Empty or Filled?

The Sermon Study Guide is here.

Matthew 6:16-24; Isaiah 58:1-9a

May 26, 2013 • Portage First UMC

VIDEO INTRO

Do you know any hypocrites? Now, don’t point fingers...because they might be pointing at you as well! We’re all a blend of saint and sinner, faithful and hypocrite, because there are always times we pretend to be something other than we are. The word “hypocrite” comes from a Greek word that refers to an actor. In the theater of the Roman world, actors would wear large masks to indicate the nature of their character; it’s still where we get the theater happy and sad masks. So the actor would hide behind a mask, augment his voice so that it could be heard in these huge amphitheaters, and pretend to be someone else (Vine’s, pg. 242). He was a “hypocrite.” Today, the word still refers to someone who pretends to be something or someone other than they are, someone who loves to be seen for what they are doing.

Jesus often talks about hypocrites. In fact, the word is only found in Matthew, Mark and Luke—mostly in Matthew. Fifteen times in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus describes a hypocrite—always as someone who pretends to be other than they are, or who is simply doing something for the show, for the attention. It’s the billionaire who donates a large sum of money and makes sure the news media is there to cover the donation. It’s the politician who makes whatever promises he or she has to make in order to get elected, and then doesn’t follow through when in office. It’s the religious leader who preaches grace and tolerance and then punches out a church member in the parking lot. And, in today’s Gospel, it’s the person who chooses to fast but wants to make sure everyone knows what he’s doing.

Today we’re continuing our series on “Connections,” seeking to find ways to connect with God. So far, we’ve talked about prayer as our first and most obvious connection, and we’ve also talked about holy conferencing or community and how in the way we interact we others we represent God, we connect with God and help others do the same. Then last week, I focused on confirmation and the ways the Holy Spirit works in our lives. I hope this week you’ve been surprised by his presence in some way. But there is another discipline that is often neglected, particularly in our culture, that helps us connect with our heavenly Father. And even if we do practice it, we often get it wrong. Sometimes, we use it draw attention to ourselves, or to try to manipulate God. But neither of those things are the reason we’re called to practice fasting. And we are called to practice it. Jesus says, “When you fast,” not “if you fast.” So what is the discipline of fasting? How does it help us connect with God? And how can we practice it? That’s our task this morning.

Fasting is, quite simply, going without. It is abstaining from something for some greater purpose. Now, there is only one fast commanded in the Old Testament, and that was to take place on Yom Kippur or the Day of Atonement, the great day every year when the Jewish people make sacrifices for their sin. It’s the holiest day of the year. One person described it as sort of a “spiritual spring cleaning.” That day, according to Leviticus 16, they were to fast, to give up food in order to focus on God. Other fasts were put into place later in their history, and by Jesus’ time, fasting was connected to regular confession of sin. The Pharisees, those legalists that Jesus argued with so much, fasted twice a week, probably Monday and Thursday (Carson, “Matthew,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 8, pg. 175), and they put a lot of emphasis on this discipline God had not said a lot about. In fact, in a famous story Jesus tells about two men who go to pray, he pictures fasting twice a week as something the Pharisee brags to God about (Luke 18:12). But here in Matthew, Jesus exposes what it’s really about: they were more interested in people seeing how devoted they were to God. And so, they would let their hair and beard go unbrushed and be all tangled, and they would smear ashes on their faces so they would look dirty and unkempt (Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part One, pg. 62). So then, if someone came up to them and said, “Are you felling well?” They would respond, “Oh, I’m fine. I’m just fasting. I just want to draw closer to God. Don’t mind me.” And Jesus says if that’s what they are looking for, if they are fasting so they can be noticed by other people, then that’s all the reward they will get. They won’t connect with God; they won’t even really connect with other people. They will be noticed, and they’ll have to be content with the attention they get from people walking by (cf. 6:16).

So fasting is giving up something—which is the reason it’s not practiced much or well in our culture. We don’t believe we should be deprived of anything. If you don’t believe me, watch the fit some people throw when a store is out of something they want to buy. Or think about the massive credit card debt we have in this country. We believe we shouldn’t have to wait for anything. We should be able to get what we want when we want, and so we rack up debt in order to have everything. As of March 2013, Americans have $846.2 billion in credit card debt, an average of $7,073 per household. How long do you think that will take to pay off if we just pay the minimum amount? Many will never pay it off. We complain about the government’s debt, but they simply reflect the way we already live. We don’t like to go without, and so fasting is a cryptic practice to us. Even going without food, the traditional form of the fast, is a strange idea. We are an overweight people, not denying ourselves anything. I went to my cardiologist a couple of months back, and he sent in his med student to tell me I was fat. I had gained quite a bit over the winter. I’m working at walking it off, but most of our culture is not. According to the most recent statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, 36% of American adults over 20 are obese—and, worse than that, 12% of children who are ages 2-5 are considered obese. We don’t do well with giving up anything—and we don’t even realize what impact that has on our spiritual lives. Fasting is not just a way to lose weight or to save money. Fasting is a way to connect with God.

But how? The point of fasting from anything is to clear out space in our lives so we will have room for God. It’s not that food is bad. Food is good. Food is a gift from God, as are other things we fill our lives with. It’s just that we often leave so little room for God. These other things take over our entire lives. For the ancients, fasting was an opportunity to demonstrate that they, not their bodies, were in control. As Richard Foster writes, fasting “dethrones the body as master and gives us authority over our body. We learn that cravings need not control us” (Foster, Life With God, pg. 159). And then, with the space that is created, we can listen and pray and spend time with God. When I was in seminary, my first year, we had a covenant group that met weekly, early in the morning—back when early morning meetings seemed to make sense! And we developed a list of spiritual practices we would each take part in. The point of the group meeting each week was to hold each other accountable, and one of those disciplines was fasting. We agreed to fast every Friday over the lunch hour and spend that time praying or reading Scripture or in some other way connecting with God. I did pretty good for the first few weeks, but I remember one Friday when I was particularly overwhelmed by the stresses of the quarter, and I was hungry, and a little grouchy, so I went back to our apartment over lunch, pulled all the shades down and fixed myself some lunch. About halfway through eating my lunch, there was a knock on the door, and when I pulled the blinds back and looked out, I saw that it was Rob, my next-door neighbor and fellow covenant group member. Busted! Drat! I let him in, and he could see my lunch, so I had to confess I had broken the covenant. And with a smile, Rob said, “Well, I just finished my lunch, too.” In that moment, we both were holding each other accountable, and we both realized we had missed a chance that week to connect with God by clearing out space in our lives for God to speak and for us to listen.

Jesus, however, is talking to his disciples about ways we can abuse or misuse the discipline of fasting, and one of the primary ways is when we make fasting all about us. That’s why Jesus talks about hypocrites. They look somber and draw attention to themselves (6:16), and more than that, they are busy storing up treasures on earth (6:19). They’re busy making sure they get noticed and get rewards here on earth. They’re more worried about what others think than what God thinks. And that’s a constant challenge for us, isn’t it? I mean, we can see those others. They can talk about us. They can post on our Facebook page and point out where we’ve missed it. There are still Pharisees around today who want to judge and critique and evaluate your relationship with God. There are still plenty of people around today who want to make sure they are “more holy” than you are, and often the way they do that is to tear others down so they can be lifted up. I would imagine you know exactly what I’m talking about. At various times, we are all the tear-er or the tear-ee, and really neither position feels all that good. What it results in is us trying to impress others, to prove our value, our worth, our spirituality. Look at me, we say through our actions, look how spiritual or religious or even Christian I am! I even fast! Jesus says if we simply store up treasures on earth, we’ll find them rotting away pretty soon. When we fast (or practice any other discipline) just to be noticed, then that “notice” is all we get. We’ll never get a real connection with God.

There are times, though, we seek a connection that is not Biblical, because sometimes we only fast to try to manipulate God. Isaiah, the Old Testament prophet, called the people to account on this very issue. Isaiah says to shout aloud the message he’s about to speak; he doesn’t want anyone to miss it. “Do not hold back,” he says. “Raise your voice like a trumpet” (58:1), and then he proceeds to talk about the people’s rebellion. Rebellion? Really? He starts with what sounds like something good: “Day after day they seek me out; they seem eager to know my ways…[they] seem eager for God to come near them” (58:2). But then he goes on and says the reason they seem to be that way is because they are fasting. But it’s all an act. They’re not fasting to draw closer. They are fasting to try to get God to do what they want him to do. “We’ve fasted,” they say. “Why has God not responded? Why hasn’t God done what we asked him to do?” You see, that’s the sort of religion that was all around them. The pagan religions of the day believed that if you wanted crops, for instance, you would go to the pagan temple and either offer the right sacrifice, or sleep with a temple prostitute, or do some magic ritual, and if you did it right, then the god or goddess would be obligated to respond. Do A, get B. And the Hebrew people think that’s a pretty good deal. If we fast, if we do the right ritual, then God will have to respond. We’ll force God’s hand God will have to give us what we want. It’s the same way they approached prayer in many respects, as we talked about a few weeks ago. And yet, the prophet says, their fasting results not in holiness or in a closer relationship with God. It results in a fist fight! “You cannot fast as you do today,” God tells them, “and expect your voice to be heard on high” (58:4). God cannot be manipulated. But don’t we do the same thing today? Every once in a while, a new book comes out that promises a magic ritual or a particular prayer that if you just say it right, do it right, pray it with all your heart, God is guaranteed to respond. Do it right, get the results you want. There are even folks who believe if you fast for a certain amount of time or in a certain way, God will have to respond the way you want. Fasting becomes a way of trying to manipulate the God who cannot be manipulated. The Bible is clear that God does not respond to that, and that manipulation is not the point of fasting. The point is drawing closer to God.

And more than that, Isaiah says, when we fast in order to listen to God’s voice, we’ll respond to our world not with more demands for things or advantages for ourselves. Rather, we’ll respond to the world in the way God would. It’s interesting that the folks in Isaiah’s day were so focused on things God hadn’t said a whole lot about—fasting—and were ignoring things that he spoke frequently about—justice (Oswalt, The NIV Application Commentary: Isaiah, pgs. 624-625). “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen,” God says through Isaiah, “to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—when you see the naked, to clothe them, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?” (58:6-7). That’s Isaiah’s long-winded poetic way of saying: “It’s not about you. Fasting is not about what you get out of it. Fasting is about connecting with God, allowing him space to speak to you and allowing him to change you, mold you, shape you into a force for good in the world.” Fasting is not about getting. It’s about giving. It’s about being transformed so that God can use us. When we approach fasting with any other motive, we’re abusing this means of grace, this discipline God has given us, and we’re missing a chance to connect in a meaningful way with the creator of the universe. Jesus says we’re hypocrites, actors on a stage.

So, since fasting is by and large a lost discipline, how do we go about it? Well, first you have to decide what it is you are going to fast from. Granted, the traditional understanding of fasting is from food, but if we think of fasting as a way of breaking the hold that something has over us, of a way of confronting a second master (as Jesus puts it), then fasting could be from any number of things. I want to give you just a few examples, knowing that there are so many things in our world today that try to master us. As Jesus says, we can’t serve two masters (6:24). We have to make a choice. So let’s start with food, which is, as I noted earlier, a huge thing in our culture. If we choose to fast from food, we set a specific time frame, and I’ll talk more about that in a few moments. It’s good, before the fast, not to eat a huge meal but to, in fact, eat slightly smaller meals than normal for a couple of days ahead of time. Continue to sip water or fruit juice, and be aware that your stomach will start grumbling. Your body is trained well over many years to be hungry at certain times. Martin Luther said that the flesh tends to grumble dreadfully. But you are master of your body, not the other way around. Richard Foster says, “In many ways the stomach is like a spoiled child, and a spoiled child does not need indulgence, but needs discipline.” Tell your spoiled child to calm down and in a bit, the hunger pangs will pass. The pangs are a distraction from the purpose of the fast: to pay better attention to God. I’m not saying you spend the whole time in prayer. Perhaps you spend the time you would normally spend eating in prayer or Bible reading, but the point is to be more aware of God’s presence in your life and in the world. Be more attentive. It’s not to draw attention to yourself, but to draw your self’s attention to God (cf. Foster, Celebration of Discipline, pgs. 56-61).

Some folks, however, have medical conditions that prevent you from fasting from food. And for others, food is simply not something that controls you. But there are other things that do. For many, money is something that controls us. Some of us fixate on accumulating and hoarding money, afraid that we’ll never have enough. And others of us fixate on spending money, constantly shopping, always buying more, whether we need it or not. Money becomes a controlling force in our lives. In our consumeristic culture, we currently spend 5.6% of our income on entertainment. Now, that doesn’t sound so bad, does it, until you consider a couple of other statistics. As a culture, we give only 3.4% of our income away to charitable causes (and that includes churches, nonprofits, and the like). United Methodists are worse, though. In our tradition, we give less than 2% of their income annually. Even though we have heard sermon after sermon about generosity and tithing, still only 5% of American adults tithe. I’ve said it before: in this church, we profess to be a tithing church, and yet the numbers tell us that we currently tithe, as a congregation, as if we were living below the poverty level. Here’s another number: in America, we spend 2.1% on education. We spend more than twice as much on entertaining ourselves as we do on education and we wonder why the rest of the world seems to be so far ahead of us. You add our charitable giving and our money spent on education together and it’s still less than what we spend on entertaining ourselves. That saya something about what we value, what controls us. Money and spending are powerful forces, so perhaps a fast for you would be a fast from spending. Save what you spend. Give what you would spend. You can’t imagine the ministry that could happen in this place if we all committed to really tithing, to giving, but because we don’t, we’re limited in how we can reach out. So perhaps a fast from spending might be a time when you can talk to God about finances, and about how he calls you to order that part of your life.

