Eavesdropping on a Saint - Learning to Pray
My earliest memories include the cool feeling and lemon scent of a freshly polished wooden pew on my cheek. Mom married a pastor and then became one herself. It’s hard to imagine being more steeped in church than I was. Imagine my surprise then, when I met Martin. I don’t remember what Martin said, we didn’t meet at a church event. I do remember that he talked for only about 3 minutes and I remember thinking, “that guy knows God.”
This simple recognition changed my life. As I learned more of Martin’s story, I became deeply curious about the ways he, despite significant personal difficulties and tragedies, had become a person of such incredible presence. I remember thinking, “I’ve been around Christian people my whole life… many of them good, generous, even godly, people, but Martin is the first person who, when I look at him, I also see Jesus.”
It wasn’t his eloquence, charisma, or theological sophistication that caused me to see God living in him. It was his sense of delight over a cup of coffee, or the way he visited inmates at the local prison, naming their gifts and talents. He’d say, “Alejandro can sing beautifully… Robert is an artist… Dave is always thinking about his kids.” It was the way he’d laugh, as though he and Jesus were sharing an inside joke, when he misplaced his keys.
Praying with Martin was like standing on the edge of a waterfall. You were aware, because Martin seemed to be aware, that you were in the presence of this immense and powerful current that, if you let it, could easily draw you over into the vast unknown, and yet the impact of standing so near this torrent was peaceful not terrifying. Donald Miller wrote, “Sometimes you just have to watch someone love something before you can love it yourself. It’s as if they are showing you the way.”
As I think about Paul’s prayer from Ephesians 3:14-21, I imagine that Paul is inviting us to watch him love God and love the people of God in the hopes that we’ll learn to love them too.
Today I want to invite us to eavesdrop on a saint. His prayer pushes beyond our ordinary thought categories as he describes, for example, knowing a love beyond knowledge, or being filled with fullness. But, if we’re willing to attend to this prayer, we just might find our hearts strangely warmed. So, forgive me for not trying to explain this prayer, let me instead show you around it.
The first thing that’s worth noticing is the posture of the prayer. Paul says, “For this reason I kneel before the father…”. You probably know that in the ancient world kneeling was not a typical posture of prayer. People usually stood when they prayed, which means the posture of kneeling matters. For a point of reference, let’s think for a minute about the prayer life of Jesus. Jesus spent all night in prayer before he chose his core community of twelve disciples. He probably stood. Jesus wept and prayed at the tomb of his dear friend Lazarus. He was standing. Jesus wept over the city of Jerusalem, praying a prophetic lament. He was sitting. The only time Jesus is ever said to kneel in prayer, is the night before his death, in the garden of Gethsemane in a moment of such emotional distress that he was sweating blood. So, when Paul tells us he’s kneeling in prayer we have to do some cross-cultural translation.
A couple of months ago my mother-in-law, who is Filipino, came to our home with ten pounds of breakfast cereal. Now, for some of you, I don’t need to say another word. Your heart is moved. You may even feel your tear ducts swelling. For the rest of us, let me translate. Food is the language of love in the Philippines, (as it is in other Asian cultures). In the home where I grew up my mother told us she loved us with words and showed us she loved us with hugs. My mother-in-law communicates love by asking, “did you eat?” And then, no matter what your answer to that question, she’ll say, “Kain na,” or “come eat with us.”
Now, the other thing you need to know, is that no one in my household eats breakfast cereal, except for me. So, what did it mean, when my mother-in-law showed up at our door with ten pounds of breakfast cereal? It was her way of saying, my dear son, I see you… I love you… you matter to me… and even though your taste in food is totally incomprehensible to me, I’ll go out of my way to care for you and show you that I love you.
By kneeling before God, Paul is holding nothing back emotionally. That’s what his posture means. A modern equivalent in some circles might be to say something like say, “he was on his face.” This prayer is worth his full emotional commitment. This request, this purpose, this longing is worth everything.
What is getting your full emotional commitment? What is the thing for which you would hold nothing back, the desire that is worth everything? Is it possible that life with God is worth that kind of commitment?
Now, from posture let’s move on to petition, or the content of the prayer. We can get a little lost in the language and miss both the point and the poetry. A quick word about each… the prayer is composed of one kernel idea, but it’s expressed in a parallel poetic structure which takes each clause of the kernel sentence and rephrases it, reframing it, so that we’re drawn more deeply into the content. For example, It’s one thing to say I’m committed to my two daughters. It’s another to quote to them from the great children’s music composer Eminem, as I used to when they were little, “we all we got in this world, when it spins, when it whirls, when it twirls, two little beautiful girls.”
It’s the same idea… it’s just that poetry gives the idea wings.
