00:00:00.000 - 00:00:36.000

[Music] Jubilee and the Life of Prayer. A message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. [Music] Leviticus 25 is one of the most radical chapters in the scripture.

00:00:36.000 - 00:00:59.000

In it, the concept of jubilee is presented to us. Every 50 years, all land is to be returned to the original owners without compensation. Now, in an agricultural society like Israel's, land was capital. At the beginning, the land, the capital, was distributed equally among all the people.

00:00:59.000 - 00:01:25.000

And Leviticus 25 announces that God wants that equality to continue. What God says in Leviticus 25 is this, "I own everything. No one owns anything that I have not loaned him, and I am right now calling in all of your IOUs. And we will begin again where we first began, and there will be economic justice on my earth."

00:01:25.000 - 00:01:48.000

Now, this principle is quite radical, especially in a laissez-faire society like our own. It asserts the sovereignty of God and the equality of all people before him. It also asserts that all people are to live in accord with that equality. That is, we are to live in brotherhood and cooperation and love.

00:01:48.000 - 00:02:16.000

And it is for this reason that God indicates in Leviticus 25 at verse 9 that this year of jubilee is to begin on the great day of atonement. Now, the day of atonement was the day on which the people would repent and God would forgive them for their sin. He would give to them a new spiritual beginning.

00:02:16.000 - 00:02:49.000

Now, the point of this is, jubilee calls all folks to be in reconciliation with one another. But jubilee begins on the day of atonement, which is the day in which everyone is in reconciliation with God. What is being said in the passage is this, that there can be no real love between humans, no reconciliation on the horizontal plane until humans are reconciled with God,

00:02:49.000 - 00:03:15.000

until there is reconciliation on the vertical plane. Reconciliation with God is prior to and the energy for reconciliation among mankind. Now, I call this to your minds tonight because Lynn Tucker asked me to talk about the theme of jubilee and the life of prayer or personal devotion.

00:03:15.000 - 00:03:43.000

Prayer is the most intimate contact between God and mankind. Prayer is the fruit of that vertical reconciliation between God and man. Jubilee, then, all of us being reconciled to one another, can only happen when God and man are reconciled, when God and man are at peace, and the sign of that peace is prayer,

00:03:43.000 - 00:04:03.000

which is the way God and mankind love one another. Now, please notice how I am defining prayer. I'm saying that prayer is the way that God and mankind love one another. Prayer is not those obscene performances that we see at presidential inaugurations

00:04:03.000 - 00:04:23.000

and here in locker rooms and before Rotary Club luncheons and in some churches. And it's also not that private act of devotion, which is usually little more than auto-suggestion or some type of motivational manipulation. These acts, both public and private, are at one and this.

00:04:23.000 - 00:04:45.000

In both of them, prayer is principally an act of men. God is some kind of object, almost a victim, a mere respondent to our petitions. God is made dependent on our prayers, on our overtures. And to do this is to mock God and to profane him.

00:04:45.000 - 00:05:03.000

Prayer is the relationship which God initiates and which God constitutes by his love for mankind. He is the primary and definitive actor. Prayer does not begin with men and end with God.

00:05:03.000 - 00:05:29.000

It begins with the love of God and ends with men when they respond in word and deed to his love. Prayer is where God's love is echoed in the lives of his children. Now, that echo may be verbal or it may be a matter of deed. The vocabulary may be a number of words or of things done.

00:05:29.000 - 00:05:55.000

But regardless of which vocabulary is used, whether it is said in syllable or in service, prayer is the reflection of God's love. We respond to God by corresponding with God, with our lips and with our lives. Now, the supreme example of this, of course, is our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

00:05:55.000 - 00:06:19.000

And in order to understand this, we must understand Jesus' concept of God. Now, I'm speaking now of Jesus under the limitations of his flesh, Jesus as a man, not as the only begotten Son, the sublime second person of the Trinity. When Jesus took upon himself flesh, he thought as a man.

00:06:19.000 - 00:06:36.000

What was his human conception of God? Well, it was very much the same as most first-century Jews. That is, he thought of God prophetically. God is in conflict with men because of the things, the terrible things that men do to one another.

