Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
This podcast is a production of Watermark Community Church in Dallas, Texas, USA. Watermark exists to be and make more fully devoted followers of Christ, looking to God's Word as our only authority, conscience and guide.
**Timothy Ateek:** Hey, welcome to Watermark today. If this is your first time ever with us, let me just say thanks for trusting us with your Sunday morning. My hope every week for anyone who shows up here is that you would take either your first or your next step with Jesus today.
I am so excited about this morning, because you're going to get to hear from Tyler Staton. If you don't know Tyler, Tyler is the lead pastor of Bridgetown Church in Portland, Oregon, where he lives with his wife Kirsten and their sons Hank, Simon, and Amos. He's passionate about living prayerfully and relationally. He's the author of four books. Many of you have probably read one of his books, whether it's _After Amen_; _The Familiar Stranger_; _Praying Like Monks_, _Living Like Fools_; or _Searching for Enough_.
The reason Tyler is in town is for his After Amen event, which is happening tomorrow night, and it's going to be incredible. If you have not made plans to go, you totally should. Even if you're serving at CLC, you should come to CLC, and once you finish up here, you should go to the After Amen event. It's going to be an incredible night of poetry and prayer, exploring what it looks like to live the prayers we pray long after we say, "Amen."
Tyler is talking today about prayer, which is so fitting as we're in the book of Acts, because you see the people of God in the first century pray all throughout the book. I'll just say, for me personally, Tyler's writing has been very impactful in my life over the past year, so I'm so glad we get to have him here today. Would you do an incredible job welcoming Tyler Staton to Watermark?
As he's coming up, I just want to invite you to pray, like we do every Sunday. If you would, just take a moment and pray for yourself and ask God to speak to you today. Then, would you pray for the people around you and ask God to speak to them as well? Then, would you take a moment and pray for Tyler and ask God to speak through him to you?
Lord, thank you for how you used Tyler in the first service, but this is a new moment, so I want to ask and pray for your grace upon him as he speaks. I pray, Holy Spirit, for your clear and unmistakable work in our hearts and in our minds. Would you glorify Christ today? Lord, we want to meet with you. We believe you're here, that we get to meet with you and hear from you through the study of your Word. So, have your way. In Jesus' name, amen.
**Tyler Staton:** Amen. One Monday morning in early spring a couple of years ago, I was jogging along the Willamette River that slices right through the heart of downtown Portland where I live. It was an unseasonably clear morning, and the sun rose that morning in such gorgeous watercolor hues that I literally stopped in my tracks to drink it in. I even said to a complete stranger passing along the river at the same time, "Are you seeing this? Wow!"
The rest of the run home, I was just lost in a prayerful stupor, staggered at the God who paints his masterpieces on hours most of us snooze away, and even those of us who are awake tend to be staring not into the glow of the sunrise but the glow of a pocket-sized screen. I arrived home and immediately walked out on my front porch where I have a little prayer space sitting there with a candle that I light each morning and my Bible and my journal.
Only, to my surprise, not all was as it should have been. My candle wasn't there. My matches were strewn all over the place. The pen had been removed from my journal and was nowhere to be found. I knew right away what had happened. Amos, my youngest son, who was then 2 years old, had taken a recent fascination to his dad's little prayer closet.
I found the candle stuffed in our mailbox, half the beeswax torn away. I picked up as many of the matches as I could and returned them to the box. I never found that perfectly smooth ballpoint pen, though. Irritated, I walked inside to ask Kirsten, who had just woken up, how she could let this happen to my one space, and I gave little Amos a brief lecture about not touching Dad's special things.
As I returned to the porch to pray, the irony of it all suddenly occurred to me. The wonder of the sunrise, the prayerful stupor I had stumbled home in washed away at something as small as a missing beeswax candle. That morning prompted a question for me, one I haven't been able to shake since, one I hope I never shake. How do I pull my prayers from the majesty of the sunrise above down onto the front porch below?
How do I pray in a way that doesn't escape the mess for a brief enlightened moment at dawn but welcomes God into the mess of the day I'm just beginning? So, again I prayed, "Oh, gracious God, give me more than prayerful words, but give me a prayer-shaped life. Bring my prayers down from the sunrise that I gaze upon above into the mess of my parenting, my husbanding, my befriending, my living, my relating."
