Praying with your back to the wall

It must have been May 1993 when I found myself stranded at John F. Kennedy International Airport.

I'd been living in Petionville, Haiti, for the past six months and was on my way to Pittsburgh for a visit with my parents, and to Minneapolis, Minn., to visit the mission's headquarters, before going to visit my church in Easton, Pa.. During the next weeks I was expected to raise my missions support, but first I had to get home. And that was proving to be something of a problem.

I'd left Port-au-Prince on time and arrived in Miami when I'd expected, but that's where my plans had broken down. A downpour had delayed flights leaving Miami, and now here I was at JFK, my connecting flight long gone and the airport terminal closing for the night.

“I'd like American to provide me with a hotel voucher for the night,” I told the service agent behind the desk.

“It's not the airline's policy to provide vouchers for delays or missed flights caused by weather,” she said for the tenth time.

“I understand that,” I said for the tenth time, matching her polite tone and professional demeanor for polite tone and professional demeanor. “But I'd like you to make an exception and give me one anyway.”

“I can't help you,” she said.

“Then is there a supervisor who can?” I asked.

My request may have been impertinent, but it wasn't like I had much choice. Depending on how you looked at it, home lay either 1,000 miles south, six hours to the west, or two hours away, but in the day before cell phones, there was no way to get there and no way to contact anyone. I had less than $50 in my wallet, no credit cards, and a duffel bag full of clothes and personal possessions.

Either American Airlines was going put me up in a hotel room, or I was going to be outside the airport in twenty minutes, trying to stay awake all night in the streets of New York. I'd lived the previous six months in a country under military rule, and even I had no desire to try that. My situation was that desperate.

Desperation can drive us to uncanny levels of audacity. My chief recollection of my interaction with that customer service agent is how utterly calm I was as I acknowledged that I had no right to ask for the break I was asking for, but I was asking for it anyway. Unlike other passengers on the flight with me, I never once lost my cool.

This encounter with the airline came to mind recently at a Bible study where we were looking at Luke 11 and Jesus' teachings on prayer. This being Jesus, he never could just give a straightforward answer to a simple question. No, he had to tell a story.

In this particular story, a man whose guest had arrived at an unexpectedly late hour, had nothing to feed him. This put the host in a bad situation. In ancient cultures having a guest carried with it a serious obligation to provide for their safety and well-being. It didn't matter if the guest had arrived after sunset, failing to provide a meal would be more than merely awkward or unfriendly. It would be unspeakably offensive, a devastating failure to meet an obligation.

So, unwilling to dishonor himself and offend his guest, the host ran to a friend who he knew could lend him enough bread to cover his failing. Of course, things never run smoothly. The hour was late, and the friend already had shut the door and gone to bed, and did not want to get up.

But need compeled the host, and so he barraged his friend with requests for help until the friend, mindful that the entire village could overhear the pleas for bread and his own steadfast refusal to help, finally gave in. He got out of bed, grabbed the loaves of bread and gave them and anything else the host needed, just to get him to quiet down and not shame the friend in front of the entire community.

With this story, Jesus taught a pretty simple lesson about prayer. Be persistent. Don't give up. Don't be afraid to be pushy. There's even a suggestion that God will feel put on the spot by your need and actually may change his mind about how he responds to your request. (I always did wonder if the relationship was strained afterward, due to the scene the two men made.)

In my experience, that's often where the lesson ends. A former pastor of mine often cited this passage in his sermons in which he encouraged us to ask God for what we wanted. His point: God loves us, and wants to give us good things. We just need to ask.

In this vein Pastor Weber loved to cite an exchange between Queen Elizabeth I and Sir Walter Scott Raleigh. “Why do you ask for so much?” Elizabeth asked Raleigh in this conversation. “Because your majesty keeps giving me what I ask for,” Raleigh replied.

With no disrespect meant to my former pastor, nor to Sir Walter Scott Raleigh, there is something missing from such a lesson: a sense of desperation born of need.