00:06:36.000 - 00:06:52.000

There was an apocalyptic dimension to it. God is going to come at the end of time and execute justice. And there was also what is called a sapiential dimension. That is, God is a kind God who provides and supplies man's daily needs.

00:06:52.000 - 00:07:13.000

All of these aspects can be found in Jesus' thinking. But all of these aspects are subordinate to one overwhelming idea. The view of God which most captured the heart of Jesus and which therefore came most frequently to his lips was God as the God of grace.

00:07:13.000 - 00:07:40.000

In teaching after teaching and parable after parable, Jesus speaks of the glorious love of God and of the immeasurable and unimaginable dimensions of it. God's love for Jesus is so great that it makes all things possible. Once Jesus was warning of the way in which wealth can kill the soul,

00:07:40.000 - 00:08:02.000

and one of his hearers asked, "Can the rich be saved?" And Jesus answered, "For man it is impossible, but not for God, for with God all things are possible." Now notice, to Jesus the impossible is not some miracle. It's not some supernatural event.

00:08:02.000 - 00:08:23.000

It is the fact that God loves so much that even those who are choked with their own wealth, even those who worship themselves because of their own power, even people like that can be saved. So great is God's love.

00:08:23.000 - 00:08:49.000

For Jesus, the great miracle is that the transcended God, the holy and the incomprehensible God, the omnipotent and sovereign God, is a God of love. "Alas," he says to the Pharisees, "you forget justice and the love of God." And this great and glorious God that Jesus teaches us about,

00:08:49.000 - 00:09:09.000

Jesus calls Abba, which we might translate more accurately, Papa. Now we think very easily of Jesus teaching us to call God Father or Papa, but we forget how very unusual that is. He could have called God King or Lord or Jehovah or Ruler of rulers,

00:09:09.000 - 00:09:33.000

but instead he chooses the nominative Papa. And thus he says to us that the best way to see God is not in terms of God's beauty, not in terms of his power or his perfection or his sovereignty, but in terms of his love. And Jesus defines this love as it is extended especially to the suffering,

00:09:33.000 - 00:09:52.000

to the lowly and the weak and the powerless in the world. And when Jesus did this, of course, he was echoing all of the Old Testament. At the Exodus, God brought forth a people called slaves. On Sinai, God called his people to be the servants of all the world's weak.

00:09:52.000 - 00:10:08.000

When God judged and punished Israel across its history, it was always for the abuse of the powerless. When God came in Jesus Christ, he came in poverty and in weakness. And when at last his Son first spoke to the world in his first sermon,

00:10:08.000 - 00:10:30.000

he announced that he had come to proclaim release to the captives and to free the oppressed. In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says that the poor and the powerless are blessed, and he pronounces maledictions on those who do not sow love, on those who use their power of whatever kind to dominate other people.

00:10:30.000 - 00:10:53.000

Now, these words of Jesus aren't just ethical formulas. These are theological in origin. In other words, because God is love, he will not tolerate, Jesus teaches us, unloving, oppressive living. Jesus teaches us by his Word and Deed that the reality of God is love,

00:10:53.000 - 00:11:14.000

and that God is concerned for all the world's hurting people. And this means, among other things, that the way to the heart of God is by loving as God does. Love for mankind is the way of access to God. Love is prayer.

00:11:14.000 - 00:11:34.000

When the Pharisees criticized Jesus for eating with sinners, Jesus said, "It is mercy that God desires, not sacrifice." To those who are angry and empty of love, Jesus said, "Go and be reconciled to your brother before you bring your gift to the altar."

00:11:34.000 - 00:11:56.000

To anyone who wants to pray, Christ says, "When you stand to pray, forgive anyone, so that God in turn may forgive you." When some argued that Jesus had desecrated the Sabbath day, Christ replied, "Though the worship of God is good and right, God's first concern is never for himself, but for his children.

