Pastoral Prayer 10/23/2022

Posted on by albrooke

We serve a God who is vastly more subtle than we understand.

When we think we understand what he is doing in our lives or in the world, he is often acting with purposes and to ends which we have not seen or comprehended.

The grand narratives of the Bible are full of events in which it seems that God is doing one thing when in truth he is doing something else. Think about:

  • Joseph being sold into slavery, wrongly accused and thrown into prison . . . and then being elevated to a high position in which he could deliver mercy to his family: “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.” It appeared that God had abandoned Joseph, but in reality he was delivering Joseph (and his family as well).
  • The nation which came from Abraham being enslaved in Egypt, . . . and after 400 years becoming a large nation united and able to endure hardship, prepared to enter a covenant with God. It appeared that God had abandoned the nation, but in reality he was preparing it for the Law and the Land.
  • That nation eventually rebelling in so many ways and over such a long period of time that first Assyria and then Babylon invaded . . . and then after many years returning, chastened, to the Land. Again, it appeared that God had abandoned the nation, but in reality he was purifying it for true worship.
  • The people of God declining into subjugation to mighty, cruel Rome . . . and then after many years being given a delivering Messiah. Yet again it appeared that God had abandoned his people, but in reality he was preparing them for Messiah. (And yet, even then, God was not doing the thing they expected, since the Messiah had not – not yet – come to make a physical deliverance, but to offer a spiritual deliverance.)

I could go on and on. I could tell you about the lives of Job and Jacob and David and Daniel and Paul and John Mark . . . .

I remind you of these things which you know quite well, because we tend to forget that this subtlety is a part of how God acts in our own lives.

Or at least I forget it all too often, and so I miss giving God glory for the unexpected ways he delivers. I forgot yesterday.

Mostly, then, this is a prayer for me. I invite you to make it your prayer as well.

Let’s pray.

Holy Father,

I come to you who are the Master of the Universe, for you made it and sustain it and direct it, and you are in the process of redeeming it and delivering it in ways too deep and subtle for me to comprehend.

When I am frustrated and irritated and angry with the events in my life, when I blame my clients or co-workers, my family, the waiter, the cashier, the President, the governor, the society . . . Let me remember that you are the God who delivers – not often in the way or time I expect, but always completely and in your own time.

When I am frightened and uncertain about things clearly outside of my control, including my health and the health of those close to me, the economy and world affairs . . . Let me remember that you are the God who delivers – not often in the way or time I expect, but always completely and in your own time.

When I am discouraged and weary of struggling against my own sin and despairing of my own failings, and nothing seems to change . . . Let me remember that you are the God who delivers – not often in the way or time I expect, but always completely and in your own time.

Let me remember that you are God . . . and I am not,

And your ways are not my ways,

And you see more and further than I,

And you are the God who delivers,

Always,

Completely,

In your time and in your way,

Because you are the one who loves me more than I ever comprehend.

Help me to rest in your love this day and this week.

AMEN.

Losing track of Jesus

Posted on by albrooke

finding-godI seldom write “bad” reviews, feeling that (1) writing a book would be a hard feat to pull off and (2) I don’t want to encourage people to spend money on a book simply by making the cover pop up on their feed.  This is not exactly a counterexample to those feelings, just a warning that this is not the book I thought it was when I started it,* and I am not recommending it.

Mike McHargue, Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost my Faith and Found It Again through Science (2016) describes the author’s path from fundamentalist Christianity to atheism to . . . well, it’s hard to say exactly.  Notwithstanding the subtitle, McHargue does not claim to have found the same faith again, but something quite different.  He ends up with a faith which is uncertain about the Bible, uncertain about the resurrection, uncertain about hell, uncertain about whether a personal creator God actually exists.  His faith at the end is not in any way orthodox.

“What I’ve learned to do is be certain that I am uncertain. To revel in the fuzziness of my understanding of the world. And to look with great anticipation toward the next moment I’ll figure out that I’m wrong about something. And that lets you get on this trajectory where you just become more and more and more open.”

I think that to his credit, he would agree with what I wrote in the paragraph before the quotation.  He seems to be trying very hard to be honest about his life, and that is the best part of the book.  He describes the anger that church Christians expressed when he decided (based on The God Delusion and other books) that he (a deacon and a Sunday School teacher) had become an atheist.  He eventually describes the similar anger he felt from his online atheist/anti-theist community when he began to travel to his new faith.  The turning point is a mystical experience which he has on a beach – as troubling to him as it is overwhelming.  He describes this openly, though it does not fit with his self image (“science Mike”), and it does nothing to persuade the skeptical reader.

The problem, quite frankly, is that by the end of the book McHargue has created a God that is smaller than he is.

He seems to feel (and who hasn’t felt this way?) that when he reads something shocking in the Bible (the commands in Joshua to utterly destroy the Canaanites, for example), that he is qualified to decide that that, at least, cannot be part of God’s character.  Part of what Christianity would have traditionally called God’s holiness is trimmed away because it does not fit well with what we (McHargue and I, as 21st century educated Americans) think is “acceptable.”

But the God of historical, orthodox Christianity is first and foremost a God who requires obedience to a standard we do not find entirely agreeable.

McHargue hasn’t yet found his way back to that.  Then again, maybe the God of all grace is not done with him.

*I thought it would be more like Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic (2013) [link], which I do recommend.