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The Conversatoin Along the Way
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis January 18, 2004, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Psalm 20 John 15:12-17
Now that we have celebrated Christ’s birth and considered the paradigm shift revealed in his baptism, we are left on earth with words about a savior who, in many ways, is a stranger to us. We have this witness on a page and so stories we can read about him. We have the church’s confession and so concepts to help us think about him. But all of that begs the question of our relationship to the God who has come to us in him. It is as though we need, in the beginning, to strike up a conversation--to pray, I guess--but how? The words of Reynolds Price come as close as I know to describing the beginning of that conversation when, after receiving a diagnosis tantamount to a death sentence, he speaks of his “effort to string a usable line of communication with what I call God. Even a person who lacks any sense of a watchful creator may be excused in a storm,” he says, “for grasping what looks remotely like help.” But is it? Is one voice shouting in the dark usable in light of Christ’s coming? Or if not, then what manner of conversation were we made to have with the God who now is with us? “If God is not,” wrote George Buttrick in his book on prayer, “and the life of man poor, solitary, nasty, brutish and short, prayer is the veriest self-deceit. If God is, yet is known only as vague rumor and dark coercion, prayer is whimpering folly: it were nobler to die. But if God is in some deep and eternal sense, like Jesus, friendship with Him [and so the conversation that is prayer] is our first concern, worthiest art, best resource, and sublimest joy." What can we know for sure of this conversation human beings have dared along the way since the beginning? Is it, in the first place, no more than the veriest self-deceit? Ludwig Fuerbach, one of the harshest critics of religion, concludes that prayer is the act of human beings “adoring their own hearts and regarding their own feelings as absolute.” How comical we must appear if this is so. How pathetic for us to bow our heads, bend our knees and cry out our grief, our needs, our sorrows, our joys to the empty air around us or the ego within us: the veriest self-deceit. For those who lack any sense of a watchful creature, such is surely the case…until a storm comes up! Yet even for those who have believed that God is, there sometimes creeps into the mind a suspicion that prayer is, in reality, not much more than a monologue. Could there really be a God who hears our sighs too deep for words and responds? Could mere words shouted against the darkness actually affect our human condition? The question sounds speculative and detached, but more often it issues from despair, from an experience of life as poor, solitary, nasty, brutish, and short, making the rote prayer that sufficed on a good day into an absurd act of desperation. Though our doubt about this conversation also is born of awe. Prayer is, at times, too astounding an act to dare! That we finally might not be alone, that our lives could matter in some eternal sense, that our pains even now may be felt in heaven above, that our lives should unfold not just by chance and happenstance but be held within some graceful purpose: could this be true? Here prayer is deemed not so much to be an act of self-deceit or desperation as the practice of an astounding and delightful illusion…if God is not. But if God is… “If God is, yet is known,” in the second place, “only in vague rumor and dark coercion, prayer,” says Buttrick, “is whimpering folly." The God in whom so many vaguely believe seems to be a God who probably did create everything, who expects us to behave in a certain way (the founder of, at most, an ethical system), who is more known in a sunset than a sentence of scripture, but who is not the kind of God we are meant to call upon. It is a God about whom ones thinks, rather than a person to whom one prays. But Buttrick begs a deeper question: what if this God to whom we pray indeed is, but has chosen to remain unknown to us, like a stern parent whose presence is unmistakably real but whose intentions are hidden, whose actions appear arbitrary, a parent with whom no relationship can be had except a relationship marked by fear and guilt? Then we are left to beg for mercy with no assurance that the One to whom we beg has the least bit of sympathy for our plight: prayer as whimpering folly. "But if God is," says Buttrick finally, "in some deep and eternal sense like Jesus, friendship with Him is our first concern, worthiest art, best resource, and sublimest joy." If God is and has chosen to be known by us in Jesus Christ, then prayer becomes a conversation with him who first called us "friend." "I have called you friends," Jesus says to the disciples, yet this is a friendship unlike any we will ever know with one another. No doubt Jesus had come to have a true affection for his chosen companions. But that is not the reason he gives for calling them friends. Jesus calls them friends for one reason: because he has revealed to them--and so put them in relationship to--the God who first loved them. In other words, in him we know to whom we are talking when we bow our heads and close our eyes! No longer are you slaves, he says, those who do not know what God is up to in the world, those whose prayer is whimpering folly. "I have called you friends, philoi, beloved, because I have made known to you everything I have heard from my Father." Through his incarnation, we have been addressed and included in the conversation for which we were made! The silence that had lead us to experience our lives as poor, solitary, nasty, brutish and short has been broken by the Word that was--in the beginning--with God and was God and is, in flesh, the answer to our every prayer. To wit, now in the midst of any given storm, we find ourselves conversing not