Reflections on Baptism – 1/11/09 – Mark 1:4-11, Romans 6:3-4

It’s nice, sometimes, when things fall into place without a lot of intentional planning of our own.  That’s a little how I feel about this and the next three weeks of worship.  I shared in the Musing that we have a four week block now where every Sunday we will be either observing or exploring some kind of ordinance, or, as we like to call them, a sign of the church.  In following the lectionary this week we have a focus on baptism, and then next week we’ll share in communion and look at how this act is connected with the calling of being peacemakers.   We also happen to have the Coming of Age celebration for our next group of youth on the 25th, as well as the ordination ceremony the week after that.  And so we have a chance to reflect on some of these practices, ancient and almost brand new (in the case of our coming of age ceremony), that are ways that we mark our identity.  I hope this can be a time when we gain a deeper sense of the way we are shaped by these practices.   We’re not having any baptisms today, but we’ll take some time now to meditate on its meaning.

A couple months ago The Mennonite magazine had an issue with a focus on baptism (11-18-08, http://www.themennonite.org/issues/11-18/articles/Remembering_our_baptism ).  The lead article was by John Roth of Goshen College called “Remembering our baptism.”  He described the joy of recent baptisms at his own congregation and then went on to lament that he feels that the significance of our baptismal vows has been diminished in how they actually function in our lives.  He wonders if we are doing enough with instruction before baptism, as well as what he refers to as “continuing education” after baptism.  He worries that our tradition’s emphasis on baptism as a personal choice can too easily get co-opted by the individualism of our culture such that we don’t make a strong enough connection between our baptism and our commitment to a faith community where we are accountable to one another and willing to give and receive counsel.  He also wonders whether the Anabaptist teaching that baptism is not really a sacrament – an act that in itself changes our standing before God – but rather a symbol, or sign of that change that continues to happen throughout our life – he worries if this has potential to reduce baptism to “merely a symbol,” not actually very important and not actually changing us.      

One of his closing comments is a reflection on the experiences he has had at Lutheran worship services, a tradition that practices infant baptism.  One of the things that has stood out to him that he most appreciates about Lutheran worship is that there is a time each service where they are encouraged to “Remember your baptism.”  He then jokes about the irony of Lutherans, who technically can’t remember their baptism, holding this up as a weekly reminder, while Anabaptists, who, by definition, are supposed to be able to remember their baptism, are so rarely encouraged to do so.     

With all this wondering and worrying going on in this article about baptism, I wonder what comes to our minds when we are asked to “remember our baptism.”  And more than just the details around how and where and when you were baptized, I wonder how this call to remember our baptism makes baptism a present reality for us.  How does our baptism shape us?  How doesn’t it shape us?  How might it shape us?  How does it inform our present identity and sense of calling and allegiance?

This was more or less one of the questions that came up during one of the times after worship recently when the youth had a chance to ask a panel of four adults any questions they wanted to about their faith journey.  These brave adults gave thoughtful answers to the youth’s questions about sin, and heaven and hell, and God’s existence, and evolution, and what the Bible means to them, and the stories of their baptism and what that means to them.  With baptism, answers ranged from one who was baptized as an infant and who has since come to find great meaning in that event, to one who felt pressure to be baptized at a certain point in life because that’s what good kids did, to one who chose to be baptized not out of any great revelation or personal conversion experience, but as an expression of committing oneself to the work of the church and to being in community with those seeking to live in the Jesus way.  So we had a wonderful diversity even within that small group.         

I want to recognize the diversity of experience among us, and also recognize that baptism has not been a part of everyone’s faith journey.  I hope that we can have a rich, multi-faceted view of baptism among us and that we have chances to share these stories when we have opportunity.

I also recognize that events like this – baptism – like wedding vows, like communion, are never static in their meaning.  As we grow and learn we load them full of significance as to what they mean to us now, sort of retrofitting the experience to bring it up to speed with our life.  Which is really what remembering our baptism is all about.  To bring a past event into the present, and to learn from it things that we never could have anticipated when we actually experienced it.    

What I’d like to do now is to present two different sets of things that baptism brings together, each of these  centered around a scripture, and look at the ways these comings together give us a picture of what kind of thing we are entering into when we are baptized.      

