Author: firstdelray

It is a rhetorical question, of course. Who doesn’t want to be thoroughly alive, enjoying all the good things that life has to offer, to be lifted above the plane of mere existence? To live a large life, a life of spacious activities and with a grand purpose captures our imaginations. This is a life of abounding energy and possesses a deep awareness of the things that bless—both personally and those around us.

The Psalms offer treasured insight for such a life, insight for embracing a spacious life of blessedness, of extracting the secret flavors and essences of things as we live into each day. Very specifically, we are instructed in the wisdom of many who have traveled before us; we are told to exercise wise government over our tongues. Relationships with one another rise to unimaginable heights as the tongue is disciplined and directed to build, edify and, exalt those who hear us. It is as though life receives its nutriments from careful and blessed speech.

Our speech is too often destructive. Poison-soaked speech first poisons the speaker. “Every word we speak recoils upon the speaker’s heart, leaves its influence, either in grace or disfigurement,” writes that wonderful preacher, J.H. Jowett.[1] Where the tongue is untrue the heart is afraid of exposure. Life is diminished. One may also argue that such speech is lazy speech. Where there is no exercise of restraint or government of the tongue; it is free to roam at will. Therefore, urges the Psalms, to keep your tongue from evil and speaking lies. The tongue that is held in severe restriction, the tongue that only shapes words that are good and encouraging to others results in quiet and fruitful happiness.

Undisciplined tongues seem to flourish today. And the world is the poorer for it. Yet, our own lives may move to a higher plane simply by a personal revolt from the disorderly conduct of tongues. The best way to affect a departure from the guile and venom that flows freely around us is to exercise one’s self in active good, of words spoken kindly, with pleasantness and grace. The fragrance of our speech will tickle the hearts of others. It may invite them to share in the same wisdom of the Psalms, an invitation to experience a blessed life, full, safe, and abounding in good things.

Joy,

[1] Jowett, Thirsting for the Springs, 188.

Here is an example of the destructive nature of regret. Martha has lost her brother, Lazarus. Rather than accepting that death is inevitable for each of us, that Lazarus’ death was not the result of an unfortunate accident or tragedy, Martha begins to question what could have been done; what might have been executed differently that would have prevented this loss. Martha has engaged in the most common form of grief, the “If only…” cycle of questioning that impedes healing. We are familiar with this form of grief; “If only you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died.” “If only I had arranged things differently.” “If only I had made a different choice, taken another turn.” We recognize Martha’s sentiment as our own. It is a response that flows from unnecessary and harmful personal responsibility.

This appearance of grief is usually born on the morning after a loss or crisis. And it sometimes continues until we draw our final breath—holding us in an unwarranted prison of self-blame. It is a sorrow that drains away vital strength, a grief that consumes our life. The crippling result is the loss of an inward peace and the capacity to meaningfully to live for others. Others who love us, who look to us for encouragement, strength, and direction are deprived of our friendship. We are simply crushed under needless regret. “If only I had called the doctor earlier.” “If only I had noticed the signs, had paid more attention.” One devastating loss now precipitates another. We may still have breath in our lungs but no longer do we bring value to our homes, our communities, or to our network of relationships.

Suppose for a moment that there was something we could have done. Suppose that we could have made a different choice or might have taken another course of action. What then? The question that presses from this passage of scripture is, who is our God? Martha identifies Jesus as, “Lord.” What does the lordship of Jesus mean for us. Martha’s profession of faith, of her belief in Jesus’ capacity as Lord startles. It is a faith in a lord that has limited ability. She confesses—though unintentionally—a belief that Jesus’ redemptive power is only available while Lazarus remained alive, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died.” But her brother has died. Hope in anything more is abandoned. Nothing more can be done, apparently even by Jesus. Jesus didn’t arrive in time.

The Bible tells us that Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus. There has been considerable conjecture as to why Jesus wept. The Bible remains silent on this question. Some have suggested that Jesus simply gave expression to the natural human response to the loss of a dear friend. Others have offered the suggestion that Lazarus’ death provided an entrance into paradise, to everlasting life with God and now, Jesus was about to take that away by bringing Lazarus back to life. Each of these suggestions completely ignore what Jesus heard from the lips of Martha, “if you had been here.” Jesus heard an incomplete faith, “if only.” The very gospel of Jesus’ power is that things that are broken are repaired. If unintentionally we have gone astray, Jesus is the one who makes the crooked straight and gives life where the world only sees death.

