Thankful Workers for Peace :: Worldwide Prayer

  • July 23, 2018
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  • John Tillman

Scripture: Mark 5.18-20
As Jesus was getting into the boat, the man who had been demon-possessed begged to go with him. Jesus did not let him, but said, “Go home to your own people and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.” So the man went away and began to tell in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him. And all the people were amazed.

Just as Jesus left the Gerasene man to spread the gospel to the Decapolis, he would soon leave the disciples to spread the gospel to the world, and he has left us here to follow in their footsteps. May we be as miraculously transformed as the Gerasene man, and as thankful as he, running to the cities with the life-changing message of the gospel. — John

Reflection: Thankful Workers for Peace :: Worldwide Prayer
A prayer of thanksgiving from Thailand

Dear heavenly Father,

We praise you for your love and mercy to all humankind.
We praise you for your Son, our Savior.
We praise you for this wonderful universe,
for the son, the moon and the stars.

You have placed everything in perfect order so that
we may live in peace and harmony with all that
you have created. You have provided sustenance
for your children.

People everywhere face many difficulties,
they suffer,
they cry,
they are starving,
homeless, and helpless.

Help us to attempt to solve the difficulties they face,
to be active in serving the needy.
And may we be workers for peace.

We pray in the name of Jesus Christ.

*Prayer from Hallowed be Your Name: A collection of prayers from around the world, Dr. Tony Cupit, Editor.

Prayer: The Refrain for the Morning Lessons
It is not the healthy who need the doctor, but the sick…And indeed I did not come to call the virtuous, but sinners. — Matthew 9.12-13

– Prayer from The Divine Hours: Prayers for Springtime by Phyllis Tickle.

Prayers from The Divine Hours available online and in print.

Today’s Readings
Jeremiah 19 (Listen – 2:58)
Mark 5 (Listen – 5:21)

Additional Reading
Read More about Freedom for Prisoners
We fear Christ partly because the freedom Christ brings is undeserved and is not merely for the noble.

Readers’ Choice
In August we will look back at our readers’ favorite posts of the year. Submit a Readers Choice post.
Tell us about a post and what it meant to you. What post confronted you?

 

Keeping The Greatest Commandments

  • July 20, 2018
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  • John Tillman

Scripture: Mark 2.7, 16, 18, 24
“Why does this fellow talk like that? He’s blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?”
“Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
“How is it that John’s disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees are fasting, but yours are not?”
The Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?”

Reflection: Keeping The Greatest Commandments
By John Tillman

Jesus wasn’t sinless because he never broke laws. He constantly broke them.

In this one short chapter of Mark he breaks (or supports those who are breaking) five separate laws (some of which were punishable by stoning): he blasphemes, he eats with ceremonially unclean people, he eschews required religious fasting, he defends working on the sabbath, he defends David’s eating of the holy bread.

Richard Baxter (1615-1691) described the interdependence of laws and truth when advising new disciples learning about theology and the scriptures for the first time:

Truths have a dependence on each other; the lesser branches spring out of the greater, and those out of the stock and root. Some laws are but means to other laws, or subservient to them…Therefore it is one of the commonest difficulties among cases of conscience, to know which law is the greater.

According to Baxter, Christ recognized the priority of the greatest laws. We see this in Christ’s teaching. Jesus referred to “lesser” laws with language that exposed their second-tier authority. He often said, “your traditions,” or “Moses permitted,” or “you have heard it said…”

Upon this ground, Christ healed on the Sabbath day, and pleaded for his disciples harvesting the heads of grain, and for David’s eating the shewbread, and told them, that “the sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath,” and that “God will have mercy, and not sacrifice.“

Baxter refers to the various laws as if they are parts of an intricate watch—meaningless unless all the parts are in proper order.

Theology is a curious, well-composed frame. Just as it is not enough that you have all the parts of your watch or clock, but you must see that every part is in its proper place, or else it will not go, or answer its end; so it is not enough that you know the various parts of theology or law, unless you know them in their true order and priority.

When Jesus is asked what the two greatest commandments are, his answer tells us how to set our watch by the two guideposts on which hang the entire law—Love God and love others.

*Richard Baxter selections condensed and language updated from A Christian Directory.

