The way the Lord taught us to pray

Tonight @ the HUB we’ll begin 5 weeks of practicing different ways of praying.  We begin w/ the way Jesus said to pray.  In the little prayer book by Walter Rauschenbusch I’ve been working through he offers a brief but significant commentary on the meaning of the Lord’s Prayer.  He says it is, “the purest expression of the mind of Jesus.  It crystallizes his thoughts.  It conveys the atmosphere of his childlike trust in the Father.”  He goes on to say that in this prayer Jesus “..demanded simplicity and sincerity in all expressions of religion & offered this (prayer) as an example of the straightforwardness with which people might deal w/ their Father.”

And I guess the thing I picked up on most in this part of Rauschenbusch’s book was his insistence that this prayer really only finds its true meaning when it is those who pray it pray it as a prayer of offering themselves to “… the vaster purposes of the kingdom of God, and approaches all personal problems from that same point of view.”

To be honest I’m not sure how to do that.  I guess the good news about that is that this is not a prayer I pray on my own, but a prayer to “Our Father”.  The only thing I can say about it for now is that Jesus is not offering us a prayer that lets us get what we want from God.  But instead the heart of our Lord’s prayer is that more & more God’s kingdom, will & future would become a visible & present reality & that we may be the ones through whom God is pleased to bring this to bear in the world.

Tonight @ the HUB we’ll be seeking to get into the spirit of this prayer. One of the main ways we’ll do this is by seeking to write the prayer out in our own words.  Seeking to flesh out a little more clearly & concretely what Jesus is teaching us to pray & therefore do.

Here’s my offering of this, Our Lord’s Prayer:

Our Father, who dwells in heaven, may your Kingdom & Government come, may your will & desires be carried out, here, in the places where we live even as it is now being done in the place where you reign & rule on high.  In our offering ourselves to this work of yours, give us this day what we need — food, friendship, shelter, strength, forgiveness.  Yes, forgiveness.  Forgive us we pray, even as we forgive those who hurt & wrong us.  Keep us from the places & ways of temptation & deliver us from the grasp of evil.  We ask this of you, because yours IS the Kingdom, yours IS the Power & yours IS the Glory, now & forever.  Amen.

 

Another Morning Prayer

This is another morning prayer from Walter Rauschenbush’s little prayer book.  This particular prayer is difficult but necessary for me.  It is a prayer to be made the kind of person who is postured to be in ministry to people in a way that doesn’t propagate a spirituality that necessitates a certain place in society, in particular, a certain economic place in society.  It is a prayer that says, may we have the simple life of Jesus both as our way of living & as the gift we have to offer to others… all others, no more & no less.

O God, We beg you to save us this day from the distractions of vanity and the false lure of inordinate desires.  Grant us the grace of a quite & humble mind, & may we learn of Jesus to be meek & lowly of heart.  May we not join the company of those who seek after things that never satisfy and who draw others after them in the fever of covetousness.  Save us from adding our influence to the drag of temptation.  If the fierce tide of greed beats against the breakwaters of our soul, may we rest at peace in the higher contentment.  In the press of life may we pass from task to task in tranquillity of heart & spread your quietness to all who come near.  Amen.

Morning Prayer

As we begin to spend the next 5 weeks looking at some different ways of praying @ the HUB, I want to share some different prayers that I have been praying lately from a book of prayers by a pastor from New York around the turn of the 20th century.  His name was Walter Rauschenbush & the little book is called “Prayers of the Social Awakening.”  It is broken down into several different sections: morning prayer, evening prayer, prayers before meals, prayers for a guest, prayers in times of trouble, etc.

For the next few days I simply want to share some of the morning prayers. Praying these prayers reminds me of my good friend, the Rev. Spencer Turnipseed.  He has taught me a lot of things.  But one of the greatest things is to pray real & honest prayers that say something to God that is specific & that matters.

May this prayer guide you into following Jesus more closely today.