Joy,

Several years ago, my friend, Michael Brown, retired from the Marble Collegiate Church in New York City, where he was the senior minister. Retirement implores each of us to examine what we have gathered through our life and forces the decision of what will be retained for a few more years and what will be given away. For Michael, one of the most difficult decisions was what he would do with his professional library—a library built with considerable thought and care over forty years of ministry. Among his large and distinguished collection of books were approximately twenty volumes by Leslie D. Weatherhead, a Methodist pastor of another generation. These volumes had special value for Michael, and he could not simply dispose of them. What he settled upon was asking me if I would add them to my library.

This is not uncommon—passing to our children or dear friends those things that hold rich meaning for us, but we are simply unable to possess any longer. My brother, Wayne, has our mother’s wedding ring and I have my father’s wallet which holds very old pictures of him as a child and of his parents—pictures that were to him of great nostalgic value. Nostalgia is a very natural, deep, and powerful emotion that takes up residence in many of us. The value of nostalgia is that it reminds us from where we come and provides a sense of identity and connection to something much larger than our individual lives. But nostalgia can be dangerous. Nostalgia is dangerous if it entraps us in yesterday; traps us in a yearning to return to the past. By idealizing the past, the present and future begin to grow dim.

The apostle Paul recognizes the potential dangers of nostalgia in these words he writes to the Christians in Corinth; “God has prepared things for those who love him that no eye has seen, or ear has heard, or that haven’t crossed the mind of any human being.” Though the Bible has a rich regard for remembering the past—particularly God’s mighty acts—God desires that our faith be one that leans forward into the future. Paul seeks to assure the Christians in Corinth that the past, however rich their memories may be, is nothing compared to what is to come. God continues to be present in our lives, as God was present in our past. God continues to create, as God created in the past. Therefore, the practice of our faith is to lean forward, not backward as some caught in nostalgia are apt to do.

Today there are frightened and insecure people. They don’t know what the future holds. They cannot grasp the future, cannot see the future. The result is that they cannot manage or manipulate the future. Largely beyond their control, they fear the unknown. At its core, that is what original sin is, that great teaching of the church that is simply the desire to go through life on our own. Fiercely independent, we may love God, but we don’t want to trust God with the navigation of our lives. That belongs to us, or so we wish it would be. The result is fear, fear of what unknown circumstances, health challenges, and loss of loved ones will bring. Paul asks that we let go of our grasp of the future and trust it to God once again. For God does know the future. What is now hidden from us has been prepared for us by God.

Joy,

Whether anything happens in prayer largely depends upon what kind of person we are. Many of us want to live a life of significance—a life that impacts our world in a large or small way. Such a life is rarely achieved without preparation, hard work, and the perseverance to move forward in the midst of challenges and difficulties. The road to significance is often hard. Yet, to recall a well-spoken line of wisdom from a movie some years ago, A League of Their Own, “It’s the hard that makes it great!” The question is one of orientation. Some seek to define for themselves what significance looks like and then move toward that vision. Others seek to know God’s will and then move toward that.

Regardless of our beginning place—fashioning our own desired future or seeking God’s future for us—we want to take full advantage of the years we are given on this earth. Robert Cohn, a character in Ernest Hemingway’s novel, The Sun Also Rises, comments to his friend, “‘Listen Jake,’ he leaned forward on the bar. ‘Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you’ve lived nearly half the time you have to live already?’[1] Urgency has grasped Robert Cohn. Urgency grasps us. Looking back, we make a judgment, an evaluation of where we have come. Life is going by and the question presses, “Are we taking full advantage of it? Are we making a difference?”

If we are the kind of person that lives as we please, as we have fashioned our future, our aspirations, and our will, then the prayers we make will lack power. Prayers are rarely made unless our plans get into a snarl. That is the occasion we pray. We ask God to get us out of it; God is reduced to our celestial office assistant. Then we move forward with our own small plans. We remain unchanged. Ignoring God for a long time until our plans become jammed up is a little different from being a grasping child. The child asks the parent for unreasonable and selfish things. The parent may give what the child asks on occasion when it seems there is no other way to communicate love. But, as the child matures, parents help the child to think reasonably.

Those who seek to find God’s mind and will experience greater power in prayer. Principally, such persons pray because they love God and God’s will. Prayer is a communion between two who seek increasingly to know the other, to please the other. We pay close attention to a spouse or a dear friend to learn about them and to know what they like and dislike. Then we turn the orientation of our life over to causing the other joy. Loving and caring for the other is not separated from life. It becomes our way of life. In the final analysis, prayer implies a conversion, a new orientation to live not solely for oneself but for the other. It is a decision to turn our will over to the will of God. There, our lives find their significance.

