Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri

The Worship of God · July 25, 2010

Litany of Praise

From Psalm 85

This place where we stand is hallowed ground, a blessing received.

   Speak your ways of peace to our waiting hearts.

Steadfast love and faithfulness meet; righteousness and peace join together.

   Righteous harmony is as close as the ground and falls down like rain.

Let us pray:

   Your ways are goodness and truth and your path the way to peace.

   Set our feet upon that way that we might delight in you! Amen.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost;

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,

World without end. Amen. Amen.

Pastoral Prayer

Tim Carson

O God, we enter into this time of holiness receiving your gift of silence.

[A time of silence for personal prayer.]

Have thine own way, Lord. Have thine own way, you the potter, and we the clay. Hear the prayer of our hearts, O Mystery beyond Knowing, you who show your face to us. Hear our prayers, the ones that we utter, and the ones we can barely speak. Go to the broken places, O God, and bring your healing balm. Strengthen our will and our purpose that we might find our peace in you. And when the rising doubt clouds our imagination, bring clarity again, by the power of your grace.

So, we pray in the name of the One who taught us to pray, saying…

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: for thine is the kingdom, the power, and glory, forever. Amen.

New Testament Lesson

Luke 11:5-13

And he said to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.’ And he answers from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.’ I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.

“So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

Message

Playbook for Prayer

Tim Carson

If you want to see a movie that will raise the hair on the back of your neck, it is Winter’s Bone.  It’s been playing at the Rag Tag Theatre. If you are not courageous, don’t go. If you are, do. It is magnificent. It was filmed in Missouri, the deep Ozarks. If you go to Lebanon, Missouri, and drop due south toward the Arkansas border, you will have the sense of it all. It was all filmed on site. The story is about a seventeen-year-old girl who is living with her mentally-ill mother, who can barely function, and two younger siblings in the absence of her meth-cooking father. When she discovers that her father has put up their house as collateral on his jail bond, but has disappeared and will most likely miss his court date and lose the house – their only means of taking care of themselves – she embarks on dangerous journeys to find him.

In a sub-culture where people take care of their own and an unwritten code determines the law of the land, she enters into a relentless search for her father, knocking on doors, most of which are slammed, closed, or barely opened to her. There is great danger in her knocking and she is punished for it, harmed for it. But her cause is righteous and courage is unfailing, so her knocking persists and she never gives up. Because she is persistent and righteous, her search leads in the right direction, but sometimes in horrifying ways.

And that’s the essence of Jesus’ parable this morning: What if, Jesus said, guests showed up in the middle of the night, traveling as they did to avoid the scorching sun? It is a knock at your door. The knock comes from one who is traveling in the middle of the night, because in the middle-East, it is too hot to travel during the daytime. Well, heck, in Columbia, Missouri, it is too hot to travel in the daytime right now. So there is the knock at midnight. And what if you were unprepared and didn’t have even one loaf of bread to share? To what ends would you go to provide something?

This might not seem like an emergency to you or me, but to a Middle Easterner, it represented a hospitality emergency. The solution was to go to a neighbor’s house and seek help, to beat on the door until they answered. The problem is that the neighbor is not highly motivated to help; they are all tucked in for the night and the kids are asleep. Friendship is not carrying much weight at this point. But, says Jesus, when friendship fails, persistence takes over. Finally, the door is opened not because those inside are willing to do anything to help a friend, but because they are irritated with the knocking.

So it was with Winter’s Bone – it was not the virtue of those to whom the girl went for help that eventually caused them to help. It was her unrelenting persistence and their irritation, fear of exposure, and embarrassment that caused them eventually to respond.

And then Luke ties a famous saying to this parable: Ask and it will be given to you, Seek and you will find, Knock and the door will be opened to you. If your children ask for good things, you as a parent won’t give them bad ones. So God, who is infinitely good, will provide good for his children.

As regards the life of faith and prayer in particular, almost everything of significance takes place at that intersection represented by the door and our knocking on it. And it happens over and over again, a repeating story. This morning, I want to offer three different perspectives on that sacred threshold. Imagine them as different instruments in the same orchestra or a compilation of individual artists all working in the same studio. Their voices span 17 centuries and three continents. Listen to the voices before the door and imagine these perspectives that are coming to you around the door, and the knocking at the door.

1.      The first voices describe what I call the fearsome boundary, something terrible that we do not want to engage, the object that fills us with dread. It is so awful that we don’t want to look at it. It is so uncomfortable that we do not want to allow it into our mind’s eye. It is something we want to avoid.

The songwriter, composer, and poet, Daniel Beaty, is known for his poem, Knock, Knock. His words speak of life’s looming obstacles, in particular those of a child whose father was incarcerated and absent:

I jump out of Mama’s arms

and run joyously towards my papa’s

only to be confronted by this window.

I knock knock trying to break through the glass,

trying to get to my father.

I knock knock as my mama pulls me away

before my papa even says a word.

There are life-defining obstacles against which we knock our whole life-long. They stand as barriers of reference, obstacles to peace, the reality that seems to name every other reality because they exist in the first place. And we struggle to allow them to transform, change, become something different in light of every other experience we have, every moving of the Spirit that might transform them, as Howard Thurman says, from a shaft of frustration into a beam of light.

A second voice from the fearsome boundary comes from Mary Oliver, and it is a coincidence that her boundary revolves around father as well, in her poem, A Visitor (New and Selected Poems, Beacon, 1992):

My father, for example,

who was young once

and blue-eyed,

returns

on the darkest of nights

to the porch and knocks

wildly at the door,

and if I answer

I must be prepared

for his waxy face,

for his lower lip

swollen with bitterness.

And so, for a long time,

I did not answer,

but slept fitfully

between his hours of rapping.

