GREAT BASEBALL CATCHER Yogi Berra played a game in which the score was tied with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning. The batter from the opposing team stepped into the batting box and made the sign of the cross on home plate with his bat. Berra was a Catholic, too, but he wiped out the plate with his glove and said to the pious batter, “Why don’t we let God just watch this game?”
Letting God just watch. That’s good theology when applied to the outcome of a baseball game. It’s terrible theology when applied to the way we live our lives and carry out the work of the church. Worse than that, it’s fatal.
But too often that is precisely the outlook we bring to our vocation as Christian elders, deacons, and pastors. God attends the game, but only as an honored spectator. Our prayers are merely ceremonial functions, like asking the President of the United States to throw out the first baseball at the beginning of baseball season, they are tips of the hat, verbal recognition over the loudspeaker between innings. He may even be in the dugout, but he rarely, if ever, gets on the playing field.
Are my words too strong? Not if I am to believe half of what I hear from my colleagues about the weight and frequency assigned to the role of prayer in their work. Prayer is always getting nudged aside, neglected, or perfunctorily performed as more pressing concerns cake center stage. Many of us feel we just have too much to do to have time to pray. That’s the problem. We don’t believe we are really doing anything when we pray—other than saying the words, chat is.
That attitude is one of the most subtle and pernicious forms of worldliness infecting the church today. Why don’t we believe we’re getting anything done when we pray? Two reasons: the world’s view and the world’s pace.
All there is?
The world’s view is basically a philosophical issue. It’s the view of secularism; the notion that the material world is all there is; chat reality is limited to what we can caste, touch, hear, smell, and see; and that we therefore live within a closed system of cause and effect, with nothing outside to influence what goes on inside. Such a world-view is suffocatingly claustrophobic. It is what sociologist Peter Berger called a “world without windows.” G. K. Chesterton said it feels spiritually like what middle-aged businessmen feel after a big lunch. There can be no prayer in that kind of world, only spiritual slumber.
Of course, no Christian can be a secularist. But she can, however, be secularized. Secularism is a formal philosophical system. Secularization is a sociological reality. According co Os Guinness, it is a process by which religious ideas, institutions, and interpretations are losing practical social significance.
That last phrase is the operative one. For instance, it is fine to pray in your support group; it builds intimacy and warmth. But when we need to get something done in the church? That calls for practical things: committees, not prayer calls; talking, writing, telephoning, spending, budgeting, mobilizing, organizing, and mailing. And those kinds of things cake time. So prayer gets preempted. It’s a pleasant luxury that would be wonderful to spend more time on, if only we had the time to spend. But necessity presses in. After all, we have the budget to complete, the policies to formulate, and the proposals from the fellowship committee to act upon.
Not all there is
God’s view couldn’t be more opposed to that fatuous perspective. Our battle is not with these so-called necessities, but “against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph. 6:12). We therefore fight a spiritual battle wearing spiritual armor and wielding spiritual weapons: the shield of faith, the breast-place of righteousness, the helmet of salvation, the belt of truth, the shoes of the gospel of peace, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. (See Ephesians 6:13-17.)
Prayer plays a critical role in all of these. For how do we put on this armor? And how do we wield this sword? By praying “in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests” (Eph. 6:18). We put on the armor with prayer. We wield the Spirit’s sword with prayer.
What if every church business meeting began with a reading of that passage from Paul? What if pastors, elders, and deacons really believed we were in the midst of a raging spiritual battle in which the stakes, the territory being fought over, is none other than ourselves and our people? What confidence would we place then in our organizational charts, lines of accountability and authority, budget reports, and plans for the Labor Day picnic? My hunch is that we’d all be too frightened not to pray. We’d all become foxhole Christians. Can there be any other kind?
It isn’t that those business items are trivial; they are to be included in the responsibilities of Christian leaders. They are, however, trivial in comparison to our vocation to be men and women of prayer. To paraphrase Calvin Coolidge’s famous remark about the business of America being business, the business of the church is to pray.
The hard and the soft
God’s view is that there is one reality, but two dimensions: one seen, the other unseen (Col. 1:16.). But of the two, it is the unseen that is the larger and the more determinative. In fact, the seen is usually the arena in which the drama of unseen realities is being played out. It is the unseen that gives meaning to the seen. Rather than negating the seen, the unseen frames it and gives it a reference point. So Paul writes of his often difficult and discouraging work as an apostle in the realm of the seen, as being defined by the unseen:
Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. (2 Cor. 4:16-18)
When I was in college, we used to speak of so-called hard courses and soft courses. The hard courses were the sciences, things like physics and biology, chemistry and math. The soft courses were things like philosophy and English, history and art. Hard meant fixed, solid, unchanging. Soft meant shifting, unsubstantial, ephemeral. But if change in the sciences has demonstrated anything in the last thirty years, it has shown just how changing these hard things are and how timeless the soft things are. Indeed, without the soft things, the hard things lose their meaning. So it is with the seen and the unseen.