I had a friend, one of the members of our covenant group in seminary, who wasn’t able to fast from food and so he chose to fast from words. I don’t know if you know this or not, but preachers do a lot of talking. And Greg was more extroverted than the average preacher, so he talked a lot. He liked to talk. He loved spirited conversations. But he realized that he talked so much he rarely took time to listen. So his fast was to stop talking and to listen—to God and to others around him. It wasn’t easy, but it was valuable. As Pastor Deb said a couple of weeks ago, sometimes we’re so busy planning what we’re going to say next that we don’t listen. We’re so centered on ourselves, even in conversation with someone else. As we begin this summer and fall to train new Congregational Care ministers, one of the first things we will teach is how listen—to God and to others. It’s not as easy as it sounds, especially in our sound-saturated world. If you’re one for whom controlling the conversation—even the conversation you have with God—is an issue, perhaps a fast from words would be something that would create space for you to be able to better listen to God. I love the story—I’ve told it before—of journalist Malcolm Muggeridge who once interviewed Mother Teresa and asked her what she said to God when she prayed. “Nothing,” she said. “I just listen.” Muggeridge said, “Well, then, what does God say to you?” “Nothing,” she said, “he just listens.” And if that story leaves you scratching your head, perhaps a fast from words is what your soul most needs.

One of the other big things that gets in the way of our spiritual growth is our practice of entertainment. We spend, on average, 34 hours a week watching live television—that doesn’t include DVDs we might watch or other videos. And we spend an average of 25 hours a week online; 16 minutes of every one of those hours is spent on social networking sites like Facebook. 34 hours watching television; 25 hours online—that’s a total of 59 hours with media of some sort. 35% of our week. Now, granted, it’s probably true that some of that online time is for work, but still, that’s a lot of time. Some of us sit down at the computer because we have nothing else to do and we just click or read or play games with no particular intent. We do the same thing with television. When I was a kid, flipping through the channels to see if something was on took about 5 minutes, because we only had 3 channels. Now, how long does it take to flip through the hundreds of channels that are piped into our homes? I had a friend who felt he had to do that every night before he could go to sleep. Maybe we need a media fast. Perhaps media is taking up too much of our time, filling time and space we could better use by investing in our spiritual lives. I’m not one of those who says all media is bad and evil. I don’t believe that. But there are times when it’s good to unplug, get away. On Fridays, my day off, I intentionally don’t log on to Facebook most weeks, because I need to be away, to let God retool my soul. It’s a social media fast. So if you tag me in something or send me a message on Friday, I won’t respond until Saturday and sometimes not until late Saturday. I’m not ignoring you—well, maybe I am, but actually, I’m fasting for the health of my soul.

Because, remember, the point of fasting is this: it’s to make yourself “empty” so you can be filled more with God’s spirit and presence. Author Chris Webb puts it this way: “The point of fasting is not that food makes us less pious, but that seeking God with a stronger desire than our appetite for food satisfies a spiritual hunger” (Webb, The Fire of the Word, pg. 159).

So Jesus says, “When you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face” (6:17). In other words, he says, get ready just like you always do. Putting oil on your head was part of their preparation in the morning, much like we might shave or put on perfume in the morning. So get ready, and look like you always do. Why? “So that it will not be obvious to others that you are fasting, but only to your Father, who is unseen; and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you” (6:18). I like Isaiah’s imagery. He says when we fast in such a way as to allow God to shape us, to call us out beyond ourselves, this is what will happen: “Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard” (58:8). Your light will shine out. People will be able to begin to see God working in and through you. That’s what Jesus told us to do, anyway, isn’t it? “Let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:16). See how it works? We fast in secret, allow God to shape us in secret, allow God to make us into people who do what he calls us to do because we’ve drawn closer to him, and then others will see that. They’ll see the work of God, not us. Your light will shine brighter because of the time you’ve spent making yourself empty so that you can be filled with God. “Then you will call,” Isaiah says, “and the Lord will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I” (58:9).

Self-control is part of the fruit of the spirit (Galatians 5:23), and fasting is one discipline that helps us in that area. Richard Foster describes it this way: “The benefits of fasting extend to many areas of impulse control: pornography addiction, food cravings, Internet obsessions, or everyday activities such as shopping or television watching used to excess. The Spiritual Discipline of fasting teaches us not to repress desire, but to rechannel it properly” (Foster Life 160). The goal of fasting is to lead us closer to God and to help us find in life what is most important and most valuable. So this week, I want to call us to practice a Methodist fast, or maybe I should say to begin to practice, as this would be a valuable practice to continue each week. What do I mean by a Methodist fast? It was the practice of the early Methodists and our founder, John Wesley, to fast from after dinner on Thursday evening until “high tea” on Friday afternoon, somewhere around 3:00 p.m. Wesley was British; you don’t miss high tea for anything! So that means, if you’re fasting from food, missing two meals and breaking the fast with a light snack. Fast from media for that time period. Fast from speaking for that time period. Or if you’re fasting from spending, perhaps that day is not the best. Pick a day when you’re most tempted to spend or to give in to the consumerism of the day. The point is to make ourselves empty for a period of time, to give something up and allow God to fill us rather than all those other things. You see, if all of the space in our lives is already filled, how will we ever allow God to get in? So make room. Clear some things out. Become empty so that you can be filled. Practice a Methodist fast, and then as you grow comfortable with that, you may want to extend it a little longer. But don’t, for the sake of your soul, focus on what you’ll get out of it. Focus instead on how much of you God will get out of it, for fasting is all about drawing nearer and making a deeper connection with God. So as we begin our challenge this week, to master those things that seek to master us, to remember that “no one can serve two masters” (6:24), let’s pray.

Even Greater Things

The Sermon Study Guide is here.

Acts 2:1-4; John 14:8-17

May 19, 2013 (Confirmation) • Portage First UMC

VIDEO INTRO

Last summer, we did the Exodus in reverse. By that I mean, we began one morning at the traditional site of Mount Sinai and made our way across the Sinai Peninsula to Cairo, Egypt. It’s a vast, hot, dry desert. There is not much to see besides sand, sand and more sand. In fact, very early on in the trip, our guide said, “This is about the last place to stop where you can use the restroom and get snacks.” And he wasn’t kidding! By the time we got to Cairo, we were exhausted, hot and tired, ready for a rest. I tried to imagine what it would have been like for those ancient Hebrews to leave the region surrounding the Nile River, the lush green Nile, and head out into the desert. Yes, they were finally free. Yes, they could now make their own decisions. But it was a desert. A dry, hot, vast, barren desert. And for fifty days, they traveled. They walked, and walked, and walked. Nothing to see. Nothing to do but walk. No wonder there are those moments when they want to go back to Egypt! Yes, it was slavery, but they at least had food and water there! And then, fifty days after they left, they arrived at Mount Sinai. If the traditional location of Saint Catherine is the authentic location, it’s a bit higher up and somewhat cooler. It would have been a much nicer place to camp than anywhere they had been before. Fifty days after the first Passover. Fifty days after leaving Egypt, they arrive at a mountain, where Moses goes up (not an easy climb) and then brings down what we call the Ten Commandments—God’s instructions for living life. The fiftieth day after Passover came to be known as Pentecost, and eventually it was celebrated as one of the three great pilgrim festivals in Judaism—meaning it was one of three times in the year you were expected to come and worship in Jerusalem. It became a time when you offered the first of your grain crop to God, an agricultural festival. But it was also a time when the people renewed their commitment to God and remembered how he had given the law at Mount Sinai (Longenecker, “The Acts of the Apostles,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 9, pg. 269; Wright, Acts for Everyone, Part One, pg. 21).