It is desperation that drove the host in Jesus' story to plead for bread late at night. In the culture Jesus lived and taught in, failing to give his guest something to eat wasn't just a faux pas. It was a massive insult. When Nabal refused to give provisions to David and his men, it was an act of war. It wasn't just a kind favor that the host was asking his neighbor to help with, it was a stark necessity.

The same extremity of need is evident in other examples of prayer earlier in the gospel of Luke. Parents brought children afflicted with unclean spirits to ask for healing because the seizures threatened the lives and health of the children. A woman had spent a fortune trying to find relief from nonstop menstrual bleeding that had made her miserable, left her ceremonially unclean and kept her husband from her for years, and so she hoped just to touch the hem of Jesus' garment. Lepers wanted to return to the communities they had been driven from, the leader of a synagogue ruler was watching his daughter die before his eyes. These weren't people asking for gravy on their potatoes. They were people driven by extreme need.

Of course, this story being one of the parables of Jesus, it's not enough that it illustrate his lesson in a memorable way that we can still talk about thousands of years later. The story also has to end in a jarring way that makes us wonder if we're even talking about the same thing Jesus is.

After he finished his story, Jesus asked his listeners two interesting questions, and then made an astounding statement.

“What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent?” (No one.)  “Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion?” (Don't be ridiculous.)

“If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

Where did that come from? During the Bible discussion and study meeting last Tuesday one attendee suggested that Jesus was saying that he would send the Holy Spirit to people who believed in him. That may very well be true, but it feels like it's beside the point. This entire passage has been rooted in concerns such as meeting earthly needs such as bread for the body, and avoiding the snares of money by avoiding debt and forgiving debtors.

This isn't a pivot to a more spiritual theme or an appeal for an individual decision to have faith. It's Jesus cutting to the chase in the way that he does and drawing the line of connection between our faith and the earthly need of others. It's a reminder to us, who like to separate spiritual things from practical matters, that the two are inextricably linked. The Lord's Prayer, which includes a request for the day's bread, begins with the pledge “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven.”

So what is Jesus saying? The first time the gospel of Luke mentions the Holy Spirit, is when the angel Gabriel promises the birth of Jesus, after telling Mary that her son will re-establish the throne of David forever. There are more prophecies, linked to the Holy Spirit, that promise that Jesus will overthrow the established order of things as he ushers in the Kingdom of God. The writer even claims that the Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus at his baptism.

When he returns from wandering in the wilderness for 40 days, Jesus declares the purpose of his ministry:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”

The connection between the Holy Spirit and the acts of mercy and compassion that Jesus performs in the gospel could not be clearer.

And that is what we see happen over the ensuing chapters. Jesus comes promising to usher in the Kingdom of God and restore things to their intended state. He heals all those who are sick without asking for payment, and without considering whether they are deserving of such charity. He casts out unclean spirits, he welcomes sex workers and immigrants into his company, and he feeds the hungry. There is no one so low that he will not lift that person up.

Receiving the Holy Spirit then isn't just a mark of personal salvation; to receive him is to step into the shoes of Jesus and commit to alleviating the suffering of the world around us. Just as Jesus proclaimed release to captives, healing to the sick and liberty to the oppressed, asking to receive the Holy Spirit is to put ourselves into the spot of the man whose friend came asking for bread when it was inexcusably late to come around asking for favors he had no right to ask for, and who gave it to him anyway.

God's goal, after all, is not for us to be happy. What is happiness, after all? It's a will o'the wisp that vanishes before we even can lay hold of it. God's great dream is not to see us happy and carefree, it is to enjoy a relationship with us.

And however awkward things might have been the next morning between the host and the friend he pulled out of bed, one thing is certain: The host will never forget what his friend did for him, and he'll be sure to repay the kindness whenever and however often the opportunity arises.


Copyright © 2017 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Prayer deconstructed

Digging a little deeper

About 23 years ago, I was a teacher at a private Christian school in Bethlehem, Pa.

There admittedly were a few problems with this scenario. For one thing, the school used the A Beka curriculum published by Pensacola Christian College, and  I just couldn't get on board with its narrow and dogmatic approach to everything. Among other things, I objected to its simplistic view of history and to its rigid insistence on one worldview instead of allowing students to develop their own.