But finally there came the night

when I rose out of my sheets

and stumbled down the hall.

The door fell open

and I knew I was saved

and could bear him,

pathetic and hollow,

with even the least of his dreams

frozen inside him,

and the meanness gone.

And I greeted him and asked him

into the house,

and lit the lamp,

and looked into his blank eyes

in which at last

I saw what a child must love,

I saw what love might have done

had we loved in time.

Of course, because she is the remarkable poet she is, we have no idea whether she let her actual father into her house after long knocking, or if it was her haunted memory of him, or just her coming to terms with him finally as she lets him inside the door. But it doesn’t matter, really, because we all have to realize that the fearsome boundary comes as others knock on our door, as the disappeared parts of our life knock to be recognized, and we long to stay with heads buried under the sheets, anything but face the pain or worse. But it’s only then, finally, when we allow some access, that we might receive the gift of seeing “what love might have done had we loved in time.”

These are the fearsome boundaries where we knock against the unbreakable barrier and where we barricade ourselves against the knocking, the place where souls are won and lost, where life is mortgaged in the effort to avoid pain, or life is transformed as some crack in the door of grace appears.

2.      The second tier of these voices describes doors that cover hidden openings. A door only exists because it fills an opening, which means that doors are intrinsically hopeful, covering an entrance.

T.S. Eliot wrote in his Little Gidding (Collected Poems, Harcourt Brace, 1991),

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, remembered gate…

Eliot reminds us that at the end we return to where we started, so the door that we are standing in front of now is the same one before which we have stood before. Does your life ever seem like the movie, Ground Hog’s Day? We have come around to it again, like a revolving door in a department store, and though the issue, the reality, the challenge may look the same, it is possible that we are not, since we’ve journeyed far since then. There is the hope, the possibility, that this time it can be different, that however familiar it seems, it is also new because we are new, new to this old door, this opening.

So following Jesus’ encouragement to ask, seek and knock, we realize that we have, perhaps in different ways, already asked and sought and knocked in this very same place before. But like the man in the parable, we continue, persistently, waiting for answers, waiting to find, waiting for a way to open before us. Sometimes it seems to take a lifetime, while in other cases the way opens before us instantaneously.

Billy Collins speaks of revealing the hidden this way in his poem, Splitting Wood (Sailing Alone Around the Room, Random House, 2001):

I want to say there is nothing

like the sudden opening of wood…

And rarely, if the wood

accepts the blade without conditions,

the two pieces keep their balance

in spite of the blow,

remain stunned on the block

as if they cannot believe their division…

Now rushed into this brightness

as if by a shutter

that, once opened, can never be closed.

Knocking on that door dares to seek something we can’t see, not just more of what we already do. It waits for the splitting of the wood, for the hidden power of God and life to reveal itself. The door of faith, the door of prayer, covers hidden realities and truths that are yet to be revealed.

I suggest that this doorway cannot be accessed through rationality or reason. Instead, it depends on spiritual intuition and spiritual imagination. What is on the other side of that door for you?

3.      The final tier of voices are perhaps the deepest, the most mystical, and they come from surprising sources. And they describe what I call knocking from a different direction. We preoccupy ourselves with knocking – our longing, our desire, our need to know, to have certainty. But what are we knocking on and how? There are those poets who remind us that we have it all backwards, which is fairly normal for us. We often start backwards and then turn ourselves around in time.

The first two voices are surprising ones, because they are such classical “fathers” of the church – Augustine and Aquinas – but here are surprising testimonies from both that cause us to see everything in a different light. First, from Augustine:

I came to love you too late. What did I know?

You were inside me, and I was out of my body and mind looking for you.

You were inside me, but I was not inside you…

Here is the theologian who finally falls on his knees and realizes that what he has been seeking has been there all along. He finally realizes that what he seeks is not outside, but inside, and has been all along. In fact, it has been his estrangement from his deepest self that maintained the estrangement with God.

            Aquinas puts it in a similar way:

“Ask anything,” my Lord said to me.

And my mind and heart thought deeply for a second

Then replied with just one question,

“When?”

God’s arms then opened up and I entered myself.

I entered myself when I entered Christ.

And having learned compassion, I allowed my soul to stay.

Both Augustine and Aquinas have these profound moments when they realize that their knocking on the door is not really a knocking on the outside, but on the inside, and that if the door to God opens it will be found in the deepest reaches of our own being, at the root, or base of who we are, what Paul Tillich calls the “center of my being united with the ground of all being.”

            And that’s what the Sufi mystic Rumi means when he writes:

Living on the edge of insanity

Wanting to know reasons

I knock on the door and it opens

I’ve been knocking from the inside.

We’re really knocking from the inside, inside ourselves, not knocking on a door outside ourselves. When we ask, seek, and knock, it is on this door that is so very close at hand, the door to our deepest selves that is at once the door to Christ, the door to God.

So whether we encounter the fearsome boundary, something terrible that we do not want to engage but which still calls to us, keeps knocking, keeps asking that it might be transformed; or the door that covers the hidden opening, someplace we may have been before and return to one more time, revealing the hidden like the inside of the split wood; we finally realize that we are knocking from the inside, that the door is hinged on our hearts and to go there is to go to God, and if anyone is going to open us it has to be us.

It’s like knocking on your neighbor’s door at midnight only to wake up from a dream and realize it’s been your house all along and the bread is inside, the bread of life come down from heaven. There it was inside your own house all along as you kept walking over to the neighbors. If you will give good gifts to your children, do you think the Spirit will do any less for you? Don’t stop asking, seeking, knocking, until you realize that you don’t need to.

This is the Word of the Lord for us today. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Benediction

And wonders of his love, and wonders of his love, and wonders of his love. Go in peace, Amen.