Category: Blog

During a debate between Alister McGrath and Richard Dawkins, Dawkins questioned the logic behind thanking God for one answered prayer in the midst of so many that are left unanswered.  The eye of faith, he rightly contended, seems to focus on the one child miraculously saved from a disaster but ignore the thousands of others who were not so fortunate, to focus on the one answered prayer in the sea of fervent, faithful, yet unanswered prayers.

In today’s world, it indeed takes the eye of faith to see God’s faithfulness to prayer.  For example, disasters, both natural and human-made, do not seem to relent despite the countless prayers of the faithful.  So much suffering seems to stagger on unabated.  Though I believe God does act on prayers, He does not seem to do so often.  Why not?

I believe this problem is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer had in mind when, in his Letters and Papers from Prison, he wrote that “God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him.”  Humanity has turned its back on God, and God has granted humanity’s wish by allowing us to live without Him.  God allows Himself, in a certain sense, to be “pushed out of the world.”  To see the suffering in the world is then to see our need of God.  On the other hand, then, to see the one child saved is to see God’s intention for the thousands of others.  That answer will not silence many critics, and will not, in itself, offer much comfort to those in pain.

The Christian response does not end there, however.  As God is pushed out of the world, so God becomes one with us through Jesus Christ.  God is present to us in suffering and weakness because we have rejected His power and strength.  He experiences the struggle of a creation without a Creator, even experiencing the height of our abandonment in His death. As Bonhoeffer continues, “Man’s religiosity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world: God is the deus ex machina.  The Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help.”

And so, I would add, only the suffering church can help.  Not all of our prayers will be answered, at least not in the ways and with the timing we wish them to be answered.  Not everyone will respond to God’s love.  Not everyone will find their pain eased.  In this sense, we must continue to struggle as those who have pushed God out of the world and so live without Him.  But we can now pray with the knowledge that God is present in our pain and with the hope that God is even now setting things right.  That knowledge should drive us to be present with people in their suffering, to love, serve, and pray for them as Christ loved, served, and prayed for us, no matter the consequences.  Our prayers, then, may not be effective in any immediately perceivable sense, but the ultimate point of prayer is not to be effective.  The point is to be faithfully dependent on the One who will be effective in setting things right.

In the last weeks of summer leading up to 8^th grade, I began thinking about the football practices in 100 degree heat that would accompany going back to school in the fall. I had joined the team mainly because of family pressure, and I was not excited. Although not religious by any stretch, I prayed with all the earnest, melodramatic passion of middle school that God would make the upcoming season worth my while. “Just one touchdown. That’s all it would take. Do it, and I’ll read the whole Bible.”

For the first game of the season my coach put my then 90 lb. body at second-string linebacker. During the second quarter I was thrown into the game, and spent the first two plays running for my life from a lineman twice my size (and age, for that matter) without even feigning an attempt to go after the ball. The third was a pass play, and, forgetting what I was supposed to do on pass defense, I just stood still. The quarterback, perhaps as confused as I was, threw the ball directly at my feet. I caught the pass, ran for my life, and, just barely squeaking into the endzone, scored what ended up being the only points of the game. I then read up to the genealogies in Genesis before abandoning my side of the bargain.

I know it’s a silly thing for God to take action on, and I realize that it’s not even much of a coincidence when you think about it, but that memory still reminds me of God’s faithfulness, even as it makes me wonder about the role of prayer. And I think it’s more than fair to wonder why an all-knowing, all-powerful God listens to prayers, especially trivial and selfish prayers like mine above. I think the answer lies in the nature of the relationship between God and humanity.

The Bible presents the first act of sin in the book of Genesis as an act of autonomy against God, a declaration of independence from God. The following chapters in Genesis then portray a downward spiral, as the order God created under His leadership dissolves into the violence and power-plays stemming from our willful rejection of Him for our own devices. If this is the case, it would make sense that our participation in God’s restoration of peace and order in the world would invovle a constant submission to God’s leadership, a submission expressed in humble prayer. I believe God hears and acts on prayer because it reflects His original intentions that we be dependent on Him, that we put aside our aspirations for power and independence.

Too often our (or at least my) ministry finds its foundations in my own reasoning and devices. When that happens, we easily find ourselves building up our own kingdoms. Instead, the loving service of our neighbors and neighborhoods must find its foundation in humble prayer that acknowledges our dependence on God and asks Him to build His kingdom with us and through us as His servants. And even when our dependent prayers focus less on His kingdom and more on our selves, I believe God in His grace still desires to provide for His children and reward dependence on His provision.

It’s now cliché to point out that the great revivals of the Christian faith that swept across the country in the past few centuries began with the prayers of a few. So if New Wine’s conference this fall involves rethinking the concept of evangelism in light of scripture, then the best place to start may be to rethink how we pray. I would like to write a few pieces on prayer that looks at prayer (especially petitionary prayer, i.e. requests for God’s action or provision) in the light of God’s redemptive work in Christ.

Discussions of prayer usually begin with what is referred to as the Lord’s Prayer, and not without good reason. But if sharing in the sufferings of Christ is central to the spirituality of the New Testament, then I believe the prayers of Jesus from the cross should be the starting point for any discussion of Christian prayer.

