All posts in Prayer

  • Silence Please

    A Quiet Place

    Silence Please
    Brian Zahnd

    Ours is an angry and vociferous age. We’re constantly subjected to the noise of charged political rhetoric — the wearying din of the culture wars. Too often Sunday morning can be little more than a religious echo of this same noise. But shouldn’t Sunday be a Christian Sabbath, a time to quiet our souls and receive the gift of silence? What if, instead of being another contributor to this clatter, our churches became a shelter from the storm offering respite to shell-shocked souls?

    Silence belongs to an earlier age. Ours is an age of noise. With our technological progress has come the din of modernity. With the advent of digital social media has come the white noise of everyone “expressing themselves.” Silence is now a precious commodity, a scarce resource hard to come by. Sure, we can pray anywhere, anytime, but to pray well, to pray in a way that restores the soul, we need to find some quiet places. This is what we find appealing in the holy hush of the cathedral, the sacred stillness of the monastery, the reverent quiet of the woods.

    When birdsong and gentle footfall replace the shrill rancor of 24-7 news and the inane blare from five-hundred channels, the soul has a chance to heal. Without some intentional silence the weary soul is a prisoner being slowly worked to death in a merciless gulag of endless noise. The always-posted sign at the entrance of the tourist-attracting cathedrals is perhaps a desperate plea from the soul of modern man — Silence Please.
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  • Income Tax Day by Walter Brueggemann

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    Income Tax Day
    Walter Brueggemann

    On this day of internal revenue
    some of us are paid up,
    some of us owe,
    some of us await a refund,
    some of us have no income to tax.

    But all of us are taxed,
    by war,
    by violence,
    by anxiety,
    by deathliness.

    And Caesar never gives any deep tax relief.

    We render to Caesar. . .
    to some it feels like a grab,
    to some it is clearly a war tax,
    to some — some few —
    it is a way to contribute to the common good.

    In any case we are haunted
    by what we render to Caesar,
    by what we might render to you,
    by the way we invest our wealth and our lives,
    when what you ask is an “easy yoke”:
    to do justice
    to love mercy
    to walk humbly with you.

    Give us courage for your easy burden, so to live untaxed lives.
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  • Jerusalem Bells

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    Jerusalem Bells
    Brian Zahnd

    If you visit the Islamic world you quickly become acquainted with the adhan — the Muslim call to prayer. You may very well become acquainted with it at five o’clock in the morning! Five times a day, beginning before sunrise, you hear the cry of the muezzin from the minarets — Allahu Akbar. It’s a call to prayer. When I first began to travel in the Islamic world I reacted to the call to prayer with an irritation rooted in cultural disdain and religious triumphalism. I was annoyed by it. I didn’t want to hear it. But eventually I began to feel differently about it. To be honest, I was envious. Here was a culture with a public call to prayer.

    In the secular, post-Christian West we have nothing like this. The best we can manage is to clandestinely bow our heads for ten seconds in a restaurant and hope no one notices. We don’t call people to prayer. Few Christians living outside of monasteries pray five times a day. We pray whenever we feel like it…and too much of the time we don’t feel like it. But in the Islamic world I found a religious culture that publicly calls people to prayer five times a day! I was envious of a society that holds to a religious tradition where prayer is taken seriously and is attended to in a prescribed manner. So when I heard the adhan I would wistfully think, I wish we had something like that. Then one day the pieces fell in place.

    I was walking through the cobblestone streets of the Old City of Jerusalem on a Sunday morning when I began to hear the bells toll. Church bells. A cacophony of sacred sound centuries old. Orthodox bells, Catholic bells, Anglican bells, Lutheran bells. The enormous bells from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre seemed to belong to another age. It was a wonder I found strangely moving. That’s when it dawned on me — this is the Christian adhan. Church bells are the Christian call to prayer. (A practice predating the Muslim adhan by centuries.) Of course I knew this, but I had somehow forgotten it. I had forgotten the bells just as the post-Christian West has forgotten the bells.
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  • Beyond Elementary School Christianity

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    Beyond Elementary School Christianity
    Brian Zahnd

    In his groundbreaking book, Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning, James W. Fowler describes spiritual development in a series of stages from zero to six. Fowler describes stage two as the faith of school children. This is a stage where metaphors are often literalized and a strong belief in the just reciprocity of the universe is held dear. At this stage of faith the idea that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people is a controlling axiom. I won’t summarize all the stages here, but Fowler describes stage five as the capacity to acknowledge paradox and experience transcendence.

    Fowler’s final stage is characterized by compassion and the view that all people belong to a universal community. This is the mature stage where the spiritual journey breaks out of the paradigm of “us versus them” that dominates so much religious thought and controls so many religious institutions.

    In his forthcoming book, A More Christlike God, Canadian theologian Brad Jersak comments on Fowler’s stages of faith and the current plight of evangelicalism making this stinging observation: “Entire streams of Christendom are not only stuck at stage-two faith, but actually train and require their ministers to interpret the Bible through the mythic-literal eyes of school children. Growing up and moving forward is rebranded as backsliding; maturing is perceived as falling away.”
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  • My 4th of July Prayer

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    My 4th of July Prayer
    Brian Zahnd

    Father God, Creator of heaven and earth—
    You have made all the peoples of the earth for your pleasure,
    You have appointed the nations of the world for your glory.
    As a people who have pledged allegiance to our Lord Jesus Christ,
    We pray today for the nation in which we dwell.
    We pray you would grant us to be governed by good and wise leaders;
    That we would be governed in such a manner that we may live in peace.
    We pray you help this nation strive for righteousness and justice;
    That your care for the widow, the orphan, the poor, and the alien—
    Would flow like a mighty stream through our nation.
    May we be a people of humility, generosity and compassion.
    May the weakest among us, the unborn and the unfortunate, the elderly and the ill—
    Be shown your justice and mercy.
    We pray that we who are the followers of the Prince of Peace and his kingdom,
    Would be a peaceable people seeking to live in peace with one another.
    We pray that hate and acrimony would give way to love and harmony.
    We pray that the church of Jesus Christ in our land would be found faithful.
    We pray that we would be a faithful witness to the kingdom of God;
    That the church in this nation would be a city set upon a hill;
    That the church in this nation would faithfully model the way of salvation—
    The way of following Jesus Christ.
    We ask all of this in the name of your Son, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
    Amen.
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  • Contemplation

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    Contemplation
    Brian Zahnd

    I practice contemplation. It’s important. We either gain new perspectives or we forever look at the world the same way — which is to say, we never change. In order to see the world the way God sees it we need contemplative breakthroughs.

    In the tenth chapter of Acts we find the story of the Apostle Peter’s contemplative breakthrough — a breakthrough that altered the entire course of Christianity. The fisherman apostle was staying in the seaside town of Joppa. At noon he went up on the roof of Simon the Tanner’s house to observe one of the designated hours of prayer. While in prayer Peter went into a trance (ekstasis) and saw something — a great sheet filled with non-kosher animals being let down from the sky. A voice instructed him to “kill and eat.” Peter refused saying, “By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is profane or unclean.” The voice from heaven replied, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” This happened three times. As a result of this mystical experience Peter was willing to accept an invitation to enter the home of a Gentile — something he had never done before. When Peter arrived at the home of Cornelius, a military officer in the occupying Roman army, Peter said—

    You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or visit a Gentile; but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean…I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. (Acts 10:28, 34–35)

    The implications of this breakthrough are incalculable. Peter’s new perspective opened the door for the gospel of Messiah to be preached to Gentiles. But how did Peter arrive at this new perspective? Peter had a limited ethnocentric worldview. For Peter, Yahweh was the God of Jews only. Jesus was the Messiah for Jews only. The community of Messiah was for Jews only. If Gentiles wanted to be accepted by Yahweh and be saved by Messiah they had to become Jews first — be circumcised, keep kosher, observe the Torah. Peter was locked into a Jewish-only perspective of God, Jesus, and the gospel. This was not just Peter’s theological perspective, it was his personal identity — how he understood his place in the world. What Peter knew for sure was that to be accepted by God one had to be a Jew!