The first coming together I want to highlight in baptism is that of the royal tradition, the kingly, and the servant tradition.  This is one of the major themes being illustrated in John’s baptism of Jesus.  The king and the servant fused together.  Jesus launches his ministry out of the one that John had already begun, and goes under John’s hand in the Jordan River.  It’s the first thing we read about Jesus in Mark’s gospel: “In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.  And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.  And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” 

There is plenty to unpack in this short narrative, but I want to focus on the voice that comes from the heavens.  The words themselves are a conflation of two traditions of the Hebrew scriptures.  The first part of this statement, “You are my Son” is a reference to the royal tradition when the king was coronated and declared to be the Son of God, something common throughout the ancient near east.  The words come from Psalm 2, believed to be a Psalm used at a coronation ceremony.  Part of that Psalm reads, “I will tell of the decree of the Lord: The Lord said to me, “You are my Son; today I have begotten you.  Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage.”  By referencing this Psalm, the voice from heaven is signifying a royal event happening.  There is a giving of power, a conferring of authority that is taking place.

But then something very interesting happens.  The next words come out of a tradition that we may consider the flip side of the royal tradition, that of the humble servant.  The rest of the phrase, after “You are my Son” is “the beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”  These words are an allusion to one of the servant songs of Isaiah.  Isaiah 42 begins “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, with whom I am well pleased…he will not cry out or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street;…he will faithfully bring forth justice.”  With this reference, the voice from heaven is signifying the humility and lowliness of the calling.  Essentially unnoticed, off the radar screen, as if it’s nothing at all.  A power so subtle that it’s not heard in the streets, but comes from below to bring forth justice.

By bringing these two together, we have the conferring of an identity through baptism that shapes one’s life.  True power and authority, are made evident in servanthood.  The one who is baptized enters into this odd position of recognizing the great worth of one’s life – a king, a queen, a beloved child of God, while also recognizing that one’s work may not even register in the ways that work and worth are often measured.    

        

The other coming together in baptism that I’d like to point to is that of death and resurrection. 

No one is completely sure what all the physical act of baptism was meant to represent as it was practiced throughout the ancient world — in Babylonian and Greek cultures, for example — and then was adopted by Judaism as a way of marking the conversion of Gentiles. When John the Baptist came on the scene he was using a form of religious ritual that had been around before him and was speaking fresh meaning into it, inviting people to be baptized for forgiveness of sins.  But why dunk people in water?  One of the proposals for what was being represented is that baptism was an act of simulated drowning.  That going under the water and coming back up out of the water, was nothing less than a symbolic death, and being raised up to new life.  The person being baptized is voluntarily entering into a death of the old life and beginning a new life.

This is what seems to be echoed in Paul’s letter to the Romans.  At the beginning of chapter six of that letter he says “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?  Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.”          

In this image the water becomes both a grave and a womb.  The end of a life and the beginning of another life.

In our Anabaptist tradition the connection between this simulated drowning of baptism and an acceptance that one might actually die by drowning has been quite direct.  The one who we consider to be the first martyr of the Anabaptist movement, Felix Manz, was one of those who was in the inner circle of people who first re-baptized each other as adults, believing that they were now claiming their true allegiance to Christ above their allegiance to the established church and the violence of the state it was so entangled with.  In response to this heresy, in a twisted 16^th century sense of humor, the magistrates decided that if anyone who called themselves Anabaptists wanted water for themselves, then it was water they would get.  Felix Manz was bound hand and foot and drowned in the Limmat River in Zurich as a warning to those who would challenge the authority of the church.  Drowning came to be referred to as the “third baptism.”  If the Anabaptists wanted to give themselves a second baptism as adults, they could very well meet up with the third baptism soon thereafter.

And so in a very real way, one’s acceptance of baptism was closely tied with one’s acceptance of death, an idea very much present in the New Testament.

Whether or not our lives are threatened as a result of baptism, there is a sense in which baptism carries this spiritual reality of accepting death.  We can think of baptism as dying in advance.  This is where the more mystical aspects of our baptism come into play. 

Through baptism we are invited into a condition, a way of being, that has already taken death into account and is connected to the Life greater than ourselves.  We come to acknowledge that our lives are no longer in our hands, but that the life that we now live, we live to God.  Our small individual “I”, our limited personal ego, gives way, dies, we could say, and is joined up with the Great cosmic I, the I AM, that holds us in being.  By dying in advance, we have the opportunity to take that spiritual journey of what it means to live beyond ourselves, as if our life, as we would have it, were already over.    

