On Having It Backwards

On Having It Backwards--April 9, 2019

"First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity. This is right and is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself a ransom for all--this was attested at the right time." [1 Timothy 2:1-6]

So here's a humbling realization for a supposed "religious professional" like myself: I've had it backwards, all this time.

We--or at least I know myself on this one--tend to think about prayer as the starting point of a chain reaction of cause and effect where my words eventually lead God to do something to change things around me.  We tend to think that praying is something like a chemical reaction, a catalyst for making God do something that God was not previously inclined to do. We think of it almost like the old elementary school volcano science project: my words (like vinegar) get poured out on an inert, unmoved deity (like baking soda), in order to provoke a response from the heavens to change someone else, heal a sickness, move a heart, or bring someone to faith.

So in other words, our usual thinking is that my prayer initiates a change in God's will and action.

But what if, just what if, it's God who is prompting us to pray in the first place, because God's will is ahead of where our hearts are?  What if it's God's good will that needs to stretch out our shrunken, shriveled hearts so they can catch up to the breadth of God's all-encompassing love?

If that seems a strange idea, read these verses from what we call First Timothy again.  Note how the train of thought goes.  The writer urges that we pray for the needs of "everyone"--a group that includes even ungodly pagan rulers and leaders (remember, Christianity was illegal for the first several centuries and no king or ruler was a Christian for hundreds of years after this letter was written). And the reason given for us to pray for all people is that "God desires everyone to be saved and to come ot the knowledge of the truth."  

In other words, it is God's will to save and redeem everybody that leads the writer of First Timothy to tell us that we ought to be praying for everybody!  It's NOT that we have to persuade a miserly, stubborn, and apathetic God to start working on someone's heart to turn them to faith.  Just the opposite--God is already at work in the world, willing for all people to "come to the knowledge of the truth," and WE are the ones who have to be smacked upside the head to get on board with this policy of God's.  We are the ones nursing prejudices, grudges, and hates that want to keep this group or that group (or this particular person or that particular person) out of the reach of God's mercy, and God is the one who has to keep stretching our prayer lives to become big enough for the needs of the world that God loves.

And as if to keep pushing our buttons even further, the passage says that this is exactly what the cross of Christ tells us, too!  As the author says here, since Jesus is the one mediator for all of humanity, and since Jesus gave himself as a ransom for "all," then we who are followers of Jesus are called to no less than love and concern for the well-being of that same "all."  The cross of Jesus ransomed not only me, but the same "everyone" and the same "all" of this whole passage.  And that means that God is intimately, passionately, and unswervingly concerned for the well-being of all people.  I don't get to pick who is or isn't of concern, because God has just up and declared that all of us are worth God's dying for in Christ.

That means it's the cross itself that points me to pray for, to act for, to speak for, and to spend myself for.  It's the cross itself that won't let me look away from the neighbors around me who are stepped on or struggling.  It's the cross itself that prevents us from saying, "We don't really want to invite THOSE people to worship--they might actually come, and we don't want THAT sort here." It's the cross itself that calls baloney on us when we mutter things like, "We don't want those noisy kids around in church--keep them at home if they are making a fuss!" It's the cross itself that keeps us from saying, "Only people like 'us' should be looked out for--sorry, others--you just aren't my concern."  It's the cross of Jesus that turns us from setting up boundaries of who "counts" as a neighbor, and it's the same cross of Jesus that turns us toward a love for all people, near and far. 

And to be clear, it's not that it's "my bright idea" to reach out to all, and then I have to pray to drag God along with that idea.  It's the other way around.  I'm the stingy, shrunken-hearted, small-minded one, and God has to point me to the cross to get me to see wider, and to pray wider, for the well being of "everyone."  God is the One whose vision is bigger--God has to stretch me to re-discover that people from all over this beautiful blue planet are God's beloved.  God loves the people who already name the name of Jesus--and God loves the people who do not.  If I care about the well-being of people who share my faith in God, that same God compels me to care about the well-being of people who do not share that faith, too.  If I would get upset to see people who look like me being mistreated, then the God in whom I believe will not let me off the hook to be indifferent when people who do not look like me get mistreated, abused, or regarded as "less than." If I am concerned for the health and safety of people who were born in the same country as I was, or whose skin color has the same amount of melanin in it as mine, then the God of the cross insists that I be as concerned for the health and safety of people whose birthplace or complexion are different from mine.  And it is God who pulls me to that realization--this is not my idea that I have to plead with God to go along with.  It is God who has to drag us, all too often, kicking and screaming, into a love as wide as God's already is.

So today, it is time for us to be done once and for all with the backwards pictuure which says that praying is about our attempt to change God's mind. And instead today is the day to hear from the Scriptures themselves that God changes our minds and prompts us to pray for everybody's needs, when we had been settling for something much too small and shortsighted, and from there, our prayer becomes action and speech and love.  God doesn't need you to pray for something in order to become informed about someone else's needs, but sometimes we need God to smack us upside the head to be moved to pray about needs of people we had written off as unimportant.  

Everybody is on God's heart.  Everybody.  After all, as these very verses note, it's God's desire for all to be saved and for everyone to come to the knowledge of the truth.

I guess the only question that remains, then, is whether this God (whom we rightly name as Almighty, All-powerful, and Omnipotent) will ultimately get what God desires in the end.

Your will be done, O Lord, on earth.