The kernel sentence, or the plea that this prayer is making is this: That God strengthen the community of faith with power to know the unknowable depth of God’s love and to become a meeting place between God and people.
There are some assumptions here that are worth paying attention to. First, there is an assumption that the reason God isn’t already more palpably present is not because God lacks interest, but because we lack strength. The main petition of the prayer is that we would be strengthened in our inner being.
This petition might not be intuitive to us at first, so maybe an image will help. Imagine a box strong enough to contain the sun. It would not only have to be enormous, but it would also have to be indestructible. A nuclear power plant in the US is typically encased in concrete walls 3ft – 5ft thick. And that’s just the containment for nuclear fission reactors, whereas the sun is mostly powered by the far more potent energy of nuclear fusion. So, imagine the kind of strength, or internal fortitude, necessary to hold the sun.
Here, Paul is praying for nothing less than for the community of faith to have the inner fortitude necessary to hold the creator of galaxies.
Sometimes I wonder if our religious imagination has become a little domesticated. Christians sometimes speak of, “having Jesus in their hearts” as though it were a small thing to be occupied by the mysterium tremendum. We who struggle with the basic tasks of global citizenship, easily enticed by half-truths, who have to fight a constant battle of self-discipline in order to hold onto our jobs and relationships, might need to re-discover what it means to quake in the presence of holiness.
The second assumption in this petition is that it’s possible to know a love that’s unknowable. (I told you before, I’m just showing you around… I can’t explain it.). Every bit as important as the strength to hold and understand the divine presence, is the longing to participate in a love that surpasses knowledge.
The closest thing I can approximate to knowing a love that’s unknowable is what happened to me when my daughters were born. As I cradled these tiny humans in my arms, I suddenly knew a love for them so overwhelming and so total that it felt hard to breathe. A moment before I was being a dutiful husband, trying my best to comfort Sophia and attend to the need at hand, now I’d have given anything, at any cost, for the love of these girls. Now some of that experience is pheromonal, and that’s ok, because the point is that there is something about our capacity to love that can expand rapidly beyond our ability to rationally process it.
Paul prays that the community of faith would experience in their relationship with God what I experienced when I held my daughters for the first time, a life altering experience of love that changes everything.
I wonder, do we want that? Do we have the internal fortitude for it? What would happen in our lives and communities if God were to answer this prayer?
The third assumption in this prayer is that it is possible for the invisible God to become visible in a community. I love and have preached many times the words of Tom Skinner’s 1970 message, “Racism and World Evangelism.” In this message Tom said, “It has always been the will of God, to saturate the common clay of a man’s humanity, and then send that man in open display in the midst of a hostile world to bear witness to the fact that it is possible for the invisible God to make himself visible in a man.” While I still think Tom’s words are true, I think they are incomplete, because Paul isn’t praying for individuals. He’s praying for the community.
Imagine praying with selfless abandon that the church would be a place where heaven and earth overlap and interlock, where the invisible God became visible. Well, perhaps we don’t need to imagine. The need is clearly before us as scandals, schisms, and social issues undermine the church’s credibility. There is a major reckoning happening, across all Christian denominations in North America, as many people have left the church (or are leaving).
If you asked Paul what the church needed in this moment; he wouldn’t suggest a really good marketing campaign, a suite of programming, or social platform. Paul would get down on his knees and cry out to God to strengthen the community of faith with power to know the unknowable depth of God’s love and to become a meeting place between God and people.
The final section of this prayer is devoted to praise. Paul’s request, from a human standpoint, is impossible. This is why he anchors his hope in God who is able to do far more than we can ask or even imagine. Ultimately, this prayer leads us to rest in the goodness, love, and power of God.
How might we integrate some of our eavesdropping into our prayer practices this week?
If you have a prayer practice, you might consider finding a new, physical posture in which to pray. What physical posture signifies whole, unreserved, commitment to you? One friend I know used to look up and turn his arms out. I’ve prayed lying on the floor with my arms outstretched. Sophia is taking on the practice of getting out of bed and getting onto her knees before she does anything else. Find a posture this week that signals to you, full, unreserved, engagement, and pray in that posture. It doesn’t have to be long… but come back to it… and notice how your posture changes your prayer.
If you don’t have a prayer practice, consider taking 2 minutes a day to reflect on this image of being strengthened in your inner being by God… for God. Pay attention to what emerges for you.
As I eavesdrop on this saint in prayer, I keep thinking of my friend Martin. What did Martin have that set him apart? In a word… God. Martin had a life with God you could sense from across the room. Martin expressed that life with God in simple, non-flashy, but joyful, acts of love and compassion toward others. It was Martin’s life with God that made me want to know him, and ultimately want to know God. “Sometimes you just have to watch someone love something before you can love it yourself.”