Pray the Scriptures (Lamentations 1:1-4)

Sunday, February 16, 2014

          This book of the Bible is referred to as ‘Lamentations.’ Can it possibly contain any hope? Actually, yes.  We will get to that, but not at first.  It would not be appropriate to begin there.  We must never rush to Easter, skipping Good Friday along the way. 

Lamentations is one of the places the Bible declares bad news bad news that must be acknowledged out loud.  Too many voices in Christian circles fear pain, so they bury it.  In the face of sorrow they pretend nothing is wrong.  They talk of God’s goodness and how God has a purpose in all things. 

The Bible rejects the impulse to skip over the painful moments of life.  The Bible names it all – disappointment, loss, death.  I am one who is guilty of not wanting to face darkness.  I want to stick with what feels good and hope pain will go away if it is ignored.  What I share in this message is my experience of being confronted by God.  God had had enough of me turning away from the ugliness of sin and pain that fills real life.  Through praying the scriptures in Lamentations, God brought forcefully face to face with things that demand lament.

In my quiet times of prayer toward the final months of 2013, God’s confrontation was intense enough that to spare myself many days, I just played online games instead of having prayer time.  I should not have done that.  But, I did.  There were, though, enough times that I turned the computer off, opened the Bible, turned to Lamentations, turned inward, found God in the deep parts of myself, and there, I was confronted. 

For me the beginning of this portion of my walk with Jesus was our youth grip mission trip to Atlanta.  The week in that city brought me face t0 face with the black-white divide in America; the face of urban, inner city poverty and toughness of life in that context; my own tendency to retreat to the safety of my cozy life in the suburbs.  I want to follow Jesus.  Atlanta pried open doors inside me, doors that had been locked.  Without those doors being opened, my discipleship was severely reduced.

While we were Atlanta, July 2013, another important American city, Detroit, declared bankruptcy.  I sat at breakfast preparing for a day of tutoring belligerent inner city Atlanta sixth graders in reading.  I saw the story of Detroit’s demise in the Atlanta newspaper.  I felt a chill.  Detroit is a city that matters to me.

Detroit is marked by mile roads that run east-west, lines on a map marking how far you are from the center of the city.  Fourteen mile road is 14 miles north of downtown and 15 miles is a mile north of that and so on.  By the time you get to 14 mile you’re actually out of the city.  We were in a suburb.  My mom had grown up on 7 mile in the city limits.  We moved away from the Detroit area altogether, to Virginia, in 1982.  I was 12.  My grandmother stayed in Detroit on 7 mile until she died in 1994. 

The city experience post World War II prosperity in the 50’s, post Civil Rights Movement upheaval in the 60’s, and terrible decline in the 70’s, 80, and 90’s.  As the city changed, Grandma’s life did too, or it should have.  But, she did not change her habits and thus, she was mugged.  One Christmas Eve while we were all out, the house burglarized.  The crime rose, yet this little old lady defiantly held onto her life there.

She, came to America as an immigrant at age 13.  She was an English girl surrounded by Americans.  When she and my grandfather began life on 7 Mile, their family was one of the few gentile families in the neighborhood.  Most of my mom’s school friends were Jewish. 

The neighborhood changed and by the time we moved to Virginia in 1982, the Jews had migrated to the suburbs and Grandma was among the last of the white people still there.  She would not move.  There is nothing bad about an English woman surrounded by Americans or a gentile living among Jews or a white among blacks.  American, Jews, and black people are all beautiful, wonderful people.  I simply point this out to illustrate the city’s changes and my Grandmother’s steadfast commitment to honor the life she built – a life built on faith and indomitable intestinal fortitude.  She was always a minority and never felt like it.  7732 West 7 Mile Road was her home. 

Sitting in Atlanta in July of 2013, almost 20 years after Grandma’s death (of natural causes at age 84), I read of Detroit’s plight in an Atlanta newspaper, and it hit me very personally.  And to read of it while doing God’s work in another large American city with black-white racial tension amplified my emotions.  When we returned from Atlanta, I needed to do something with those emotions.  Talking to someone did not feel right.  Who would understand why I, a Chapel Hill resident, went to Atlanta, and got emotionally messed up by the news from Detroit?  It doesn’t even make sense as I type it.  I needed to talk to God; real, deep conversation.  I turned to lectio divina, an ancient method of praying the scriptures. 

