Luke 11- Andy's thoughts

It is hard to believe that this blog only began a little over a week ago. In ten short chapters, I feel like I have learned so much and have been moved so much toward seeing Jesus. I hope that we as a community continue to move closer toward God through this blog. Thanks again Steve for taking the initiative. You have been a Godsend.

I also realize that I have been posting longer and longer blogs and I hope that these thoughts may be beneficial to others. Mostly, they have been my opportunity to organize old thoughts and new in a specific place. I do not pretend to have answers to everyone’s questions nor do I have a clear understanding of everything I read. I am humbled the more I read this gospel as I realize that Jesus is so much more than I could have ever imagined. Thank You Lord for your words to us and your love for us. This gospel is your love letter to us, your beloved.

Imitation not incantation
The chapter opens with a rephrasing of the Lord’s Prayer. I find it interesting that Jesus begins to teach his disciples to pray by telling them to ask that God’s name be kept holy. I wonder, how would it not be made holy? God is holy and therefore his name should be holy. It almost seems tautological. But then I realize that Jesus is stressing that his disciples maintain God’s holiness in our thoughts and prayers.

It is far too easy to recreate God in our own image. In Greek mythology, the pantheon of gods was basically a lot like humans only superpowered. They shared in all of the human failings of greed, pride, envy, lust, anger etc. Jesus teaches us that we ought not to view God the Father like that. He is not one to give into these sins. He is holy (which means devoid of sin). If God was not holy we would be tempted to try to appeal to these baser emotions. We would ask God to do things by appealing to his pride or greed or anger. He would be a god that we could bargain with. We could make deals with such a god.

But thankfully, God is not like that. Goethe, the old German writer tells of the story of Faust. Faust seeks to make a deal with a celestial being in order to get what he wants. This being isn’t God, however, it’s the devil. When we pray, we don’t come to one who seeks to make a deal. We come to God who is truly holy. There is no corrupt bargain to be made with him.

What is it that we ought to then pray for? Basic needs and just living. We should pray for our daily food. We should pray for grace- to receive and to give grace. When I look at this passage in conjunction with Matthew’s account of the Lord’s prayer, I am reminded that this is not taught to us individually, but rather communally. Why is this significant? Because in praying for our daily needs, God may respond to us communally.

God may give one disciple the food that is meant to be shared with ten others. So when we live in our affluent society, we must MUST MUST realize, that God may be answering the prayer for daily food for our community by entrusting some of us with the food that is meant to be shared with others. If we find ourselves blessed with abundance, it is not simply to fulfill our baser emotions and cravings. It is to build within us a connection to our larger community.

How shameful it is to squander God’s provision for the world on our hedonistic drive for self-satisfaction. As John the Baptist taught- if we have two cloaks we should share with the one who has none. We should not be focused on trying to get a trendier third cloak. This is a deeply radical teaching that we all too often marginalize in America. Woe to us if that is the case.

The last bit of the prayer is here recorded as “do not bring us to the time of trial” or in Matthew it is “lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.” This is a potentially tricky phrase. I don’ think that Jesus is implying that God seeks to lead us into a life of tests and temptations. While there might be occasional times of testing, I think that there is a different primary path that God intends for us. It may be better to put a pause in the prayer and read it instead as- and lead us. Not into temptation. But deliver us from evil.

We pray that God would primarily lead us. We trust that his leading will not take us into temptation but instead will lead us to a deliverance from evil. In the new bible study that ORB is doing on Sunday afternoons, I introduced the idea of the various metaphors that we use to frame our understanding of discipleship. I talked about how we often go to an academic metaphor to understand our life and faith. We think of everything as a test. These tests can be passed or failed. These tests are designed to see if we are succeeding or failing as disciples.

What is the problem with this academic metaphor? The problem is that an academic metaphor is all about you. It is all about how you do and how well you perform. But good discipleship is about Jesus and our relationship with him. It is not performance driven. It should not lead us to a constant worry that we are passing or failing as disciples. Instead we ought to focus on being led by God. Faithfulness as a disciple is not about passing tests, it is about responsiveness to God’s leading. Oh how I wish we could free ourselves from the never ending carousel of performance-based Christianity.

