A single word uttered from an open heart can do more for us than any amount of anxious babbling. There’s a lot of mental and emotional debris floating around us and within us that needs to be removed so we can see God clearly. Jesus reminds us that humility is our first posture in prayer, remembering that God is God and we are not.
One of the most ancient prayers we can pray is this: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me (a sinner).” A simple prayer like this is meant for repetition so that it becomes like breathing, sinking down from lips to heart - your spirit prays even when your lips aren’t.
A rich prayer life connects us to God from the inside-out, and from the outside-in. It’s valuable to have prayers that arise from our thoughts and feelings spontaneously, but often we might find ourselves stuck in where to go beyond that. Spontaneity does not equal authenticity, and it doesn’t lead us to maturity in the faith. We need guidance to learn God’s character and will. Liturgical prayers helps lead us places we might not go in our wandering.
Everything about our faith flows first from sharing in divine love with Jesus through prayer. Often the story of Mary and Martha is reduced to “don’t do stuff, just sit,” but there is something deeper at work. Jesus is not critical of Martha’s activity itself, but her motive. She is anxious because she finds her value in her good behavior and she is projecting her frustration upon her sister. Action and contemplation actually go hand-in-hand - to “pray without ceasing” is to merge our communion with God and our daily activity. Without contemplation, our activity burns us out and we become filled with contempt.
We need a “rule of life" to steward vision from God so we don’t get distracted. It is a fact of life that maturity, in any form, does not happen to us spontaneously. The life of the Spirit we are called to live into sees both our passions (what makes our hearts come alive) and our discipline (what we commit to regardless of how we feel) as gifts meant for our liberation.
The wisdom of the Spirit does not fit inside the wisdom of the world; it transcends all our political ideologies and philosophies. We are spiritual babies when we try to use Jesus just justify our preferred party in the political binary in this country. Sometimes we keep God’s wisdom out of our thinking about politics; sometimes we believe that we can use political power and control to bring about the Kingdom. A life of the Spirit means we having a different foundation that teaches us to live creatively, maintaining our integrity in the public sphere. As we mature in God’s sacrificial love, we cling less tightly to the wisdom of the world and find our home in the wisdom of the Spirit.
Right action and contemplative thinking are important, but it is the love in our hearts for Jesus that keeps us close to him. To love God with our whole self is to pay careful attention to how each of our faculties are being redeemed by the word spoken to our souls, calling us Beloved. Contemplative thinking opens us up to possibilities beyond the conventional, right action helps us embody the truth, and emotional attachment binds us in the heart so devotion can sustain the journey.
I wonder if we were the ones Jesus asked, “do you love me?” how we would respond. We often think of love in sentimental terms, as feelings and inclinations. The Greatest Commandment, however, is an imperative to close the gap between our vague aspirations and the material reality of how we lives our lives; to bind the heart, mind, and body to our soul. I think here is is especially important we remember that Jesus does not ask us questions like this to bring us shame, but rather, to come to terms with this gap.
Love is an action. When I move towards my beloved, I have to attune my attention to her needs and desires. Rather than spraying loving gestures into the wind willy-nilly, I must learn - what can I do to love my beloved as she actually is, not the illusion I have built in my heart and mind? Sentimentality refuses to take an honest assessment of our actions, and it gives little heed to to desires of the object of our love.
As Christians we can fall prey to anti-intellectualism or rigid thinking. We might have been told “don’t think, just believe”, or we might have been told what we’re supposed to believe doctrinally but not how to hold those beliefs so that they lead to encounter; both types of thinking keep us on the surface of life, only reaching for what we already know.
At the empty tomb, John bends over as a sign of humility to see the strips of linen lying on the deathbed without a body to accompany them. Contemplative thinking enables us to to lean in and listen for resurrection possibility beyond our assumption about how life is “supposed” to work. The word contemplation derives from con- meaning “with, together”, and the root temple, which means “a space demarcated for sacred consecration”. To contemplate is to establish a sacred space in the mind to be joined with God, which is the goal of the spiritual life.