A disclaimer: if you are well-schooled in Lectio Divina, then you know more than I do.  I don’t know if what I did would satisfy a ‘Lectio Divina’ purist.  Someone may hear what I have to share and say, “Hey!  That’s not how you do Lectio Divina!”  All I can say in response is this is how I did it, and God spoke to me. 

Returning from Atlanta and thinking about Detroit and thinking my own place in American culture, I had thoughts for which there were no words.  I needed help expressing what I was thinking and feeling because I could not identify it until I expressed it.  And I could not express it.  So, I turned to Lamentations and my own attempt at praying the scriptures.  What I offer this morning is my testimony of my own personal experience.  This is what I did starting in late August, 2013.  I kept up this routine (when I wasn’t retreating to Facebook video games) until the end of the year.

The first step is reading the passage that will guide you into prayer.  God lead me to the book of Lamentations. 

Lamentations 1:1-2 (CEV)

1 Jerusalem, once so crowded,
    lies deserted and lonely.
This city that was known
all over the world
    is now like a widow.
This queen of the nations
    has been made a slave.
² Each night, bitter tears
    flood her cheeks.
None of her former lovers
    are there to offer comfort;
her friends^[a] have betrayed her
    and are now her enemies.
³ The people of Judah are slaves,
suffering in a foreign land,
    with no rest from sorrow.
Their enemies captured them
    and were terribly cruel.^[b]
4 The roads to Zion mourn
because no one travels there
    to celebrate the festivals.
The city gates are deserted;
    priests are weeping.
Young women are raped;^[c]
    Zion is in sorrow!

I was in a quiet place, no distractions.  I read the entire passage out loud.  I closed my eyes and took four deep breathes.  Then I repeated, the entire passage followed again by four slow, deep breathes.  I did this four times.  This was my reading of the passage. 

The second step is meditating – thinking deeply about the text.  After reading, I looked over the passage and chose one word or a phrase.  Then, I would go over it and over it and over it some more, in my mind.  I spent an entire week on the first five verses of Lamentations.  Each day, in the meditation portion, I devoted my thoughts to a different word in the passage. 

The reason Lamentations was so fitting for me in this exercise was the phrase that began my meditations on day 1.  From verse 4, “the roads to Zion mourn.”  I chewed that phrase us.  The roads to Zion mourn … the roads to Atlanta mourn … the roads to Detroit mourn.  I was filled with sadness and helplessness and the Lamentation gave me the words and the framework to not only speak but name what I was speaking as I lifted it to God.  I thought of every city I have encountered.  I have actually done a lot ministry work in down town areas: Roanoke, Richmond, Washington DC, Kombolcha (Ethiopia).  Ironically, I have not done any in Detroit and only one week in Atlanta.  But, I have lived my life in Detroit.  So as I focused on the phrase, I thought of cities.

I also though of every occasion for mourning and grief I have known.  What is it like to grieve?  What are cities like?  What does it mean, the road to the city mourned?  The thoughts ran together in me as I mediated from Lamentations.

The first step was reading; the second was meditating.  The third step was spoken prayer.

Eugene Peterson writes, “It’s one thing to be listening to … Jesus preach the Beatitudes on a grassy Galilean hillside.  … It’s quite another to realize that God is speaking to me [as I sit alone with no one else around].  I am speechless; or I stutter.  How do I answer God?  But answer, I do, for the text requires it” (quote adapted from Eat this Book, p.103).  And God invites it.  And the Holy Spirit helps.