We were an evangelical school, and among other things officially believed in the six-day creation described in Genesis 1. The school had been founded by an Assemblies of God church, and the church took the Bible literally, even the poetic bits.

This may seem odd to people not familiar with creationist thinking, but it's unwise to underestimate the human mind's ability to find logical consistency. Skeptics will ask how Noah fit all those animals onto the ark, for instance, but this isn't really a challenge. Just imagine Noah taking juveniles or eggs, and the species differentiating as they spread out after the flood, and the whole thing becomes a lot easier to believe.

As a teacher I favor giving people the tools to find truth rather than just telling them what to believe. I was expected to teach the creationist viewpoint, but I still wanted my students to understand the principles behind evolution even if they didn't believe them.

This meant that I often had to find or create my own materials to supplement the curriculum. The A Beka test on Darwin asked, "Explain why evolution is wrong." The test I gave asked, "Which model of life's origins do you believe? Support your answer."

I wouldn't even tell my students where I stood on the issue. That upset a few students, but what really caused problems for me with the other staff was my approach to staff devotions.

Devotions typically are shallow readings of Scripture or other stories with the weight of Peter Rabbit, intended more to make us feel good than they are intended to challenge us to think more deeply about God or a life of holiness. Poems like "Footprints" or "The Touch of the Master's Hand" are popular material for devotions. These things reassure us that God is in control of things, and no matter how it seems to get, everything will turn out all right in the end; that we are special to him; and so on. "The Velveteen Rabbit," with its focus on how love makes us real, makes for a good devotion.

I've never been a big fan of such an approach to matters of faith when it comes to adults. I've always felt that the purpose of reading the Bible is to discover something new about holiness and our pursuit of God. Its messages of social justice and liberation should afflict us when we feel comfortable and make us think of a better way. Too often we use it to lull ourselves further to sleep.

If you read a story like Joseph and all you come away with is that Joseph forgave his brothers for mistreating him, and we should also forgive people who have been unkind to us, you have failed dramatically at understanding the story. There is so much more to learn by digging into the material, understanding the motivations that drive the characters to act the way they do, and grasping the authorial intent behind the story.

We were required to attend devotions every morning before school would start. The other teachers hated when it was my turn.

The other teachers read essays by authors like Max Lucado or short stories from books like Chicken Soup for the Soul. These were stories about the legacy a good teacher can have, or the value that lies hidden within each person. I shared readings that had made me think, or that shed light on something familiar from an unexpected angle.

Once it was a passage from Orson Scott Card's "Speaker for the Dead" in which Card retold the familiar story of the woman caught in adultery and explored the tension between justice and mercy. All things considered, it was a decent meditation on how Christ strikes the perfect balance between justice and mercy, and thus brings us neither death nor corruption, but a full life.

As John the evangelist tells the story, the Pharisees brought the woman to Jesus as a test to see if he would uphold the Mosaic law and approve of her execution. Instead, Jesus famously replied, "Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone," and pointedly ignored the woman's accusers until everyone had dropped their stones and walked away.

In Card's first retelling of the story, the teacher in Christ's place spares the woman's life because he is corrupt, and sees an advantage in letting her live. In the second retelling the teacher kills the woman himself because justice must be upheld or the law will lose all meaning. That actually elicited a horrified gasp from one teacher.

A different time I shared a passage from Don Richardson's "Eternity in their Hearts," a book about redemptive analogies found in pre-Christian cultures. The book contains dozens of these, and argues that they providentially serve as a doorway for the gospel story to enter new cultures and grow organically in the culture without the baggage that comes with traditional missions work.

I am a former missionary and I find this sort of thing fascinating. The other teachers found it tedious. Evidently some of them must have remarked to the administration what a bad fit I was at the school.

"You don't do devotions the same as everyone else," the principal observed during one conversation we had.

No, I suppose I didn't, and I still don't. As I've aged, I've found that the Bible has found new ways to afflict me in my comfort. One of the most constant themes in the Bible is the divine obligation we are under to look out for others and to oppose injustice whenever we see it rather than turning a blind eye to it.

I live in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, where my chief concern each day is not whether we'll eat, but what I'm going to make my family for dinner. If I get pulled over by the police, I can be confident that the worst I'll get is a ticket but there's a good chance I'll just get a warning. Not everyone is that fortunate. Particularly in the past week, the question "And who is my neighbor?" has become one with profound implications for how I live.

The school in Bethlehem was actually my second year teaching at a Christian school. My first year was at Cradle of Life Christian School in Haiti. We had staff devotions there only three times a week, instead of every day, and because we had a much larger staff, it took longer for each of us to have a turn. The only guidance there was the same as at my second school: Share what God is teaching you.

So one time, when it was my turn, I did. I shared the questions that had been piling onto my shoulders the entire time I had been in Haiti, about whether the evangelical gospel of forgiveness was really relevant in a country with such crushing poverty, or if it was incomplete and missing something.

I read a page or two from "The Grapes of Wrath," and shared how Jim Casy and Tom Joad had affected my thinking when I had read the book six months into my Haiti experience. I read passages from the book of Isaiah, and how they were challenging my understanding of the gospel. And mostly I shared about the need I saw every time I stepped outside the school gates or left my apartment on Rue Pelerin 7.

No one in the staff objected in my hearing to what I shared, but the school administration didn't seem very happy with it. I was put on probation the next day. A month later I was fired after I shared the same thing with my students.

I've never been a fan of devotions, but I'm pretty confident I did that one right. I pray that we all get it right during the next four years.


Copyright © 2003, 2017 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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We are his hands

Once in Haiti, I asked God, "Don't you see this?" I've shared his response many time with other visitors. "Of course I do, that's why I showed it to you. And now that you see it, the question is, 'What are you going to do about it?"

By its very nature, omnipotence is limited only by the character of the Deity. We can assume that God will put his omnipotence on display at some point in history and forcibly eradicate those who exploit the poor and oppress the powerless, but that narrative ultimately invalidates the life and teachings of Jesus. Such an attitude suggests that even God is going to come to the conclusion that this "turn the other cheek" and "Do not resist an evil person" and "Whatever you did to the least of these, you did to me " stuff just isn't practical, and doesn't work.

On the other hand, if we accept that God has chosen to limit himself to what we will do in partnership with him, suddenly Christ's invitation to join him in the redemption of the world takes on a new sense of urgency.

Prayers like "Your will be done on earth as in heaven" aren't empty phrases about a distant time, and statements like "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God" take on new meaning when our nation is involved in three separate wars.

So it comes back to the question that I am answered with when I ask God how he can allow injustice to stand. In the example of Jesus, we see a God who identifies with prostitutes, with the needy, with the hungry and with those who are being crushed by those in power.

And the question is this: Where am I going to stand?



Copyright © 2011 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Repo man

About seventeen years ago, I was living in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where I was a resident missionary with STEM Ministries.

STEM is a missions organization with a focus on the North American church. By providing groups from the United States and Canada with short-term experiences in third world nations in the Caribbean and South America, it hopes to awaken the church in two of the wealthiest nations on Earth to the global scale of God's work.

In other words, it might seem really pressing to build a state-of-the-art nursery with a cappuccino bar for the workers, but there are Christians in the Dominican Republic where they'd be grateful for a corrugated tin roof to keep the rain and sun out.

It's a pretty straightforward proposition: Show American Christians what the rest of the world is like, and let God challenge their preconceptions. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes you forget right away, sometimes your experiences in the third world stay with you for the rest of your life.

While I was there, one of the nationals we worked with came to the ministry with a problem. He needed money, or the bank would take the land he and his family had been living on. Seventeen years is a long time, so I don't remember all the details. What I mostly remember is Steve Schmidt, our base director, mentioned that another missionary he knew would categorize this fellow's problems as the wealthy ignoring the plight of the poor, if not outright taking advantage of them.

Steve dismissed that as nonsense, since as he (correctly) pointed out, the fellow in question did have the money for the bank payment, or at least he used to. Like many people, he had used the money for other things, including things that he hadn't needed.

That's actually a common situation in Haiti, I'm afraid. A boujwa will come and buy a piece of property from someone for a handsome price, and tell him that he's going to build a house there in 10 years or so. Ten years will come and go, and then the boujwa will start building his house.

