The Church Of Broken Blessing- Matthew 14, 26

“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.

Rebecca

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Taking Excellence By Force- 2 Samuel 13

This is prayer- sitting on a large rock in the middle of a forest, entering into the Word of God. I was on a spiritual retreat last weekend, where I spent extra time doing “nothing” with Jesus. Now I am back home, absorbing every detail of His word with a refreshed soul. And I find myself entering the story of King David and his son Absalom. I am drawn into the tension and the drama of Bible stories- for me, prayer is inserting myself into the Biblical story and walking the journey right alongside my Savior’s family. When I was on that rock at the top of a mountain, my act of prayer become an act of entering into the Bible instead of simply reading it. I now take this practice with me into my quiet times of prayer at home.

Here now I enter into the unexpected drama of King David and his son Absalom while I sit at my kitchen table, the same Bible open to me that I held in the forest several days earlier. Today I was supposed to focus my prayer time on the directions given to me by my seminary professor. So I settled in with my Bible and my journal and prepared to respond internally to the questions Dr. Coe had asked us in class-

1.     What did you experience in your faith in the past as you worked through your undergrad education?

2.     What attitude do you find within yourself now as you do your graduate homework?

3.     What amount of time should you actually spend on homework- what grade should you earn? Consider this answer carefully as you work in the power of the Holy Spirit rather than in your own strength- it may sometimes entail settling for a lower score in order to submit your will to His.  

I was prepared to contemplate these questions when my daily reading of Scripture landed me in 2 Samuel 13, and the unfolding story of David and Absalom pulled me right in and caught my full attention. After just a few lines I found myself held in rapt attention at the unfolding of this Biblical narrative full of scandal and intrigue. How could I intertwine this passage of Biblical drama with the questions I was instructed to meditate on by my professor? The goal of my prayer time today is to discover how these two pieces might meet together- both the scholarly questions and the passage of Scripture. I am asking God to show me how they are related, for nothing ever happens by coincidence when I am attuned to the Spirit in meditation. May I draw upon the intimacy with Jesus that I experience on the mountaintop as I listen to His gentle Spirit here in the solitude of my home…

2 Samuel 13 (NLT)

⁴ One day Jonadab said to Amnon, “What’s the trouble? Why should the son of a king look so dejected morning after morning?” So Amnon told him, “I am in love with Tamar, my brother Absalom’s sister.”

I recognize that my soul is wide open to love, as is Amnon’s. I desire reconciliation, forgiveness, intimacy and joy. I first noticed this after sitting on that rock in the forest and observing the way in which I could recognize my soul as separate from my mind. I realize there is a lack of integrity within me, as my soul is free and full of light but my mind is weak and afraid. Why should the daughter of a king look so dejected morning after morning? the past, this fear has been the driving force of most of my decisions, including my four years of undergraduate work. How have I approached education in the past? I worried. About failure. So I secured my victory through the plans and efforts of my own two hands. I spent all my resources in order to attain the excellence in education which became central to my identity. I did not talk to my King about this- I came up with my own plans to possess what I wanted…

⁶ So Amnon lay down and pretended to be sick. And when the king came to see him, Amnon asked him, “Please let my sister Tamar come and cook my favorite dish^[b] as I watch. Then I can eat it from her own hands.” ⁷ So David agreed and sent Tamar to Amnon’s house to prepare some food for him.⁸  So Tamar took his favorite dish to him. ¹¹ But as she was feeding him, he grabbed her and demanded, “Come to bed with me, my darling sister.”¹² “No, my brother!” she cried. “Don’t be foolish! Don’t do this to me! Such wicked things aren’t done in Israel. ¹³ Where could I go in my shame? And you would be called one of the greatest fools in Israel. Please, just speak to the king about it, and he will let you marry me.”

For many years I was able to successfully use my worry as a means of propelling me into excellence. I held a minimum of a 3.5 GPA throughout college, and I never missed a single assignment. This was all fueled by worry- could I possess perfection and excellence in education? “Just speak to the king about it,” whispered the Spirit. But I was not listening- it never once entered my mind to invite God into this process. It never once occurred to me that He wanted to be involved with blessing me with what I desired- instead I took it by force. I took inventory of my resources, a smart brain and a motivated attitude, and I used these gifts to my advantage. I worried about rejection and so I grabbed hold of success with both hands. I took what I wanted at the cost of spiritual ignorance- I did not ask my King for His blessing. I took the good things within my reach and used them to my benefit, for my good, done completely in my power. And in my haste, I took excellence by force…

¹⁴ But Amnon wouldn’t listen to her, and since he was stronger than she was, he raped her.¹⁵ Then suddenly Amnon’s love turned to hate, and he hated her even more than he had loved her. “Get out of here!” he snarled at her.¹⁶ “No, no!” Tamar cried. “Sending me away now is worse than what you’ve already done to me.” But Amnon wouldn’t listen to her. ¹⁷ He shouted for his servant and demanded, “Throw this woman out, and lock the door behind her!”¹⁸ So the servant put her out and locked the door behind her. She was wearing a long, beautiful robe,^[c] as was the custom in those days for the king’s virgin daughters. ¹⁹ But now Tamar tore her robe and put ashes on her head. And then, with her face in her hands, she went away crying.