And then we continue to have life in this world where there are great injustices, like waterboarding, and other forms of torture, and the taking of life, and the oppression of the weak, and our baptism enables us to enter into this context with a spiritual footing.  As we take up the new life of Christ, we live a life in a community that is a contrast to these injustices and we accept that we may very well be on the receiving end of these injustices.  If we have died in advance, then our life that we do have becomes a gift that we are given every day.  So what will we do with it?

Baptism is a coming together of the royal and the servant.  Death and resurrection.    

We put a lot of value on being an age of accountability and responsibility when we make our decision for baptism.  But no matter how old we are, we never really know what we’re getting ourselves into.  We have a vague notion when we recite our baptismal vows that we are entering something that we’re only beginning to understand, and we have the rest of our lives to work out what it means to be a dead/resurrected queen/king/servant beloved child of God.

If you have been baptized, I offer that the event is something that can continue to carry more meaning throughout your life.  Whatever it meant to you at the time of your baptism, you get to continue to pack the event full of meaning as you grow, and keep coming back to that event that symbolizes all these things for us, letting it shape our priorities and our commitments.

If you’ve not been baptized I encourage you to consider this as a way of publicly expressing and marking your faith commitments.  I’m open to hearing from you and being in conversation, and, if you decide to move forward, to walk with you toward receiving baptism.

Let’s end this reflection by learning a lesson from the Lutherans and remember our baptism.  Remember the vows we have made to God, to ourselves, and to our community of faith, and remember the gift, the voice, the resurrection, that fills our life with mystery and grace.

Remember, beloved children of God every one of you, remember your baptism.

 

 

At Home In Our Conflicted World – 9/07/08 – Matthew 18:15-20, Romans 13:1-10

Since we’ve been away from following the lectionary this summer I’ve been curious to see what the scripture readings would be when we picked back up starting today.  I’ve enjoyed the change of pace in following the theme of the summer and selecting scripture passages that fit around each topic.  With a topical kind of approach like this, one can choose just the right passage that illustrates what one would like to say about the subject at hand.  But when following the lectionary, the scriptures choose you.  They’re there, already selected, laid out in that three year cycle that so many different churches follow together.  Rather than allowing us to focus on just what we find most intriguing at the moment, the lectionary makes sure that we cover a wide variety of stories and teachings.

In reading through this week’s scriptures, I found them to be….difficult.  Matthew 18.  Conflict in the church.  A process for how to relate with someone who has sinned against and injured another person.  Hmmm.  Tough stuff.  Not sure if I want to go there.  But the good thing about the lectionary is that it offers choices.  Along with the gospel reading there’s also an epistle reading.  Romans 13, Paul’s instruction to the Roman church that they are to fulfill the law by loving their neighbor.  Coming just on the heals of his instruction to “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.  Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed.”  Hmmm.  The divine right of governmental leadership.  Really not sure I want to go there. 

What the two passages share in common is that they are addressed to those living in the midst of conflicted relationships – conflict with other believers, and conflict with governing authorities and institutions.  What they also share in common is that they have been abused texts throughout church history, with both being used by those who have power – church leaders, kings – to maintain a certain kind of order that tends to harm those most vulnerable.  They’ve been used as “Stay in line, or else…” kinds of scriptures. 

So, with church history on my mind and an inward desire to avoid talking about conflict and controversy, I did an internal Jonah and ran in the opposite direction of the texts.  Mentally sailing toward the opposite side of the world, away from relational tension and the complexity of relating with government, I reached the far shore of peace and quiet and isolation.  Ah, surely something worthwhile to talk about over here.  Looking around a bit however, I found myself looking at a strange scene.  I met up with Simon the Stylite.

This past week marks the anniversary of the death of one of the more eccentric characters in church history.  Simon the Stylite died on September 2^nd, in the year 459, at the approximate age of 70 years old.  He died perched on top of a pillar in the Syrian desert, where he had lived for 37 years praying, sleeping, preaching to those who would venture out to hear him, and eating the meager diet of water and bread that was handed up to him by admirers.