00:11:56.000 - 00:12:19.000

Even the Sabbath was not made for him; it was made for his children." Again and again the point is made. God is love, and no one can have communion with God who does not love. We are to correspond in our lives to the love that is in his.

00:12:19.000 - 00:12:42.000

Now, perhaps the most astonishing evidence of this is seen in this fact. Jesus very rarely spoke of loving God. And when he did speak about loving God, he always spoke of it in terms of loving other people. To the Pharisees he said, "Woe to you!

00:12:42.000 - 00:13:07.000

You tithe everything down to the smallest plant in your garden, but you neglect justice and the love of God." To the rich young ruler who asked about eternal life and how to gain it, Jesus replied, "Not that we are referring to any of the first three commandments which tell of our obligation to God, not to have other gods, not to make graven images, not to take his name in vain.

00:13:07.000 - 00:13:30.000

Instead, Jesus refers to those commandments that speak of the obligations which are to exist person to person, the love that is to exist among the children of God. He says, 'Keep this love, the love of your neighbor, and then you will have fellowship with God.'" And surely the most significant passage in this regard is in Mark 12,

00:13:30.000 - 00:13:51.000

where Christ is asked what the greatest commandment was. And he replies that the great commandment is to love God and your neighbor as yourself. These two commandments, he says, are like unto one another. And the critical experts in studying this passage, recognizing that it has been written and rewritten across the years,

00:13:51.000 - 00:14:13.000

have brought it down to a final redaction, which indicates that the way this passage probably originally read, in the earliest manuscripts, is this. A scribe said to Jesus, "What is the greatest commandment of all?" And Jesus replied, "It is this. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no greater commandment."

00:14:13.000 - 00:14:34.000

And no one, the passage closed, dared ask him anything further. It's just this idea that Paul picks up and amplifies when he writes to the Galatians in the fifth chapter, summing up the whole law of God, and he says, "The whole law may be fulfilled in one saying, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'"

00:14:34.000 - 00:14:57.000

And in Romans 13, Paul writes, "The commandments about adultery and murder and theft and covetousness and any others may be summed up like this, 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'" Now, I suppose that what I am saying is troubling to some of you, but it shouldn't be. I'm not saying that the Bible says that we are not to love God,

00:14:57.000 - 00:15:16.000

though it does speak of this much less than most people imagine. What I am saying is that the Bible says that the way we love God is by loving others. Our love for God is to be indicated by our love of others. It is to be shown when the love in us corresponds to the love in Him.

00:15:16.000 - 00:15:43.000

John puts it this way, "Beloved, if God has loved us so, we must have the same love for one another." God is love. He loves us first. Christ is the proof of this. And we prove our love for God by loving others as He does. Christian faith says that we do not best love God directly.

00:15:43.000 - 00:16:04.000

We best love Him through the love of others. And Christian prayer is not just to any God. It is to the Papa of Jesus. And we can communicate with the Papa only when we love as He teaches us to love. That is, we are to love like Him.

00:16:04.000 - 00:16:25.000

And when we do that, then we are at prayer. Now this prayer happens in two different locales. The first is the public locale. Prayer is seen in our loving, God-like acts toward the powerless of the world.

00:16:25.000 - 00:16:53.000

There came a day after the Sandinista had defeated the Somoza regime in Nicaragua, when the political prisoners of the evil Somoza regime were being released from prison. In a dramatic display of symbolism, which is often so beautifully and powerfully used by our Latin sisters and brothers, the same day that the political prisoners were released,

00:16:53.000 - 00:17:16.000

the secret police who had been working for Somoza were put into jail. The scene was a very impressive one. The opponents of Somoza, who had been jailed for so long, were led out of the jail by the very oldest man of their number, the only living member of the original Sandinista group.

00:17:16.000 - 00:17:43.000

He'd been in prison for many years, tortured and castrated. He led the prisoners from the prison, and they walked through a corridor made up of the secret police who were about to go into the prison and be jailed there. And suddenly, as this old leader of the Sandinista was leading the group of prisoners out between these rows of secret police,

00:17:43.000 - 00:18:00.000

he noticed one of the secret police, and he walked over to him and he said, "Do you know me?" And the policeman said, "No, no." He said, "Oh yes, you do know me, for you are the one who castrated me." "No, no," the man denied.