 

Once more a new day lies before us, our Father.  As we go out among people to do our work, touching the hands & lives of our fellow people, make us, we pray, friends to all the world.  Save us from blighting the fresh flower of any heart by the flare of sudden anger or secret hate.  May we not bruise the rightful self-respect of any by contempt or malicious talk. Help us to cheer the suffering by our sympathy, to freshen the drooping by our hopefulness, and to strengthen in everyone the wholesome sense of worth and the joy of life.  Save us from the deadly poison of class-pride.  Grant that we may look ALL people in the face with the eyes of a brother or of a sister.  If any one needs us, make us ready to give our help ungrudgingly, unless higher duties claim us, and may we rejoice that we have it in us to be helpful to our brothers & sisters.  Amen.  

@ the HUB

For the next five weeks, beginning Wednesday night, January 18 we’ll be doing a little less at the HUB.  Normally our nights there are so busy!  We come in from long days of school, from practice, from tests, from study groups, etc… We come upstairs hang out for a few moments only to be hurried into our time of worship.  We sing, we pray, we listen to some one talk for a while, then we usually all talk about that.  And we try to do all that in a little less than an hour & 1/2.  

I love what we do at the HUB.  I think it’s all very good.  But it’s a lot each week.  And I’ve come to value two things in particular about our time together on Wednesday nights: 

1. We get to hang out together, talk, caught up a little, play some ping pong, tell funny stories about our weeks so far, etc.  And I don’t want to rush us past that part.

2. I think what’s best about our times together in the HUB room are the times when we are discussing our faith together or learning to practice a particular part of our discipleship together.  

So in order to let those two things really shape our time together on Wednesdays we are going to spend a bit more time hanging out.  I’m going to spend a bit more time hanging out.  And when we do begin, it won’t necessarily follow our pattern of sing, pray, talk, talk together.  

In fact for the next 5 weeks we’ll be looking at some different ways of praying.  In order to give this our full attention there will be little to no singing & me & Wes will not be giving full blown talks.  We’ll help you have enough information to begin practicing these ways of praying & then we’ll practice them & talk all together about how that’s going & what that way of praying is like to you.  

I’m looking forward to it!  I think this will be a great way to start off the new year & get us ready for Winter Retreat.

Conversation Killer

This week in the gospel of Matthew (ch. 22) I read a story of Jesus being asked questions by the pharisees.  For the last few chapters they have been seeking to trap Jesus in his words so that they might find a way to take “legal action” and shut him up for good.  Finally when we get to the end of chapter 22 Jesus asks THEM a question about whose child the messiah is.  After a short discussion about David it says that none of them could “give him a good answer and from that time on no one dared to ask him any more questions.”

The way I read this, it sure sounds as if Jesus was just tired of this game, weary of their attempts at “dialogue”, pretending to be genuinely interested in conversing w/ Jesus, when really all they wanted was to get their way.

Just before this part of the gospel Jesus tells them that loving God w/ all your heart, soul & mind AND loving your neighbor as yourself are at the heart of everything that God has been up to in seeking to cultivate a people who would be God’s people.  Everything God has said or done or commanded hangs on these two things: Love God, love people.

Perhaps this is why Jesus kills the conversation at this point.  When love of God and love for others is not holding the center, not motivating our prayers and conversations that Jesus wants to drop a one liner that shuts us up and move on.

How often are my prayers and conversations w/ Jesus aimed at getting my own way — of trying to get Jesus to say what I want him to say instead of being genuinely interested in what Jesus would say to me and how he would want to direct me to be a better lover of God and those around me.

Does it trouble you to think that Jesus would respond this way to religious folks like you and me expecting that our conversation would be constrained by the gospel rather than our desire to get our own way?

How we prayed @ the HUB

We youth pastor-type folks have a reputation for saying things like, “you should pray… you should read your bible…”
Call it an occupational hazard or something. But one of the things that I try to keep in front of me all the time and one of things we try and do fairly often during our mid-week worship gathering is to learn some specific ways to pray, some specific prayer practices. Like telling a hungry and cold person to keep warm and well fed, I worry that we are doing no good to others when we tell them to pray and read Scripture but don’t offer to do that w/ them and to give them some concrete ways of putting those things into practice.

