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On "Thoughts and Prayers"
James 2:14-18, Matthew 7:7-11
March 4, 2018
James 2:14-18
14 My brothers and sisters, what good is it if people say they have faith but do nothing to show it? Claiming to have faith can’t save anyone, can it? 15 Imagine a brother or sister who is naked and never has enough food to eat. 16 What if one of you said, “Go in peace! Stay warm! Have a nice meal!”? What good is it if you don’t actually give them what their body needs? 17 In the same way, faith is dead when it doesn’t result in faithful activity. 18 Someone might claim, “You have faith and I have action.” But how can I see your faith apart from your actions? Instead, I’ll show you my faith by putting it into practice in faithful action.
Matthew 7:7-11
7 “Ask, and you will receive. Search, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened to you. 8 For everyone who asks, receives. Whoever seeks, finds. And to everyone who knocks, the door is opened. 9 Who among you will give your children a stone when they ask for bread? 10 Or give them a snake when they ask for fish? 11 If you who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him.
When we had our confirmation-led worship service a few weeks ago, our current confirmands – Katie, Miles, Nico, Sarah, and Natalie – stood up before our congregation before the service began, and asked us to pray in a moment of silence for those who had been effected by the mass killing at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. After the prayer, Miles continued sharing the prepared statement in which they called on our government officials to take some action to make our schools and country safer. Right after the call to action in that moment of silence and solidarity was written, which was a few minutes before the service began, Miles looked up at me, and asked quizzically asked if the statement wasn’t political, this call for our political leaders to do something about the problem of mass killings in our culture. And I looked at him and said, yes, it was, and though I didn’t say it to him or the other confirmands at the time, I was thinking that there are times when politics and religion do mix, when your faith calls you and I to seek solutions through the means of the body politic which is our right as citizens of this great and imperfect country. Prayers for those students and persons damaged by gun violence, including the gun violence found right here in Chicago on almost daily basis, prayers are needed but they aren’t the end point of anything, at least most of the time – that is why the students ended that time of silence with a call to action. And yet recently many of you have seen a flurry of controversy on the internet over the tepid reaction that some politicians have had to the constant drumbeat of murder and violence in this country – thoughts and prayers are offered by some politicians for those effected by these shootings, but they don’t or won’t use their political power to do something about it. It’s inevitable, it seems to them, that people will kill each other with guns, and it’s the price all of us must pay for the supposed Second Amendment right to buy assault weapons at our local Bass Pro Shop. And so prayers are offered to God, concern is expressed by words spoken and posted on social media and nothing is ever done, and the cycle continues, with many of these politicians telling us that any kind of talk about solutions to this problem so near a particular mass killing is somehow an insult to the victims and their families. Of course the tragedies just keep piling up and keep coming at us at a maddening pace that there is never anytime between massacres to talk of solutions, according to this silly, Orwellian logic. But Senator Marco Rubio of Florida is not seeking solutions – he is seeking to keep the people that gave his campaign 3.5 million dollars happy, keep them unaffected by the people’s anger that the cycle keeps happening over and over again, with the same types of weapons.
So, there, I got a bit political, but I do believe that the Gospel of Jesus Christ calls on us to seek a solution to injustice, and often times we need to address justice through political means. And I want to remind us that the reason why the Romans put Jesus to death was for political reasons – they did not care about his religion, about what he or anyone else believed about the divine. What the Romans did care about was how Jesus’ religion might cause the system of empire to be questioned by the masses, of how he might stir up the people to rebel against the injustice they were experiencing at the Roman’s hands. When Pilate entertained the complaints of Jesus’ religious enemies, he did not care about their disagreements with Jesus theology – Pilate only cared that the peace be kept, and if one man should die for the sake of Roman rule and power, so be it. Jesus was certainly a religious figure, but the Romans bought into the idea his enemies propagated that he was a political danger to the Empire – and to some degree, he was, his ideas being so radical that they might destabilize the religious and cultural status quo of his time, a destabilization the Romans feared might bleed into the political status quo. Now, before your alarm bells go off, please know that I am aware of the danger of people claiming to speak for God in the political realm - I know that acutely, and many of us are affected by some of these people, whether it be around gay rights or abortion rights. And I am aware that people of good faith and pure motives may disagree vehemently on what Christian justice might look like – but disagreements about the nature of what love looks like in the public square doesn’t mean we should stop having that sometimes difficult debate, or trying to enact our vision of what Christ’s love looks like when it is given feet in the actual world we live in.