00:18:00.000 - 00:18:14.000

Paying no more attention to him, his denials, the prisoner then looked at him and said, "Do you know what this revolution means?" "Oh yes, yes," he said. "No," the prisoner said.

00:18:14.000 - 00:18:37.000

"You do not know what the revolution means. This is what it means." And reaching out, he shook his trembling tormentor's hand. Now in this act, in this forgiveness, in this loving, even of enemies, we see real prayer.

00:18:37.000 - 00:18:57.000

The love which corresponds to the costly love of God. Most often in the New Testament, prayer is not what someone says, it's what they do. Look at Jesus. He was magnificently the son of his father. His whole life was an illustration of God's love.

00:18:57.000 - 00:19:18.000

But we never read in all of the scriptures of a dialogue between Christ and his father. There are only two places in the Synoptic Gospels in which Jesus specifically is noted as praying to his father, and we know the content of the prayer. And both of those prayers are monologues.

00:19:18.000 - 00:19:36.000

No answer from God is reported. The father never verbally replies. There's no "I, thou" indication in the passage whatever. You see, the real dialogue between Jesus and his father was not in his words.

00:19:36.000 - 00:20:05.000

It was in the way he lived his life. His total loving and forgiving service of humankind, it was to this that God responded again and again. And think also of the very critical words that Jesus launched against the prayer practices of his day. How in Luke 18 he condemned the man who thanked God that he was not like other men.

00:20:05.000 - 00:20:31.000

That is, of course, a very narcissistic prayer, an exercise in self-deception. The fault of that prayer, of course, is that it focuses on the prayerer. And Jesus teaches that prayer is prayer only to the degree that it focuses on someone or something outside the self. Or in Matthew 6, Jesus condemns those who pray on street corners in order to be noticed.

00:20:31.000 - 00:21:01.000

He brands this as hypocrisy. And the chief error of the hypocrite is that he or she thinks that by their pious religious acts they will gain the applause of God. Jesus teaches that religion only gives folks a good reputation with God when it finds its expression in works of charity and justice. In Matthew 6 again, Jesus condemns those whose prayers are nothing but a multitude of words.

00:21:01.000 - 00:21:19.000

He says it is mechanical prayer and quite worthless. Wordiness is no substitute for works of love and caring. This is the Lord's lesson. In Matthew 7, Jesus teaches that those who pray "Lord, Lord" will not enter into the kingdom.

00:21:19.000 - 00:21:34.000

Only those who do the will of his Father in Heaven. Mere appeals to God are useless. They must be accompanied by real life practice. Orthodoxy and orthopraxis.

00:21:34.000 - 00:21:48.000

Prayer without action is meaningless. It is not even true prayer. Prayer is a future-oriented thing. It deals with and it concerns change.

00:21:48.000 - 00:22:06.000

And change requires action. And as we are changed, we will inevitably and invariably be involved in changing society. Again here, Jesus is our example. The view of our Lord as a purely spiritual figure is a quite false one.

00:22:06.000 - 00:22:22.000

Jesus was not primarily concerned for the spiritual kingdom. Jesus was not crucified for blasphemy. Had he been killed for blasphemy, he would have been stoned to death. That was the proper penalty. That's what happened to Stephen.

00:22:22.000 - 00:22:45.000

He was crucified instead. And crucifixion was a form of execution used by Rome exclusively for escaped slaves and rebels. For enemies of the state. The cross was a political act in response to the life and the teaching and the work and the example of Jesus of Nazareth,

00:22:45.000 - 00:23:08.000

who was a very powerful political figure. And he was not crucified on a piece of linen covering an altar between two crosses. He was crucified on a garbage dump between two thieves. Now we gather here today, and we are the heirs of a long legacy of Western theology.