with some blind tyrant or some unrelenting silence or finally with our own ego writ large, but with a loving Father, a good shepherd, a brooding mother, a persistent widow. Moreover, we are in conversation with a friend whom we may trust with our every weakness because he knows us from the inside out and-unlike the fickle friends by our side-in mercy he forgives. How else but in conversation with him, through the words of scripture and the witness of his church, could we trust that God is a God who will come after us when we are lost, who will dine with us when we are cast out by all others, who will welcome us home after we’ve wasted our lives, who will keep us from falling too far? How else but as God’s Spirit intercedes between the words that bear witness to him and our poor, solitary, nasty, brutish and short lives without him will we find ourselves accompanied along the way by a “reliable presence.” Still this is flimsy evidence, leaving us, says Price “somehow to build our lives on radical uncertainty, knowing only that we are heard by something more than the loyal but powerless humans near us.” Yet we do know more. For our friendship and so our conversation with God through Christ has to do not only with who we know God to be through him, but also with what God has already done for us in him: our prayer already answered. "No one has greater love than this,” he says, “to lay down one’s life for one’s friends." God loved the world in this way, the fourth gospel keeps telling us over and over and over again: the word connotes not a feeling but the act of laying down his life for us, of being born in our flesh so that he might take upon himself our death and carry this conversation for which we were made all the way to the grave and back again, in order that we perish not but have eternal life. What is it to perish but to live and die without Him who calls us friend? What is eternal life but our lives forever lived in relation to the Living God? Friends, philoi, beloved. If God is in some deep and eternal sense like Jesus, we can talk: through thick or thin, come hell or high water, no holes barred because nothing--neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities nor powers nor things present nor things to come nor height nor depth nor any other creature--will able to silence the Word that answers our prayers in his flesh. This conversation obviously, then, has a cost--one he has borne for us--but also one he invites us to bear lest we live for nothing much more than ourselves. Lest we die and can only conclude in the end that life is poor, solitary, nasty, brutish and short. "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you": as he has loved us. When Jesus said those words to the ones he called friends, they did not begin to comprehend the consequences. When the writer of the fourth gospel wrote those same words down, he knew full well the end of the story. The friendship of God leads us out into the world where life is poor, solitary, nasty, brutish and short; where people whimper their prayers and know not the God to whom they pray; where faith seems the veriest self-deceit, where all appears to be silent and God-forsaken, where death would seem to have dominion. We have been sent out with a Word not our own and with the charge simply to strike up a conversation, for Christ’s sake, to speak a truth we can barely believe ourselves, to befriend those whose lives are literally poor, solitary, nasty, brutish and short, that they may one day make the effort to strike up a usable line of communication with the God made known in Jesus Christ too. “Prayer,” says Buttrick in the end, "is a friendship. We do not make friends by nodding our head to a man across the street once a month. A friend begins by appearing aloof. Then through speech and silence, through laughter shared and danger braved, through the give and take of unsuspected self-revealings, heart opens to heart and mutual loyalty is gladly pledged. So," he says, "with Friendship from above: it grows of oft-repeated meetings, contacts, self-givings…trust." There is a story told of Horace Bushnell, congregational preacher and theologian of the 19th century, who had lost the thread of the conversation he once had had with God. But, as the story goes, "he carried on, praying to the next best thing, the abstract principle of right. It was a dreary devotion but sincerely meant. He put into his prayer no more faith than he had in his heart; he would tell no lies on his knees. If he could not address God as a known person, he approached God as an unknown Something. If he could not feel God, he could feel after God. If he could not see God, he looked in the direction where he conjectured God might be. If he saw anything that seemed to be sunshine, he stood in it. At last in Christ, the sky cleared and the revelation of the Living God became to him real once again.” Years later, a friend who had accompanied Bushnell on a camping trip to the Adirondacks recalls that, "When it came time to get into our blankets…I asked him to pray. [I must admit, the thought of such a request makes me very anxious!] He turned partly over on his face…and began in his natural voice…what seemed for all the world like speaking to someone who was next to him but whom I could not see. And so he continued—till, when he ceased, I found every other feeling swallowed up in the thought that God was there.” If you are one who suspects, despite your presence in the pew, that prayer is no more than talking to yourself and so the veriest self-deceit; if you are one who may harbor an abstract idea of God in your head, but have found little in that idea to move your heart or change your life; if you wish you could pray but cannot because you have heard only silence in response to your cries, then I invite you simply to strike up a conversation along the way with this One who has called you “friend,” and in whose love, I pray one day you may come to believe, your prayers have been answered. Thanks be to God. Amen. |