“Prayer is not a
place to be good. It is a place to be honest.” Like a wave from the sea, these
words from Professor Coe crash over my head and break upon the shore of my
faith with the force of supernatural admonition. This week for my prayer project
I am to contemplate how the church of my past has shaped me:
How have I been shaped to know the Word, and how have I been
shaped to know the Spirit? In what ways have I been equipped by the church to receive
self-knowledge? In what ways has she (the church) directed me in the art of spiritual
formation? Do you feel called to participate in spiritual direction within the
church?
Wonderful questions- complex
answers. I have no appropriate response, except to feel the old tension of
looking back once again at my past in order to better understand the present
moment. I will enter into this time of prayer with honesty in order to ask God for
new perspective on old memories.
My mind wanders to
sinful places, and I resist that which brings shame. The church? She is both a
beloved friend and a source of pain- she has both helped to propel my faith
while also contributing to my failure to launch. I hate the church and I love
the church- I serve her and I run from her, because she will inevitably let me
down when all I want is for her to love me as Jesus loves. This is her calling,
is it not? And yet she will always and forever fall short of her God-given
ideal. As do I- yes, and we are one in the same, the church and I. I feel
guilty for speaking against her, the bride of my King and a cherished part of
myself and my history.
Ah, but this is
prayer. Prayer is not a place to be good,
it is a place to be honest. There is no condemnation in honest prayer. How
have I been shaped by the church? I have
been taken by her, blessed by her, broken by her and given away. And in
this time of prayerful meditation, my mind wanders to precise and exact moments
of pain which I want to remove from my memory. But Jesus does not want to
remove the pain, He wants to heal it. And so I invite Him in by speaking my truth about His bride.
The church took me
in and cared for me in my immaturity. For the formative period of my faith she
planted seeds that would grow later into the roots of my foundation in honest prayer to Jesus. She taught me
the Word of God. I learned about ministry, community and service. I learned
about Jesus from the Bible, and it was great head-knowledge and lots of good
words that we read together. One Sunday in Matthew 14:19 the church and I learned of
the story about the abundance of our Savior’s great love for His broken people,
a foreshadowing of our future:
Jesus took the
five loaves and two fish, looked up toward heaven, and blessed them. Then, breaking
the loaves into pieces, he gave the
bread to the disciples, who distributed it to the people.
This taking,
blessing, breaking and giving away, this all sounds nice on a Sunday morning.
But underneath the surface, the church and I were headed in a direction that
would end in a divorce that was to come for us both- the divorce of childlike
innocence from the reality of the human condition. The church had taken me and
blessed me- now it was time to break me away from her ever-inadequate and autonomous
attempt at love. Yes, here in this honest prayer before God I can say that His
church gave me good Words to hold in my head- but they were words she could not
teach to my heart. She took me in and blessed me.
And then she broke
me.
I had these painful
words spoken over me one Sunday morning: “I
want to see more of the Holy Spirit working in you.” Then the church walked
away and left me to figure this directive out by myself- no tools, no support,
no admonition or direction. She held me to a high standard that she herself
fell short of. We had never developed an inner attunement either to each other
or to God. This lack of knowledge about the movement of the Spirit was detrimental
to my immature faith. The church gave me
no spiritual direction- just words. Words
on a stage, words in community, words in ministry, words in service- words that left me informed
but spiritually empty. She gave me the Word and she gave me standards to
live up to and rules to follow, but she did not give me spiritual direction-
only an awareness that I needed more. In this way I realized the church of my immature faith could never help me- I was broken.
And then came a
long hard road of self-knowledge. Because she blessed and then broke me, the church of my past gave me up to the counsel and ministration of the Spirit for forty
days in the wilderness. The hypocrisy of Your people, God, has been my
undoing. It has also been my place of revelation and self-knowledge. How has
she taught me to be self-aware? By bringing to the surface my awareness of the
depth of human brokenness- hers first and then mine. In her failure to apply the
Word on Sunday to relational action among her needy people throughout the week, she has
shown me my own hypocrisy even as I find myself pointing at hers. So she has been
the teaching tool for refining my faith, revealing to me the absolute
requirement for a disciple of Jesus to engage in spiritual formation and
self-awareness before attempting to serve publicly in His name. Church ministry
without self-awareness is death to the body of Christ, no matter what denomination
or type of community they may call themselves. Hypocrisy is not selective- it can be found in the most sincere and
well-meaning church communities, just as it can be found within even my very best
attempts at autonomous Christ-likeness. This is morality as vice. Oh you lying
virtues, you cover the truth and hide ulterior motives.
