Prayer: Openness
What has four wheels and flies?A garbage truck!
Words don’t always mean what we think they mean. That’s why it’s important to maintain a stance of openness. And when our life is suffused with prayer, we are more able to stay open to what God is doing.
Let’s begin with our lesson from the gospel of John. Nicodemus, a Pharisee, visits Jesus under cover of night. Given the relationship between Jesus and the Pharisees, no wonder he sneaks over. He is convinced that there is something Godly in Jesus and wants to find out more.
Rather than answer him directly, though, Jesus answers him in riddle. It's as though he wants to bog him down in some kind of quagmire. Our translation this morning attempted to retain some of that confusion in a way that our familiar renderings don’t keep well. In other words, as John portrays Jesus, the Messiah is a fan of puns. Jesus says to Nicodemus, “You must be born…” and here, he uses a Greek word, anothen, which has two meanings.
So does Jesus say, “You must be born again,” or “You must be born from above”?
John leaves a hint at what Jesus’ real meaning is in Nicodemus’ response: “How can you be born anothen after being grown? Should you go back into your mother’s womb?” Every time Jesus uses an ambiguous word, and this is one of at least six examples in John’s gospel, his conversation partner always picks the wrong meaning. Nicodemus assumes Jesus’ literal meaning about a physical birth; when the birth Jesus is talking about is an eschatological one, a spiritual one. Jesus, it turns out, is still full of surprises.
This is why a discipline of prayer is so important. It’s how we remain open to God’s possibilities, to the surprises that Jesus holds for us.
Since January, I have been encouraging all of us to spend at least five minutes a day in prayer. If you are just now joining us, the outline of that particular prayer is on the back of the pew card. And throughout this season of Lent, there are many opportunities for you to work on this practice of prayer:
The Invitation Team, or iTeam, is gathering at the back of the Sanctuary every Sunday morning at 10:45am to pray for our worship service and all those who will come here.
The iTeam is also sharing their reflections on prayer during worship as they lead us in prayer.
The iTeam has also made Lenten prayer journals available to everyone who wants one, along with a Lenten devotional with daily reflections.
And our centering prayer group continues their weekly meetings for silent prayer on Wednesdays at 5:15pm here at the church.
In other words, there are multiple opportunities to learn how to pray, whether with words or in silence, or perhaps with some quiet guitar music, with a reading to focus or your own thoughts to guide you.
As we continue these practices throughout Lent, I want to give you a simple goal to strive for. By the time we get to Easter on April 20, I want to encourage you to be praying two more days a week than you are now. In other words, if you are currently praying three days a week, by the middle of April, I want you to be at five days a week. If you are at zero, then get to two days a week.
And for those of you overachievers who are already at seven days a week, I want you to add five minutes to each of your daily prayer. If you’re at five, by Easter, I’d love to see you be at ten.
Prayer, in short, is crucial. It is how we open ourselves to God’s incredible possibilities for us.
Back to Nicodemus and Jesus. Jesus drops his second pun of the day. “pneuma blows where it will. So it is with everyone born of pneuma.” Again, there are a multitude of translation possibilities: the wind, breath, and the Spirit. For Jesus, our Spirit-filled births are just as important as our physical births. It’s not about translating things so closely that we miss the meaning, being sure that everyone has their “born again” date, or their “Spirit birth” date or anything like that. I’m not knocking it, though, because I know how important this moment of Spiritual awakening is to some of you. For others, though, it is rarely the split-second conversion that changes our lives; but rather a series of smaller epiphanies that clears away the spiritual cobwebs.
Let me put the question to you this way: have you ever been so convinced that you were right about something until suddenly you had a flash, a moment of inspiration, that made you realize that you had it backwards? Maybe it was an argument with a friend or someone you love. You were sure they misunderstood you, and did it intentionally; then the more you played the conversation back in your mind, the more you realized that what you said was so vague that it would have been easy to misinterpret?
In a sense, that’s what the openness of prayer is all about: having enough self-awareness to realize that we might have missed something in our spiritual lives that God wants us to see differently.
I’m reminded of the story of Wag Dodge. Dodge was a Montana fire jumper. In 1949, he and his crew headed to the Mann Gulch river valley to put out a forest fire. The grass and trees were dry, but the fire was on the other side of the gulch. Suddenly, the blaze leapt across and was speeding toward his team. Every fiber in his being told him to run away; but he soon realized doing so would be in vain. The fire would soon overtake him. In his own recollections, he says that he figured out that his panic was not going to help him.
So after searching desperately for a few moments for a solution, he lit the dry brush on the other side of him. It, too, got carried by the wind, cutting a swath of burnt ground next to him. He then took a wet cloth, covered his head, and lay down on the smoldering embers he had just made. The blaze soon caught up with him and was swirling around him…he got burned, but he survived. His quick thinking saved his life. Dodge’s solution is now standard procedure for fire jumpers.
Dodge was a veteran fire jumper at the time. He had encountered numerous forest fires and thought he knew all there was to know. But what saved his life in that critical moment was unlearning all of that. The fire fighter set a fire. And not only did that absurd notion keep him alive, it transformed the whole industry and has saved many lives since.
What about you? Where is your forest fire? What are you running from that you need to face? What is it in your life that has stumped you? What is it that is calling for a new kind of openness, the kind that only being born of God can bring? What is your late night visit to Jesus all about?