Joy,

[1] Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises,18.

A little boy once explained to his minister that he didn’t say his prayers every night because “some nights I don’t want anything.” Many of us are like that little boy. Our view of prayer is a limited one, reduced to asking God for something. Certainly, Jesus invited us to take our request to God in prayer. But that is not all Jesus taught—or demonstrated in his own life—about the subject of prayer. The consequence of an inadequate understanding of prayer is felt in our own lack of spiritual power. We are troubled by doubt, and by fear, and by a sense of weakness to make any real difference in a world of brokenness and need. We miss much of the strength God would provide us through a more expansive understanding—and practice—of prayer.

In this teaching from Mark’s Gospel, Jesus had just finished a hard, demanding day meeting the needs of numerous people. Another awaited him. How could Jesus be ready for it? The answer is right here in this one sentence of Scripture; “Jesus rose and went to a deserted place where he could be alone in prayer.” Conspicuously absent is any record of the content of Jesus’ prayer. In other prayers that Jesus offered, we are told the substance of the prayer. Perhaps the most familiar prayer is the one Jesus offered the night he was betrayed by Judas, arrested, and placed on trial during the night. It is a prayer that is familiar because we have offered it so often ourselves: “Take this suffering from me.” But here, in this account of Jesus at prayer, we are not allowed in on the conversation. All we know is that Jesus got up early in the morning to be alone with God.

This little verse teaches more about prayer than most realize. Rather than distract us with the actual dialog between Jesus and God, we are left only with the fact that it was important to Jesus to be alone with God. Before another day of ministry, before another day of addressing the great need of the world, Jesus addressed his own need to be alone with God. Regular time alone with God was the source of Jesus’ incredible spiritual power. Here, Jesus teaches us that prayer is more than our formal presentation to God of our various needs. Prayer is a demonstration of a life that is lived with God. Our failure with prayer is that we have reduced prayer to asking rather than understanding that prayer is a real and vital relationship with the divine.

Mark has one additional insight on the wisdom of prayer before we leave this story. Moving the narrative quickly along, we are told that Simon and the other disciples tracked Jesus down, told Jesus that other people, with their various needs, have gathered looking for Jesus, and that Jesus surprises the disciples by announcing that he is going in the other direction. What is apparent is that time alone with God in prayer supplied Jesus with more than spiritual power. Prayer infused Jesus with fresh clarity and focus upon God’s intention for Jesus. Jesus was now to go to the nearby villages so that he may preach there also. “That’s why I’ve come,” Jesus declared. It is easy to respond to the “asks” of those around us, people asking us to meet their needs. It is the greater wisdom to discern God’s intention for us, in prayer, and to respond faithfully.

Joy,

If we come to a throne, our posture must be that of deep reverence. Continuing today is the demonstration of respect and reverence as world leaders come before a king or queen – reverence demonstrated by a simple bow. It may be a bow of the head or a bow from the waist. Yet, what is expected is that any approach before royalty is accompanied by homage and honor. In the instance of prayer, the royal one we approach is the highest of all royalty, the King of Kings, says the prophet, Isaiah. Thomas Long, a wise interpreter of scripture, writes that sometimes contemporary Christians, schooled on a tame and domesticated picture of God, forget the sheer audaciousness of human beings daring to approach the holy, and thus we engage in prayer with all the casual nonchalance of ordering at a fast-food restaurant.[ii]

Though we come before “the throne of favor” with humility and reverence, we do come before a throne. Small change found in the sofa and left-over crumbs are not dispensed in a place of royalty. More, we are present before God at God’s invitation; we a called God’s children. That knowledge removes any hesitancy to ask God for anything. That knowledge also removes any expectation that all we can hope for are small favors – small coins or breadcrumbs. God’s invitation suggests that we are to appear with enlarged expectations! Yet, beware of imagining that God’s thoughts are our thoughts or that God’s ways are our ways. Ask for great things because you stand before a great God. But always pray as Jesus prayed, “let it be what you want.” (Matthew 26:42)

Joy,

[i] Karl Barth, Prayer: 50^th Anniversary Edition (Louisville and London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002) xiii.

[ii] Thomas G. Long: Hebrews: Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1997) 64.

