Church News

Posted on

Compassion that reaches beyond the boundary

Jesus touches a man with leprosoy

Jesus was compassionate. That is not exactly news to most people. But to the fact that Jesus was compassionate, we must add another piece of information: Jesus’ compassion teaches about the nature of God. In Jesus’ acts of compassion, we see that God reaches outside the boundaries to enable outsiders to come in. Consider briefly with me Jesus healing a leper.

impure made pure

In Mark 1:40-45, we read about Jesus cleansing a man with a skin disease. According to the laws in Leviticus 13, Jesus probably shouldn’t have been hanging around with a leper. But he did. In fact, he did even more than just hang around with him:

40 Now a leper came to him and fell to his knees, asking for help. “If you are willing, you can make me clean,” he said. 41 Moved with indignation, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, “I am willing. Be clean!” 42 The leprosy left him at once, and he was clean. (NET)

Jesus touched him. According to all of the social conventions and the Torah on which they were based—some more rightly than others—Jesus shouldn’t do that. To be a ‘leper’ meant the man had a skin disease which rendered him ritually impure.

Note: the word leprosy in the Bible is not referring to the skin disease which we today call leprosy, or, more technically, Hansen’s disease. It refers to a variety of skin conditions of uncertain nature that resulted in rashes, spots, etc.

Ritual impurity worked a lot like COVID lockdown guidelines—touch someone who was sick and you had to go into quarantine, too, until you could prove you weren’t sick. Avoiding ritual impurity was an important consideration in Jesus’ day and place. Jesus sets this all aside and touches the man.

Why does Jesus do this?

following the model of God

Jesus follows the model of how God deals with a rebellious people who are ritually (and morally) cut off from him. We see this model many places in the Old Testament, but an especially poignant instance occurs at Mt. Sinai.

While Moses is up on the mountain receiving the Law, the people decide to through their own impromptu religious orgy. In this act, they violate the provisions of the covenant God is making with them. Thus, if God were driven by legal technicalities, he would walk away from them and never come back. Instead, the sin becomes the backdrop for God’s self-revealing action.

In Exodus 34:27 we read:

27 The Lord said to Moses, “Write down these words, for in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel.” (NET)

This verse sounds interesting, but once we remember it is after the golden calf rebellion, it takes a profound meaning. Despite God’s people breaking their nascent covenant with God, he reconnects with them. In his compassion, he reaches beyond the terms of the covenant they broke and takes hold of them again.

We learn about God by what he does, and what he does is reach out with compassion beyond the boundaries.

the cleaning touch

The model of God’s action in Exodus is not lost on Jesus. God made the people fit for relationship even though they had made themselves unfit. He crossed through a boundary and brought them back.

In a small, symbolic way, Jesus does this same thing. He steps across the boundary of clean/unclean and brings the leprous man back. His command, “Be clean!” effects the opposite of what is expected. In the purity system, when a clean person touched an unclean person, it was always the uncleanness that was contagious. Jesus acts with the finger of God to bring restorative cleanness to the man with a touch.

We learn about God by what he does. One compassionate touch from Jesus has so much to teach us about a God who crosses boarders and boundaries to bring people home.

Posted on

How, then, shall we pray?

neon sign praying hands on black background

Few questions have the power to make a church gathering awkward more quickly than asking people about their prayer life. Yet it is a deeply important part of life for the follower of Jesus. A new year is a fair time to ask an ever-important question: how, then, shall we pray? There are two approaches to prayer that you should utilize which can yield benefits in your prayer life (and life in general): off the cuff prayer and scripted prayer.