Prayer: A Reading
Jesus taught us, saying: “Enter by the narrow gate, since the road that leads to destruction is wide and spacious, and many take it; but it is a narrow gate and a hard road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” — Matthew 7.13-14

– Prayer from The Divine Hours: Prayers for Springtime by Phyllis Tickle.

Prayers from The Divine Hours available online and in print.

Today’s Readings
Jeremiah 16 (Listen – 3:52)
Mark 2 (Listen – 3:55)

This Weekend’s Readings
Jeremiah 17 (Listen – 4:50) Mark 3 (Listen – 3:41)
Jeremiah 18 (Listen – 3:40) Mark 4 (Listen – 5:01)

Additional Reading
Read More about Regaining Love’s Highest Meaning
Even Christians are easily misled into thinking love is primarily a feeling. Yet, it is so much more.

Readers’ Choice
In August we will look back at our readers’ favorite posts of the year. Submit a Readers Choice post.
Tell us about a post and what it meant to you. What post refreshed your faith?

 

With Christ in Solitude and Loneliness

  • July 19, 2018
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  • John Tillman

Scripture: Mark 1.35, 44-45
Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed…

…Jesus sent him away at once with a strong warning: “See that you don’t tell this to anyone”…Instead he went out and began to talk freely, spreading the news. As a result, Jesus could no longer enter a town openly but stayed outside in lonely places. Yet the people still came to him from everywhere.

Reflection: With Christ in Solitude and Loneliness
By John Tillman

In Mark’s first chapter we find Christ experiencing both solitude and loneliness—they are not the same.

Paul Tillich says, “Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone…It has created the word ‘loneliness’ to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude’ to express the glory of being alone.”

Alone, in solitude, Christ communes with the Father, examines the recent events and successes of his ministry, and emerges into community with a renewed sense of purpose and direction.

Then in crowds, Christ is lonely. Christ is expelled from community in a way that causes pain and difficulty.

Richard Foster, in his classic book, Celebration of Discipline, discusses how our culture prefers the distraction of noise to the discipline of solitude.

Our fear of being alone drives us to noise and crowds. We keep up a constant stream of words even if they are inane. We buy radios that strap to our wrists or fit over our ears so that, if no one else is around, at least we are not condemned to silence. T.S. Eliot analyzes our culture well when he writes, “Where shall the world be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.”

My personal copy is the ten-year anniversary edition, printed thirty years ago in 1988. Yet, Foster’s comments, originally penned in 1978 (twenty-nine years before the first iPhone) sound like they could have been written last week in Wired Magazine, if we only updated the tech speak.

Fleeing to technology from our fear of being alone, we have run into the lion’s mouth. Or perhaps, as in Amos’s vision, we have fled the lion only to be bitten by a snake.

The anti-venom we need is to learn, like Jesus, to seek solitude rather than flee to distraction. We need the type of inner solitude that Foster called, “a portable sanctuary of the heart.”

Loneliness is inner emptiness. Solitude is inner fulfillment…if we possess inward solitude we do not fear being alone, for we know that we are not alone. Neither do we fear being with others, for they do not control us. In the midst of noise and confusion we are settled into a deep inner silence. Whether alone or among people, we always carry with us a portable sanctuary of the heart.

Prayer: The Request for Presence
Lord God of hosts, hear my prayer; hearken, O God of Jacob. — Psalm 84.7

– Prayer from The Divine Hours: Prayers for Springtime by Phyllis Tickle.

Prayers from The Divine Hours available online and in print.

Today’s Readings
Jeremiah 15 (Listen – 3:49)
Mark 1 (Listen – 5:05)

Additional Reading
Read More about Restorative Silence
Once a spiritual discipline, silence is now more likely to be viewed as the uncomfortable penalty for those who do not have enough to do.

Readers’ Choice
In August we will look back at our readers’ favorite posts of the year. Submit a Readers Choice post.
Tell us about a post and what it meant to you. What post refreshed your faith?

 

Collateral Blessing

  • February 13, 2017
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  • Park Forum

When you forgive somebody who has wronged you, you’re spared the dismal corrosion of bitterness and wounded pride.

― Frederick Buechner

Scripture: Genesis 46.29

Joseph had his chariot made ready and went to Goshen to meet his father Israel. As soon as Joseph appeared before him, he threw his arms around his father and wept for a long time.