When we lose God’s view of things we lose perspective on everything else, too. Distinctions between the good, the better, and the best—even good and evil—grow fuzzy. A kind of radical egalitarianism takes over our responsibilities and activities, with anything and everything screaming for equal attention, equal time. Henry Zylstra was writing about life in the ’60s, but what he said is truer now than it was then. If the proverbial anthropologist from Mars were to return from Earth to report to his planet on the religious culture of North America:
[He] could do worse than take a copy of Time magazine with him, point to its table of contents, and say that what he had seen down here was a lot of people interested in: Art, Books, Cinema, Education, Medicine, Music, People, Personality, Press, Radio, Religion, Sports, Theatre … and the rest. If he were then asked whether the item called Religion, tucked in there between Radio and Sports, were the governing thing here … he would have to say that he thought it was not. He would have to say that Religion was operating alongside of those other things rather than in them and through them.… Presumably the man from Mars would have to report that religion, so far as serving as the leaven which keeps the body of the national life from crumbling is itself one of the fragments.1
In this regard, the church has become a reflection of the culture, a thermometer instead of a thermostat. When prayer is moved to the periphery of the church, it can only mean that God has, too, and life becomes fragmented and very, very busy. For the world’s view leads inevitably to the world’s pace. The logic of secularization is busyness.
There is a sign on the Alaskan Highway that reads, “Choose your rut carefully. You’ll be in it for the next 200 miles.” The view that sees the material as all there is, or all that is of any practical value, creates a pace that is frantic at times, monotonous at others.
I read an article that, at the time, created a great deal of anxiety in me: “If You Are 35, You Have 500 Days to Live.” Subtract the time you will spend sleeping, working, and tending to personal matters such as hygiene, odd chores, eating, and traveling. In the next 36 years you have 500 days of leisure. If this world is all there is, then none of us should waste our time praying. We should literally be grabbing for all the gusto we can get.
We see precisely that all around us. Yet, as leisure time increases, so do the problems of emptiness, boredom, and restlessness. We have, as a culture, a frantic determination to relax, unwind, and have fun. Where an earlier generation may have been compulsive about work, we are compulsive about what we do with our leisure time. We have made an idol of activity. Goethe’s Faust is in many ways the quintessential modern. When he was trying to re-translate John 1:1, he searched for a more suitable equivalent to the Greek logos than “word.” He settled on act. Thus: “In the beginning was the Act, and the Act was with God, and the Act was God.”
God’s pace
God’s pace is different. He says to us, ” ‘In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength.’ ” But even as he says this, he knows how slow we are to believe it. He adds, ” ‘But you would have none of it.’ ” It’s true, too true.
God parodies our solutions to our busyness: ” ‘You said, “No, we will flee on horses.” Therefore you will flee! You said, “We will ride off on swift horses.” Therefore your pursuers will be swift'” (Isa. 30:15-16). How do we try to solve our busyness? Why, we get busier! God’s judgment is to hand us over to the logic of our choices. The faster we run, the faster our anxieties will run. Until, perhaps, we fall exhausted and let God be God.
Theologian Hans Kung wrote On Being a Christian, a 602-page theology of the Christian life, without a word about prayer. He was asked why, and he answered, in effect, “I forgot.” There was the publisher’s deadline, and the harassment he was receiving from the Vatican, and he overlooked prayer. Precisely. Prayer is always the first thing to go when we get caught up in the world’s pace. And only prayer can deliver us from that pace.
Contrast that with Jesus. One day he is approached by a distraught father, a leader in the local synagogue, Jairus by name. His twelve-year-old daughter is dying. Would Jesus please come and help his little girl? If ever there was a. 9-1-1 emergency, that was one.
So Jesus walks to his house. I had a friend remind me one busy day that Jesus walked just about everywhere he went. When he brought this to my attention, I said, “Of course he walked. He lived in the first century.” But my friend smiled triumphantly and said, “Couldn’t he have been born now, when he wouldn’t have to walk everywhere? Wouldn’t that have made so much more sense for the fulfilling of his mission on earth—to be born when he could have had a cellular telephone, a fax machine, and a word processor, access to air travel and the media? But doesn’t the Bible say that he was born in the fullness of time, at the best possible moment in history? (Gal. 4:4). Clearly, he thought it was sufficient to come at a time when all he could do to get the message out was to walk places.” Jesus didn’t appear to be in nearly as big a hurry as I was.