“With a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last.” Mark 15:37

The last prayer of Jesus recorded in Mark’s gospel does not have words. It is an unintelligible cry of abandonment, pain, and desperation. It echoes the prayers of those under oppression, the prayer that God is seemingly most likely to act on (Gen 18:20, Ex 3:7, etc.). In Christ, God shares in our humanity and experiences the pain of His creatures who have chosen to turn their backs on Him. In Christ, God becomes one with us, experiencing both abandonment from the Father and death for us, and cries out to the Father from the depths of that suffering. In short, Jesus’ prayer is a crying out to God both for us and with us.

The prayer that Jesus models, then, is a cry on behalf of and in solidarity with those who are suffering. Though we cannot experience the suffering of others in a literal sense as Jesus did, we can, however, empathize with them in prayer, petitioning God not just by reading off a list of requests, but by allowing our hearts to break for them, and as much as possible, with them. Even though Everett’s prayer in the previous post is theologically flawed in some fairly obvious ways (the characters are kids, after all), he gets at this truth in a poignant way. The prayer that would best provide the foundation for “lifestyle evangelism,” the proclamation of the gospel in word and deed to neighbors and neighborhoods, is the prayer that imitates Jesus by seeking to be on behalf of and in solidarity with others.

The following is a selection from The Brothers K by David James Duncan I thought was interesting. The four teenage brothers, who represent a wide array of religouis beliefs, talk about their Papa, who’s trying to make a comeback in professional baseball after an injury, as they get ready for bed. Everett is the atheistic American equivalent to Ivan from The Brothers Karamazov.

“Well,” Everett began, “I warned you it’s stupid. But the other night, after Freddy’s little prayer, I got to thinking about how easy my life is compared to Papa’s. Then I started thinking what a strange notion it is that Jesus supposedly got strung up on a cross to save zillions of other people – as if his one life, in exchange for zillions, was some kind of even trade… It didn’t make much sense to me, really,” Everett said, “but what I thought was: What the hell. If that’s how things actually work, why not propose a similar swap – on a much smaller scale, of course – to help Papa out. Why not ask God, if He exists, to let me do for Papa what Jesus supposedly did for everybody on earth. Why not ask to trade some of my good luck for some of Papa’s bad, just to get his life back on track.”

“That’s not stupid at all,” Peter said.

“I don’t think so either,” I agreed.

“Me neither,” Irwin said. “Except… I don’t quite get it. Yet.”

“The way I see it,” Everett said, “God either made everything there is, Satan included, or He’s nothing. He’s in charge of all of it, or none of it. So what I was thinking about prayer – especially ours lately – was that when people turn it into begging, when they use it to try to blackmail God into giving them nothing but miracles and money and new cars and babies and marriages and all that, what they’re really asking Him is to remake, or even unmake, what He’s already made… so I was gonna propose to God, if there is one, not that He change His will, not that He remake or unmake the life he gave Papa, but just that He hand me enough of the rotten part of Papa’s life, and Papa enough of the good part of mine, to get him back out on the ballfield.”

“Why do you say your prayer was stupid?”

“It’s not the prayer that was stupid,” Everett muttered. “It’s praying to someone who isn’t there that’s stupid.”

“But He is there!” Irwin bellowed.

“Whisper, you moron!”

“But He is.”

“Then you do it,” Everett said. “It’s not too late. You’re the big believer, Irwin. Why don’t you ask God to put Papa’s bad luck on you and your good luck on him. Go ahead! Do it up good! And we’ll see how much it changes anything.”

“I’ll do it,” I said.

“Me too!” Irwin cried.

“Then let’s everybody do it,” Peter said, laughing at the look of disgust on Everett’s face. “That way, if it works, we’ll spread the rotten luck over a wider area.”

I feel somewhat odd writing on the cross again, but it’s a subject that has kept popping up in the most unlikely places and has been keeping me up at nights (literally… look at the time up top). I’m not sure how I was able to avoid it until now, but this summer I’ve been forced to look at the reality of the cross in all its horror as the scandal it truly was and is. And I’m finding, rather than my heart being “strangely warmed” through the experience, that my heart has been strangely chilled. Which isn’t to say emptied of love, but haunted by what it means for God to have entered into our world in the flesh, to have suffered, and to have died on the cross for the sake of His wayward creatures

Freud said that religion was little more than a way for people to alleviate the harshness of the real world. I am convinced he had it backwards. I think what we often perceive to be the ‘real world’ is an attempt to alleviate the harshness of what the Gospel reveals. The same Jesus whose love and solidarity with the suffering and the God-forsaken led to the cross bids us to come and follow Him by loving others in self-sacrificial solidarity, no matter the consequences. I fail to see even a hint of escapism. If anything, the Gospel’s call is a self-consciously probing realism, a call to proactively seek out suffering in the world and participate in God’s redemptive work. If it has been a source or encouragement of escapism, I’m afraid it’s because we’ve misread the Gospels along with the rest of the New Testament.

I don’t know the ins and outs of blog-ethics, but this post borrows heavily from British atheist-Marxist Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith, and Revolution. As I said above, unlikely places.