00:23:08.000 - 00:23:31.000

And Western theology has always stressed our radical need for God's grace and the inability of any one of us to work out or to earn his or her own salvation. Believing this and recognizing it, it should not surprise us that we discover in the ranks of faithful people

00:23:31.000 - 00:23:59.000

those whose response to human suffering and need is superficial. Our theological tradition teaches human incapacity to alter the human condition. And many have told themselves as a result of this, that only God can bring peace and justice. So they pray for peace and justice and do not work for these things.

00:23:59.000 - 00:24:18.000

Their favorite hymn is, "Sit down, O men of God, His kingdom He will bring. Whenever it may please His grace, you cannot do a thing." Neither the word or the example of Jesus will support such a view. Prayer is never a substitute for obedience according to Jesus.

00:24:18.000 - 00:24:49.000

And the words we are to obey are verbs like, "Feed the hungry, visit the imprisoned, clothe the naked, release the oppressed." Don't just talk about these things. Do them. It's this obedience which God hears and answers, for this is the most real prayer. This is prayer in its purest form. This is prayer that is active and life-changing.

00:24:49.000 - 00:25:08.000

Whenever I think of this, I'm always reminded of Albert Schweitzer, that great servant of God who had three Ph.D. degrees, but spent his whole life serving the poor in a remote section of Africa. Schweitzer was not given to saccharine piety.

00:25:08.000 - 00:25:26.000

He referred to what he called the sugary language of Canaan. And the grounds of his little hospital in Africa were not littered with posted Bible verses. Though there was grace at all meals, and there were evening hymns, and there was Sunday worship which he always conducted.

00:25:26.000 - 00:25:51.000

Always for him there was the prayer of deeds, the practice of his faith. He responded to God by corresponding to God's love. And the credo of his entire life may be summed in the words with which he concluded his great theological masterpiece, "The Quest of the Historical Jesus."

00:25:51.000 - 00:26:13.000

This is what Schweitzer wrote, "Christ comes to us as one unknown. Without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, he came to those who knew him not. And he speaks to us the same word, 'Follow thou me.' And he sets us the tasks which he has for the faithful to do in our time.

00:26:13.000 - 00:26:44.000

He commands, and those who obey him, whether they be wise or simple, to them he will reveal himself in the toils and the conflicts and the sufferings which they will pass through in his fellowship. And, as ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience who he is."

00:26:44.000 - 00:27:08.000

[Bell rings] Please turn your cassette to the other side. [Silence] And that is the highest kind of prayer, the kind that is heard and answered.

00:27:08.000 - 00:27:33.000

Loving like God, you come to know God as you can know him in no other way. You discover who he is. Now, the second locale of prayer is private devotion. I think that most of you are familiar with the traditional symbol of Tao, the Chinese religion.

00:27:33.000 - 00:28:02.000

The symbol is the yin and the yang. Now, in Tao, the yin and the yang are, when separated from one another, completely meaningless. But when they are put together, they represent wholeness or completion or perfection. In early Tao, the yin appeared as a cloud, representing the darkness and the source of water in rain.

00:28:02.000 - 00:28:25.000

And the yang appeared as a banner or a flag, representing the aggressive and the vigorous life. Together, in the unity of the mystery of the cloud and the activity symbolized by the banner, together, wholeness was to be found. Now, it is just so in prayer.

00:28:25.000 - 00:28:43.000

Prayer is the sweet fruit of reconciliation with the love of God. And I've labored to point out that the most vital and real prayer, as the scripture sees it, that modeled for us by Christ, is active engagement in the works of love. That's yang.

00:28:43.000 - 00:29:03.000

But the wisdom, the vision, the sensitivity to the leading of God's Spirit, this comes from the dark, quiet, mysterious moments of personal devotion. That's yin. Private prayer is necessary, for it is in private prayer that we learn God's will.

00:29:03.000 - 00:29:19.000

And God's will is always for active works of love. In a sentence, what I'm saying is this. Solitude and solidarity are inseparably linked. One without the other is incomplete.