    But Peter’s ethnocentric perspective began to change when he had a contemplative breakthrough while praying on Simon the Tanner’s rooftop. In a trance he was shown non-kosher food and told by God to break the law and eat it! Peter was being instructed by God to break the law of Moses! Talk about cognitive dissonance! But Peter got the message — he was to stop classifying other people as non-kosher and unacceptable to God. Now Peter would break the Jewish law he had always observed and enter the home of a Gentile. Without a contemplative breakthrough this would have been impossible.
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  • You Are What You Pray

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    You Are What You Pray
    Brian Zahnd

    I am a religious person because I pray.

    In that sense I have a solidarity with all who pray.

    I have more in common with the Egyptian Muslim who prays five times a day than with the European secularist who never prays.

    I have more in common with the Indian Hindu who prays to Brahma than with the American consumerist who prays to nothing at all.

    I have more in common with the mystic Rumi than with the Deist Jefferson.

    (That the majority of American evangelicals feel more at home with an Enlightenment secularist than with a Muslim mystic shows just how secular we really are.)

    I am a Christian because I pray as a Christian.

    I pray to the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

    I pray in the name of Jesus Christ.

    I pray the prayer Jesus gave his disciples to pray.

    I pray the prayers of the Church.

    How we pray is how we are formed.

    The Hindu is formed by Hindu prayers.

    The Jew is formed by Jewish prayers.

    The Christian is formed by Christian prayers.

    The Muslim is formed by Muslim prayers.

    The secularist is formed by not praying.

    Those who refuse to pray the liturgical prayers of a received tradition are on the verge of becoming a secularist.

    They have followed the dictates of Voltaire and Jefferson and rejected the authority of religious tradition.

    They endorse Voltaire’s cynicism and Jefferson’s scissors.

    If they pray at all, they pray their own prayers, which is to say, they’re not being formed by prayer—
    They’re only wishing.

    They wish for what they want and call it prayer.

    Window shopping imagined as prayer.

    This is the prayer of the consumerist, the secularist, the atheist.

    But Christian tradition knows better.

    The primary purpose of prayer is not to get God to do what you want him to do—
    But to be properly formed.

    We are formed as Christian people as we pray Christian prayers.

    “When you pray, say…” -Jesus

    BZ
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  • My 4th of July Prayer

     

    This Sunday I led our congregation in this “4th of July Prayer.”

    Father God, Creator of heaven and earth—
    You have made all the peoples of the earth for your pleasure,
    You have appointed the nations of the world for your glory.
    As a people who have pledged allegiance to our Lord Jesus Christ,
    We pray today for the nation in which we dwell.
    We pray you would grant us to we be governed by good and wise leaders;
    That we would be governed in such a manner that we may live in peace.
    We pray you help this nation strive for righteousness and justice;
    That your care for the widow, the orphan, the poor, and the alien—
    Would flow like a mighty stream through our nation.
    May we be a people of humility, generosity and compassion.
    May the weakest among us, the unborn and the unfortunate,  the elderly and the ill—
    Be shown your justice and mercy.
    We pray that we who are the followers of the Prince of Peace and his kingdom,
    Would be a peaceable people seeking to live in peace with one another.
    We pray that hate and acrimony would give way to love and harmony.
    We pray that the church of Jesus Christ in our land would be found faithful.
    We pray that we would be a faithful witness to the kingdom of God;
    That the church in this nation would be a city set upon a hill;
    That the church in this nation would faithfully model the way of salvation—
    The way of following Jesus Christ.
    We ask all of this in the name of your Son, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
    Amen.

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