In my reading and meditating, God had helped me name it – sadness over loss and over the death sin inflicts on cities – cities I have known.  Next, I had to pray.  Thinking about the grief, I prayed for those kids we met in Atlanta.   I prayed for the CBF missionaries who don’t leave after a week.  They live there in that tough place and share their lives with those troubled children.  I prayed for the people who broke into Grandma’s house on Christmas Eve.  I don’t even know if those crooks are still alive.  God knows.  How desperate must your life be that you spend Christmas Eve breaking into others’ homes?  I prayed for the new mayor in Detroit, for the street children I have seen in Addis, for the poor kids I work with each year in Kombolcha and the city kids I used to work with in Washington DC.  I prayed for the people in our city, Chapel Hill, those for whom our HillSong teams have built ramps and removed trees and help in other ways.  I poured my heart out before Heaven.  What I said in those prayers was been shaped as I listened to the Word of God in Lamentations and meditated up on it.

The third step, spoken prayer, is unstructured and carries on as long as it needs to.  God is a patient, encouraging, inviting listener.  God receives all these prayer.

I ended with the fourth step.  This is where I listened to God.  At the the end of the spoken prayer, I would take a deep breath.  I had the word in me.  My own experiences and memories were awakened.  Everything I dumped on God in my spoken prayer was out there.  I took another deep breath or maybe a few.  I quieted down my mind, and sat in stillness. 

I sat comfortably, but not so relaxed that I might fall asleep.  I wanted to heighten my senses, my mental alertness and my listening.  I asked God to speak into the silence.  The constant flow of my own thoughts interrupt, but I don’t beat myself up over that.  I understand that that happens.  I imagined my thoughts as a river and I let the distractions flow through my mind and return to the silence.  Usually, I practice this silent contemplation for about 5 minutes.  Sometimes I spend much of the time forcing distractions out of my mind.  Other times, the intensity of God’s presence is such that I don’t know where the time went.

When my 5 or 10 minutes of silence was up, I recited the passage one more time.  I thought once more about the roads – the roads to the city mourn; or whatever my phrase was for that day.  I thought about it, took a final deep, intentional breath slowly exhaling.   Then I got on with the day. 

The prayer and the word stuck with me.  Again Eugene Peterson: “contemplation means living what we read, not wasting any of it or hoarding any of it, but using it up in living.”  Everything I have shared this morning about praying the scriptures culminated in me seeing the world through Jesus-tinted lenses. 

Now, that season in Lamentations is complete.  My care for the city is awakened.  As Lent and then Easter draw near, I realize now God is confronting me anew.  Just as God forced me to deal with my disregard for issue like racism and poverty, now God is forcing me to deal with another topic – spiritual laziness.  I will continue the practice of praying the scriptures, but not Lamentations.  I am now going to move to 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd John for my practice of praying the Word.  God is in the process of shaking me awake. 

The process of praying the scripture I have shared is one anyone can practice.  If you want to, but don’t know where to start, contact me this week.  I don’t know what would happen in our church life if 20 HilllSong people were praying the scriptures with this focus and intensity and raw confessional honesty.  Or 50 or 100?  We could find out.  Would you try it, 30 minutes a day, from now until Easter?  What is God going to say to you?  There’s only way to know.

One last thing; if you plan to begin where I did, in Lamentations, don’t give up before you reach the middle of chapter three.  Even in that book that serves to remind us how important it is to be honest about the pain in the world, there is also hope.

Lamentations 3:22-24(CEV):

²² The Lord’s kindness never fails!
If he had not been merciful,
    we would have been destroyed.^[a]
23 The Lord can always be trusted
    to show mercy each morning.
²⁴ Deep in my heart I say,
“The Lord is all I need;
    I can depend on him!”

This God of Lamentations, the one on whom we can depend, whose mercies never fail, is who we meet when we pray the scriptures.  God is why we pray, so my urging to each one of is that we make space for Him.  Pray the scriptures so that the word of God takes us to the heart of God.

AMEN

The Roads to Zion Mourn

Bring on the day you have announced,
    and let them be as I am.

22 Let all their evil doing come before you;
    and deal with them
as you have dealt with me
    because of all my transgressions;
for my groans are many
    and my heart is faint.