Centuries later, on the day of Pentecost, Jesus’ disciples gathered all together in one place (2:1). Where, exactly, we don’t know, but most think it was probably the same Upper Room where they had celebrated the Passover meal, some fifty days ago. Jesus, ten days before this, had ascended into heaven. He was gone. There had been no more appearances since then. And he had told them to wait. “Do not leave Jerusalem,” he had told them, “but wait for the gift my Father promised. For John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit” (1:4-5). Since then, they had waited. And waited. And waited. Ten days they’ve waited. Don’t you imagine that some of them began to get discouraged? Maybe Jesus had forgotten. Maybe he had gotten back to heaven and been busy answering his mail or checking his Facebook account. Had it just been some sort of prank? But still they waited. And then, Pentecost came. We read the account of what happened then just a little bit ago, and it’s a hard scene for me to picture. Listen again to how Luke describes it: “Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them” (2:2-4). The sound of a violent wind—not necessarily a violent wind, but the sound like it. And something like tongues of fire appearing over their heads—not fire specifically, but something like it. And languages. All of them given different languages to speak. What in the world is going on here?

Perhaps the point is that there is something going on here that is out of this world. Luke uses three symbols to tell us what is happening: wind, fire and speech (Longenecker 270-272). The word for “wind” can also be translated as breath or spirit. From the beginning, “wind” represented God, for it was God’s breath-wind-spirit that brought creation into being, that gave human beings our very life. When the violent wind shakes the place where they are, it’s a message that what’s happening here is going to shake things up and bring new life. God is about to change life as it has been. “Fire” also reminded the Jewish people of God’s presence. Moses was called to serve God when he saw a burning bush. When the people left Egypt, a pillar of fire led them through the wilderness and protected them at night. On the top of Mount Sinai, God’s presence was represented by a consuming fire. Now, fire comes again as a reminder of God’s presence. Even in Jesus’ physical absence, God is with them. And speech. It’s very perplexing what happens here, and many people have interpreted it in different ways. We hear it described as “the gift of tongues,” but if by that you mean (as many do) speaking in an unintelligible language (or a heavenly language, as some say), then that’s not what happens here. We know the disciples go out from this room and are able to speak about Jesus in the languages of the people who have gathered there in Jerusalem. In other words, they speak in actual languages they have never learned. They are given the ability to share the good news. They are given what they need at that moment to tell others about Jesus. There’s no indication they retained that ability. We’re not told elsewhere in the book of Acts that they still spoke in those same languages. For the moment, in the midst of that experience, they are given what they need. Wind, fire, speech. Things are changing, God is with us, and he will give us what we need.

This morning, on this Confirmation Sunday, we are continuing our series of sermons on Connections, asking the question, “How do we connect with God?” We’ve talked about prayer and we’ve talked about what John Wesley called “Christian Conferencing,” and this morning, on this Pentecost Sunday, we come to another important aspect of our connection: the power of the Holy Spirit. To some of us, that sounds scary. We’ve associated the work, even the name of the Holy Spirit with “pentecostals,” which for some of us is a negative word. We picture loud, boisterous worship, speaking in strange languages, and whatever else you might think of. We hear Jesus talk of being “baptized in the Holy Spirit,” and we get kind of nervous. It sounds scary, out of our control. And it is, but not in the way we might think. What happens in that upper room on that first century Pentecost is, in every way that matters, exactly what will happen here today. It’s a renewal of their faith. It’s a new beginning of their commitment to God. Some call Pentecost the birthday of the church, and that’s true on one level, though some would argue the church really began with the coming of Jesus in Bethlehem. But more than anything else, Pentecost is about making sure disciples remember who they are and are given what they need to do ministry in the world. That’s what Confirmation is all about. Today, nine young people will stand before God and the congregation, declare their faith and announce their intention to be “faithful disciples.” They will say they are committing to loving God, loving others and offering Jesus in everything they do. For most of them, it’s a renewal of their baptismal vows, promises that were made on their behalf by their parents long ago. Confirmation is not just about church membership. Sometimes we reduce it to that, but that’s not a good enough reason to celebrate. Confirmation is about renewing our faith, connecting with God and constantly receiving the power we need for living out this faith.

In the Old Testament, having faith meant obeying. Obeying the law. Doing what you were expected to do. Not doing things you were told not to do. A big chunk of the Old Testament is devoted to different laws and instructions, and we sometimes ignore those or we treat them as irrelevant. But all that law was meant to help God’s people be different, live differently. The law set them apart; they weren’t just anyone, they were God’s people. The law was meant to point them toward God, to know how to live as he knew was best for them. Unfortunately, though a series of difficulties, the law became what it was all about. The people came to almost worship the law rather than God. And so Jesus came, and in the New Testament, having faith means following. Now, while that sounds easier, it’s really not. It’s much, much harder. Yes, certainly, there are things we should and should not do. But our faith it not just a list of rules; our faith is a way of life. Our faith is about following Jesus, living as he did and loving as he did. That’s why, on Pentecost, Jesus sent the Holy Spirit, because we can’t do it by ourselves. We can’t live this way on our own. We need a helper, which is exactly how Jesus described the Spirit.

On that last night he spent with his disciples, Jesus told them that the way they would show to the world they were his people is to follow his commands. And do you remember what the “new command” he gave to them that night was? “Love one another” (John 13:34). It sounds simple, doesn’t it—until you try to practice it, live it out. Love is hard. Love is work. And we don’t make it easy on each other. These confirmands know that. They live in a world where their beliefs aren’t respected, where there are times they try to live in the way Jesus taught them and they’re made fun of. They live in a world where bullying goes on in ways both subtle and overt. Love is hard work. Loving that other person when they treat you badly is difficult, and there are days, we’ll all have to admit, where we just don’t want to. I don’t want to love that other person, because they’ve hurt me so badly that if I risk loving them again, I risk getting hurt again. Yet, Jesus says, “Love one another.” That’s his command. Above everything else, that’s what he calls us to do. And I’m convinced that if we’re doing what he told us to do, we won’t have time to worry about the things he told us not to do. If we’re busy loving others, we won’t have time to do the things we shouldn’t do. If we’re always seeking the loving response, the loving action, the loving word—we’ll be too busy to do things we ought not to do. That’s why following Jesus is harder than obeying the law, because it’s so easy to stop loving. And that’s why Jesus sent the Spirit.