What was my approach to education in the past? I never asked God’s permission- I did what I wanted to do, what I was capable of doing in the power of my autonomy. He gave me an intelligent brain and I used it for my benefit. He gave me a high capacity for detail, and so I worried my way into perfectionism. I took good grades by the force of my will because I wanted to be excellent, so that by the time I graduated I was an anxious mess. The soul inside me that wanted to have a voice, but I wouldn’t listen to her. I plunged ahead on the fumes of my autonomous will. I struggled to make it through finals week of my senior year- my dad had to drive me to the last test because I was too anxious and fatigued to drive myself. And after all that, I had no interest in attending my own graduation. I was done.

I had to drag myself across the finish line of undergraduate work and fell in a heap on the other side, spent from four years of too much worrying. I gave God no invitation in all of this- I was not attuned to His voice because I believed I knew what I wanted and had the power to take it myself. God was for Sundays. And so that central piece of my being, the eternal soul within, I silenced that voice because I did not know how to respond to it.

²⁰ Her brother Absalom saw her and asked, “Is it true that Amnon has been with you? Well, my sister, keep quiet for now, since he’s your brother. Don’t you worry about it.” So Tamar lived as a desolate woman in her brother Absalom’s house. ²¹ When King David heard what had happened, he was very angry.^[d] 22 And though Absalom never spoke to Amnon about this, he hated Amnon deeply because of what he had done to his sister.

I sent the anxiety of my senior year packing, stuffing it down and ignoring the pleas of my soul to be heard. “Well, my soul, keep quiet for now,” I said as I sent the voice of my inner self away. I look back now and see how in many ways I have lived most (if not all) of my 35 years with a lack of integrity inside- my soul is naturally free and light, but my mind is worried and afraid. I can sense the duality of my being now, just as I could on that rock on my spiritual retreat last week. Only the transformation of the Holy Spirit can bring unity to these two parts of myself that have never been allowed to work together- the anxious worry which has fueled my excellence has taken the front seat, and I have silenced the voice of my childlike soul which is full of joy and peace. When we have suppress the eternal parts of our inner self for so many years, then it is a literal war to bring integrity back within…

²³ Two years later…Absalom prepared a feast fit for a king. 28 Absalom told his men, “Wait until Amnon gets drunk; then at my signal, kill him! Don’t be afraid. I’m the one who has given the command. Take courage and do it!” 29 So at Absalom’s signal they murdered Amnon. ³⁰ As they were on the way back to Jerusalem, this report reached David.³¹ The king got up, tore his robe, and threw himself on the ground. His advisers also tore their clothes in horror and sorrow. ³⁶ They soon arrived, weeping and sobbing, and the king and all his servants wept bitterly with them. ³⁷ And David mourned many days for his son Amnon.

Two wrongs do not make a right- the past is doomed to repeat itself when we refuse to learn from it. So I look at my graduate work with apprehension- how will it be different this time? What has been my attitude about my homework thus far? It has been war- because I refuse to live off the fuel which gave me success in the past. I will no longer run on anxiety, worry and the push for perfection which got me through grad school. It has been ten years, a marriage, house, and two kids, since then. I no longer have the same mental and emotional resources which (barely) got me through undergrad. No, I am waving the white flag. I threw myself on the ground there on that rock on the hilltop, and told Jesus I surrender. I long to be reconciled to His will, because I will not take excellence by force this time. My self-sustaining pride and perfection will be the death of me in seminary. There must be another way- I long to be reconciled to myself, to give a voice to my soul.

Absalom fled to his grandfather, Talmai son of Ammihud, the king of Geshur. ³⁸ He stayed there in Geshur for three years. ³⁹ And King David,^[g] now reconciled to Amnon’s death, longed to be reunited with his son Absalom.^[h]

This reconciliation can only be made possible through humble prayer. And while the story of David and Absalom goes on and ends in more heartache, this is where my prayer project will diverge. I leave the scriptures now to contemplate on myself. One part of me reads the story of David and Absalom and wants to sink down into my own story of helpless brokenness, surrendering to the violent reality of the sinful human condition and the damaged parts of myself and my relationships that it leaves behind. Another part of me wants to rise up above the past and claim a new identity as a free and bright child of the King, flying into a Kingdom of restoration and redemption and leave the pain behind. These are both very real parts of myself- in this quiet time of prayer I realize that I have longed to be reunited with my soul for many years. My deeper self has been kept quiet for far too long. I want the joy of my soul to sing a song with the Spirit over my weary mind and begin to transform it. I need Jesus to lead this orchestration of spiritual victory as He begins the transformation of my wounded and anxious thoughts.

There is one question my professor asked me which I have not answered yet- what amount of time do I give to my seminary work, and what grade should I hold myself to? That answer is simple- only what brings freedom to my soul. If I am powering through my work at the cost of spiritual peace, then I need to back off. But if God supplies me with the physical strength and mental capacity to pursue more, then I will do so with gratitude. This depends entirely on my prayer life, which is still very much in process. Can I listen to my soul, and allow it to commune with God as I pursue college education for a second time?

Not in my power, Lord, for I have none left. Only in Yours. Come into my being and heal me, Jesus. The story of David and Absalom is the story of my mind and my soul when they are at war over my attempt to take excellence by force. Thank you for this reminder, Father, that You want to bless me in ways that make room for my soul to speak and my mind to receive peace. Thank you, Father, for that hilltop experience last week. I am profoundly grateful.

Amen.

Rebecca

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