Simon was a part of a stream of people of his time seeking to be faithful to God by moving away from the centers of civilization into the desert.  With the power structures of the church becoming more developed and at times corrupted, some sought the pure experience of God through the life of isolation.  Away from church and civilization equals away from conflict and controversy.  Simon was one of these solitary seekers and in his young adult life entered a monastery and dedicated himself to fasting and prayer.  Not content in the monastery he asked to leave and lived alone in a hut for three years.  After this he confined himself to a narrow space in a mountainside, but by this time he was becoming well known for his holy life and people came seeking him for counsel and prayers, interrupting his prayers and meditations.  So he went away from that place, discovered a pillar in the desert that remained from some ancient ruins,  built a small platform on top, and decided to live his life on top of the pillar.  It’s estimated that the first pillar he climbed up was twelve feet high, but over the years people constructed higher pillars for him and eventually he was perched 45 feet up in the air, on a platform about 12 square feet.      

He lived this way for 37 years.  In his own, rather bizarre way, he found a way to live in solitude for most hours of the day.  He was only a few miles off of a main Roman road and would preach twice a day to people who came to hear him, get food from those who would climb up a ladder to give it to him, and give counsel to those who asked.  He was called Simon the Stylite, with style being Greek for pillar.  Roughly translated, his name would have been Simon the Pillar Guy.  He inspired other stylites to follow in his example of being the solitary spiritual seeker who gets closer to God in a literal sort of vertical way.    

There’s not a whole lot left of Simon’s pillar these days as pilgrims have taken little pieces of it as relics over the centuries.  In my travels in the Middle East in 2000 I was able to see what’s left of the pedestal and the church that was built around it in honor of Simon.

I hadn’t thought about Simon a whole lot until this week when my imaginary travels away from the challenges of church and societal relationships took me back to him.  He’s kind of the perfect image of what you get when you choose to escape conflict.  He definitely had his own challenges, but he set up camp on the opposite shore of where we live on a daily basis.  In my encounter with Simon, I’m pretty sure I saw him standing on top of his pillar pointing back in the direction where I came, telling me to go back.  This is the world where I and Cincinnati Mennonite Fellowship are called to live. 

So now that we have this bizarre picture of isolation and solitude in our minds, here’s another bizarre image to take its place – the one that these two scriptures from Matthew and Romans speak to.  As strange as it is to think of someone experiencing God, by himself on top of a pillar for most of his adult life, it is also strange that we believe we can experience God through our relationships with each other.  That somehow through the church, and all the idiosyncrasies of the people who make up the church, and through how we relate with our neighbors and our government, that God is present with us and that we are the Presence of God to each other.

It’s bizarre for us to believe this because these relationships can be so challenging and complex and at times unfulfilling.  But that’s the strange place where each of us here is called to live.  Finding our way, receiving our daily bread, even – getting closer to God – on ground level, mixing and interacting with governments, grandparents, friends, family, enemies, strangers, sinners and saints.

I imagine Jesus knew this well, as did this Apostle Paul.  So what we get are some teachings from them, addressed to people in their own context, for what this may look like.

So let’s take a brief look at these two scriptures of the morning. 

With the Matthew passage, the last verse gives a sense for where Jesus wants to go with things.  Jesus says, “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”  This is the closest thing we get to Jesus’ definition of church.  Church happens whenever two or three come together out of a desire to fellowship in Jesus’ name.  In other words, wherever there is relationship happening, even if its just one relationship between two people, then Jesus shows up some where in the middle of that and you’re having church.  On Wednesday of this past week we had a Spiritual Leadership Team meeting in the evening and a couple of us arrived early and were sitting out talking on the church steps by Peace House.  As often happens in this neighborhood, someone soon came walking by.  He was a resident of the Find-A-Way building down the street and after we asked him how he was doing he took a seat next to us and talked for a bit.  We had about five minutes with him before our meeting started, but I take it from what Jesus is saying here that before our meeting even started we had already been having some church together. 

Now Jesus might as well also have said here that wherever two or three are gathered, there, eventually, you will have conflict.  This is what he highlights in the preceding statements.  It’s interesting that there are only two areas that mention the word “church” in the gospels.  They’re both in Matthew, and one of them is here in this passage.  On the rare occasion that church comes out of Jesus mouth, he’s already talking about how to work through some of the difficulties of relationships that can occur. 