In John 14, he says, “If you love me, keep my commands. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever—the Spirit of truth” (14:15-17). Other translations call the Spirit a “counselor,” “comforter,” “friend” or “helper.” The word is “paraklete,” which means “someone who comes alongside.” Someone who comes to help. Someone who pleads our case. Someone who stands up for you. That’s the way Jesus describes the “paraklete,” the Spirit. The Spirit is the one who comes alongside, who gives us what we need to be able to live the life Jesus puts before us. I know in my own life many times the only way I was able to love the other person is because of the Spirit’s work. And I also know that there are times when the only way someone else can love me is because of the Spirit’s work in their life. Jesus sends the Spirit to enable us to do what he said to do, to live this life, to follow him.

Then there’s this other promise Jesus made, just a bit earlier in the text. “Very truly I tell you,” he says, “whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these” (14:12). We know the sorts of things Jesus did, but what does he mean by “greater things”? Can we really do greater things than Jesus did? Scholars and theologians continue to debate, even 2,000 years later, what Jesus meant by that, but I wonder if it isn’t fairly simple. Jesus said his command was to love. But Jesus is God, and God is love, we know (cf. 1 John 4:16). It was and is his nature to love. It is his character to respond to every person and every situation with love. Maybe the “greater things” he saw us doing is loving in spite of our nature, drawing closer to God and to each other despite our tendency to withdraw. Maybe the “greater things” that were to come out of Pentecost are the all the ways we find to love people into the kingdom of God.

The Spirit came in wind, fire and speech—and the Spirit continues to come in wind, fire and speech. When the wind blows through, life is reordered, things are changed. The Spirit shakes the house where the disciples are, and when the Spirit blows through today, he changes our priorities. We live in a changing world, where things are being shaken and priorities are changing. The generation coming up is setting different priorities than my generation or older generations. For one, family is becoming more and more important. Earlier generations, mine and older, have in many ways disappointed our children. Marriages thrown away, lives disrupted, and so there are indications that one of the priorities of the up and coming generation is to keep the family together, to not let little things drive them apart. Family is key; priorities are being reordered. And yet, at the same time, there is a huge challenge in the younger generation, because another priority that is being set is an anti-church priority. Sixty-five percent of the younger generation rarely attend church, and following the truth of the Bible has become less and less important. The Spirit of truth wants to blow into their lives, but they need to see you and I living out what we say we believe—faithfully and consistently. What a great thing this morning to celebrate with these nine confirmands, who are bucking the trend and allowing the wind of the Spirit to blow into their lives. Their Confirmation this morning gives me hope.

The Spirit also comes in fire, and fire is not only representative of the presence of God, it’s also a purifying symbol. Fire separates the gold from the dross, the good stuff from the bad stuff. When the Spirit blows into our lives, he seeks to clean out the bad stuff, the stuff that does not honor God, the sin, the unforgiveness, the times we outright rebel against what God wants. The Spirit comes to make us more and more like Jesus. One of the characteristics we hear over and over describing this younger generation is a longing for authenticity. They want to see if what we say we believe matches the way we live. And there is little patience today for anyone who is inauthentic. The challenge is for us to let the Spirit burn through our lives and get rid of those things, those ways we live that do not honor God. It’s not okay to come to church, worship God and then to go into the week and treat everyone else like they are less than human. Jesus told a story about that once, about a man who was deep in debt to his king, and when he begged for some more time to pay it off, the king did more than that. He forgave the debt. The man was grateful; you might even say he worshipped the king. But then he went out, found another man who owed him a little bit of money, grabbed him by the neck and had him thrown in jail because the second man couldn’t pay his tiny debt. He’d accepted the king’s forgiveness, but he wasn’t living like he had been forgiven. When the Spirit burns through our lives, he will make our Sunday life match our Monday through Saturday life. Authenticity—living what we say we believe. John Wesley was once asked by a preacher what he should do since he found his faith was slipping, and Wesley repeated advice he heard someone else give: preach faith until you have it, and then preach faith. In other words, live faith until it becomes real, an authentic way of life, and then live faith. Let the Spirit burn everything else away.

And then the Spirit comes in speech. There comes a time to give outward evidence of our faith. Sometimes that means we need to speak about our faith, about Jesus. Sometimes it means we need to speak up for the least, the last, and the lost. Sometimes it means we must give a voice for someone who has no voice, to be advocate for someone who is all alone. When the Spirit comes, he will, Acts says, “enable” us to do what we need to do to reach the world for Jesus. And the good news is that the younger generation is much less afraid or timid than we have been about speaking of their faith. They’re not afraid to stand up for what they believe, even if it’s unpopular. And more than that, they’re not content to just talk about it. They want to do something about it. This next generation is and will be the most educated generation in American history, and they are also the largest generation in history, having recently passed the Baby Boomers in size. They want to change the world, and they will speak up and they will act to try to do it. Faith for them is not just about sitting in a chair on Sunday morning; it’s about taking Jesus’ love out into the world to make a difference. And so, look at the marvelous things the youth in our church are about. This past winter, nineteen of them participated in an activity called the 30-Hour Famine where they not only learned about hunger but they allowed themselves to become hungry. They spent the night here, went without food and raised money which will feed children around the world. Our Middle Schoolers have been busy this spring raising money for the Royal Family Kids Camp, making it possible for kids who are abused and neglected to go to camp free of charge and experience the love of Jesus. And our Mission Possible Kids? They gave up a Sunday evening a few weeks back and came in droves here to make sandwiches and meals for the Porter County Homeless Ministry. No one made them come. They came because they are passionate about doing something. We have kids in this congregation who give money from their own allowance every week toward Feed My Lambs so that other kids they go to school with can eat on the weekends. And we have a teen praise team called Ignite that is singing about the love of Jesus in a bold way, proclaiming that God’s not dead. Could these things be among the “greater things” Jesus was talking about?

You see, when I see these things happening and I see pictures and hear stories about the things our youth are doing, I get excited. That’s why I keep saying that, as many great, powerful and wonderful things as God has done in this church throughout the last 177 years, I still believe our best days are still ahead. Jesus said as we connect with the Holy Spirit, as we allow the Spirit to guide us and empower us, we will do even greater things than he did. Now, I know talking about the Spirit is a scary thing to some, and that’s why I want to invite you to come on Wednesday evening and take part in a four-week class called, “The Power of a Whisper.” Through those four weeks, you’re going to learn a lot about the work of the Holy Spirit in this day and time, about how to listen for the whispers of the Spirit, and about how the Spirit can empower and embolden us to proclaim the good news across the world that Jesus Christ is Lord. That starts this Wednesday evening, and you can sign up at the Connection Center as many have already done. What might happen when we allow the Spirit to blow through our lives in wind, fire and speech? Might we be even more empowered to live out this faith?