On his way to Jairus’s home, the crowd following him through the village street presses up against Jesus. Among them is a woman who has been suffering from a hemorrhage for years. She has it in her mind that if she can just touch Jesus’ clothes, she’ll get well. So she leans through the mass of bodies surrounding him and touches the hem of his robe. And the bleeding stops.
Jesus also stops. He looks around and says, “Who touched me?” His thoroughly secularized disciples say, “Master, the people are crowding and pressing against you.” But Jesus insists: “Someone touched me; I know that power has gone out from me” (Luke 8:43-46). And the woman crawls trembling to his feet and explains everything. One gets the impression reading this story that Jesus actually chats with her awhile.
Have you ever wondered what Jairus was doing while Jesus was taking care of this woman? I have. Was he out of his mind with grief and impatience, gesturing silently for Jesus to get a move on? I think so. The woman can wait, his daughter can’t. And, in fact, his girl does die.
But then Jesus walks to her and heals her, too.
Now, it would be a complete misreading of this story to conclude: “Sure, Jesus can take his time. It’s easy for him. He can raise the dead. He can miraculously do what didn’t get done. But I can’t.” But the point of the story is not that Jesus can fix whatever got broken while he was distracted. The point is he never got distracted—and therefore he could take his time, because Jesus, the man of prayer, was perfectly in touch with his Father’s will. He marched to the proverbial beat of a different drummer. He saw the seen through the perfect lens of the unseen.
And when he came to the end of his life, he could say to his Father with perfect calm and conviction, “I have brought you glory on earth by completing the work you gave me to do” (John 17:4). He got it all done! When was the last time you went to bed and looked back over a single day, feeling you could say you did all you were supposed to do? But there is always enough time to do what God wants us to do. The problem is we don’t know what he wants because we’re too busy doing what we think he might want done. It really wouldn’t be a bad idea to ask him what he wants, would it? And then to listen?
Ora Labora
We would do well to take our clues from St. Benedict of Nursia. I first became aware of the Benedictines while driving across North Dakota one summer. Bored with the monotony of the Northern Plains, when my wife and I saw a church spire on the horizon, we turned off the interstate to see to whom it belonged. It was a Benedictine monastery. One of the brothers graciously gave us a tour. As we walked through the grounds and the buildings, I kept seeing the words Ora Labora. For all I knew, it was a kind of mouthwash. I was embarrassed at my ignorance, having gone to seminary and taken church history.
It took me a while to gee up the courage to ask. What I heard has changed my life.
Benedict founded his Benedictine order as a reaction to the worldliness of the sixth-century church. His slogan was Ora Labora, from the Latin ora, “pray,” and labora, “work.” He taught his followers that to pray was to work, and to work was to pray. Following chat rule, the Benedictine order broke down the artificial dichotomy between work and prayer. From there they also bridged the gap between the manual arts and the liberal arts, the physical and the intellectual, and the empirical and the speculative. A great tradition developed in which learning, science, agriculture, architecture, and art flourished. Much of what is considered beautiful “nature” in Europe today, particularly in France, was created by the Benedictine monks who drained swamps and cleared forests.
We must learn that prayer is our chief work. Only then can our work become prayer: real service, real satisfaction. This simple truth alone explains why so many workers in the church find themselves exhausted, stretched to the breaking point, and burned out.
How often has our telling someone we’ll pray for them been a cop-out? Meaning we won’t do anything that really matters, anything concrete; or meaning we want to maintain a safe distance from them and their need.
Our prayer is our work! Only when that is true for us will our work be prayer: real worship, praise, adoration, and sacrifice. The classical postures of prayer, arms stretched out and hands open, or head bowed and hands folded, are gestures of openness and submission to God. They express perhaps the greatest paradox of prayer: that only when we give up on our human efforts can God’s work begin and, mysteriously, human effort can come to fulfillment. As Ole Hallesby puts it in his book Prayer, “Wherever we touch his Almighty arm, some of his omnipotence streams in upon us, into our souls and into our bodies. And not only that, but, through us, it streams out to others.”2
Ora Labora.
Henry Zylstra, A Testament of Vision (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1961), 181-82.
Ole Hallesby, Prayer (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1963), 63.
Copyright © 1998 Ben Patterson