This might surprise you at first, but the fruit of prayer isn't only about miraculous intervention and divine action. Even more than that, the fruit of prayer is about what happens within the praying person after all of their "Amens." The real fruit of prayer is the way it reforms the heart of the praying person until they see and live and act in their ordinary world just as Jesus would. Prayer is an exercise that trains me to drag the majesty of heaven down into the ordinary of life.
If you will let him, Jesus will bring prayer far closer than you imagined when you began praying, closer than the power just to change the world around you, but close enough to change the world within you. I think what I'm trying to get at is as you grow up in a life of prayer, you become less and less enamored about exactly what happens between your "Dear Gods" and "Amens" and more about who you become _after_ all of your "Amens."
It's great to be with you today, Watermark. I'm really glad to be here in Texas. I've only spent a tiny bit of time in Texas in my life, but I _have_ binge-watched _Friday Night Lights_, so I think I get it. What I haven't done, though… And I want you to know, because I'm about to talk with you about some pretty serious topics, so before we get there, you need to know that I'm a pretty good time.
For instance, I was asked earlier, "Is there anything special you're going to do while you're here?" and I said, "Absolutely. Ride a mechanical bull." I've never done that before in my life, and I think this is the only place on earth that those exist. So, if anyone has any strong recommendations for mechanical bull rides or _real_ bull rides, depending on how this sermon goes, just let me know where I can get at that.
I want to take a look today at Colossians, chapter 4, beginning in verse 2. We read, **"Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful."** Paul is beginning to close out his letter to the Colossian community of Jesus' apprentices with some final words of instruction about prioritizing the spiritual practice of prayer. In the very same breath, he very quickly jumps from private prayer to verse 5.
**"Be wise in the way you act toward outsiders; make the most of every opportunity. Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone."** Paul seems to be assuming here that the conversations we begin with God in secret become the actions and conversations we pick up with our neighbors in public. Paul, the very guy who said, "Pray without ceasing," seems to imagine a life of unending prayer, not as one of endless dialogue with God but rather one where a prayer-shaped life is birthed into the world.
**"Devote yourselves to prayer…"** That's where it all begins. It's the source and origin point of daily bread and kingdom come alike. The English term _devote_ in this passage is the Greek _proskartereo_. Can you say that? That was medium. You guys are getting there, though. It's a word that's used 10 separate times in the Bible, almost always in reference to prayer.
For instance, in Acts, chapter 1: **"They all joined together** \[or devoted themselves\] **constantly in prayer…"** Later in Acts 2, **"They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer."** In Acts 6, **"We will turn this responsibility over to them and will give our attention** \[devotion\] **to prayer…"** Romans 12: **"Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful** \[devoted\] **in prayer."**
We get an even more fully formed understanding of the sort of devotion the Scriptures have in mind here by its alternative uses, the few times it's applied to something other than prayer. In Acts 10:7, we read a passage speaking of a "devout soldier" who was one of Cornelius' attendants, and in Romans 13, civil officials are said to be devoting their time to governing.
So, the Bible uses this word _proskartereo_ to refer to the secular vocation of those working outside of the church and then takes a vocational word to describe someone's career and repurposes it to all followers of Jesus as they pray within the walls of the church. In other words, Scripture says that prayer, as a follower of Jesus, is your primary vocation, the center that the rest of your life orbits around.
In the life of a disciple, then, there are many good things. There's work and obligations, appointments and needs, friends and neighbors, but there's only one devotion, just one center around which everything else revolves, finding its proper place in the working order that sustains life, and that is prayer. In your life, you can have many priorities, but you can only have one devotion.
Jesus himself did say in Matthew 6, **"No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other."** Now, in context in this passage, Jesus is describing the competing relationship to money, but the principle holds for _any_ competing devotion.
So, if all of this is, biblically speaking, a vocational concept about the primary devotion of my time, energy, attention, and resources, then it's worth considering… If someone observed me inside and out for a week, if they heard every passing thought that ran through my mind, if they observed every minute of the way I spent my days, if they watched my habits and practices and priorities objectively, who or what would they say I'm devoted to?