Reflection: Collateral Blessing
The Park Forum

Twenty-five years after he finished the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo returned to begin work on The Last Judgment. The painting covers the expansive, 1,700 square-foot, altar wall and depicts Christ’s return, the resurrection of the dead, heaven, and hell.

The work, which would be among Michelangelo’s last, was controversial even before it was completed. Detractors were disquieted by the amount of nudity in the painting. Papal Master of Ceremonies Biagio da Cesena joined others in critiquing Michelangelo, calling the master artist’s work, “a very disgraceful thing.”

To strike back at da Cesena, Michelangelo painted him into the corner of the wall. The critic’s head appears atop the body of Meno, the Greek god of the underworld, who greets the damned as they enter hell.

“Of the seven deadly sins, anger is the most fun,” writes Frederick Buechner. “To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor the last toothsome morsel of the pain you’re giving back to them, in many ways, is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down at this feast is yourself.”

Most people can imagine what forgiveness might cost. Where we struggle is imagining what the costs of un-forgiveness will run us and what benefits forgiveness might bear.

Michelangelo’s bitterness is enshrined in history. (There are even teams of artists dedicated to preserving it.) Un-forgiveness always works that way. Entire nations rage against one another for the grievances of prior lifetimes.

Although it rarely feels grand, forgiveness has its own way of stretching beyond the moment. Because Joseph forgave his brothers, a family was preserved from starvation—from that family a nation was born.

More importantly to Joseph, he experienced a restored relationship with his father. Their joy-filled reunion was an effect of his forgiveness of his brothers. The meaningful things we long for are found only in the fruit of sacrifice.

Prayer: The Cry of the Chuch

Even so, come Lord Jesus!

– From The Divine Hours: Prayers for Springtime by Phyllis Tickle.

Full prayer available online and in print.

Today’s Reading
Genesis 46 (Listen – 4:47)
Mark 16 (Listen – 2:34)

Don’t Conjure Forgiveness, Extend It

  • February 10, 2017
  • /
  • Park Forum

Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners.

― Miroslav Volf

Scripture: Genesis 43.31, 34

After Joseph had washed his face, he came out and, controlling himself, said, “Serve the food.” […and] they feasted and drank freely with him.

Reflection: Don’t Conjure Forgiveness, Extend It
The Park Forum

The ease of forgiveness is based off the cost of the debt. In Jesus’ parable of The Unforgiving Debtor he depicts a servant who owed his master millions of dollars, an amount that could never be repaid in a lifetime. (Servants like this were far less like slaves and more like business managers, sometimes over entire divisions of their master’s endeavors.)

To owe this amount it must be assumed the servant was either imprudent, investing foolishly, or unethical, embezzling the master’s money over an extended period of time. Once discovered, the servant begs for his life—he knows there is no way he could ever repay the debt, so he is left to the master’s mercy.

Someone must absorb the debt. The servant is insolvent, yet in a shocking act of mercy the master writes off the debt, absorbing the loss himself. The freshly-forgiven servant then runs into a second servant who owes him a nominal amount of money—something that could be earned in a matter of days.

The first servant becomes physically violent with the second, demanding immediate repayment. When the master hears of the first servant’s actions—the servant whom he has just forgiven—he is enraged.

The second servant’s debt is owed not to the first, but to the master himself. This is the linchpin to the story—everything in a servant’s life belongs to his master—although the first servant feels the burden of the debt, the ultimate repayment is to the master himself. The first servant is condemned because, although he had intimate familiarity with the master’s forgiveness, he refused to extend it to others.

Forgiveness, for Jesus, is less about conjuring an emotion and more about praying to God for the ability to extend his forgiveness to those around us. “Once we start inhaling God’s fresh air, there is a good chance that we will start to breathe it out, too,” says N.T. Wright. “As we learn what it is like to be forgiven, we begin to discover that it is possible, and indeed joyful, to forgive others.”

Prayer 

The Lord is full of compassion and mercy, slow to anger and of great kindness. — Psalm 103.8

– From The Divine Hours: Prayers for Springtime by Phyllis Tickle.

Full prayer available online and in print.

Today’s Reading
Genesis 43 (Listen – 5:02)
Mark 13 (Listen – 4:32)