Jesus outlines a three step process.  “If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two or you are alone.”  If there’s not progress made here, you bring in several other members of church into the situation.  If there’s still no progress, or acknowledgement of wrongdoing, it becomes not just a private issue but a church issue.

It’s been observed here that this process only works when there is a balance of power in the relationships.  Unequal power calls for a different approach, which is often the case.  The overarching theme of Jesus’ teaching is that wrongdoing should always be addressed and confronted, rather than hidden.  The whole community benefits when we are up front with each other in this way.  The goal is reconciliation, but if that doesn’t happen, or if the sin is so severe that it will take a long time to heal, then special attention needs to be given to the situation and to the offending party.  You treat them as a Gentile or a tax collector, which, as Jesus modeled, means that you treat them with extra compassion, even as you expect them to change their behavior.      

The church isn’t unique by having an absence of conflict, but hopefully we can strive to be unique in that we deal with conflict in a constructive and healthy way. 

And what about in how we relate with government?  Is there a healthy and constructive way to be found here?  Romans 13 is one of many different scriptures that talk about how the early church was working out how to relate to the Roman Empire.  Taken by itself it easily looks like these second generation Christians are losing their radical edge and going mainstream in how they relate with the governing authorities.  Jesus gets crucified on a Roman instrument of capital punishment for being a threat to the stability of the region, and now a generation later Paul is instructing the church in Rome to “be subject to the governing authorities” and not to resist the authority that God has appointed.  He then goes on to describe a government that rewards those who do right and deals justly with those who do wrong.  This is one of those cases when I have to scratch my head a little bit and wonder what’s really going on here.  What’s going on with these Roman Christians at this time that Paul is writing that he’s having to tell them to chill out and not resist the authorities?  It seems you don’t ask a group of people to allow themselves to be subject to the good of the law unless they’ve been getting out of line on a regular basis in inappropriate ways.  While other New Testament writings show the dangers of power and authority and how wrong they can go, here’s a case where the virtues of government are being spoken of.  It’s not all bad.  Government does serve an important role. 

In applying what’s being said here to our time, a phrase that comes in useful is “insofar as.”  Insofar as our government is rewarding good behavior and dealing justly with poor behavior, let’s honor that and encourage it.  Insofar as our tax money is being used for programs of social uplift, let’s honor that and encourage it.  Let’s cheer on our elected officials for the ways that government is serving the common good.  But insofar as government is being unjust and leaving behind those most vulnerable, we subject ourselves to a higher authority.  The authority that calls us to speak up, address and confront the wrong, and call for another way.

The direction Paul takes this is the direction of us being continually committed to the well-being of one another.  “Let no debt remain outstanding, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.  (All) the commandments are summed up in this word, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.”  If we keep engaging in loving relationship with our neighbor, Paul seems to be saying, then our relationship with governing authorities will flow out of this.  If we realize that we are indebted to one another and each other’s well-being, then when the laws of the land serve this purpose we will gladly submit to them.

       I would guess that we all have at least a little piece of Simon the Stylite in our make-up.  There are times when we would like to escape conflicted relationships, find a peaceful quiet place, and let problems work themselves out without us.  I would also guess that none of us are going to take the pillar option for a very extended amount of time.  We get to live with our feet on the ground, trying to be church to each other, loving our strange and imperfect neighbors, and relating with the government as if our little voice and actions mattered.  My guess is that in doing this, we’ll encounter conflict in all these relationships, and that we’ll also encounter Jesus , who said he’d be there, somewhere, whenever relationship is happening. 

 

Sighs Too Deep For Words – 8/03/08 – Romans 8:12-27

The Apostle Paul speaks for all of us when he writes “for we do not know how to pray as we ought.”  I imagine we’ve all had certain times or seasons of life when we simply didn’t know how to pray, or whether to pray at all.  An experience where there are no words right there to express what is going on.  Or a situation when it is unclear what one is supposed to desire or ask of God.  Or maybe an extended period of time when the energy for the effort to even try prayer just isn’t present.  To all this Paul’s words provide some assurance that we are all on common ground.  None of us know how to pray as we ought.  Not me, not you, not the Roman Christians receiving this letter in the first century, not the Apostle Paul himself.     