What priority do I uphold no matter what? What do I manage to purchase when my paychecks are plentiful and when they're thin? What do I always live with and never live without? When life goes as planned and gets interrupted, when I'm doing well and just barely getting by, what do I always seem to get in? Who or what am I devoted to? Am I devoted to my ambition? How much energy do I expend toward my career pursuits? How preoccupied am I by my boss' or coworkers' opinions?
How closely do I watch my inbox after turning in a project or how inflated am I by a positive remark and how anxious after a critical one? How badly do I need to succeed, how much does it scare me not to, and who gave me the definition of success I carry around with me? Am I devoted to my social circle? How much emotional energy do I expend people-pleasing at work or peacemaking within my family or competing, criticizing, gossiping, and one-upping?
Am I the one who shows up to every happy hour, who says "Yes" to every last invitation? Do I spend more time on my social media profile than I do my soul? Do I share a million conversations with others but barely whisper a word to the one who spoke me into being? Or am I devoted to my body? How much of my mind's attention is spent on my diet, my meal planning, calorie counting, what I'll eat today, or how I'll make up today for the indulgence I allowed myself yesterday?
How much of my time is given to exercise, to the perfecting of my body, or the pursuit of my goal weight? How much regard do I give to my physical appearance? What story do my finances tell me about how much I value maintaining the youthfulness of my complexion or the fashion of my wardrobe or the tone of my skin?
Am I devoted to pleasure? How much of the workweek do I spend daydreaming about the weekend? How satisfied am I to have nothing particular going on, and how often do I find myself there? What do I use to escape the stress of my life? Is it food, drink, screens, shopping, activity, or people? There are plenty of reasons to be devoted to prayer, but the first and most obvious one is that any other devotion makes you less. Only prayer will make you more.
Devote yourself to your ambition, and you will climb the corporate ladder until you fall, and it will hurt. You'll get up and keep climbing and keep climbing until you've passed your whole life on a ladder that you never got to the top of and forgot why it was you had to touch the top rung anyway. Or even worse, you'll reach the top, and then you'll expend more energy fending off the others trying to climb the same ladder than you ever did getting to the top in the first place.
Devote yourself to a social circle, and you will fill every minute, every thought, and expend every ounce of energy you have trying to keep people happy, people whose happiness is a riddle to themselves, so how are _you_ going to be able to solve it? You'll keep plenty of people happy by hiding your true self, and you will lose track of who you are and will never see and draw forth the real in them either.
Devote yourself to your body, and you will never be beautiful enough. You will always be working on yourself, turning everyone else into a comparison scale, making certain that neither you nor they are known for the divine imprint on your soul within you.
Devote yourself to pleasure, to your choice means of escape, and you will escape your life's responsibilities frequently and with increasingly longer stretches until you wake up one day to realize that somewhere along the way you evacuated your life altogether, that you had one shot at being a mom or dad, son or daughter, friend or neighbor or coworker or disciple, and you traded it for being the life of your preferred party. Now here you are turning the lights out on that party that everyone else left somewhere along the way.
But devote yourself to prayer, then everything else in your life is going to find its proper order. It will fall into alignment. You will not be the center, but you will find yourself revolving around a center where life is sustained through changing seasons and passing years. Who or what am I devoted to, not aspirationally but honestly? What does my life, my time, my thoughts, my energy, my finances…? What does my life orbit around?
It was a couple of years ago now, standing on my front porch offering a brief lecture to my 2-year-old, that I was confronted by that very question and the realization that I wanted my answer to be prayer. "I'm devoted to prayer." I could remember a time when that was a true statement of me, but somewhere along the way, in all of the coming and going, pastoring, writing, errands, and tasks… Somewhere in the shuffle of it all, I lost sight of the center around which life orbits. Lesser loves have a way of doing this, of slowly but subtly nudging their way onto the throne of your life's devotion.