So this week at the HUB we learned a new way of praying together. It’s a version of an old prayer that was first used as part of a larger liturgy. It’s called the Sarum Primer, but I just call it the “God be in my head” prayer.

Here’s the way we prayed it together. As you say the beginning of each part, place your hands on the part of your body that you’re asking God to be in: your head, your ears, your eyes, your mouth, your heart, you get the idea. As you ask God to be in those parts of your body, what you’re doing is opening up a conversation between you and God about your thoughts, the things you’ve seen, heard, said, etc. Let God speak to you about this and you do the same to God. Take as much time as you need before moving on to the next part.  Let’s Pray:

God be in my head,
and in my understanding.

God be in my eyes,
and in my seeing.

God be in my ears,
and in my hearing.

God be in my mouth,
and in my speaking.

God be in my heart,
and in my desiring.

Amen.

I hope this can be helpful to you.

9/11 and discipleship

As this weekend draws near I have to admit I don’t know how to articulate very well the ways that Christians living in the US should participate in the 10 year anniversary of the horrors of Sept. 11.  But I want to think about it now, because come Sunday morning I’ll be w/ my community of faith worshiping the Risen Jesus in a place where we will all be mindful of what happened that morning 10 years ago.

As Christians we are called to weep w/ those who weep, mourn w/ the ones in mourning.  We want to be honest and real about the ways in which such devastating events impact our lives and change us.  We also want to remember and respect the lives of those who died that day and most especially the brave and selfless women and men who did what Jesus said is the sign of God’s love: to lay down your life for your friends.  In all the ways that we can do this, I believe we are responding to this anniversary faithfully, w/i the context of the life of faith in Jesus in which we live.

However I think that it is important to say that there is more to the life of God w/ Jesus than what was said above.  I don’t want to say that comforting those who hurt or remember those who were lost is easy, but it does stop short of the gospel of Jesus.

The gospel NEITHER lets people stay as victims NOR says to victims, “Hurry, dust yourself off and quickly become the aggressor, get on the offensive!”  Instead Jesus offers a third way.  A way that St. Paul called “the ministry of reconciliation”… and it’s DIFFICULT!

But the Council of UM Bishops has written a letter for this anniversary and it has been helpful to me as I think through how best to participate in this day in our nation’s recent history.  Perhaps it can be helpful to you too…

http://www.awfumc.org/news/detail/695        

Mission Week, Friday

We arrived in Atlanta around 1:45 pm est. After stopping at st. Marks UMC to drop off our stuff we went over to Church on the Street, just a little more than a mile from where we’re staying.
Pastor Andy, the director of CotS, talked w/ us a out what they do, the way they do it & why.
He challenged us to think of poverty as being fundamentally about relationships saying that many children grow up economically poor and never know it because they are surrounded by family and friends who love them and care for them. Pastor Andy said that for Christians there is no overstating the importance of relationships because it was Jesus who said the two most important things on which everything else hangs are loving God and loving your neighbors.
Our time here w/ CotS is a kind of school in the practice of making friends. We spent a couple hours yesterday walking the streets of ATL simply talking to the people we met. And while many of us were a bit nervous about how to start up a conversation w/ people we don’t know we soon found that God was giving us everything we needed to get outside ourselves and be intentional & open to the people right in front of us… What a great gift!
As we talked about our day last night we talked about the things that keep us from being open to the people around us at home and school and church that Jesus calls us to care for, to be friends w/: those who are left out, forgotten, pushed aside, made fun of, etc. It is to these that Jesus came and not as a heavenly social worker, but as a brother and a friend.
This weekend we are prayerfully learning to go and do likewise!

Mission Week, Thursday

We started off our Thursday w/ a group of guys going to help paint the inside of a house that is used as transitional housing for Family Promise.  Beth, the director of Family Promise is an awesome lady w/ a heart to see families surrounded by the love and care of God, especially through times of trial!  I’m so glad our guys got to meet her and hear from her a bit about what FP is all about.

Our girls spent the morning at Waterford, an assisted living community, visiting and painting nails for the lady residence.  Now, we’ve done some visiting before and it’s typically not a big hit.  But the common consensus was that they enjoyed their time there and would WANT to go back.  Miss Renee, the volunteer coordinator there, was so grateful for our girls and told them how special they are for using their free time to come and get to know the ladies there.