So how should we pray? We should pray that God will deliver us from a pattern of thinking that sets God up to be like the College Board forcing us to jump through silly hoops to gain his favor (Can you tell that I have been an SAT tutor for too long?). We should pray that God would not bring us to the time of trial. With that said- there are seasons of life that will be genuine trials and even Jesus was led into the desert to be tempted. I guess that I am saying that those times should be the exception not the rule to our experience as disciples. There is so much more to our relationship with God than tests and trials. There is grace and mercy and joy. We ought to pray with that outlook toward our holy Father.

The rest of this section fleshes out what prayer should be like. It should be persistent and hopeful. We don’t prayer persistently because God doesn’t hear us the first time. I think we are persistent in prayer because God doesn’t want us to take him for granted. I also think God wants to give us time for our hearts to fully engage in the act of prayer. Prayer is not like an incantation that we recite in order to bend God to our wills. Prayer is an act of faith that gives us the opportunity to express our understanding that God is our ultimate provider (in Hebrew he is called Jehovah Jirah- the LORD provides- in the story of Abraham and Isaac).

Jesus reminds us that God provides not because we are persistent in asking but because he is persistent in giving grace. Just as Jesus understood that there was a sense of timing to his earthly mission, he also understood that there is a sense of timing- a cadence- to prayer. Waiting can be good for the soul. Waiting is not a sign of God’s apathy toward us. It is often a sign of his grace. As we pray, we are called to be like God in showing grace to others as well.

Filling not emptying
The following section illustrates Jesus’ authority over everything and his power to fill a person. Steve, you implied a question about what was going on here. I think that the story of the man who was freed from a demon that was later filled with even more demons tells us a very practical truth. Sadly, there is a lot of junk in my own life. As I seek to purge it and as God delivers me from it, I shouldn’t just focus on being free of that junk. I should seek to be filled with something better. As we learn in science class- nature abhors a vacuum.

Here is a concrete and honest example- there was a time when I gave up drinking alcohol for six months because I felt convicted that I was drinking too much. I shared that at a Tuesday night YAG meeting and it was great. I felt supported by my other leaders and the group overall. But I also started smoking during that time. DUMB. Sigh.

I know that it is easy to pick on the traditional Christian taboos of drinking and smoking. Yet there are a lot of other things that would be easy to talk about as well. If we try to repent of gossip or anxiety do we then turn to pride or judgmentalness instead? The trend in Buddhism (Americanized Buddhism at least) is to seek to empty ourselves. And this sounds great. We should empty ourselves of the garbage in our lives. But the process of emptying is just a means not an end. Christian spirituality should seek filling.

Years ago, I spoke at a retreat about the idea of letting go of our baggage. Pete and Christian wrote the song “These Burdens” to emphasize that theme. During the retreat, I asked what is the best way to get the air out of a glass? The answer was not to pump out the air using a vacuum. It was to simply fill it with something else.

Ultimately, this is not just a metaphorical truth but a literal one. Jesus teaches that we should seek to be filled not with evil spirits but with his Holy Spirit.

What matters is the inside not the outside
The last parts of the chapter show that Jesus is concerned far more with the inside of people than the outside. When he describes the eye as a light to the body, he is teaching us an internal truth. What we look at affects what we think about. To behold beauty invokes an attraction to true beauty. When we set our eyes on truth, mercy, justice, compassion, goodness, and grace, our souls are changed. Such a vision resets our internal hardware to want to seek more of these traces of God.

When we set our eyes on lies, violence, selfishness, cruelty, judgmentalness, and envy, our souls are also changed. Jesus calls us to fix our eyes on the light of his being. It is not hard to make statements about the internal sabotage that we create within ourselves from focusing on pornography, violence, and free market capitalism. All of these things share a common link of making people into objects to be subjugated to our drive towards self gratification.

So what should we do instead? Don’t focus on giving up porn or violent movies or fashion magazines or business magazines. (though it wouldn’t hurt- and it’s not like I don’t also stray towards some/ all of these). We should focus on filling ourselves with that which is good. Fellowship, prayer, bible reading, worship, service, accountability, fasting, meditation. All of these are tools that point us toward our true fulfillment- sitting at Jesus’ feet and listening to him.

As a teacher, it is so easy for me to stray towards being more like the Pharisees than Jesus. Kathleen, I agree with you totally. I think that one of the ways to be free is to be honest with our own struggles, so it is with that intent that I bare my soul more in this blog post. I thank God for the grace to reveal these struggles more openly. I hope others continue to feel the same.

Application:
• Are we trying to make deals with God rather than emulate him?
• What are we trying to purge from our lives?
• What are we trying have fill our lives?