"Who or what am I devoted to?" Whenever you can be honest enough with yourself to answer that question, here are a couple I would ask on its heels: "Do I want to become who it's making me, and do I get to keep what it's giving me?" My humble conviction is that I want to be devoted to prayer. My honest reflection is that a life devoted to prayer is a life that is lived on three mountaintops: _Mount Tabor_, the _Mount of Olives_, and _Golgotha_. So, that's a map for the rest of our time together this morning.
First, _Mount Tabor_. It's on this mountain that Jesus is transfigured, that he is glowing with the beaming image of God's glory. Matthew 17: **"…a bright cloud covered them, and a voice from the cloud said, 'This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!'"** Now, this is one of just three distinct occasions on the pages of the Bible when the voice of God the Father speaks audibly over the Son. You have the transfiguration of Jesus that we just read. There's also before this at Jesus' baptism, and there's after this in the temple during his final week.
The three messages from the three times we hear the voice of God audibly are nearly identical. At his baptism, the Father says, **"You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased."** Here on Mount Tabor in the transfiguration, the Father says, **"This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased."** At the temple in his final week, Jesus cries out, **"Father, glorify your name!"** and the voice of God says, **"I have glorified it, and will glorify it again."** In context, the message is "You're already bringing me glory, Son. Not in some future aspiration of who you might become but here and now today, just as you are."
Now, surely, the three distinct occasions on the pages of the Bible where we get to eavesdrop on dialogue within the Trinity are some of the standout moments in the whole of Scripture. Right? I mean, you would think God would have seized the opportunity to say something a bit more productive. Like, to rebuke the corrupt priests or the Roman oppressors or to call Israel to repentance or explain the meaning of life or something like that.
But when God spoke loud enough to his Son for the whole world to hear, he only ever had one message: "I love you, and I'm proud of you." There is no discovery you will ever make more formative than the love the Father has for you, and it is just that. The Father's love must be discovered. It cannot simply be learned or read from the experiences of others.
If we're to know the Father's love personally, it's going to take more than just a solid theological library and sound doctrine. We can get to belief through knowledge alone, but knowing, the relational, experiential sort of knowing, requires that what I already believe objectively I also experience subjectively. As long as all we're talking about here are textbooks and math problems, objective information is going to do just fine, but the second we go into something like relationship, then our experience or our subjective knowledge becomes equally vital.
Love cannot be learned; it can only be discovered. So, hear the Father's affirmation over you. "You are my son" or "You are my daughter, whom I love; with you I am well pleased." Hearing God say that over your life today is not all prayer is, but it's definitely the foundation on which prayer is built.
You cannot sustain a life of prayer on belief in the power of prayer alone. You can sustain a life of prayer only by discovering, "I am the beloved of God. He is my sun and my shield, the warmth on my face on life's best days and a shelter in the storm on life's worst days. He is the one who trains my hands for battle, and he's the one who binds up my wounds when I walk home limping and injured."
I'm not here advocating for devotion to prayer because I'm super into the practice of prayer or because I'm really convinced about the power of prayer. I do believe both of those things, but I am devoted to prayer because I've come to believe that full life starts and ends with remaining in the love of God, and that's what prayer is.
Both Matthew and Mark's gospels show us that when Jesus returns from this mountaintop encounter, he's greeted by an absolute mess waiting for him in the village down below. His disciples are trying to heal a boy suffering from epilepsy, and it's not going very well, to put it politely. Jesus then heals and delivers this boy, and his disciples ask in verse 19, **"Why couldn't we drive it out?"**
To which he replied, **"Because you have so little faith. Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you."** Scholars Henri Nouwen and Dallas Willard both argue that the Greek word _pistis_, which appears here and is frequently translated _faith_ in our English Bibles, is probably best translated _trust_, because faith is the outward expression of an internal restored trust.
The Serpent in the garden at the very beginning of the story didn't attack Eve's faith, making her doubt God's power; he attacked Eve's trust, making her doubt God's love. That's what makes mountaintop moments so useful, those moments in your life when you encounter the power of God. They restore in us a trust that "The very God that I've heard on the mountaintop is the same in the valley."