That’s what happened to those first disciples. As the Spirit empowered them that Pentecost morning, they went out into the street and preached about Jesus. In languages they had not learned, they proclaimed the good news, and Luke says about three thousand people found salvation in Jesus that day. But that wasn’t the end. The Spirit continued to send them out. In fact, some say the book, “The Acts of the Apostles,” really should be called “The Acts of the Holy Spirit,” because without the power of the Spirit, without being connected to God through his spirit, those disciples couldn’t have done any of it. And yet, with the Spirit’s power, they literally went to the ends of the earth. They went to Rome, to India, to Ethiopia and Egypt. Tradition tells us that all but one died as a martyr (a “witness”) because they would not deny Jesus. Only in the power of the Spirit could they live that confidently. And only in the power of the Spirit can we live the way Jesus calls us to live: to love all, to love well, to live out love.

That’s the challenge before us: to do even greater things than those first disciples as we live out the love Jesus told us to. We need the power of the Holy Spirit, and so in just a bit, I will put my hands on the heads of each Confirmand and I will tell them to remember their baptism and be thankful. Now, except for Jessica, none of them will likely remember their actual baptism. But they will remember that they are baptized, that they are counted among God’s people. They are set apart and called to a different life. And then I will pray that the Holy Spirit would work within them, that having been born through water and the Spirit, they may live as a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ. But as I pray that for them, I also want to pray that for all of us this morning. Pentecost is not just a time for teenagers to make a new commitment to God; it’s a time for all of us to do that. In the spirit and tradition of our forefathers and foremothers, I invite us all, this morning, to confirm our faith, to renew our commitment and to pledge anew our desire to live out love, to be who Jesus calls us to be. And then, he says, we will do even greater things. What greater things do you suppose we might be able to do, as a church of faithful disciples, in the midst of this community? I can’t wait to find out.

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8:30 Service - “Congregational Reaffirmation of the Baptismal Covenant,” Hymnal 50

10:00 & 11:30 Services - “The Baptismal Covenant I,” Hymnal 33

Investing In Hope

The Sermon Study Guide is here.

Matthew 6:5-15; 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24

May 5, 2013 • Portage First UMC

VIDEO INTRO

It began with one college student, a computer and a goal of connecting people. Mark Zuckerberg wondered why there wasn’t an easy way for the students at Harvard to get to know each other, to be connected to one another. The university didn’t have a centralized database, and they said it would take them a while to create one. So Zuckerberg starting writing code. “I think it’s kind of silly,” he said, “that it would take the University a couple of years to get around to it as I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week.” In January 2004, Zuckerberg launched his website, thefacebook.com, and told a couple of friends. Then they put it out on their house’s mailing list, and by the end of the evening, they had “somewhere between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred registrants.” Within a few months, thefacebook.com had expanded beyond Harvard to other Ivy League schools, and then on to other schools in the United States and Canada. In October 2005, it reached Great Britain, and today what has become Facebook has somewhere over a billion subscribers. Zuckerberg tapped into a great need, or a great longing: this desire we have to connect with others. No matter how much we pretend we prefer to go it alone, do it by ourselves, we have within us a hard-wired need for community, for connections—even if that community and those connections are virtual. Facebook was only among the first attempts at such connections. In March 2006, Twitter was born, and other services keep popping up like Google+, Instagram, Vine, LinkedIn and so on—all of them capitalizing on our need as human beings to be connected to someone else.

We have become a well-connected—or some might say, over-connected—society. Who remembers a time before cell phones? Eighteen years ago, my brother was selling cell phones, and he was trying mightily to convince me to buy one. I remember clearly telling him I didn’t want one of those things. There ought to be some times when I can’t be reached, I told him. Be careful what you say, because sometimes you have to eat your words. I remember why we did get our first cell phone. It was a bad winter in Muncie, and Christopher was just about three months old, and we lived out in the country. I got to thinking about what would happen if Cathy slid off the road with just her and Christopher. How would she get ahold of me? How would she call for help? And so we gave in and got a cell phone—and it’s been a slippery slope ever since! Now, I love technology. I use it a lot. But there are still times I want to be unconnected, unplugged. It’s hard to do that today. So much noise, so many people and things clambering for our attention. But as we have become more connected to each other, even to people we don’t really know, what does that do to our spiritual lives? For the next few weeks, we’re going to be talking about connections on a spiritual level—specifically, what are some of the ways we can connect better with God? “Liking” a page called “God” on Facebook doesn’t connect us to the creator of the universe. I’m pretty sure that’s not actually Jesus sending out tweets on the name @jesus! So how do we connect? Previous generations called these practices spiritual disciplines—and “discipline” is an important word because connecting with God takes work. It takes focus—something we often lack today. It’s hard simply because there are so many other voices calling for us to pay attention to them. Paying attention to God means we have to turn away from those voices, unplug and log off, and focus on the one who loves us more than anything else. And the primary way we do that, the way we start, is through prayer.

Prayer is, quite simply, conversation with God, and we tend to go to one of two extremes with it. Either we avoid it (we at least avoid praying out loud or in public) because we don’t think we know “the right words to use,” or we become so formal in our prayers that they just become words, or even worse, magic words. Jesus said, “When you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words” (6:7). He’s criticizing both extremes there. He says don’t just keep using lots of words as if you were trying to wear God down; that isn’t what prayer is for. But there’s also the assumption in his statement that we will be people of prayer. He doesn’t say “if you pray” but “when you pray.” Prayer, as Jesus understood it, is vital to our connection with God the Father.

Prayer was, of course, an important part of the religious practice of Jesus’ day. Jewish prayers were said twice a day—in the early morning and at the ninth hour or about 2:30 in the afternoon (Wilkins, NIV Application Commentary: Matthew, pg. 273). The disciples would have known that form and timing of prayer since their childhood, as would Jesus. But they notice that John the Baptist’s disciples have received special teaching about prayer, and so in Luke’s Gospel, the disciples come to Jesus and ask him to teach them to pray. You seem to have a natural prayer life, Jesus, so teach us how you do that. In Luke, Jesus gives them a bare-bones version of what we call the Lord’s Prayer (Luke 11:1-4). It’s much shorter than the version we most often use. The more well-known version comes probably a bit later, when Jesus is teaching on a mountainside overlooking the Sea of Galilee. He’s teaching what we call “The Sermon on the Mount,” and in that sermon he’s redefining what it means to be a person of faith. There, he teaches those gathered the prayer we know so well, “The Lord’s Prayer.” It’s really misnamed, though, because it is meant to be “The Disciples’ Prayer,” a prayer that we pray, a prayer that models what connecting prayer looks like. Many of us learn it by heart early on, and we pray it often/weekly here in worship. As I said last week, sometimes this prayer can be words for us when we don’t have words of our own, but there is also the danger of knowing it so well that we just say the words without any sort of meaning or connection to the one we’re supposed to be praying for. While Jesus doesn’t tell us not to pray it word for word, I think he also gave it to us as a framework or a scaffolding on which we can build our own prayers (cf. Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part One, pg. 58). Either way, the goal or the point of prayer is connecting with God, not just saying rote words. Prayer is connection with God. Prayer is conversation, and as Jesus’ model prayer shows us, it’s not so much about us as it really is about God.