In fact, that conflict, that debate about what justice looks like in the real world, which is really just a debate about what love looks like in the real world, is certainly what we are dealing right now, in this backlash towards those who offer nothing but their thoughts and prayers, even if it is no so obvious. For example, Marco Rubio, the senator from Florida who received millions from the gun lobby, tweets a daily Bible verse to his thousands of Twitter followers. And yet, his vision of love given flesh and bone in the world includes the idea that no restrictions should be in place for gun owners seeking guns used in war, or minimal ones at most. To his credit, he got on national television to answer and debate this question of what justice and love look like when it comes to guns, but that picture he offered around justice on this issue was just such so incongruent of any picture of Jesus one finds in the New Testament, of any semblance of the one who said that those who live by the sword will die by the sword, the moment when he told Peter to put down his sword as the Roman soldiers approached him in the Garden of Gethsemane. All that some politicians can offer to God and to us is thoughts and prayers, and so many of us have become disgusted by this almost meaningless gesture, especially in light of politician’s particular and unique ability to effect change around this issue. I posted a cartoon on our Epiphany Facebook page that depicts a man on the docks on some sort of body of water, and he spots another man who is drowning and desperately calling out for help. The man remains on the dock, and says to the other man that he is sending his thoughts and prayers to him, and when the man is finally yelling out his last call for help, his hand barely sticking out of the water, the man on the dock starts shouting “thoughts and prayers” at him, in a seeming attempt to drown out his cries. What are to do with fellow believers whose is response to injustice, is nothing, rooted perhaps in the belief that that she or he can do nothing to help, and who only offer prayers and thoughts, despite having the ability to jump in the water to save a drowning man, a drowning nation, from dying? How can this be Christian, how can this “doing nothing” be helping God to bring out the Kingdom into this world?
Today, I want to look a little closer at this gesture that Marc Rubio and others were willing to offer us and God after the mass shooting of school children, which is their thoughts and prayers. As I mentioned earlier, there has been a huge backlash to this offering of thoughts and prayers by our leaders after these kinds of shootings, because it seems as if their thoughts and prayers are for naught, as if it means nothing when something could be done, something we could do to prevent this madness. Now, it’s often skeptics of religion who hurl scorn at this gesture, and they’re reflected in various memes found on twitter and the Facebook – there is the picture of a back of the U-haul truck which is empty and the line that goes – “Excellent news – the first load of your thoughts and prayers has arrived.” Or the picture of the garbage truck with THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS emblazoned on its side, dumping those thoughts and prayers into a trash landfill. Or even the picture I’ve placed on the front of your bulletin today, with someone pressing the THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS button instead of the multitude of DO SOMETHING options. Look, I share the frustrations of those who are simply tired of people seemingly offer prayers of solidarity and concern for those effected by tragedy, but who don’t do anything, or won’t do anything, to help hurting people or prevent future mass killings. And “doing nothing” is probably all of us to different degrees, at some point in our lives, we who have looked away from the shadows in an effort not to feel burdened by what we feel we cannot change. One of my favorite Pink Floyd song is called On the Turning Away, during which the lyricist says “on the turning away from the pale and downtrodden, and the words they say, which we don’t understand. Don’t accept that what happening is just a case of other’s suffering, or you’ll find that you’re joining in the turning away.”
And yet we Christians are said to believe in the power of prayer, and we are taught by our Savior that we are to ask and we shall receive, knock and the door will be opened to us. In one of our texts from the Gospel of Matthew, we have Jesus saying that when we look, we will find, and that God will treat us as we would our own children, we parents who would not give our child stones when they asked for bread, or snake when they asked for fish for food. God is father of good gifts, Jesus says, and all we are to do is ask for goodness, and it will be given to us. Now, look, as many of us have found these words to be true of our prayers to God, that God was as kind were as generous and kind as our parents were at their best, we also probably have stories when we did what Jesus asked us to do here, to pray for what we needed for ourselves or for another, and nothing seemed to come of our prayers – for some of us, stones and snakes were what we actually got, at least seemingly. And, of course, you have that moment in the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus begs God to spare him the horrific death he knows is coming on a cross outside Jerusalem, on a hill that was called Golgotha, at the place of the Skull, tortured to death in a humiliating death days after riding on a donkey into that very city, in an act of triumphant humility. Jesus begs and begs for God to spare him, and yet, in the end, he knows that God is God, and he is not, and so he ends this prayer with humility, knowing that God will ultimately choose whether or not he will receive bread or stones, death or life. We may ask, we may want, and we may deserve what we pray for, but, in the end, seemingly everything is up to God’s will or sometimes even random chance.