We put trust into action, believing ourselves to be his beloved and acting in step with that belief long after the inspiration has worn off. That's what Jesus means when he drops this famous mustard-seed mountain-moving line. He's saying, "If you believe that I am who I am on the mountaintop and you are my beloved, then you will be untouchable to the deceiver of this world down here in the valley. You will effortlessly restore creation alongside me because you are rooted in heavenly power, born from a heavenly identity."
Prayer is the practice of beholding Jesus aglow and hearing the Father's voice over you, but prayer is also the invitation to live with the tinge of that glow still on your face after you say, "Amen." Not to escape this world into a holy moment or two but to glimpse your ordinary life…the streets you walk on, the office you work in, the school you attend, the home you live in…as a globe bursting with the potential of holy moments. Will I trust God, the very God I met in prayer, is every bit as interested, alive, and involved after I say "Amen"? That's the mustard seed-sized faith that restores creation.
So, prayer begins on Mount Tabor, but then it moves to the _Mount of Olives_. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all remember this peak as the site of Jesus' arrest when he was interrupted by Judas and a team of officers while he was praying in Gethsemane. Luke, though, points out an interesting little tidbit. Luke 22:39: **"Jesus went out as usual to the Mount of Olives, and his disciples followed him."**
It's a hint back to the previous chapter when Luke tells us that for the whole of what we now call _Holy Week_ (the final seven days of Jesus' life), he went to pray at the Mount of Olives every single night. So, this is more than just the site of one famous prayer for Jesus; it's a frequent favorite prayer spot for Jesus.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke all remember the same prayer of Jesus on this mountain when he prayed through blood and sweat from his knees, "Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me. Yet not my will but yours be done." John's gospel, though, recalls a different prayer from the very same mountain on the very same night, one that Jesus prayed on his _way_ to the garden where he fell on his knees, and it is typically called the _High Priestly Prayer_. It's among the most joyful prayers in the whole of Scripture.
So, check this out. On the final night of Jesus' life, he prays both joyfully and sorrowfully, and both Jesus' joy and his sorrow are born from empathy. He prays out of empathetic excitement for all he's about to share with you and me, and he prays through empathetic sorrow for the pain he will endure on behalf of you and me.
Jesus' internal world as revealed by his prayers is unique in this way: for Jesus, power does not erode empathy. I hate to be the bearer of bad news here, but the psychological consensus is that power in any form among any community is bad for you. If power were a prescription drug, it would come with a long list of side effects. Power can intoxicate, corrupt, and distort.
That holds true whether we're talking about the organizational power of mid-level management in your company or the social power of walking into a room where you're known and others aren't or being in the popular crowd at your high school or the in-group at your workplace, and it holds for the spiritual power of being called _pastor_. The psychologist Dacher Keltner writes, "Once we have power, we lose some of the capacities we needed to gain it in the first place."
He names this the _power paradox_, and then backs it with more than 20 years of lab and field experiments, all of which verify that people with power behave, psychologically speaking, like people who have suffered a traumatic brain injury. Meaning, people with power become more impulsive, less risk aware, less risk averse, and less adept at seeing their view through the eyes of another.
His conclusion is that people in power gained that power through empathy. Meaning, you gain social influence by seeing and understanding the other in a way that would engender their trust. Empathy wins you power. But, Keltner continues, power leaks empathy. Meaning, the longer you have it, the less you have of what gave you power in the first place. Isn't that fascinating? I find this absolutely fascinating.
So, maybe the great power abuse scandals in recent history that have poured out of the corporate world, the political world, and the church… Maybe they aren't the result of a few bad apples but are, rather, the result of power's corrosive effect on seeing the other through eyes of dignity, love, and compassion, of seeing the other through eyes of empathy.
Here we have one of the characteristics that makes Jesus so unique. Jesus operates in an extraordinary amount of spiritual power _through_ empathy. The power of the Spirit that we see in Jesus doesn't erode empathy; rather, it amplifies it. How did that happen? How did Jesus grow in power _and_ empathy at the same time? Prayer. Jesus was called a glutton and a drunkard, and he was called a man of sorrows. Jesus is publicly accused of being too celebratory, too joyful, and too sorrowful, too much of a downer.
That's who prayer will make us: someone who holds both joy and sorrow together in their person. Henri Nouwen writes, "Prayer always leads us to the heart of God and the heart of the human struggle at the same time." In other words, prayer is where empathy is cultivated, because it is in prayer that we identify both the victorious promises of God that are real today, here and now, and the present pains of this world where those promises are deeply needed. Prayer is the practice of holding joy and sorrow together in tension. It is the practice of empathy.
Last spring, I spent a week teaching at a few different gatherings and festivals around the United Kingdom, and I took my mom along with me. That was really special for me because, first off, she had never been to England, so it was just really fun to get to travel somewhere new with her, but also because it was the only week I have ever spent alone with my mother in my life. That's not because I have a strained relationship with my mom. I have a great relationship with my mom. It's because I'm the middle child of three boys.
So, since the day I was born into this world, I was sharing her with a couple of other brothers and a father. Now I'm the middle child of three boys who's sharing my mom with my dad, my brothers, and her nine grandchildren. Every time I'm with her, we're swimming in a sea of relatives. But here we were boarding a 10-hour flight with seven days together, just me and her, stretching out in front of us.
While we were there, she got word that her very best friend from high school was in critical condition and on her deathbed, and my mom began to grieve in front of me. She was getting updates from the family very frequently, recalling memories of growing up together. She was carrying very real sorrow within her every day of that trip, but at the same time, she was treasuring the memories we were making on that trip, and she wanted to hold on to them forever.
So, on our last day (this is a true story) in this little English countryside town, she pulls me into a seedy little tattoo parlor and says, "Let's get tatted up, matching tattoos to mark the memory." So, here I am with my mom in the latter half of her 60s getting inked up for the first time in her life. I can guarantee you that's the only thing either of us is going to remember about that trip in 10 years.
I'm going to forget whatever we ate for dinner, whether our flights were on time or delayed, and how it went in each of the teachings I gave, but my mom, agonizing in pain while an amateur tattoo artist tries to draw a flower on her ankle? I'm never going to forget that. She was sorrowful, but she was alive in joy, both at the same time. That's who prayer will make you.
Romans 12:15: **"Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn."** In other words, "Cultivate empathy," says Paul. That is the distinguishing marker of all of Jesus' disciples. Great idea, but of course that's easier said than done, because every one of us who accrues some degree of power, that power slowly but surely erodes the empathy required for entering into the joy and sorrow of others.
So, how am I supposed to empathize with my fellow human beings? How am I supposed to live for love, the only thing that lasts, in the number of days I have? Well, just zoom out a touch. Paul has already covered that bit in the same chapter. Romans 12, beginning three verses prior: **"Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction,** \[devoted to\] **prayer** \[_proskartereo_\]**. Share with the Lord's people who are in need. Practice hospitality. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn."**
Do you want to grow old into the sort of person who weeps empathetically with her friends while also marking memories with her sons? I certainly do. The sort of person who can carry very real sorrow in her gut and on that very same day say, "Stick a needle into me, buddy, because this body of mine is going to wear out and decay, but this memory I'm making in love with my son will last forever."
If you want to grow into that sort of person, then devote yourself to the only thing that makes you more, not less. Devote yourself to prayer. We tend to think that someone devoted to prayer is someone who grows more stoic, more religious, more serious about their life the older they get, but if we're taking our cues from Jesus, it seems to me that a life devoted to prayer is one that holds an offensive amount of joy and sorrow in it at the same time, a joy and a sorrow that marks the love within which I engage the world.
A life devoted to prayer is a life absolutely serious about one relationship so that I can laugh hysterically and weep compassionately in all of my other relationships. A prayer-shaped life is not a more stoic, more religious, more serious life. It's not even necessarily a life of more prayer or more intense prayer. It's a life more joyful and sorrowful in all of the moments I live after I say "Amen," a life more full because of a single, solitary devotion.
That brings us, finally, to the last mountain or hill on which Jesus prayed, _Golgotha_, where he was crucified. Jesus' last words spoken from his cross were a prayer, a prayer not original to Jesus but, rather, one borrowed from the Psalms. **_"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"_** This prayer of Jesus is important for a multitude of reasons, but one of them is just the honest realization that a prayer-shaped life is a more painful life.
