A Refugee's Prayer--April 1, 2020

A Refugee's Prayer--April 1, 2020

"Turn to me and be gracious to me,

    for I am lonely and afflicted.

 Relieve the troubles of my heart,

    and bring me out of my distress.

 Consider my affliction and my trouble,

    and forgive all my sins.

 Consider how many are my foes,

    and with what violent hatred they hate me.

 O guard my life, and deliver me;

    do not let me be put to shame, 

    for I take refuge in you.

 May integrity and uprightness preserve me,

    for I wait for you." [Psalm 25:16-20]

Leonard Cohen sang, "Every heart to love will come, but like a refugee."  He was right.

I find myself paying attention these days to the reasons for God's actions in the Scriptures.  I keep looking for what moves the heart of God... and what moves the hand of God, in the old storytelling.  And I keep seeing this recurring pattern--that God doesn't seem persuaded by our appeals to our own worthiness or greatness or accomplishments, so much as God is moved to help us at the point of our need.  The praying poet doesn't say, "Turn to me and be gracious, O God, for I am great--so great--and I'm winning at life like you wouldn't believe."  But rather, the psalmist brings only a refugee's prayer:  "I am running for my life, and you're my only hope  I take refuge in you."  And everything hangs on that hope--the hope that God's nature, God's character, is to help the desperate.

And that is indeed enough to hold us.

In the end, our hope is not that God will help us because we were religious enough, or well-behaved enough, or prayed hard enough, but simply that God's deepest core impulse is to bring us to life.  It's not about me, how much I have achieved, how hard I believe, or how often I pray.  It's about God, and how much God loves, how fiercely God holds us, and how ready God is to act even before we've asked or mouthed a prayer.  Our hope is in the God who brings us to life, the God who meets people at the point of their loneliness and affliction, the God who knows what it is, in Christ, to be alone and afflicted, too.  

These days it is tempting to look for religious rabbits' feet that we think will make God act for us.  Maybe if I get the right words in a prayer, God will help me.  Maybe if we all go out to gather for worship in public in defiance of the wisdom of health experts, we'll prove to God we're devout.  Maybe if I just believe hard enough that Jesus' blood covers me from coronavirus, it won't come to my house.  All of those may be easy thought patterns to slide into, but they are also all dangerously bad theology.  They all end up pointing back at me rather than at God, and they are all grounded in what I do in order to make God do the thing I want, rather than centering on God's goodness to us when we're at the end of our rope. 

Those voices are all around us, honestly.  It's the Respectable Religious folks who say, "If you're afraid of getting sick these days, it must be because you have unconfessed sin in your life."  It's the preachers and religious professional that insist, "If you really had faith, you wouldn't get sick," and it's the loud talking heads on television that shout, "Of course God must be on my side--look how successful I am!"  They all focus in the wrong direction--on us, and what we do, rather than on the goodness of God, even when all we bring are empty hands.

The honest voices of faith in the Scriptures know better.  They turn our attention not onto themselves and their "greatness," but to the God who holds them precisely at their weakest points and most desperate hours.  They recognize that God raises us up exactly when we have nowhere else to turn and have run out of options and aces up our sleeve. They help us to see that God's life-giving help is not given as a reward for good behavior, a prize for a certain amount of "winning" and "greatness," or in return for showering God with adequate amounts of prayer and devotion.  God's help is given as a gift of grace, like streams in the desert for parched souls, like life for Lazarus lying dead in the tomb, like shelter for the homeless and the refugee.  God doesn't give out rescue on the basis of who "deserves" it; that is simply not how God operates.  God does not love us on the basis of what we offer the Almighty.  No, our hearts come to the Love of God like refugees--when all we've got is nuthin', and when we are knee-deep in trouble.

This, it turns out, is good news.  Because if God's help depended on my worthiness, I'd never be able to rely on it.  My heart is fickle, and my best intentions are always tainted by my insecurities, fears, and selfishness.  But if my hope is rooted in who God is, apart from how I have behaved or how much I look like a "winner," then I can rest secure, because God's goodness doesn't change.  We can pin all our hopes on this God, even when we've got nothing else in our hands.

Lord God, turn our focus away from ourselves and onto your faithfulness.  We are seeking you for refuge, and all we bring are our empty hands.