I’ve had a recent experience of not knowing how to pray as I ought that I’m still trying to work through and learn from.  It happened at Community Meal several weeks ago.  A lot of what I do at Community Meal is sit down and talk with people and hear about some things going on in their life.  Occasionally it feels appropriate to offer a prayer for someone right there at the table if they are going through something especially difficult.  So this particular time I was talking with a woman whose son had recently been put in jail.  She felt that he had been treated very poorly by the police and that the charges against him were unjust.  She was angry with the police and anxious about the upcoming trial where she would testify on her son’s behalf.  After hearing more about her situation I offered to pray for her and her son, which she welcomed.  Not knowing quite what to say, and not wanting to pray anything too specific, or make any requests that God might not answer and thus disappoint her and me, I focused on praying for peace for them and that they would be able to accept whatever came about.  This is a wonderful prayer in many circumstances and one I’ve found helpful for myself many times, and it was what I had to offer in this case.  I then asked her if she would like to pray.  She knew exactly what she wanted to pray for.  She prayed for justice to be done, for her son’s innocence to be validated, for her own words in court to be heard and prevail, and for them to be delivered from this trial.  As soon as she began praying her words reminded me of one of the many Psalms that cry out for a similar kind of deliverance against one’s adversaries.  I wasn’t sure what my prayer reminded me of.

In reflecting on this since I’ve been considering how our two different prayers for that situation related to each other and what I could learn from her prayer.  And in this the eighth chapter of Romans has emerged as an important scripture.  When Paul mentions this statement about not knowing how to pray as we ought it is in keeping with a general theme throughout the letter.  And this is the theme – things are not as they should be.  The world, as it is, is out of joint, out of sync with God’s intentions.  Jews, Gentiles, men, women, all of creation is living within a certain brokenness of relationship with the steadfast love of God.  A brokenness that one can simply call “sin.”  We’re separated from each other, separated from ourselves, and separated from God. 

None of this comes as much of a big surprise.  We know this because we experience it everyday.  We see it around us, we hear about it on the news, and experience it within ourselves.   

The surprise comes in the way that we begin to come back in step with God, reconnected with the divine energy that has always been there.  The way that we learn how to pray.  This is what Paul is working with in chapter eight.  In verse 22 of that chapter he says “we know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.”  I think one of the last times I gave out a good groan was this past weekend when I arrived up at my folks house and got out of the car and noticed a bulge in one of the sidewalls of the front tires.  I gave out a hearty, deep groan at the realization that I would need to buy two new front tires in the next couple days before heading back to Cincinnati.  Here the groaning is much heartier and deeper.  It says that the whole world is groaning in labor pains, something more visceral than any groan I’ve experienced. 

The remarkable thing about this world-groaning is that it’s not just a sign that there is something wrong and ill at ease, but that it itself is a sign of God’s abiding steadfast presence.  When Paul says, “for we do not know how to pray as we ought” he goes on to say “but” the very Spirit of God intercedes for us with “sighs too deep for words.”  The deep sighs of the Spirit and the deep groans of our own spirits are here directly linked.  God’s Spirit groans along with us and even through us.  It’s as if Paul is saying — if you don’t know the words to say in prayer, just be quiet and listen.  And you’ll hear a deep groaning coming from the world that is itself a prayer to God.  If you can allow yourself to groan along with the Spirit, then you have begun to pray.

I’m struck by the way this is presented as being pre-speech, preceding any words that may form on our lips to express ourselves in prayer.  This passage could have said that the Spirit teaches us words to say when we want to offer ourselves to God, or that the Spirit will provide someone who will come along and speak the words we need to hear in a certain situation.  These are both good gifts of the Spirit that we need.  But that is not the concern here.  The initial prayer act that puts our spirits in sync with the Spirit of God happens through “sighs too deep for words,” and that’s all that needs to happen for prayer to be prayer.