Devote yourself to prayer, and you will experience more joy. Absolutely. Prayer is fullness of life. But devoting yourself in prayer includes sorrow of the most personal variety. If you devote yourself to prayer, you will live more fully. You will laugh harder. You will be more present. You will cherish the precious moments.
You will press each one of your days like a grape underneath your feet as you squeeze the intoxicating wine out of the one life you have to live. _And_, if you devote yourself to prayer, you will be confronted by more pain, more disappointment, more deafening silence, and more heartrending disillusionment. In a God-empowered, Serpent-deceived world, you do not get one without the other.
If you want to climb Tabor and see Jesus aglow and hear the Father's voice, if you want to ascend Gethsemane and grow old into a woman who gets tatted in seedy shops along the English countryside, well, then you're going to have to march up Golgotha, hang on your own cross next to Christ, and cry out between tears, blood, and bated breaths, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why do you seem to have forgotten me, to have left me alone in my moment of need?"
Joni Eareckson Tada, a 17-year-old high school girl, went to the beach in the summer of 1967, and in her excitement, she ran and dove into the water, unaware of how shallow it was. Her head struck the bottom, fracturing her spine between her fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae, and she has lived, to date, more than 50 years paralyzed from the neck down. The very first prayer Joni began to pray after her accident was a thousand different versions of "Why?"
In her own words she wrote, "For the longest time, I tried to twist God's arm so he would reveal why I had my accident." That prayer or some version of it is the first kind of dialogue most people exchange with God when confronted with any variety of suffering. "Why this? Why me? Why?" I call it dialogue, but the truth is, for the praying person, it feels more like a monologue. It feels more like a conversation I'm carrying out with God, and he's saying nothing back to me in return.
Then she turned from asking God for an explanation to asking God for a miracle. She began to confidently try to well up faith and tell all of her friends, "One day you're going to see me stand up out of this wheelchair." Three years into her suffering and God's deafening silence in the face of her cries for a miracle, Joni was clinically depressed and battling suicidal ideation.
Jesus prayed the first line of Psalm 22 in Jerusalem before a majority-Jewish crowd. Now, the Psalms are the prayer book of the Hebrew Bible. They were recited in the temple by all ancient Israelites from childhood. Praying the first line of a psalm in front of a majority-Jewish crowd is like praying the first line of the Lord's Prayer in front of a Christian church or singing the first lyric from "The Star-Spangled Banner" in front of a room of Americans.
The entire psalm is implied in referencing the very first line. The entire prayer would be downloaded into the imagination of everyone watching Jesus be crucified. The reason that matters so profoundly is because Psalm 22 begins, **"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"** but then quickly turns to…
**"Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest. Yet you are enthroned as the Holy One; you are the one Israel praises. In you our ancestors put their trust; they trusted and you delivered them. To you they cried out and were saved; in you they trusted and were not put to shame."**
It's a prayer that begins with a felt sense of God's absence, but it doesn't stay there. Here is the mystery unveiled in Jesus' final prayer, the mystery captured in Psalm 22. God's presence is experienced most profoundly by praying _through_ the experience of God's absence. It is a great grace to be able to experience God's presence in our feelings and our thoughts, but even when we don't, it doesn't mean God is absent. Only those who keep on praying apart from feeling discover the rush of God's presence that comes to the waiting.
C.S. Lewis writes, "I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face, questions die away. What other answer would suffice?" The psalmist prays in Psalm 73, **"When I tried to understand all this, it troubled me deeply till I entered the sanctuary of God…"** In other words, "Until I knew God's presence in the pain that I could not understand."
Joni Eareckson Tada, clinically depressed and battling suicidal ideation, then prayed what she calls the most powerful prayer of her life. "God, if I can't die, show me how to live, please." Later, she would reflect, "He has chosen not to heal me but to hold me. The more intense the pain, the closer his embrace."
C.S. Lewis, Joni Eareckson Tada, and the biblical Psalms are all naming the great mystery and the great grace of prayer, that where God's absence is most painfully felt, his presence is most profoundly revealed _if_ we pray our way through our pain. That's more than just comforting theory; it's the story of countless friends I've walked alongside personally…the story of friends who have battled prolonged infertility and countless miscarriage; the story of friends who have lost parents, siblings, friends, and children; the story of friends who have battled slowly debilitating diagnoses and immediately debilitating emergencies.
Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann, who authored a fascinating book titled _How God Becomes Real_, notes that Christian prayer, among all spiritual practices, seems to have significant psychological benefits. In fact, psychological studies reveal that a non-praying person who begins to pray regularly to Jesus experiences the exact results of a new patient who begins to practice CBT, or cognitive behavioral therapy, with a licensed psychiatrist, which is among the most universally employed psychological techniques for revisiting, healing from, and overcoming trauma.
When we experience the pain of God's absence, praying through that absence becomes a gateway to healing, overcoming, and even deepening our experience of God's presence, even on a clinical, psychological level. Just a few years ago, in 2018, on top of her paralysis, Joni was in her second bout with stage 3 breast cancer, and she tells the story of this one day when she was dazed and nauseous in the passenger seat of her car as her husband Ken drove her home from chemotherapy.
As he looked at her, reeling and broken, unable to hold her head up, he said to her, "Suffering is like splash-overs of hell, isn't it?" After driving the rest of the way home in silence and pulling into the driveway, Ken picked up that train of thought, saying, "What do you think splash-overs of heaven are? Are they those easy-breezy times when the wind seems to be at your back and life seems to be going your way?"
Joni said, "No. Splash-overs of heaven are finding Jesus _in_ your splash-overs of hell. To find Jesus in your hell is ecstasy beyond compare." The ultimate fruit for those who pray through God's absence, or the experience of what feels like God's absence, is not the comfort of God's temporary presence in our pain, as good as that is; it is the sure hope of God's constant presence in a coming world without pain.
Jesus' Golgotha prayer were his final words for, give or take, 72 hours, but they were not his final words, because death for Jesus was not an end; it was a new beginning. When Jesus resurrected, he did not transcend his body; he redeemed it. Scars were still on his skin, telling the story of his victory. He invited his disciples to touch him, and their hands didn't pass through a ghostly figure. They met a flesh-and-blood, living human being, alive in this world without pain.
The resurrection of Jesus means the soul does not transcend the body, but the soul and body are fully and finally healed. The return of Jesus means that one day soon I will know God's constant presence in God's painless world without end. That is a comforting abstract thought until you've prayed through your own Golgotha. When you do, _if_ you do, that gospel story becomes a sure and certain hope.
Joni still believes that one day she's going to stand up out of her wheelchair and walk. What she's not sure about is _when_. Will it be in _this_ life or in the next, in _this_ age or in the age to come? That is the real gift of after "Amen" for those who pray through their pain, a hope on which I can rest my life today.
Let me close by offering you this, family. Peter is probably the disciple of Jesus we get to know the most about from the pages of Scripture. On Tabor, Peter is the only voice we hear other than the Father's. He pipes up, interrupting the divine dialogue between Jesus and the Father to suggest that they camp out on the mountaintop, that they build tents and stay there forever apart from the fray down below. Peter, not unlike me on my front porch, thinks he wants a prayer of escape rather than one of incarnation.
Then, on the Mount of Olives, Jesus asked Peter to keep watch with him, to stay awake in prayer beside him in his hour of need, and Peter falls asleep on the job. Then he misunderstands the whole story, taking up violence as a means of renewal when Jesus has in mind to renew all wrong, including violence, by his sacrifice.
As for Golgotha? Well, Peter never made it there. After three denials in the courtyard, he didn't even show up in the crowd to see Jesus' last breath and hear his final prayer. Peter is absent in the very place God is most present. After all of that, Jesus goes to find Peter, not to reprimand him, condemn him, or correct him but to forgive him and restore him.
Look. I hope you will devote yourself to prayer, friends. I hope you will root your life in the only source of devotion that makes you more not less, but I know that no matter how strong your desire or fervent your follow-through, God is more devoted to communion with you than you will ever be to him. God longs to hear your prayers more than you ever long to pray them and to speak his love into your soul more than you ever long to receive it. So, why don't we stand, and we will give our ear and our prayer to this God in response. TA is going to come to lead us.