When the king in Alice in Wonderland was asked where to begin, he said gravely, “Begin at the beginning… and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” Begin at the beginning. Naturally, that guidance seems reasonable. That is, until you have to actually open your mouth, and speak. With thoughts racing from one place to another, it quickly becomes apparent that there are many fine places to begin. Jesus tells his disciples, here in Acts, “you will be my witnesses.” Where do the disciples begin? Where are we to begin? Sharing our faith in Jesus seems reasonable until we actually confront that moment – that moment when we are asked, “Who is Jesus?”

That moment came to me one Easter morning. I was enjoying breakfast in a Doylestown, PA diner, looking over the message I would preach in just a few hours. Mary, the waitress assigned to the table where I was seated, approached with coffee and said, “I guess this is your big day, pastor!” “I guess so,” I remarked. Then Mary asked, “What is Easter all about anyway?” Initially, I dismissed her question, not thinking she was serious. But I was mistaken; Mary was very serious. It was then I took the time to really notice her, to look into her eyes and really see her. I will not forget those eyes—eyes that betrayed her silence; silence of considerable pain. “Where do I begin?” I thought. I began with her pain. “Easter means that you can stop beating yourself up. Whatever guilt you may have now, whatever mistakes you have made in life, Easter means that you are to stop immediately from beating yourself up. God has removed it all.”

“But there is more,” I said to Mary. “Easter is an invitation to pay attention to Jesus.” I shared with Mary that as she paid attention to Jesus, by reading of him in the Bible, she will discover that she will want to be more than she is now. “Pay attention long enough to Jesus and you will experience a compulsion to be something more; you will begin to live differently.”  Mary needed to hear that Jesus doesn’t leave a life unchanged. Any significant time spent with Jesus always results in a desire to be made new. “Your whole world will appear different. You will want to be different.”

“Finally, Mary, begin to follow Jesus as you learn about him.” I shared with her that what that means is to “do what he asks in his teaching.” Imagine Jesus as a mentor in life and do everything that is asked of you. Something inexplicable happens when someone commits to doing all that Jesus’ asks: they receive an uncommon power to do so. People who obey all that they understand of Jesus’ teachings receive a power from outside of themselves; a power that actually makes them something so much more than what they were. Mary began to cry and asked how to begin. That is when I knew I had come to the end. And there, in a diner in Doylestown, PA, Mary gave her life to Jesus.

Joy,

“I’m not saying this because I need anything, for I have learned how to be content in any circumstance. I know the experience of being in need and of having more than enough; I have learned the secret to being content in any and every circumstance, whether full or hungry or whether having plenty or being poor. I can endure all these things through the power of the one who gives me strength.”

Philippians 4:11–13

Have you noticed how many people have delayed their happiness? They seem to believe that if they can achieve a little more success, acquire a little more wealth, or marry the right person then they will possess happiness. Happiness, they believe, is what follows effort, time, and, perhaps, a little luck. It is as though happiness is somewhere out in front of everyone who is industrious enough to pursue it. Happiness is something to grasp, they believe, and their minds remain fixed upon it until they have taken ownership of it. Striving day upon day toward the possession of happiness, what they miss is that the secret of happiness is already present in the lives of those who long for it.

Paul’s letter to the Philippian Church provides the secret of happiness—as God’s people, we are to live in humility, looking out for others more than for ourselves. That is a great reversal of the commonly accepted formula for happiness. Essentially, Paul teaches that if we are always chasing after happiness, happiness always remains beyond our grasp. On the other hand, if we occupy ourselves with looking out for others, adding value to other people, and promoting their welfare, happiness quietly joins God’s people and takes-up residence in them. Paul is urging God’s people to break free of the tiny little world of themselves and join the great enterprise of God’s work in the world.

Here, in the fourth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Philippian Church, Paul further develops the secret to happiness. Having shared the secret of happiness, disclosed in the activity of Jesus who accepted humility to become like us, for the purposes of restoring us to God, Paul points to a mysterious strength that converges in our service to one another. That strength comes not from any person—or from the community of God’s people—but from the outside. It is God’s strength. There is far more going on when God’s people join with one another for the promotion of the welfare of others. The same Christ who became human to serve now empowers and enables God’s people in their service to one another.

Shortly following the death of his wife, J. R. Carmichael entered a nursing home. Yet, if you inquired about him, you learned that he is never in his room. It seems that each morning Mr. Carmichael would shower, dress, eat breakfast, and then move from one residential room to another. In each room, Mr. Carmichael spoke with the resident about their family, read the Bible to them, prayed with them, and told them that he loved them. Then it was off to the next room to do the same thing. Mr. Carmichael missed his wife every day but he never waited for happiness. Happiness found him, as he loved others deeply.

Joy,