Not much of a prayer, is it?  I copied it from Biblegateway.com.  It is Lamentations 1:21c-22.  The title of this post comes from Lamentations 1:3.

Why am I lamenting, spending my prayer time in such blue verses, clouds of doom hanging low, swallowing me?

My wife and I are reading a book about Lectio Divina, praying the scriptures. To put into practice what I have read and to bring new life to my prayer life, I have practiced Lectio Divina.  I have read the passage over and over (a month ago Lamentations 1:1-5 and today Lamentations 1:21-22).  I have read each aloud, over and over.  In between readings, I do deep breathing.

Then, I listen for a word given, and pour over it in my mind.  I think about it, uses of it, where it comes from, what it could mean.  

After reading and thinking, I pray directly to God.  In terms of "the roads to Zion mourn," I thought about cities.  This first came home to me in doing missions back in July in Atlanta.  The inner city kids we tutored in the literacy camp took a lot out of me.  While we there, the news came that Detroit was bankrupt.  My is from Detroit, born and raised until young adulthood on 7 Mile Road.  She studied at Wayne State University and taught at Mumford High School.  My mom was Detroit.  

And we would go back there every Christmas and throughout the year.  We lived in a suburb, Clawson, between 14 and 15 Mile Roads.  Then in 1982, I was 12, and we moved to Roanoke, Virginia. Still the trips back to Detroit were frequent.  

So in July of this year, a city was confronting me - Atlanta.  And my memory confronted me - Detroit.  (And none of this accounts for the many years I spent doing ministry with kids in inner city Washington DC).  When I returned home to Chapel Hill from the wonderful and draining and hard week in Atlanta, I got into the Lectio Divina, and began reflecting on cities - Zion, Atlanta, Detroit. Recent events have called other cities to mind - Damascus, Cairo, Terhan, and Pyong Yang.  And of course, there is the city that newly forced its way into my heart, the city of my middle son's birth, Addis Ababa.  

God loves cities.  I don't have any specific prayer.  I went before God on behalf of Detroit and on behalf of my kids in Atlanta.  And Addis.  And ...

But really, I had nothing to ask for (and everything to ask for).  I just sit with God, thinking about cities, trying to join my heart to his.  And I grieve.  

I know God sees.  God sees the injustice and there will be day of reckoning. Setting things right is my job.  I couldn't handle it.  I'd mess it up in an awful way.  But I can love those who hurt.  I can hug and cry.  I can rally people to educate or contribute $$$ to the education of children who would not get it without help.  I can care.  I can sit with.  I can pray.  I can go.  

Bring on the day, Lord.  Bring on the Day of the Lord.  Until then, I pray and I sit with you.

AMEN

Disrupted Christmas

Disrupted Christmas (Malachi 3:1-4)

Sunday, December 9, 2012 – Advent 2

 

            My family moved from our home in Clawson, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, to Roanoke, Virginia.  That was 1982.  I was 12 years old.  Every year after, we made multiple trips back to Michigan to see family.  If we only made one trip in a year to Michigan, it was Christmas time.  We stayed at the home of my mom’s mother.  She lived in a declining neighborhood in Detroit: Seven Mile Road, just a mile from Eight Mile made famous by Eminem. 

On Christmas Eve, all of us, including my grandmother, traveled from Detroit out to Clawson to my dad’s parents.  After the party we headed back to Detroit for bed and then to wake up and share gifts on Christmas morning.  One year when we did that, we got back to Grandma Biscomb’s house and discovered burglars had come.  They were gone by the time we returned. 

Their damage had been done.  All our presents were opened and many had been taken.  Other items, small ones, were also stolen from Grandma’s house.  That was a disruption to our normal Christmas routine. 

This Advent season, we anticipate Christmas by hearing from the prophets, and my hope, no my prayer is that our Christmas, yours and mine, will be disrupted!  We will hear the fury of the prophets and the feel the power of God in this words, and we will be shocked.  Disrupted?  Having burglars steal the Christmas presents is nothing like the disruption of God invading our lives, disrupting our comfort, confronting our sin, and calling us to repentance and holiness. 

