Thoughts

According to Luke 3, John the Baptist’s vocation was to be a voice in the wilderness calling people to “prepare the way of the Lord” through repentance, anticipating the “forgiveness of sins” and the arrival of the Age to come.

He warns people that they must “produce fruit in keeping with repentance” rather than rely on pedigree or belonging to the correct in-group.

Naturally, because repentance isn’t just feeling differently but acting differently, people asked “What should we do?” How to make this repentance concrete? What fruit would indicate we are participating in preparing for God’s salvation to arrive?

John the Baptist’s first answer to this question is economic redistribution: “Anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none, and anyone who has food to share should do the same.” He goes on to tell tax collectors and soldiers to stop practicing extortion and injustice.

Isn’t that striking? The kind of repentance that prepares a highway for God isn’t just a feeling of sorrow over personal wrongdoing. Repentance is concrete and embodied. Repentance is social and material. Repentance is political and economic.

In other words, biblical repentance that prepares the way of the Lord involves practicing social justice and redistributing wealth on behalf of the poor.

The cosmos environing us actually is, beyond all else, a self-sufficing community of unspeakably magnificent personal beings of boundless love, knowledge, and power.

Dallas Willard

This remarkable sentence refers, of course, to the Trinity.

I’m struck by the qualifiers Willard uses to talk about God’s character here: boundless love, knowledge, and power. To live a life of faith, trusting God to bring about flourishing for us and the world, it seems to me that we must trust that all three of these are true of God.

• If we don’t trust God’s power / ability, we won’t trust God can accomplish what’s best for us.
• If we don’t trust God’s knowledge / wisdom, we won’t trust God knows what’s best for us.
• If we don’t trust God’s love / goodness, we won’t trust God wants what’s best for us.

I’ve found this to be a helpful rubric for understanding some of my doubts and struggles with faith over the years. I hope it’s helpful for you, too. I wonder what you find easiest and most difficult to trust about God?

In faith we rest ourselves upon the reality of the Trinity in action – and it graciously meets us. For it is there. And our lives are then enmeshed in the true world of God.

Dallas Willard

“No one who drinks a well-aged wine wants new wine,” Jesus said, “but says, ‘The well-aged wine is better’” (Luke 5:39).

In the parable preceding these verses, Jesus is telling people that his presence is a new situation that demands a new response: the bridegroom is here; the heavenly banquet has begun ahead of time, and thus eating and drinking are more appropriate for his disciples than fasting and praying. You don’t fast on the day of the wedding!

But it’s hard to make this kind of shift, because old habits die hard. It’s difficult for those accustomed to well-aged wine to appreciate the new. Whatever you’re accustomed to is what seems best, because it’s familiar, and familiarity is comforting.

It makes me wonder what old habits I have that seem right simply because they’re familiar. Am I paying close enough attention to what God is doing now that I can respond appropriately? Even when it offends my sense of propriety?

It seems to me that there are different “stages” people move through in the lifelong journey of learning to pray. Different “modes” of prayer that seem to develop along a trajectory of growing experience and maturity.

Prayer as petition

It seems the first stage is usually prayer as petition: simply asking God for what we want, recognizing that we cannot do everything ourselves. Over and over in the Scriptures we are invited to ask God for what we want. This is a vital and legitimate mode of prayer for the believer. The Lord’s Prayer is filled with simple petitions, and we never “outgrow” this mode of prayer.

But if we get stuck in this stage of prayer, we end up viewing prayer as a means of manipulating God: We attempt to coerce a “higher power” to do our bidding in a quid pro quo kind of arrangement. We scratch God’s back and God scratches ours. The story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal in 1 Kings 18 is a macabre example of this kind of prayer.

Prayer as surrender

A second “stage” (or mode) of prayer, then, is prayer as surrender. We recognize that God is interested in doing deeper transformative work in our souls, beyond simply answering our explicit petitions.

In prayer, God is at work in us to transform us into the likeness of Christ. Prayer is about letting go of our preconceived notions about what I need, and allowing God to work in us. Prayer is how I give myself over to the work only God can do in me. Prayer becomes not about getting what I want from God, but surrendering to what God is doing in me.

Again, this a good and vital progression in the life of prayer, and we never “outgrow” our need to pray in this way. But I think if we get stuck in this mode of prayer, we miss something vital about how God desires to work both in and through us in prayer.

I think a further “stage” or mode of prayer that incorporates and integrates both prayer as petition and prayer as surrender could be called prayer as participation.

Prayer as participation

Prayer as participation plunges us into the depths of the life the triune God shares with us. We realize that prayer is not about manipulating God, of course, but we also recognize that it is not only about changing us. Prayer is how we learn to participation in the life and activity of the Trinity in and around us.

Prayer as participation works both “ways,” then: we surrender to God’s will in prayer and are changed, but we are also invited to become agents of change through prayer. Prayer is how God shares God’s power with us, to really affect things “out there” in the world.

It’s not a math equation, of course. God is not a machine we manipulate for measurable results. But neither is it a ruse when Jesus tells his disciples, “If you ask me for anything in my name, I will do it” (John 14:14).

God really does desire to share divine power with us in prayer, inviting us to become agents of divine goodness for others through prayer. Prayer as participation allows us to return with a “second naivete” to prayer as petition from an increasingly surrendered place, integrating everything. As Richard Rohr put it, “God allows us to matter and our prayers to matter” (The Divine Dance, p. 153).

Everything is connected

Prayer as participation accomplishes the good work of God shaping us into the likeness of Christ, but it also accomplishes something outside of us as well. Of course it does! How could it not, since we’re connected to one another in deeper ways than are imagined in Newtonian physics?

Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote about the Church’s process of “spiritual osmosis” whereby one person’s experience in contemplative prayer can allow her or him to bear difficulties and sufferings on behalf of other people (whether they pray or not), and multitudes could in fact be practically helped by one person’s willingness to enter into prayer and open themselves to whatever God wanted to do in and through them on any given day (Prayer, p. 90).

Thus God’s work is never purely “out there” or “in here.” It’s connected. God is always present and at work, in here and out there, it’s all part of it, and we don’t control any of it. Prayer is where we learn to live in this reality. This is prayer as participation.

John’s Gospel shows Jesus being constantly misunderstood by those who listen to him, because he is speaking from what we might call a spiritual paradigm, and most of his hearers have what we might call an earthly paradigm.

(“Spiritual” doesn’t mean “disembodied”, but rather having to do with the unseen realities of God’s Spirit interacting and overlapping with the visible realities of our earthly existence.)

We should be able to empathize. Jesus often seems to contradict himself in John’s Gospel, and answers questions with non-sequiturs. Right after saying that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood (John 6:53), he says the flesh counts for nothing (John 6:63).

Ironically, his words about being bread that has come down from heaven, about eating his flesh and drinking his blood, are indeed words of Spirit and life. It’s confusing.

But here’s the crux of the issue: those who follow Jesus can trust Jesus without fully understanding Jesus. “This is a hard teaching,” the disciples complain, but “to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have come to trust and to know that you are the Holy One of God.”

I sense this duality every time I receive Holy Communion. “This bread is my body,” Jesus says, “and this cup my blood.” How does that work? What’s really going on here? It’s a hard teaching. But I don’t really need to understand how it “works.”

I only need to trust that Jesus’ body is real food, and his blood real drink, and that by participating in this meal, I share in the life Jesus shares with his Father, and will be raised up on the last day.