The former owner of the land, sadly, will still be on the property and will no longer have the handsome sum, which he theoretically could have used to buy land elsewhere, buy some goats or pigs to start a business and raise his family out of poverty, or something of the sort. Sadly, the owner usually will have done none of those things, and now has nothing left to show for the money he once was paid. It's all gone, and soon they are not only out of the money, they are out of the place they have lived for years.

There's no denying that the fellow who sold his home and then frittered away the money -- aside from any money that was put to a good use, like sending the kids to school -- made some really stupid decisions with his money, and in the end has to shoulder responsibility for his plight. On the other hand, it's a pretty cold thing to throw a family out of their homes, and leave them to fend for themselves.

Steve isn't that cold. He gave our national colleague some of the ministry's designated mercy money -- not enough to cover the whole payment, but a good chunk of it. The idea was that he would have to earn the rest of the money somehow, and make some adjustments, rather than us encouraging dependency on the "rich white missionaries."

Still, the story has stuck with me for the past 17 years because I can't shake the fundamental wrongness of evicting people from their homes. That feeling has stayed with me, and in recent months has grown still stronger, as banks that essentially preyed upon people by offering them mortgages that they couldn't afford, all in the name of making a buck. And while those homeowners have been thrown out onto the street, figuratively or literally, the executives responsible for the mess have been raking in huge bonuses even as the economy comes crashing down around the ears of the rest of us.

One fellow I know -- a dyed-in-the-wool God-is-a-Republican sort of Christian -- insists that capitalism is biblical. I'm not sure entirely how he justifies that, but there you have it. American-style capitalism unquestionably grew out of the Protestant work ethic practiced by groups like the Puritans and the Moravians, but it's quite a stretch to my mind to see Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" as being in sync with a text that never really got into particulars of economic theory beyond things like stressing the value of honest weights. At best, I can say that it is an extrabiblical economic system that can be shaped by biblical values of compassion (as opposed to the greed that drives the market most times).

But you know, home ownership is one area where capitalism keeps running afoul of biblical values, I think. In the U.S. economy, if I default on my mortgage, the bank theoretically has the legal right to foreclose on the mortgage and kick me, my wife, and our children, out onto the street.It doesn't matter if I've lost my job because of what the financial giants have done to the economy, it doesn't matter if they sold me a predatory mortgage for a market price that is three times the house's actual worth. If they have my signature on that mortgage contract, theoretically they have the legal right to kick me out of the house and try to sell it to recoup their losses.

There's something else at work here, though. While the hardcore apologists of a free market will expound on the virtues of tough love and making people take the consequences of their bad choices like parents disciplining an unruly child, it's not hard to find public sympathy for homeowners who are falling prey to economic forces that they have no control over.

There is something fundamentally unjust about evicting people from their homes. Not just unfair, but unjust. There is a fundamental connection between people and the homes they live in that we violate at our peril and to our shame.

The Bible backs me up on that. In ancient Israel, where my friend sees evidence of capitalism at work, that relationship was inviolate. An Israelite could buy the land of another Israelite, it's true, but only for seven years. Levitical law requires that when that seven-year period ended, the land had to be returned to its previous owner. The Torah also instituted the Jubilee, a period that came once every 50 years, where all debts were canceled, all slaves were set free, and all property rights were restored.

And therein lies a challenge for the American church as we stand on the cusp of what may blossom into the Second Great Depression. As we move forward, we must be mindful that we do have neither the right nor the authority to dictate to the rest of society how it should function.

But we should -- we must -- champion justice, and we have an obligation to advance alternatives to what our society practices, alternatives that respect and safeguard the basic dignity of everyone, especially those whose lives so often are chewed up in the cogs and gears of the systems that make our society work.

Some countercultural groups like The Jesus People in Chicago, or A Simple Way in Philadelphia, have explored the power and strength of communal living in contemporary society. Clearly that's not for everyone, but the alternatives are limited only by our faith and our imagination.

In the name of the one we claim to follow, we have a calling to do better.



Copyright © 2009 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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