The Power of Prayer

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bad, difficult to love, enemy, good, just, love, love thy neighbor, sensitive, strife, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, unjust

Perhaps I am more sensitive these days because of all the strife in my own country and the world, but it seems that Jesus is repeatedly pushing his point about how we are to love. Today, again from the fifth chapter of Matthew’s gospel, I can practically hear the urgency in his voice when he tells us that we are called not just to love those who are easy to love but also those we would name “enemy.” He leaves no space for misinterpretation of the message. God, he says, “makes the sun rise on the bad and the good and causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust.” Then come his questions:

If you love those who love you, what recompense will you have?…If you greet your brothers only, what is unusual about that??

In trying to get a handle on just how serious a challenge this is, I create examples of people I might cross the street to avoid. One might be a man dressed in black pants and a muscle shirt who is covered with tattoos and chains for jewelry, smelling of alcohol and/or cigarettes. I ask myself how I would greet this man. Not knowing anything about him, I would probably jump to the conclusion that he is a gang member and just that designation has taught me to fear him. Then there are those I don’t need to create because I hear about them and their actions on the news at night. Just hearing the name Bashar al-Assad is for me what we used to call a “near occasion of sin.”

So is there a way to “love” those “neighbors?” I can think of two possibilities. The first answer for me is always prayer; I could pray for them. (Noting that I say “I could pray” points out to me that I have not – thus far – taken Jesus seriously on this point.) Then I would have to get serious about how to pray for them. What would I ask for? Their conversion, perhaps? Or my conversion toward them, seeing them as human beings, deserving of my consideration?

As a start, though, perhaps I ought to pray for those people in my daily life who are difficult to love, and treat them as the beloved of God. By practicing on those cases, maybe it would become more possible to approach “my enemy.” Maybe the guy with the chains is part of a very charitable Harley Davidson group – a fact I wouldn’t know unless I approached and greeted him and got him talking…On the other hand, I will likely never meet the world leaders that I find most difficult so everything in that realm is just theory. But there is still my prayer…Do I really believe in the efficacy of it? Might I (at least) be changed by consistent and sincere practice? I will never know, I guess, until I try.

 

 

 

 

 

Cooperation

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bad, division, Ezekiel, good, heart, new heart, new spirit, passivity, prophet, reconciliation, responsibility, sins, spiritual path, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, unity, violence

I’ve always been partial to Ezekiel’s verse in chapter 36 that has God saying, “I will take from you your stony hearts and give you natural hearts…” It’s something I hold onto when I’m feeling ungenerous or grumpy – or worse. This morning however, in the earlier text from Ezekiel, chapter 18: 21-28, I read a serious message about bad and good behavior and the consequences of turning in one direction or the other. In case we miss it in the first reading, the verse before the gospel says this: Cast away from you all the crimes you have committed, says the Lord, and make for yourselves a new heart and a new spirit. (18:31) The lesson for today, then, is that we have a responsibility to work toward restoring ourselves to God’s image rather than letting God do all the work.

There is more to this story, however, that resolves the apparent contradiction in the above comments. Why did Ezekiel change his mind from chapter 18 to chapter 36? The story goes that Ezekiel became a prophet in Babylon during the exile, and “his first task was to prepare his fellow countrymen in Babylon for the final destruction of Jerusalem, which they believed to be inviolable. Accordingly, the first part of his book consists of reproaches for Israel’s past and present sins and the confident prediction of yet a further devastation of the land of promise and a more general exile. In 587 BCE, when Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem, Ezekiel was vindicated before his unbelieving compatriots.” (New American Bible commentary, p. 972)

The good news of Ezekiel’s prophecy which I quoted at the beginning of this reflection is that God never does abandon the human race, but there are questions that arise, I think, from a comparison of the Israelites’ situation to the state of our fractured nation today. Have we been shaken enough by the division and violence that continues to occur in our country and the world to wake up? Will we take the responsibility to change our own hearts and cooperate with God in moving toward unity and care for one another before we devolve into a people who will lose any semblance of humanity? I know those questions sound alarmist and dire but the story of the Israelites this morning calls me to look deeply into my own spirit and ask myself about my behavior. Am I so sure that I am “above the fray” by saying my life is on a spiritual path? Do I avoid difficult conversations because I think I have the right answers and don’t trust people on “the other side” to be rational about differences? Is praying for movement toward peace and reconciliation enough to do if I am unwilling to leave my prayer space to reach out to anyone I see as unsafe or uncomfortable? The blindness of the Israelites and the severity of Ezekiel’s message this morning have touched me as never before and shaken my passivity as one who believes that God will always save us. I still know that truth but now ask myself how long I am willing to watch what we are doing to each other before I give God some active help in the effort of our reconciliation. A sobering question for this first Friday of Lent…