This was a great way to start the day.  And our evening was even better!  Chappell and his kitchen crew of youth spent a good bit of the afternoon preparing a great meal for the folks at the Friendship Mission.  While they were finishing up cooking 1/2 our guys went out to the mission to help sort clothes and shoes in their outdoor clothes closet.  We met Robert who oversees volunteers like us.  It was obvious that he loves people and enjoys what he does.  Several others of our group showed up w/ the food at 4:30 PM.  We served and ate and visited, staying for their bible study afterward.  The guest preacher was AMAZING and challenged us all to be people who are open to be used by God no matter what circumstances we may find ourselves in.  Austin Morgan was exceptional at the Mission!  He carried a conversation w/ one man the entire meal and made so many others feel cared for and at ease by his smile and willingness to say hi and introduce himself to everyone he met.  He told me that this was the best thing we’ve ever done and that we need to do it again soon.

While we were at the Friendship Mission all our girls and a handful of our guys went to the Family Sunshine Center’s Exodus House for a cook out and game night w/ the children there.  The kids there had an impact on our youth.  As we shared tonight they said, “We have to go back soon, they invited us to come back soon!”  As the youth shared their stories of being witnesses and participants in God’s work today I was so thankful to God for the ways in which he weaves together the people and places of this week and uses them to grow and build up a living and active faith in our youth.  And I love to hear their reflections on the day… many are funnies stories, but even more there are stories of seeing the gospel of Jesus come alive in and around the people they met today.

Thanks for your prayers!

Tomorrow morning we leave for Atlanta between 9:3o & 10 AM.

I didn’t get to take many pictures today.  But here are a few from the house we painted and our time at the Friendship Mission… I worked only w/ guys today.  I’ll get some pictures off Stephanie’s phone tomorrow night, I hope!  Enjoy…

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Mission Week, Wednesday

Today was our first full day of mission week 2011.  We began last night w/ a time of worship and talking together about the opportunity a week like this affords us.  There’s no better way for us to begin our week together than by worshiping Jesus.  We ended Tuesday night by just hanging out together… It’s hard to over estimate the value of getting to live together and work together over the course of a week like this one.  We are bummed because Sean Eiland isn’t able to serve w/ us this week, but are so excited to have Emily Lutz home from her first year of seminary at Garrett w/ us!  She is a great example of what it means to say “yes” to God and to bend your life around that “yes”.

Today we did some important work in the life of Aldersgate… we helped the food pantry move to it’s new home in front of the “old kitchen”.  Tonight as we shared about the work we did today and why it was important we heard stories of how many of our girls not only stocked the pantry in the new location but how they acted w/ love and compassion to meet the needs of a few unexpected visitors in need of food for their families.  It reminds me of the story in Genesis where Abraham provides hospitality to three visitors and ended up entertaining God.

All of our mission week participants spent three hours serving at the Chisholm Boys & Girls Club.  We took 1/2 in the morning and the other 1/2 in the afternoon.  The time spent there was amazing.  Through our time there I can see God’s faithful work in the lives of our youth who a year ago met God as they played w/ and served children in Jamaica and Mobile and felt called to return to their city and do that same work.  Getting to be there for three hours at a time was really helpful in letting us connect w/ and care for the children.  And I am always amazed at the way the small staff there cares for and looks after the kids there.

We also had a group go shopping for and put together hygiene kits that we will give to folks me meet in Atlanta later this week.  And we sent a handful out to Oliver Creek to pick up trash.

Our day ended at the home of Mike and Kathy King where we had dinner, relaxed a bit, and then talked together about our day and the ways in which we had seen God at work in us and how we are challenged to be people who seek to console rather than be consoled, to understand rather than be understood ,to love rather than be loved.

It was a good day.  We’re already pretty tired.  In fact as I write this at 11:54 PM it is completely quite and I’m w/i 25 feet of nearly 30 teenagers!

Here some photos from our day.  I’ll work on adding more each day.  Remember us and those we will be serving in your prayers!

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