00:29:19.000 - 00:29:45.000

Solitude is private prayer, where one gains the deep sense of the reality of God and the awareness of this world's needs, and the inevitable way in which these two are to become one. Now, I'm quite obviously not speaking of that shallow, gooey, religious-less piety

00:29:45.000 - 00:30:06.000

which often parades around as prayer. That kind of stuff which is designed to make life go more smoothly by thinking God thoughts. This type of personal devotion doesn't wear very well. It doesn't stand up in the awful moments when the pain and the mystery of life are upon us.

00:30:06.000 - 00:30:29.000

Christian personal prayer is not to be a facade. It's not something that we hide behind to avoid the world. It's not a diversion to separate us from the horror around us. Personal prayer involves a naked, exposed openness to all the storm and the fire of life,

00:30:29.000 - 00:30:55.000

and the raging, consuming love of God which is at war with it. I suppose that no person of prayer is so honored in our 20th century as the late Thomas Merton. Thomas Merton was a Roman Catholic monk, a trappist, a cloistered monk, one who took upon himself the vow of silence.

00:30:55.000 - 00:31:19.000

But his experience of God and prayer was so great that he was given by his superiors permission to tell of it. For Merton, the life of prayer was what made him a social critic and a questioner of the values of society. He saw the life of prayer not as an escape from common life, but as a way of experiencing and sharing in the redemption of the world.

00:31:19.000 - 00:31:39.000

He wrote, and I quote him, "The monk abandons the world only in order to listen more intently to the deepest and most neglected voices that proceed from its inner depths. The nun and the monk should be the great protesters," he said.

00:31:39.000 - 00:32:02.000

"They should be God's clearest face in the world." Now, I am not arguing now that we are all to be nuns and monks, but I am arguing that their personal devotion is amongst the most intense that we know. And the greatest of them argue that the function of their personal devotion

00:32:02.000 - 00:32:28.000

is to be God's face, God's voice, God's hands in the liberation of the world's suffering. It was not by accident that the Berrigans were at the center of the Vietnam protests, and it is not by accident that nuns and priests and bishops are being shot to death in El Salvador. These are persons of prayer, but their prayer, private, personal, and devotional,

00:32:28.000 - 00:32:43.000

engages them with the world. And the purpose of prayer, as I have said again and again tonight, is to deepen our experience of God and the enjoyment of his love and the sweetness of being reconciled with him

00:32:43.000 - 00:33:06.000

and the exploration of new dimensions of freedom and illumination and love, which we then share with the whole world. The inevitable result of this, this mixture of the yang and yin in the Christian experience, is loving acts of service to other men and women.

00:33:06.000 - 00:33:32.000

Let me try to say what we all know but all find it hard to say. What is our experience of Christ in private prayer? We do not experience our Lord Jesus by sight or by hearing or by touch. It is not by our emotions or by our senses that we recognize that we are being penetrated by him.

00:33:32.000 - 00:33:53.000

It is by the movement of our hearts. When our stony souls are quickened and aroused and goaded and softened, when he begins to pluck up and destroy, to plant and to build, to water dry places and to send light into gloomy corners,

00:33:53.000 - 00:34:10.000

when he throws open in us that which is closed tight, when he inflames that which was cold, when he straightens the crooked in us, when he makes the rough places smooth, when we feel our secret vices begin to weaken,

00:34:10.000 - 00:34:33.000

when we discover and begin to know release from hidden faults, when we drowned ourselves in the admiration of his wisdom and his goodness and his kindness, these are the things that let us know that we are in unity with him. It is as the old mystic John Towler said in the 14th century,

00:34:33.000 - 00:34:51.000

"Being loved like Christ is like having a fish hook in your mouth. After the hook is in there, you can't get rid of it. The fish may swim about and even swim directly away from the fisherman, but the fisherman is sure to land him.

00:34:51.000 - 00:35:09.000

And just so anyone caught by Christ's love is held perfectly fast, and yet that captivity is sweet. For with the captivity comes a new freedom from self and a desire to set other people free as well.

00:35:09.000 - 00:35:33.000

Christ in a heart heats the blood to boiling with the impatience of love. With unity with Christ comes the passion to be in unity with others. Jubilee in the soul leads to the pursuit of jubilee in the life of the whole world. This has been true in the lives of all the great prayer warriors.