The goal of loving with our hearts, minds, and strength is to drill down and touch the eternal place where our souls rest in God, rather than remaining on the surface of our lives through emotivism, intellectualism, or frenetic activity. As we pierce the surface of life to encounter and embrace our soul, our true self in God, our whole person becomes the best sort of apocalyptic event, the place where resurrection manifests. We cannot experience resurrection life if we judge our hearts, mind, and strength by conventional means in the world outside ourselves. Integration only happens at the soul-level, as we recognize we are not even the culmination of our thoughts, feelings, or actions; but what we have been taught makes us “us” is united by something deeper than them all.
When we’re shamefully attached to God, we may accept that God loves us because God has to, but we don’t believe God like us very much. We have internalized the idea that God naturally despises us and sees us primarily as sinners; Christ imputed his righteousness to us to make us slightly less deplorable. When we believe this, we assume we have to perpetually beat ourselves up to be on the same side of God.
When we’re avoidantly attached to God, we choose to go it alone rather than to offer our needs and feelings to our Abba. At some point in your religious upbringing it may have been communicated, however subversively, that to have dark emotions means you are not close to God, forcing you to choose between emotional honesty or relationship. You may have also grown up believing that God does not want you to feel bad feelings, so you pretend they aren’t there in the name of Jesus. Sadly it is easier to trust in a belief system than it is to risk emotional honesty and intimacy with God.
When we’re anxiously attached to God, we constantly worry that we are never doing enough to earn God’s favor. For many in the Christian household, we have been told that “sin is what separates us from God”. This leads to all sorts of anxiety-inducing questions and struggles because it insinuates closeness is directly proportional to our ability to manage our sin. The program can look a variety of ways depending on the values of our denomination of origin.
Knowing God as “Abba”, as Jesus does, is the goal of the spiritual life. What we believe about God, and how we attach to God, shapes our understanding of everything around us and within us. Even the version of God we may no longer believe in still has a grip on the deepest recesses of our minds. Part of the work of developing intimacy is parsing through our stories and gaining language for our subconscious attachments, so we might find healing and hope. Our new series ABBA, FATHER will help us to identify how we connect with God now, and how we can repair our attachment so we might lay claim to the beautiful vision Jesus gives us of Who God ultimately is.
Our missionary friend Guillermo Sifuentes shares about the work he and his family are engaged in through Casas de Jesus in Pachacútec, Lima, Peru.
In an era of Herodian power-grabbing and Religious lethargy, we have an opportunity to reclaim the joy and awe of those who move towards Jesus in humble worship.
“God calls me not to the mountain of transfiguration or to the Jordan, but to the home of David to behold a mother soothe her naked, cold babe named, “Messiah”. I stand next to Mary with my head down and my heart warmed. I first assume the warmth is because I have been moved by the transcendence of my Lord’s humility, but I slowly am shown that it is the quietness of the moment that draws me deeper into the scene. Nakedness. Helplessness. Tears and blankets. A mother’s gaze. A sleeping child. An oblivious world. All these details humble my heart into conviction —no: into awe of the God of silence.”
“Bad shepherds” extort the flock, taking what they can - when God cherishes our gifts and blesses them. They intend to keep us subservient by keeping us weak, sick, and broken - when God desires to heal and empower us to wholeness. They lose interest in us when we are lost - when God relentlessly pursues us, leaving behind the ninety-nine, in order to bring us safely home. They abandon us to the “wild beasts” of the age - when God courageously protects us from the fangs of the Evil One. These “bad shepherds” preserve themselves and their privilege at all costs - but God sacrifice Himself for our sake.
When Moses seeks to know the Voice in the burning bush, God offers three references: History & Promises, Personal Experience of Love, and Transcendence above all categories - this understanding of God is what we need for liberation from bondage to freedom.
God has been a constant in history, proving His character through the promise to our spiritual ancestors. God binds Himself to us in every moment, never leaving nor forsaking us. God, as Pure Being, transcends all our convenient categories as the only one worthy of worship.
Through the Old Adam we fell subject to sin and death because we try to make ourselves into gods. We await the coming of the New Adam who brings new life.
Our radical conviction that we are all equal children of God is the lens through which we deal with issues of racism, classism, and sexism. "God shows no favoritism”; but God does give special attention to the overlooked so they might be raised up to equal standing in the Kingdom, fully-realized as children of God. It becomes the imperative of those who in traditional society are seen to have privilege and power to help up those who have been left behind in the name of Jesus, so that our claims to diversity can have meaning under the banner of unity in Christ.