This is not the first time in Scripture when the unarticulated groan is presented as an act of communication between humanity and Creator Spirit.  It plays a central role in the formative event of the Israelite people, when they were delivered out of the slavery of Egypt in the exodus.  After being enslaved by the Pharaoh and all his taskmasters, the book of Exodus says, “The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites, and made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and brick and in every kind of field labor.  They were ruthless in all the tasks they imposed on them.” (Exodus 1:13-14)  Having no one to defend them the Israelites do the only thing they feel they have power to do.  It is described in 2:23:24.  “The Israelites groaned under their slavery, and cried out.  Out of the slavery their cry for help rose up to God.  God heard their groaning, and God remembered God’s covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them.”  This is a God who from the very beginning has always been present wherever there is a groan and a cry that goes out.  Taking notice and then taking action.  When God calls Moses to deliver the people out of slavery God says this: “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry.” (3:7)  It goes on to say, “The cry of the Israelites has now come to me…so come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.” (3:9).  Later when the Israelites are freed from Egypt and are receiving the law that would teach them how to live as a free people, they are reminded of the power of the cry.  One of their laws states, “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.  You shall not abuse any widow or orphan.  If you do abuse them, when they cry out to me, I will surely heed their cry” (Exodus 22:21-22).  There is no favoritism in who gets the ear of God.  Whenever a sigh or cry too deep for words goes up, the Spirit is already at work.

So I think that part of what caught my attention in the prayer of this woman at Community Meal was that I sensed that I was in the presence of the cry, and I wasn’t ready for it.  I was trying to come up with a way to offer words that asked for something, but not too much.  Words that gave comfort, but also hope.  Words that recognize that God is present with us but doesn’t always bring about the results that we would like to see, so we shouldn’t get our hopes up too much.  And she just let out a groan, pretty much bypassing all my careful calculations of what made for a good prayer at that moment and letting whatever words formed in her mouth be what she had to offer.     

There are many ways to pray, but maybe one way that we need to explore more is this kind of prayer.  Call it the prayer of desire, the prayer of longing, the prayer of outrage, the prayer of mourning.  We are fairly good at living out of our thinking, rationalizing mind but may miss out on what originates in the gut – the place of labor pains and the place where we have silent longings seeking expression. 

I think this is a fairly risky form of prayer.  It makes us vulnerable.  If we’re going to feel the feelings of God in our gut, we’re going to feel sorrow, and anger, great loss, and passion.  And our words aren’t going to be able to contain the depth of the Spirit’s sighs through us.  But I’m not sure we have much of an alternative if we want to stay alive.  Wendell Berry puts it ever-so-gently when we says, “If you’ve lost the ability to be outraged by what is outrageous, then you are dead.  Somebody ought to come and haul you off.”  The options to avoid these prayers are that we pretend the groans aren’t there and close ourselves off to them, or we turn up the volume so loud with all the other noises we let into our life that we lose the ability to hear them.  Either way, a part of us has died and a channel of God’s Spirit is closed off. 

The Psalms are the collection of works where the groan and the cry of a people come to find expression in words.    Psalm 42 says that “deep calls to deep” and is itself an example of what this might sound like.  (Read vv. 1-3). These are brutally honest statements that often remain unresolved.  Psalm 86 says “Incline your ear, O Lord, and answer me, for I am poor and needy.  Preserve my life, for I am devoted to you; save your servant who trusts in you.  You are my God; be gracious to me, O Lord, for to you do I cry all day long.”  Jesus has the Psalms on his lips during the agony of the cross.  He voices one of the most haunting lines in the Psalms, Psalm 22:1, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  He also voices Psalm 31 – “Into your hands I commit my spirit.”  And there is almost always a recognition of God’s steadfast love.  Psalm 86:11,13.

Some of these expressions will fit into our own experiences, and sometimes we’ll have to borrow other words from other places, or wait until we have our own words, or be content to not have words.  Sometimes we’ll have the privilege of being the one who gives words to another’s groan.  Sometimes we’ll take on the longings of a whole cluster of people in our prayers of intercession – for immigrants, the working poor, the sick, those affected by war. 

In doing this we have faith that we are not only praying with our desires, but that it is actually the desires of the Spirit praying through us.

There’s a hymn that we’ll sing together soon that I first want to meditate on the words.  As you hear these words, and as we sing, do so in a spirit of prayer.  Feel free to call to mind, or to gut, the groans that you hear around you and to offer them silently to God.

This is the hymn:

Through our fragmentary prayers, and our silent heart-hid sighs, wordlessly the Spirit bears, our profoundest needs and cries.

Deeper than the pulse’s beat, is the Spirit’s speechless groan, making human prayers complete, through the prayer that is God’s own.

Let our jabbering give way, to the hummings in the soul, as we yield our lives this day, to the God who makes us whole.

Search and sound our mind and heart, Breath and Flame and Wind and Dove, let your prayers in us impart, strength to do the work of love.