00:35:33.000 - 00:35:50.000

John Chrysostom was dedicated to a life of prayer, but he was also a reformer of the Church, an opponent of slavery, and he deplored some people having too much while other people had too little. Bernard of Clairvaux, a great man of prayer,

00:35:50.000 - 00:36:08.000

hid out against social injustices, was an adversary of heresy. He was a counselor to popes and kings. Catherine of Siena spent weeks in the loneliness of personal devotion and then came out to become a great political personage,

00:36:08.000 - 00:36:25.000

winning peace in the struggle of city-states in Italy. John Calvin lived a life of prayer and devotion, but he was intensely political on every level, from writing letters to kings to developing a more sanitary sewer system for the city of Geneva.

00:36:25.000 - 00:36:40.000

Marguerite of Navarre, a queen and a woman of great devotion, who promoted education and founded hospitals for the poor. Jonathan Edwards, in his religious affections, wrote one of the great devotional classics of all times,

00:36:40.000 - 00:37:03.000

but he hid out against unethical business practices and he defended Indian rights. John Wesley, an enthusiast for God, who preached the doctrine of holiness, but who was also noted for his stans on poverty and slavery and the abuse of riches and piracy and smuggling. Martin Luther King, told of how once during the Montgomery boycott,

00:37:03.000 - 00:37:23.000

he was at the end of his rope, he was exhausted, he was ready to give up, and he sat at his kitchen table with his head in his hands and he prayed aloud, "I am taking a stand, but now I am afraid, I am at the end of my powers, and I have nothing left." And then he testified. He felt the power of God flow into him,

00:37:23.000 - 00:37:42.000

and he went out, standing for righteousness and truth, and the whole world is better for his prayer and the action that came out of it. Devotion without expression is immature religion. Being with God in the locale of personal experience

00:37:42.000 - 00:38:03.000

must always lead to being with God in the locale of public experience. When you are reconciled, you become an agent of reconciliation. Make no mistake about it, spirituality is not a leisure time activity. It is not a diversion from life. It is subversive.

00:38:03.000 - 00:38:28.000

And the test of genuineness is practicality. It sets us in isolation from the mammon-directed culture in which we live. We disaffiliate ourselves from technocracy and its false values. To know God in Christ is to live in such a way that you drop out in the most profound sense.

00:38:28.000 - 00:38:50.000

For prayer is fellowship with the struggling Lamb of God, who is faced with all the destructive forces of the world. Those who pray in personal devotion and then in public service always go like their Christ to Gethsemane.

00:38:50.000 - 00:39:07.000

You remember how he prayed that he might be freed from the cup of death there, and how that cup was not taken away. It's difficult to know all that transpired in Gethsemane because the scripture accounts are inconsistent one with the other.

00:39:07.000 - 00:39:25.000

But the core of the story is certainly true. Jesus is confronting death, which was the inevitable consequence of his life, and he asks to be spared it. Now I see nothing in his prayer which says that Christ was unwilling to die.

00:39:25.000 - 00:39:52.000

Death did not frighten Jesus. What he drew back from was death delivered to him by the enemies of truth. What Jesus did not want was for there to be even a momentary or apparent victory by evil. But still he yielded to his Father, "Not my will, but thine, be done."

00:39:52.000 - 00:40:08.000

Jesus did this. The great "I am that I am." The one who in Matthew 5 said, "But I say unto you," superseding the law. The one who sent his disciples out into the world and mentioned in Matthew 10. The one who cured the crippled and the sick in Mark 11.

00:40:08.000 - 00:40:31.000

This Jesus surrendered and sacrificed himself to his Father's will. Loving, you see, loving like God. Responding to him by corresponding with him always means pain. To love truly, to serve those who have no other servants,

00:40:31.000 - 00:40:58.000

to minister to the powerless, is to stand against the weight of the whole world's sin. And Jesus said of us when we do this, "As the world has hated me, so it will hate you." And it's just here that Christian faith must come to the fore with power. Christian faith, the fountain of life that expresses itself in prayers prayed and prayer lived.

