never will. 

…

Jesus tried another option, one that is so stupid and so naïve that it wouldn’t even be worth trying except that the other thing we’ve tried hasn’t ever worked either. He abdicated the sensible solution that we all expected of a Messiah, using violence (judiciously and sensibly applied, of course) in order to make for less violence.

Instead, he died. Peter took out a sword and tried the “stand your ground” method. But not Jesus. He responded to our world’s violence by dying, dying by our very own hand…and, at the same time, dying with us like a husband who, sick of seeing his bride suffer from a chronic disease, would gladly take the disease onto himself. The shorthand for his ridiculous alternative to the sensible and just application of law is “the way of the cross.”

Of course, our societies reflexively feel threatened by “the way of the cross.” Predictably, someone will stand up at this point and say, “Here in the real world (apparently, not the one in which Jesus lived) having no means of punishing or retaliating will give criminals free reign. Just forgiving and turning the other cheek willy-nilly will cause whole societies to spin out uncontrollably into a violent chaos.”

On the other hand, the innocent one hanging there on the cross confronts us with the fact that perhaps we had already spun out uncontrollably into a violent chaos under our law. In fact, it was our law that crucified him.

Jesus was put to death because he had the audacity to claim that the deeper hitch in our otherwise reasonable logic—that if they, out there, are littering, then we, over here, have to clean it up—had little to do with the litter and had everything to do with the “we” and the “they.”

We were expecting a messiah who would come down hard on that bad half of humanity. Instead we got one who died. Free grace is a grossly unpopular idea. It always has been. People have been crucified for even suggesting it. The world can be a horrific place. We want eyes and teeth, dammit!

Once we realized what had happened, the sun went black. We bawled and mourned and, that following Saturday, we began looking for someone to blame. “They crucified him. They’re the litterers. The chaos won. Now let us take to arms and try no more naïve experiments with love.”

Such is the wisdom of Holy Saturday.

But the story doesn’t end there.