Now, we could easily spend several weeks just on this prayer, but I want to just give us a quick overview this morning. So forgive me when I rush past your favorite part, but the prayer really breaks into two parts: three things about God and three things about us. We start with God, and the first line of the prayer is about God’s name: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name” (6:9). Father is a very intimate word; it’s not a word anyone in first-century Judaism would have used to describe God. Jesus called God, “Abba” (Mark 14:36), which essentially means “Daddy.” But it reminds us that God is not just off somewhere else. God is not an absent supervisor. God is our Father. It’s a relationship. In the best of father-child relationships, the father is involved in the child’s life, present when important things are happening, and constantly showing love toward the child. Now, I recognize that’s an ideal, and it doesn’t always that way happen here on earth. But God is a father, Jesus says, who can be trusted and who is, in fact, interested in the smallest of details of our lives. God is a father who loves; later, the disciple John will reaffirm that truth: “We know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them” (1 John 4:16). God is closer than we can imagine.

But Jesus also prays for God’s name to be “hallowed.” That means “to set apart, to treat as special.” Now, it’s not “special” like Grandma’s china that you only get out once in a while. It’s a recognition that, as close as God is to us, he’s also absolutely other than we are. God is not just a big human being, and we have to recognize that. He’s also not the same as the other gods that were around at the time. The Roman gods, for instance, had many prayers that you would repeat over and over and maybe have to say in just the right way in order to try to trick or manipulate the god or goddess to do what you wanted them to. There was always an uncertainty with that kind of prayer; you never knew if you were getting it right (Wright 58). No, God is not like that. We cannot manipulate God with a magic prayer. We can’t even manipulate God by getting lots and lots of people to pray for us. I remember a prayer meeting I was in during college where I heard a friend pray, “God, there are enough of us here that you have to do what we say.” Really? God is not like that. We often ask others to pray for us as a support, as encouragement to us, not so that we can force God to do what we want. God is other. God is not to be manipulated. He is holy, and part of prayer is recognizing that.

The second part of Jesus’ prayer is, “Your kingdom come” (6:10) Whose kingdom? God’s kingdom, not mine. God’s. We spend so much time building our own kingdoms that we, oftentimes, probably ought to leave that part of the prayer out. Sometimes I spend so much time building my own kingdom that I don’t have time much left to build God’s. Do you relate to that, at all? We gather stuff, build up bank accounts, pile up activities, run from this place to that constantly leaving little time for God. You see, God’s kingdom is meant to be all-encompassing. We’re meant, as followers of Jesus, to give everything we have over for his kingdom rather than for our own, for his priorities rather than ours. There’s an old story, which may or may not be true, of the time when Christianity became the legal religion of the Roman Empire, when Emperor Constantine gave his life to Christ. People were forced to convert to Christianity. Now, that has its own issues because every time the church has been in power, God’s kingdom usually loses out. But the story is that the military was also forced to convert under Constantine, and so they lined all the soldiers up along the banks of the river so that they could be baptized. One by one, they went into the water, and as they went, every soldier held his sword arm up above the water. If it wasn’t baptized, they reasoned, they could still use it to kill others in battle. What part of our lives would we want to leave unbaptized today? What part do we withhold when we pray, “Your kingdom come”? For a lot of people it would probably be our wallets. That’s the thing we have the hardest time giving over to God. We struggle to believe that God’s kingdom is a higher calling that the latest shiny thing we might want to buy. What do we want to leave out when we pray, “Your kingdom come”?

The third part of the prayer that’s about God is closely related: “Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (6:10). Whose will? God’s, not mine. How many of our prayers are about telling God what to do? A whole lot of mine are. “God, here’s the situation, and here’s what you should do about it.” And sometimes, that’s the only time we pray, when we need something, when things have gone horribly wrong and we finally realize we can’t fix it. Remember, prayer is an ongoing conversation. How would you feel if the only time your friends talked to you is when they wanted something? Maybe you have friends like that! A lot of us probably do, but think about your closest friends. What if the only time you heard from them is when they wanted something, and they told you exactly how to do it? You’d begin to dread seeing them, wouldn’t you? It’d be like, “Oh, here they come again, I wonder what they want this time.” And you’d be less inclined to help them out, to give them what they ask for. Thankfully, God is not like us, but our calling is to be praying for his will to be done, not our own. Prayer is first and foremost about changing us, not God. There are times in the Scripture where we’re told God “changed his mind,” and you can wrestle this week with what that means. But here’s Jesus’ point: prayer is about working toward God’s will being done on earth as it already is being done in heaven.

So the first three parts of this prayer focus on God, which is where our prayers should start: God’s name, God’s kingdom, God’s will. Then, when our hearts and minds are then focused on God’s way, we can turn to praying about our own lives, our own situations. But our prayers will be—or should be—changed because we’ve focused beyond ourselves first. And so the next part of Jesus’ prayer is for sustenance: “Give us today our daily bread” (6:11). Bread, of course, is a basic need. It represents what we need to get by. For many of us, it’s not a prayer we pray often enough. Most of us likely don’t know what it means to literally pray for food for that day, not knowing if we will have any, but there are people in the world who do know exactly what that prayer is like. There are people in our city who know what that prayer is like. We’ve been trying to combat that need in a lot of different ways, including Feed My Lambs and Smart Choice Food Source. But, on a deeper level, this is a prayer of trust—saying we will trust God for what we need. Said another way, this is a prayer for fighting against anxiety, because by praying this, we’re placing our most basic needs (daily bread) in the hands of God—a God whom we’ve already called “Father,” a God we’ve already acknowledged knows best, and who loves us. We’re choosing to trust, to believe Jesus when he says, “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own” (6:34). If we can trust God for daily bread, can’t we trust him with the rest of our life as well?

The next thing we pray about is our sin: “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors” (6:12). Of course, we’ve spent the last four weeks talking about forgiveness, so I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this one. But suffice it to say again that forgiveness is at the heart of what it means to follow Jesus. We forgive, and we are forgiven. As we’ve talked about the last few weeks, it’s common for us to be thankful that God has forgiven us even while we refuse to forgive someone else. But forgiven people are called to forgive others. In fact, forgiveness of others is the proof that we have been forgiven; if we have been forgiven much, how could we withhold that great gift from someone else (cf. Wilkins 279)? That’s what Jesus says right after the prayer: “For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins” (6:14-15). Forgiveness is critical to who we are and who God is making us to be. How can we come before God in prayer and tell God, “I refuse to forgive that other person,” when God has forgiven us much more than we can imagine? Forgive us, God. Forgive us.

This past Thursday was the National Day of Prayer, and it’s one of my favorite days in the community because we gather together not once, but twice to pray together as brothers and sisters in Christ. It’s one of those rare times when believers from across traditions can gather together. And part of our prayer is always a prayer of forgiveness. Lord, forgive us as individuals and as a nation for failing to follow your way. After all, God told the Hebrews, “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land” (2 Chronicles 7:14). Pray, seek God’s face, ask for forgiveness—as a nation, as a church, as individuals. Do you pray about your sin when you talk with God?

