Scripture: Mark 9:14-29.
For most of my life, Labor Day has been sort of like a New Year’s Day for me. Of course, when I talk about a new year I might also mean January 1, or I might mean the beginning of December, the beginning of the Advent season which in the church is often referred to as the beginning of a new year, and this can be confusing for people who don’t know which new year I’m thinking about in my head. But mostly for me the new year has always begun around Labor Day, give or take a few weeks. Of course a large part of the reason for that is that I have spent well more than half of my 58 years in school, as a student and then as a teacher. But also church life has always sort of felt to me like September is the beginning of a new year with people returning from travels and Sunday School starting up. Anyway it feels like we’re about to start a new year, and as I was thinking about what I might preach about today I found myself sort of looking ahead, and in that spirit of looking ahead, I have just a couple of prayers that I want to offer.
There are several ways to look ahead. Some people look ahead in a spirit of goals and objectives. You set some goals and you arrive at some objectives in order to meet your goals. You figure out where you want to get and how you want to get there. Sort of lay it out step by step. And I know this kind of looking ahead has its place. Maybe it even has a place in the life of the church. I’m not so sure about that, but maybe it does.
Then there’s a spirit of hoping, not step by step planning, but just hoping, maybe some very specific things, maybe some very broad hopes that it’s sort of hard to put into words. Here are some things I’d kind of like to see happen or come about. And then there’s prayer—which may be a little bit like hoping, but different too.
Maybe one way to describe at least some kinds of prayer is to say it’s hoping to God, which among other things maybe asks us to consider somewhat carefully what it is we are willing to place before God as our hopes, and secondly reminds us that the coming true of our hopes depends partly on us and partly not upon us. In any case, I think there is difference between hoping and praying, and I have been asking myself as we approach a new year for the church what it is that I am praying for Sojourners. Here are a few of the things I came up with.
My first prayer is actually an echo of the prayer that is offered in our scripture reading for this morning. A father brings his son to Jesus for healing. The boy has been afflicted from early in his life, so that he is unable to speak and has convulsions, and the father has come to the end of his rope. He’s asked the disciples but they weren’t able to do anything, so now he is coming to Jesus himself. The father pleads with Jesus to heal his son, if he is able. To which Jesus responds, “if you are able. All things are possible to the one who believes.” At which point the man cries out: “I believe. Help my unbelief.”
I have always liked this story, because of this spontaneous prayer. He knew that there were these two parts of himself: a believer and an unbeliever, which I read not so much as a disbeliever, but an unbeliever, a part of him that just wasn’t settled, that was still thinking and wondering, questioning and trying to find the right words for things. He knew there were those two sides of himself. I know there are those two sides of myself. I’m pretty sure there are those two sides to everyone. And I pray that those two sides of our community life can both be encouraged and respected and held together.
I guess I first pray that those two sides of us as individuals can be held together. It’s something I work on and know I need to work on for myself. It’s always a tendency, at least for me, to sort of lean more to one side or the other.
There are things I know in my heart to be true. Those things I know to be true are not words: words like “I believe in God” or “God is Spirit” or “God is love” or “God loves me”. All those words are just feeble efforts to put into words that reality that I know in my heart to be true for me. The reality of God is prior to any words about God. And so it takes some amount of energy to take that fundamental reality and try to express it somehow in words and then to do more than that, to make it the basis of my life so that my actions are an expression of what I know, feel, experience, deep down inside to be true. Maybe that truth, those truths of our lives, when we try to put them into words, don’t come out so much in God language but come out more in love language. Maybe they don’t come out very well in any language. And maybe that is one of the insights that our Pentecostal sisters and brothers have for us when they speak in tongues, that our ordinary language for God is just not adequate. But however we experience those positive truths, and however we express them, they can be a source of tremendous comfort, and a source of tremendous energy. But because they also make a claim on us, they also take attention and hard work.
And so there is this believing part of me that wants to build up and build on those underlying truths of my life, to recall those truths, keep my focus there, try to live my life out of those truths. “I believe.”
But I also need help for my unbelief. That part of me is there too. And when I’m working hard on the believing part of me, I don’t particularly welcome this other part that comes along with questions: But what about…? Those things you think you believe, are you really sure? Have you thought of this? What if…? The believing part of me wants to tell all these questions to “Go away. You’re interfering with my believing. You’re troubling my soul. I don’t need that.” We may want to put a lid on the unbelieving side of ourselves. We forget or ignore or don’t see that these nagging doubts aren’t just nagging us. They are helping us to come to a deeper and truer way of believing.
