Text: Matthew 7:7-12
Speaker: Joel Miller
Around 5:30 on Wednesday, the church foyer was coming to life. Parents were visiting with each other after their days of work and parenting. Kids found their friends and were in various states of play. It was the second week of Bible School, which would soon start with a meal in the fellowship hall, followed by programming in the sanctuary and other rooms.
As I came out of my office to join in, I looked toward the front doors and noticed a person I didn’t recognize. He had a bag at his feet and seemed to be taping something on the door. Was he posting an announcement for a community event? Was he here to ask for help? Should I be concerned?
I went out and introduced myself, and he introduced himself. It turned out, sticking things on doors was his work. He was a decal guy, here on a small job for our front doors. The paper he had taped to the door was his notes, which he checked to confirm he had the correct instructions. “It says here left door ‘Pray for Peace,’ right door, ‘Act for Peace.’ Does that sound right?” It did, and I thanked him for his decal-ing before heading back inside for supper and VBS fun.
Perhaps a few of you noticed his work this morning on your way in. That longstanding message has been restored. Pray for Peace. Act for Peace. It had been missing it’s second half ever since someone did a drive by sling shot from their SUV several months ago, shooting a rock right through the word “Act,” shattering the glass around it, leaving no clue of their motivations except that perhaps they didn’t like our actions and, if so, that they’re a really good shot. It left us, temporarily, with only “Pray for Peace” alongside a replacement glass panel, a blank canvas with no further instructions on what to do after one has prayed.
If you’d like a creative writing assignment, feel free to spin a few parables from the whole ordeal.
For today, I’d like to accept the gift of the sling shot, which highlighted the part of that phrase we’re perhaps least practiced in, or at least about which we feel the most ambiguity. Pray for peace. Or, just Pray. Call it, left door theology. The door, if they were a remarkable shot, just go with me on this one, the door that seemed the least threatening of two. Pray…
This is a continuation of the focus from last week where we looked at the monk Thomas Merton’s question “Is the World a Problem?” and his suggestion that we must turn toward the world, even as we consider that it is we who are the problem, alienated as we are from our grounding in divine love. And the gospel of John, which uses “world” in a way similar to how we use “system,” Jesus and his followers were in the system but not of the system. Jesus announces the presence of the Holy Spirit, which he calls the Advocate, the active divine presence permeating all of reality if only we would receive it – energizing, guiding, transforming.
Back to those doors.
I think it’s fair to say we are a community committed to that right door, Act for Peace. Case in point: Bible school is encouraging our young people to be changemakers in the peaceful way of Jesus. It will culminate in a session with our Piecemakers, giving our young people a chance to put these ideas into practice alongside the less-young, creating comforters to be shared around the world with those for whom peace is a far off dream. More living parables and signs of the kingdom of God made visible.
I think it’s also fair to say we are full of folks who have rethought, or are actively rethinking, our relationship with the left door, Prayer. I include myself in this group. Prayer can be tricky. And there’s all kinds of reasons to be skeptical of praying to a god who may or may not bring about justice and peace, and so many times doesn’t.
For folks with this story, we may feel some resonance with a prayer from a 13th century German mystic, Meister Eckhart. He was one of the influences on the early Anabaptists as they broke away from the structures of the traditional church.
One of Meister Eckhart’s recorded prayers goes like this:
“Let us pray to God that we may be free of God.”
Try that one before a meal or putting your child to bed.
“Let us pray to God that we may be free of God.” What kind of prayer or non-prayer is this?
Let’s consider that the god from which Eckhart prays to be free is no god at all, but a projection, an idol of our making. It’s something people have been doing for a very long time, and none of us are exempt. Genesis says God created humanity in God’s image, and not long after that, it seems, we returned the favor, creating god in our image, even without knowing it.
In its more dangerous form it’s a god of our people and nation who justifies and even inspires violence against the outsiders and unbelievers. In its more childish forms it’s a god who acts something like Santa Claus, ready to hear our wish list, with a list of his own whether we’ve been naughty or nice. It’s the god atheists and believers alike are right to reject. From which it takes a lot of soul work, call it prayer, to be free.
When it comes to prayer, this is a good starting, what has been called the via negativa, the negative way. This is the process of letting go of our false projections, burning our idols, negating that which is indeed not god. Maybe even recognizing that we are in the wrong house entirely, walking back out through the door we once thought was leading toward abundant life.
This necessary work is why I generally find it good news rather than a tragic loss when someone speaks about losing their faith. Or even, gasp, no longer believing in god. Maybe it’s a god not worth believing in. Maybe that form of faith is best left to the compost pile. Maybe that form of prayer was just another way of clinging to an anxious need for certainty, reinforcing the ego rather than the radical de-centering and surrender Jesus spoke of when he taught Whoever wants to find their life must first lose it. It’s like Job, through all his suffering, rejecting the traditional beliefs spouted by his friends, even as Job expands his capacity to stay in relationship with the vastness of Ultimate Reality. In the end, it is Job, as he is regaining a new life, who is asked by God to pray for his friends, who have yet to let go of theirs.
Maybe admitting that we don’t know how to pray is the first step in the losing that leads to finding a different door to walk through. Or to put it another way, when the glass is shattered, you start with a fresh new panel, free of previous markings.
The negative way gets us to the blank panel. Meister Eckhart’s parable-like prayer is one to live with: “Let us pray to God, big G, that we may be free of god, little g.”
And then what? How about the via positive? What about that restored door in which praying for peace and acting for peace become the same gift flowing through us to the world?
I like how the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, speaks to this. He includes not just poor theology, but the harmful sacred teachings of culture as part of the negative way of prayer, which he calls contemplative practice. He also turns toward the positive effects of prayer, emphasizing how threatening to the unjust order of ‘the world,’ ‘the system’ contemplative prayer can be. He once spoke these words to a group of bishops:
To put it boldly, contemplation (prayer) is the only ultimate answer to the unreal and insane world that our financial systems and our advertising culture and our chaotic and unexamined emotions encourage us to inhabit. To learn contemplative practice is to learn what we need so as to live truthfully and honestly and lovingly. It is a deeply revolutionary matter.
(Rowan Williams’ address to the Roman Synod of Bishops in 2012)
To learn prayer is to unlearn so much. To learn prayer, or contemplative practice, as Williams says, is also to learn what we need. To learn what we need in order to living truthfully, and honestly and lovingly.
None of us can pretend to have this figured out, but prayer is what we call this essential practice, as close as breathing, of staying consciously connected to what we most need. It’s how we stay attuned Thomas Merton’s proclamation heard last week: “the deepest ground of my being is love.”
If we can start to learn what we most need, we can start to be entrusted with those words of Jesus that can otherwise be so easily twisted out of shape. They were spoken as part of his longer Sermon on the Mount, containing their own door imagery:
“Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.” (Matthew 7:7-8)
Prayer is the recognition that we don’t even know what to ask for, where to search, or which door to knock on. Prayer is also the great freedom of asking for what we now know we most need; searching with patience that there is something to be found; and knocking on a door that has been waiting for us all along.
Today Mennonites are joining with hundreds of others, converging in Washington, DC in the “All God’s Children March” to ask for an end to the madness in Gaza. For the sake Gazans, Israelis, and the world, may it be given.
This week our young people will gather again for Vacation Bible school and be invited to participate in the good change-making path of Jesus. In their life search may they find and always know that the deepest ground of their being is love.
In these days may we all be so bold as to knock on the left and the right door, Pray for Peace, Act for Peace, and may they one day open wide for all God’s children.