Then, the final piece of this prayer reminds us that life is a spiritual battle. “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one” (6:13). The word for temptation would be better translated as “testing,” and there’s an important difference there. “Temptation,” in our modern use of the word, gives the impression that God will lead us to a place where we might sin. That’s not what Jesus is saying; in fact, James directly says God doesn’t do that (cf. James 1:13). But there are tests God allows into our lives; we see that repeatedly in the Biblical story. Abraham, for instance, was tested when God asked him to sacrifice his son Isaac (Genesis 22). Paul was tested with a “thorn in the flesh” (2 Corinthians 12:7) that he asked God to remove. God refused and told him to rest in God’s grace. So there are tests God brings into our lives, to strengthen our character and help us become the people we were meant to be. That doesn’t mean, though, that every difficulty is a test. What Jesus tells us to pray here, thought, is that we would not be tested to the point where we would sin. Life is a spiritual battle, and I don’t say that so that we’ll look for demons or angels behind every bush. When I say “spiritual battle,” I mean that the world and the culture we live in are not conducive to spiritual growth. There are always things—sometimes very good things—that threaten to take us away from the path God has for us to walk. It’s a battle to remain faithful to Christ. And so we pray for God to give us the strength to win the battle. Lead us not into temptation, and deliver us from the evil one.

So three prayers about God: God’s name, God’s kingdom, and God’s will. And three prayers for us: sustenance, sin, and spiritual battle. Those are handles we can hang our prayers on. And remember, this is a conversation. The goal in this discipline, this exercise, is to connect with God.

Now, sometimes I get asked about prayer. For instance, some people ask if there is a proper posture for prayer. Some of you were taught as you grew up that you close your eyes, bow your head and fold your hands. It’s a sign of respect, we were told. And there’s nothing wrong with that posture, but in Jesus’ day, many people prayed with their eyes open, looking up toward heaven, hands out to the side. Others prayed with their face on the floor, laying out flat. That is, in fact, the way we’re told Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night before he was crucified (Matthew 26:39). I watched Muslims in a Cairo airport pray kneeling and singing their prayers, and I saw Jews stand before the Wailing Wall, rocking back and forth, in deep conversation with God. There are as many ways to pray as there are people. We pray and we praise, and sometimes we get way too hung up on the right posture or the proper method. Sometimes we need to lighten up a bit.

VIDEO: Tim Hawkins, Hand Raising

So, did that help? Another question: I never hear a voice when I pray. God never responds audibly. Am I doing it wrong? No, you’re not. There are indeed stories in the Bible of God responding audibly, but there are many other stories of people who didn’t hear a voice, who simply prayed in faith and maybe never knew for sure whether their prayers were answered or not. Even in Gethsemane, we get no sense that Jesus heard the clear, audible voice of his heavenly Father. Remember, ultimately prayer is an act of trust.

Then, maybe one of the most frequent questions I hear: why should I pray if God already knows everything? Well, here’s the question: is prayer about giving information to God or is it, rather, about expressing our dependence upon God (Wilkins 274)? Maybe we spend too much time assuming God needs information, and we spell out the situation to God in great detail, when all God really wants is for us to come near to him. Prayer is an act of trust, and when we pray, we’re acknowledging that we can’t make it on our own. We can’t do it by ourselves. We need God’s strength, power, and presence in the midst of our situation. And when we pray, God then often turns us around and calls us to be answers to our own prayers. I often go back to a question I heard Dr. Maxie Dunnam ask a number of years ago: what if there are some things God either cannot or will not do until and unless God’s people pray? It’s a fascinating question, isn’t it? What if the maker of the universe is simply waiting on us to come to him so that, through us, he can bring healing to the nations? What if there are some things God either cannot or will not do until and unless God’s people pray? I believe that’s the reason Paul tells us to “pray continually” (1 Thessalonians 5:17). Don’t ever stop praying. Every moment is a moment of prayer, and when we do that, we are investing in hope for our future and the future of those we pray for.

So here’s the challenge for this week: if you’re not already regularly praying, set aside two or three times this week when you can spend, let’s say, at least ten minutes in God’s presence. You don’t have to talk the whole time. Let God’s spirit wash over you. Pray the Lord’s prayer. Pray your own words. Pray a breath prayer. The point is to spend time with your heavenly Father, and to develop a routine that will, eventually, become daily. Is your day rushed? Make a commitment right now to set your alarm ten minutes earlier or go to bed ten minutes earlier and spend that time in prayer. I would imagine we all spend way more time than that working or connecting to the internet or watching television. Can we spend just a few minutes a few times this week in prayer? If prayer is already a regular part of your day, then extend that time. Add five minutes this week, then a bit more next week. You know, we spend an average of twenty-four minutes a day just getting up and getting ready. And Jesus calls to us, “Could you not watch with me, could you not pray with me for just a while?” So, set aside time for specific prayer this week.

Here’s another way to approach it, a great idea stolen from Church of the Resurrection: Gather your family for a prayer time and bring along a bag of M&Ms. Pass the bag around, and have everyone take some, then use the colors of the candy to direct a family prayer time. Let’s say that for each green M&M they have, they can pray for one friend. For each red M&M, pray for a neighbor. For every orange one, pray for a teacher at school or church. For every yellow one, pray for a family member. For every blue one, pray for a leader in our country or in the world. Or you can choose your own topics. Pray one color at a time; give each family member the opportunity to pray for whom he or she chooses. And then, you can eat the rest of the M&Ms to end your prayer time. I’m sure you can come up with equally creative ideas for setting aside time as a family to pray.

Then, beginning this Thursday evening, our community churches will be hosting ten nights of prayer from Ascension Day to Pentecost, each night at a different church and in a different style. We’ve had people in the past who made many of those meetings and found each of them refreshing and encouraging. It’s just good to get out of our own walls and pray with brothers and sisters in Christ in a new way—sometimes even in a different language! There is a schedule in the bulletin and on the church Facebook page. Can you make it to one…two…more? You won’t be made to pray out loud if you don’t want to, but is a joy to pray with the body of Christ, to pray together for our city and for our world. In some way this week, can you set aside some time to develop a discipline of prayer?

This morning, we’re going to take part in another form of prayer. Have you ever thought of communion as prayer? It is. In fact, the seder meal that Jesus adapted for what we know as communion is really one long prayer. Jesus gave us this meal as a reminder of what he has done for us, of the way he gave his life for our salvation, and so when we celebrate communion, it’s really one long prayer of thanksgiving. That’s why, in some traditions, it’s called the “eucharist,” which is a Greek word meaning “thanksgiving.” This morning, I invite you to come to the table in a spirit of prayer and of thanksgiving, with grateful hearts for all that Jesus has done for us. At this table, let’s pray and invest in hope as we dream of the day when every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord (cf. Philippians 2:10). Let’s prepare our hearts for the bread and the cup.