But for some of us, it may be more comfortable to live with our doubts. It’s a lot easier sometimes to ask questions than it is to find answers. It’s a lot easier to find words for our questions than it is for our truths. For some of us it seems more natural, more human to simply confess that we don’t know than to imply we are certain or absolutely convinced—of anything. Some of us who have spent a good deal of our lives in school may have been well taught to be skeptical and analytical and real good at pointing out flaws. We get to be real good at debating things. We are less good at believing. It’s not so easily taught.
But someone once said that we can refuse to make up our minds. We cannot refuse to make up our lives. And somewhere inside us are those things we base our living on. Some of us are nagged by our doubts. Some of us need to be nagged by our truths. All of us need to hold these two sides of ourselves together.
And, of course, so does the Sojourners community. Just as we need to honor the questioning parts of ourselves because they keep us honest, because they force us to take nothing for granted, because they lead to deeper understanding, because they are absolutely essential for living out our faith, so we as a community try to respect all kinds of differences of belief, all kinds of questions that people may bring with them into the community. We encourage the asking of questions. We insist on no particular formula of belief, and look on the asking of questions as one way of seeking after God. All this I think we are pretty clear about, and I hope reasonably good at.
What maybe we are less good at is the need for us to nurture in each other a positive belief, the need for us not only to give each other the space to be whoever we are, but to find ways to encourage the finding and the expression of those things we know to be true. To do both of these things well and at the same time is a difficult task, but I do pray for it to be our task, and I pray that we may be good at it, honoring both the belief and the unbelief in our life together.
A second prayer has to do with the issue of growth and intimacy. From the time I arrived, actually before I arrived, I have been aware of this concern: that over time we might grow in numbers to the point where the kind of intimacy that has been present in worship, and the commitment to having all voices heard—that these qualities that have been very much a part of the personality of this church may gradually disappear or become less important. It’s a real fear, not an imaginary one, and again it can be tempting to come down more on one side or the other.
I do have growth in my heart as a prayer concern, not just as a goal for the coming year, not just as a hope, something that would be nice, but as a prayer. I am praying that we grow. There are good, practical reasons for us to grow, and most of you probably have some idea of what they are. We are moving toward being financially self-sufficient in another year or so, and we need to grow at least modestly to do that, and there are all sorts of reasons why that would be a good thing. That’s part of why growth is on my prayer list.
But it’s there also because every person who comes into this community enriches it so much. I don’t mean to be sappy or trite about it, but I do feel it that way, that not to grow would be missing out on all these gifts that new people have brought with them, are bringing with them, will bring with them.
And I guess I also pray, and I am addressing this to myself since I don’t know what other people do, but I pray for me, for us, to find ways to talk about our faith and our church to people who may not know, but to do it in ways that are authentic to us. I suspect everyone here has been proselytized in some way that we found objectionable. I know I have a whole catalogue of such experiences I could relate to you. And it may be, I know it’s true for me, that because of those experiences I am hesitant to market my faith. I don’t want to afflict others the way I have sometimes been afflicted. Still, wouldn’t it be good to talk to others, not just ourselves, about things that matter, to be able to tell others what we believe, and so forth. I pray for that, at least for myself.
At the same time I know that even in a community that already practices significant levels of sharing, it can sometimes be hard to talk about things that matter, things that really matter, even within the community of faith, and so my prayer is that we not take that part of our life for granted. I know we don’t, but that is my prayer anyway, because I know that while we pay attention to our need to grow, we also need to pay attention to our need to deepen our conversation with each other. On the one hand that already happens, in one-on-one relationships, in Lenten gatherings, prayer groups, one-anothering groups, groups of wild women, and so forth. On the other hand, it is not always easy for us to speak of what is most important to us. Words don’t come easily. There is not always a convenient setting, where there is enough trust for us to feel safe. Which is simply to say that this too is something I am feeling that needs continuous attention from all of us, and is part of my prayer for us: that we hold these two parts of our life together too, as best we can: the growing part, and the coming together part.
I have other prayers for us too, but I think I’ll just not talk any more. I’ll save them for other times or occasions. Except to say that I know we all have prayers, and I do pray that we find times and places and ways for all our prayers to be given words so that we may speak them not only to God but to one another. Amen.
Jim Bundy
September 3, 2000