Scholar Gerhard von Rad noted a time in history when prophets were seen for how dangerous they were (The Message of the Prophets, p.68). Do we realize how dangerous the prophets were and still are?  Prodded by this question and hearing this disquieting prayer – that God would disrupt our lives this Christmas – we turn to Malachi, the final book in the Old Testament.  He asks, “Who can endure the day of God’s coming?  Who can stand when he appears” (3:2a)?  Go through the Bible for the answer to that second question.  From Ezekial to the Roman guards at Jesus’ tomb to John on the Island of Patmos, every time God or an angel of God appears in glorified form before a man, the man crumbles to the ground and lies prone, trembling, until the diving being invites the man to stand.  Who can stand?  None.  But it means more than that.

We read Malachi with Christian eyes.  We believe Jesus was the one who came and will come again.  Malachi literally means “Messenger.” This is only Old Testament prophet who speaks of a messenger preparing the way of the Lord.  This passage is quoted in New Testament texts that tell about the prophetic ministry of John the Baptist, the one who came ahead of Jesus.  Both Matthew and Luke in their gospels intentionally reach to Malachi’s messenger prophecy and refer to John as the Elijah of his day, speaking God’s word that God is coming in the flesh. 

Now, two thousand years have passed.  The Jesus story is history, not news.  Yet, the incarnation – by this we mean Jesus coming as God in human form – continues to do new things today, just as Malachi’s prophecy continues to be dangerous as it was when first spoken and written.  Jesus came.  And from New Testament writings we know Jesus will come back and bring history to an end. And Jesus will judge all people when he comes.  The Day of Judgment; the Second Coming; it all points to Jesus coming in the future.  He came in the past and will come again.  But I contend that Malachi’s word has force right now – in the time in between.

Who can endure his coming?  Who can stand?

Malachi gives the answers.  “The day is coming  the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble; the day that comes shall burn them up, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch” (4:1).  Aside from the fact that in every instance in scripture where there’s a divine-human encounter, the human is overwhelmed to the point that he falls face down without thought of doing anything else, Malachi makes clear arrogant persons and evil doers will be judged, found guilty, and condemned.  Just as one receiving his verdict of a life sentence is crushed even before it begins, one who meets God and is convicted of sin dies inside and that internal death is painful and violent. 

And yet, says Malachi, “those who revered the Lord spoke with one another. The Lord took note and listened, and a book of remembrance was written before him of those who revered the Lord and thought on his name.¹⁷They shall be mine, says the Lord of hosts, my special possession on the day when I act, and I will spare them as parents spare their children who serve them.¹⁸Then once more you shall see the difference between the righteous and the wicked, between one who serves God and one who does not serve him” (3:16-18).  Different people have a different experience on the day of His coming.  The righteous are overwhelmed and maybe convicted, but ultimately ushered into the joy of God because what makes them righteous is not their conduct.  The righteous as sinful as are those condemned.  But, they’ve trusted in Jesus.  They are forgiven even though sinful behaviors are not immediately ceased. 

Who can endure his coming?  Who can stand? 

“Then I will draw near to you for judgment; I will be swift to bear witness against the sorcerers, against the adulterers, against those who swear falsely, against those who oppress the hired workers in their wages, the widow and the orphan, against those who thrust aside the alien, and do not fear me, says the Lord of hosts.⁶For I the Lord do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, have not perished.

⁷Ever since the days of your ancestors you have turned aside from my statutes and have not kept them. Return to me, and I will return to you, says the Lord of hosts. But you say, ‘How shall we return?’ ⁸Will anyone rob God? Yet you are robbing me! But you say, “How are we robbing you?” In your tithes and offerings! ⁹You are cursed with a curse, for you are robbing me—the whole nation of you” (3:5-9)!”

            Do you participate in exploitation?  Watch out!  Do you dabble in witchcraft or occult?  God is coming – the real God.  Anyone give allegiance to things, relationships, institutions when that allegiance belongs to God?  In God’s eyes, that is spiritual adultery and it will be judged.  That is what the coming of God brings.  Are we lazy or stingy with our tithes – the money we devote to God’s kingdom?  God calls that robbery.  We think of robbery as taking something that’s not ours.  God extends the definition, according to Malachi.  Robbery is holding on to what we ought to give. 

            Indeed, who can stand when He comes?

            And yet, Malachi, the messenger, finally says, “for you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall.³And you shall tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet, on the day when I act, says the Lord of hosts.

⁴Remember the teaching of my servant Moses, the statutes and ordinances that I commanded him at Horeb for all Israel.⁵Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes.⁶He will turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents, so that I will not come and strike the land with a curse” (4:2-5).

At the coming of God, some are cursed, some promised hope.  Which message is for us?  Mostly, we are middle class – affluent.  People in the dominant culture like their lives, generally speaking.  And even if they experience individual unhappiness or personal discontent, they love the idea that the dominant culture is theirs and they will not tolerate threats to it.  Jesus is a threat because He won’t fit into the place assigned to Him by the dominant culture.

Middle class Americans have to understand that we benefit from being members of the dominant culture.  This leaves us with a real tension.  Will we live at Jesus’ pleasure?  Or will we try to make Jesus fit into our lives on our terms, where it is good for us?  Who can stand at His coming?  My prayer is he comes right now, in the Spirit, into each of our lives in such a disruptive way, that every table is overturned and when things are finally rearranged in our lives, we look to the center and see that life only works when it revolves around the one who fulfilled Malachi’s prophecy.

Here’s a follow-up on the Christmas we had at my grandmother’s house when the burglars broke in while we were out.  I don’t remember all the details.  This is around 27 years ago.  What I do remember are the feelings.

First, it was kind of freaky.  Someone had been in the house.  Someone came in uninvited.  There was this weird are they still here, still around sense of things.  Would they come back?  It was uneasy.  My indomitable grandmother, 100% English, would never leave that house.  There was that break in.  A few years later she was mugged.  But she refused to leave until finally cancer forced her to spend her final months in Roanoke with my mom.  I don’t know how she stayed.  I was unnerved.

Second, I felt violated.  I am sure from my mom and maybe from Grandma, there were tears.  I don’t remember exactly.  Strangers with dishonorable intentions had gone through our personal things.   Something was taken, something more than just possessions.

Third, and this is most important, I remember another emotion, one I cannot easily name.  Our family came together.  There was Grandma’s iron will.  There was my mom’s constant care for her three children.  And there was my Dad’s determination that his family would have a happy Christmas.  I remember us joining our hearts.  We wouldn’t have said it this way at the time, but though the criminals disrupted our Christmas, they could not steal our joy.  And in fact, we did imagine this.  How desperately difficult must your life be that you are out robbing people on Christmas Eve?  Led by my faithful parents, we did feel compassion for the thieves.

My prayer for the people of HillSong – those who come every week and those who come one time – is that we get knocked to the floor.  I pray God would deliver a roundhouse right that KO’s us.  “Who can endure the day of His coming?”  Malachi asks.  Not us. 

I pray the disrupting God who came in human skin – Jesus, and who comes again – Jesus returning, will come right now in Spirit.  I pray the Spirit will come in force and I pray that we realize that when we pray in this way, it is arresting.  It is scary. 

It is also good news – the best news.  The God who blows us away with His Holiness makes us new with His grace.  The God the messenger heralded pours new wine in and the only way we can hold it is if he re-creates us; makes us new, new wine skins to Hold his sweet new wine. 

In process of knocking us to the floor with His coming, we remember our descent down under the waters of our baptism.  And we remember what happens next.  Dead in sin, we are raised to new life in Jesus Christ.  Marantha!  Come Lord Jesus.

When He comes, we are made new.  Nothing ever looks the same again because we look with new eyes.  We look through Gospel-tinted lenses.  We see the world more clearly – ourselves, those around us, and God.  And so, I pray.  Oh God, come disrupt our lives this Christmas.  O great refiner, great cleanser, O Holy God, come and do your work on each of us.

AMEN