“Off the cuff” prayer

Off the cuff prayer, or more fancily, extemporaneous prayer, is what we call  a prayer that is made up on the spot. In my experience, people in the Baptist and Baptist-like circles of Christian practice consider extemporaneous prayer to be the gold standard. Off the cuff prayer has a unique power to unleash passion, but without proper attention it also can easily end in dull routine and limited prayers.

raw and passionate prayer

Probably the best feature of extemporaneous prayer is that it connects to the actual thoughts and feelings of the moment. Since it is much like talking, it allows us to freely bring our thoughts and concerns to the throne of God, with all the angst and joy we feel right now. This conversational aspect of off the cuff prayer often results in it feeling more real, more authentic, and more connected to our lives. All good things.

the problem of routine and blinders

But for all its strengths, extemporaneous prayer has some weakness to guard against. Two important weaknesses are dull routine and prayer-blinders.

dull routine

A prayer routine is when you end up saying the same old things about the same old things. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

Nothing saps the savor from prayer quite like a dull routine. Off the cuff prayer can easily degrade from connected conversation to stale patterns and cliches. Let’s face it, the depth and breadth of extemporaneous prayer is largely limited by your creativity. While we have periodic flashes of creative brilliance, most of life is spent in the humdrum murk of the mundane. Stagnant prayers tend to result in a stagnant prayer life.

Alongside the danger of the dreaded dull routine, off-the-cuff prayer can also be crippled by prayer-blinders.

prayer-blinders

Envision the Mackinaw Island horses. They all wear the same, stylish headgear: blinders. Blinders serve to narrow the horses’ immense range of vision, so they can only focus on what is ahead. For horses pulling wagons in busy streets, blinders are useful. But for the follower of God in prayer, blinders hinder spiritual depth and breadth.

Mackinaw Island horse wearing blinders

Prayer driven only by the needs and thoughts of the moment tends toward spiritual narrowness. It is relatively easy to pray for my needs; after all, I am always acutely aware of them. But what about the needs of others in your church? The one struggling with the recent death of a loved one or the couple at a loss in parenting their child, and so many others. They are on the periphery of your life. Without some  sort of guidance you probably won’t get around to praying for them. Not to mention even further removed issues like church unity, gospel effectiveness, the spiritual health of denominational leaders, the effectiveness of community leaders, or even the perseverance of the church around the world.

All these topics, and more, deserve prayer. But when our prayers are blown about by our daily concerns, they tend to never arrive anywhere but where the wind blows.

Scripted or rote prayer.

Opposite to off the cuff prayer, the other main model involves praying from a script. Scripted prayer, aka rote prayer, is praying via reading or reciting from memory. Think reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Scripted prayers can be either self-written or composed by others. Periodically using prayers written by others can sharpen the way you pray and broaden your awareness of what is worth praying for. This makes  scripted prayers useful for learning how to pray. Scripted prayer, though, also suffers from the pitfall of a different sort of dull routine.

deep and wide prayer

Scripted prayer is like marinated meat. The longer it soaks, the more flavorful the result. Off the cuff prayer is limited by the creative spark of the moment. Scripted prayer soaks in the flavors of reflective thought. As such, scripted prayers—at least those done well—tend to have greater breadth and depth of concern, rigor, and beauty.  A prayer that has time to soak gains the strength to move beyond immediate, personal needs and embrace God’s words and intentions to us.

lasting prayer

Since it is written down or memorized, scripted prayer gains a further strength: repeatability. While many from non-liturgical church backgrounds fear repetition, the fact is that those things which we repeat shape us. Skill and expertise emerge through practice over time. Scripted prayers can shape our lives and shape our prayer sensibilities in powerful ways over the years.

the pitfall of dull routine

Dull routine is the chief drawback of scripted prayers. While repetition shapes our lives, it can also become background noise. How often do we go through the routine of taking a step without giving any conscious attention to what we are doing? A prayer life that is reduced to sub-conscious prayer is a tragedy.

Aside from monotonous repetition, scripted prayers can also become stale when they fail to excite the emotions. Prayers that feel foreign in your mouth don’t taste good, thus they are never savored. Remember your favorite B movie. One quality of B movies, aside from poorly written scripts and deeply underfunded effects, is that the actors sound like they are saying lines. The words don’t quite fit in their mouths. Praying foreign prayers is not helpful.

The best of both worlds

How then shall we pray? I hope it is clear that both off the cuff and scripted prayers are valuable. Scripted prayer tends to be strong in all the ways that off the cuff prayer is weak, and weak in all the ways that off the cuff prayer is strong. As such, there is great wisdom in incorporating both into a life of prayer. The two approaches can feed into one another in lovely ways as you build a more robust prayer life.

In the next post, I’ll give a few patterns that are worthwhile guides for praying.

Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash