Rattling God’s cage? That doesn’t sound like the deferential
relationship, the “Protestant cool”, I was taught as a child to have with God
as a long-bearded Father. The God of my childhood prayers summed up in two
phrases: “Say please, and say thank you.”
Say Please, Say Thank You. That was
the title of a book a president of my seminary alma mater penned several years
ago. The book bemoaned the loss of civility in American life; the antidote, his
title. About that time, a certain purple dinosaur erupted on TV screens around
the land teaching little boys like my Andrew what could have been that book’s
theme song: “Please and Thank You, They’re the Magic Words.”
And yet, what are our “magic words” with God? Our scripture before us today suggests that civility is not a top-shelf virtue in our
relationship with our Creator. Not
for our God, whose compassion we never need question. Not for our God, who is
always bigger than the problems we bring. Not for our God, who is never as
thin-skinned as we are. Not for our God, who craves our most intensive pleas
and our most intimate passions. Not for our God, who is just dying to love us.
Ponder a moment that phrase, if you will – that journey to Jerusalem phrase:
Our God, dying to love us …
Our scripture today and elsewhere make
plain that ours is a Semitic God of pathos Jesus engaged and taught and teaches
us to engage. A God who craves an intensely I-Thou relationship, grounded in
the passionate intimacy of Jesus’ first word of the Lord’s Prayer according to
Luke: Abba – Pater in the New Testament Greek. It’s an intimacy we polite and self-sufficient
Protestants often like to overlook. For with intimacy comes struggle, and who
wants that with God? We might think, falling back on illusions of a demanding
deity, that’s hardly a fair fight! The anger and frustration and pain we would share
with God … perhaps it would cut both ways, we might wonder? On the other hand, perhaps
God will simply choose to remain silent. Either has the power to undo us
altogether.
And yet, that God of great pathos – of unquenchable desire –
cannot be avoided. Certainly not out
of the mouth of our Jewish Lord.
Luke’s Jesus knows what God wants, what God craves: Rattle
my cage! Hammer away with the chisel of prayer until a breakthrough in the rock
of the world’s injustice jars loose.
Handle the chisel simply … directly … and very
personally: “When you pray, say: Abba: Sanctify your name! Your kingdom:
Come! Give us each day our daily bread! And forgive us our sins – for we
ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us! And do not bring us to the time of
trial!”
Simple prayer.
No “heap(ing) up empty phrases”, as Jesus warns against in Matthew’s more
familiar rendition of the Lord’s Prayer – the Greek for empty perhaps better
translated “babble” or “repeated”. No lengthy discourses … no (ahem) pastor’s
long prayers …
Simple prayer, and direct prayer – rattling God’s cage. “Sanctify your name!” – not just, “hallowed be”. “Your
kingdom – Come! … Give us this day our daily bread.” These are not requests. These
are not in the indicative tense. These core prayers Jesus teaches us are in the
imperative tense: cries from the heart, a people demanding justice of a God who
promises abundance for all – while a few who hoard so much would deny them – as
we will witness next Sunday …
Direct prayer, and personal prayer. Called to demand the
kingdom God has promised.
Jesus instructs us: Don’t just implore. Demand your just desserts! “Your kingdom:
Come!”: God, this Empire business is killing us!” “Give us this day our daily
bread”: Lord, they’re taking our food!
“Lord, teach us to pray,” his disciples plea. And Jesus’
responds: Rattle God’s cage! Make your prayers simple, direct, and deeply
personal. God can take it! God really wants it! Our empathic God would have it
no other way. Contrary to minority scripture
reports, ours is not a lofty divine, starkly omnipotent and imperious and
eternally unchangeable. That type of God would be consistent with Stoicism, a
philosophy of sage removal quite popular in the Roman Empire of Jesus’ day –
and come to think of it, among many Protestants today. The loftier the God and the
more almighty, the better.
But that is not our God, Jesus teaches us. Our God is almighty in one way alone: compassion. Compassion unleashed by our God’s deepest desire: our desirous attention. Attention that if it is desirous enough, God’s kingdom promises of inclusive love and economic justice might actually begin to flower into being.
Too often when I was growing up in the church, I internalized messages – whether the church meant them or not – that God was in God’s heaven, and all was right in the world. Or at least, I should accept the way things are, and move on. From these messages, I came to believe that Almighty God was up there, and I was down here, and there was nothing I could do – sans believe upon the name of Jesus, the mediating bridge – to draw near to the power that made this void so.
How wrong I was! And how many years
it has taken for me, for an ineffable Lord to become an intimate Abba. The God
of Abraham and Jesus, who I have since discovered is more like a devotional
expression that has grown in my estimation over the years: Each day, when I
choose to take one step toward God … each day, God takes two steps toward me.
Each day. Each and every day. Each and every persevering
day, Jesus calls upon us to rattle God’s compassionate cage.
God can take it –
and will love us and give us ever the more because of it.
Question is: Do we dare
persevere? Do we dare follow Jesus along that resurrection road?