But oh, you
blessed vices, you have paved the way for true and honest change. For the
church is an agent of the Kingdom in my life after all, because she mirrored
the act of her King- she took me, blessed me, broke me and gave me up to my
God. The miracle is that on the other side of this wilderness journey, my love
for the church has been reborn alongside my new life in Christ. This is why my
favorite moment on Sunday morning is to take communion with the very people who
have failed me in their hypocrisy as I have failed them in mine. In this way,
as both the church and I continue down the long, hard road of spiritual
formation together, we can learn from one another’s weaknesses as we bring them
to the table of our King in honest prayer. We read together Matthew 26 and
contemplate the intersection of our stories:
26 As they
were eating, Jesus took some bread
and blessed it. Then he broke it in pieces and gave it to the disciples, saying, “Take
this and eat it, for this is my body.”
How can I come before God in prayer
with an offense against His bride, the one He died for and loves for all
eternity? I can come in a posture of receiving His communal restoration as food
for my soul. Because prayer is not a place to be good- it is a place to be
honest. So when my mind wanders in prayer to the wounded places of my past, I
can pause and remember what the church has taught me- worship Jesus, practice attunement
to self, and pursue alignment with the movement of His Spirit. This dependency
on His directive produces a community of grace as the outcome of deep communion
with God. We can take our hurts to the
Sunday table, bless the ones who have caused them, break ourselves of pride and
then give ourselves away in love.
I pray this today
for myself and for the church of broken blessing, because we both need not only the
elements on Sunday but the daily grace in action which brings about the slow
but steady maturity of lasting sanctification:
“Father,
your church and I perform our habitual acts of sin at Your very feet every
Sunday. May we therefore present our sin at Your table openly, brazenly, and without
shame because You have already called us righteous and redeemed. I invite You
to witness our sins, and ask You to stand beside us in the very places where
our sin is conceived. As Your Spirit hovers over our acts of autonomous rebellion,
direct us to observe how we begin to sin differently in Your presence, and
perhaps eventually cease to sin at all. Victory over our sin will not come when
we stop the act of hypocrisy itself, but when the thought of betrayal ceases to
occur to us at all, melting away into the East and the West. So I invite You
into our habitual sins, the church and I, and ask You to speak truth into those
acts each and every time they happen. I give You permission to love us as we
are, sinning against one another and therefore against You. This is the only
way to deal with our shame- to reveal it to Your presence uncovered and
unhidden. May we cease hiding the truth of our sin habits and stop pretending
to be good- to stop hiding from one another and from You. We stand before You
in our sin and say, ‘Here I am, Father. Here is my sin. I am Yours.’”
When our prayers
our honest rather than good, the act of sin itself can be transformed into an
act of abundant grace. Is spiritual
direction something I feel called to? Yes, which is why I pursue a calling of
pastoral care for the church that once took me, blessed me, broke me and gave
me. I imagine Him standing over His beloved bride as she is engaging in
habitual acts of autonomy on any given Sunday morning, and I see Him loving her
right there in the places where her sin is at its worst. There is no
condemnation in His eyes as He looks at me, his wayward daughter, and her, His
wayward church. But He cannot touch our wounded places of pride unless He is
invited to do so. “What do you want me to
do for you?” He asks his arrogant and anxious beloved ones. I answer and
say of my own condition, “Here is my sin- heal me in the place and at the time
that it is conceived!” In this honest space of prayer, He stands in the center
of sin and shines His light of healing grace upon it.
My spiritual formation
continues as I journey with His bride away from a hard past of hypocrisy,
forward to the place of living water, where the tide of change moves with the
hope of a new community built on honest prayer. Together we are taken, blessed,
broken and given to a Kingdom that shines on the horizon of our eternal sanctification.
Amen.
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