00:40:58.000 - 00:41:22.000

It is confidence in God in the face of even the frequent victories of evil in life. It's to trust in God in the very peak of all of history's hard questions. Paul put it this way, "It is hoping against hope." It is the dream that will not die no matter how thin lashes against it.

00:41:22.000 - 00:41:40.000

Sometimes we meet those who would like to return to Eden, who naively hope that we can, by prayers prayed and lived, return to the perfection and the painlessness of that place. These people forget that according to the Genesis story,

00:41:40.000 - 00:42:06.000

an angel with a flaming sword is posted at Eden's gate so that mankind can never return. We cannot go back. The only paradise man will ever know lies ahead in the future, and the winning of it is to be a costly thing, a thing of Gethsemanes and crosses.

00:42:06.000 - 00:42:29.000

But it is the only Eden that's open to it. Therefore, we cannot rest with the present, and we cannot seek to recultivate Eden. We cannot hide from knowledge. We cannot renounce our freedom of choice, which means striving and creating and suffering and tyranny and horror.

00:42:29.000 - 00:42:53.000

Instead of this, we must follow the trail of the cross, but go beyond the cross through a broken tomb to Easter. We are building a paradise that is not innocent of evil, but is erected on the very ruins of evil.

00:42:53.000 - 00:43:16.000

And at its gate will not be an angel with a flaming sword, but a father who comes out and puts shoes on our feet and a ring on our finger and has the background music of celebration to orchestrate his greeting. This is the task, the imitation of the divine, to which we are called.

00:43:16.000 - 00:43:32.000

And it is above all other things a matter of prayer. Jacques Ellul argues in his The Meaning of a City that the space and the pace of life today are so vast and so rapid that we can no longer communicate with them orally.

00:43:32.000 - 00:43:55.000

So, he says, we are not called upon so much to teach or to preach. Rather, we are called upon to pray and to act. And to pray means to love in public and private like God. It means the cross, and it means victory.

00:43:55.000 - 00:44:17.000

It means tasting the solitude of God's anguish and poverty. It means being led into the high places of God's joy and dying in Him. It means discovering God's mercy beyond any knowledge of it that we have ever known before. It means becoming the brother of God.

00:44:17.000 - 00:44:42.000

It means learning to experience the Christ of the burnt people. This means the suffering of the wounds of Christ, which are the wounds of love. This means driving the cross like a red-hot nail into the very heart of hell

00:44:42.000 - 00:45:09.000

and piercing evil with a lance of wood. It means all of these things. So a group of children went into a dark place, and a lamb went with them. And they were watched by evil beasts.

00:45:09.000 - 00:45:34.000

And they came upon a beggar whose palms were scarred. And they prayed for him, and then they gave him money. And they came upon a boy sleeping in the street, and his head was scarred. But they prayed for him, and then they took him home and put him to bed.

00:45:34.000 - 00:45:59.000

And they came upon a naked girl whose side was scarred, and they prayed for her, and then they gave her clothes. And they came upon a band of starving people with sad eyes, and they prayed for them, and then they fed them from their own baskets.

00:45:59.000 - 00:46:16.000

And then the children stood in the streets and proclaimed that this dark place was ruled by beasts. "The beasts are oppressing you," they said. And from the darkness there came evil growls,

00:46:16.000 - 00:46:39.000

and gold and green eyes glared in the shadows. And the people began to see these eyes and hear these growls. And the children were still speaking when the beasts attacked. And all could see that the beasts had human faces,

00:46:39.000 - 00:47:04.000

and that they were sleek and powerful. And they killed the children, and they left them dying and dead in the street. And they killed the lamb, and it lay dead too, in the middle of the intersection.

00:47:04.000 - 00:47:39.000

And then the lamb stirred and rose to his feet, and so did the children. They arose to continue their fight with the beasts, and then the people joined them. And the lamb, the lamb roared! And it was jubilee.

00:47:39.000 - 00:47:45.000

May God bless to you this witness in his name.