But, and this is, as they say, a big but, there is something else that begins when we end our prayers with “your will be done,” and that something is spelled in our second text from the Letter from James, where the author says that a faith, a trust in a good God that doesn’t embody that goodness in the world, is no faith at all, not really. Praying that someone receive a good meal but not giving them that meal is not faith. Praying for people to receive bread instead of stones, and not getting up from that prayer and looking for bread for others is not a prayer at all, and certainly not a faith recognizable by Jesus. To tweet our thoughts and prayers to those we can actually help, that we can do something for and yet we doing nothing, like passing no legislation, well, that isn’t prayer, and that’s not faith – it’s the empty words that the skeptics think that our “thoughts and prayers” are, in reality. Prayer without doing what we can to make that bread a reality for ourselves or for others is not prayer, and is as empty as that empty U-Haul full of thoughts and prayers. Yes, ultimately, we can’t control everything and we can’t always provide the bread we and others need, despite our best efforts, but we need to participate in the bringing about the kingdom of God, the reality of God, the justice of God – and if we do not, we are almost guaranteed to receive snakes instead of fish, stones instead of bread. Those who mock us Christians and who mock those politicians who claim the Christ for their thoughts and prayers, but who do nothing, they do have a point, after all. We usually know what the right thing to do is, what an answer to our prayer might look like, what bread might look like in our hands, and we Christians need to put feet to our prayers, hands to our prayers, and become the good gifts we are asking for, for ourselves and for others. Love is the measure rod of any debate for us Christians – is this solution, is the policy, is this action, loving God and loving others? Many years ago in the United Church of Christ there was a favorite line that you would see sometimes see on the back of cars, with the UCC logo next to it: “To believe is to care; to care is to do.” Indeed, so true, so very true, echoing the very God truth James shares with us in this text.
Look, I know that sometimes we pray, and we get up and we look for bread, we look for fish, we look for justice, we look for change, and we find little or none of these things. Sometimes we can embody our prayers to God and sometimes we can’t, either because we searched and could not find, or we had no ability to search at all, no emotional or spiritual energy to help God bring out the results we’re praying for. But that doesn’t mean that our thoughts and prayers mean nothing if they cannot be always be fully realized now on this side of eternity – the realm of God, the kingdom of God, the work of justice, the work of healing, rarely happens in a singular moment, a single action, or the finding of a single piece of bread for a particular person or group. It is all those thoughts and prayers that were embodied in some sort of action that will eventually bring about the realm of God, the goodness of God, the ultimate healing of all things. I don’t believe that we should dismiss our thoughts and prayers as meaningless unless something immediately comes from those prayers – sometimes we spend lifetimes getting up from our prayers and seeking the bread we were promised, and the very seeking of that bread, the very seeking of that fish, the very seeking of healing and justice, is part of the slow work of God in the world, and in our lives. I don’t think I’ll be giving up my thoughts and prayers anytime soon, but I do know and I invite to know this as well, that our thoughts and prayers, our voicing of what we and others are in need of, the bread we need, is only the beginning of that prayer – the next part of that prayer is the seeking of that bread, the doing of that justice, the being of that love we wish to see embodied in this beautiful and broken world. Amen.
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By Kevin McLemoreJames 2:14-18, Matthew 7:7-11
March 4, 2018
James 2:14-18
14 My brothers and sisters, what good is it if people say they have faith but do nothing to show it? Claiming to have faith can’t save anyone, can it? 15 Imagine a brother or sister who is naked and never has enough food to eat. 16 What if one of you said, “Go in peace! Stay warm! Have a nice meal!”? What good is it if you don’t actually give them what their body needs? 17 In the same way, faith is dead when it doesn’t result in faithful activity. 18 Someone might claim, “You have faith and I have action.” But how can I see your faith apart from your actions? Instead, I’ll show you my faith by putting it into practice in faithful action.
Matthew 7:7-11
7 “Ask, and you will receive. Search, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened to you. 8 For everyone who asks, receives. Whoever seeks, finds. And to everyone who knocks, the door is opened. 9 Who among you will give your children a stone when they ask for bread? 10 Or give them a snake when they ask for fish? 11 If you who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him.
When we had our confirmation-led worship service a few weeks ago, our current confirmands – Katie, Miles, Nico, Sarah, and Natalie – stood up before our congregation before the service began, and asked us to pray in a moment of silence for those who had been effected by the mass killing at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. After the prayer, Miles continued sharing the prepared statement in which they called on our government officials to take some action to make our schools and country safer. Right after the call to action in that moment of silence and solidarity was written, which was a few minutes before the service began, Miles looked up at me, and asked quizzically asked if the statement wasn’t political, this call for our political leaders to do something about the problem of mass killings in our culture. And I looked at him and said, yes, it was, and though I didn’t say it to him or the other confirmands at the time, I was thinking that there are times when politics and religion do mix, when your faith calls you and I to seek solutions through the means of the body politic which is our right as citizens of this great and imperfect country. Prayers for those students and persons damaged by gun violence, including the gun violence found right here in Chicago on almost daily basis, prayers are needed but they aren’t the end point of anything, at least most of the time – that is why the students ended that time of silence with a call to action. And yet recently many of you have seen a flurry of controversy on the internet over the tepid reaction that some politicians have had to the constant drumbeat of murder and violence in this country – thoughts and prayers are offered by some politicians for those effected by these shootings, but they don’t or won’t use their political power to do something about it. It’s inevitable, it seems to them, that people will kill each other with guns, and it’s the price all of us must pay for the supposed Second Amendment right to buy assault weapons at our local Bass Pro Shop. And so prayers are offered to God, concern is expressed by words spoken and posted on social media and nothing is ever done, and the cycle continues, with many of these politicians telling us that any kind of talk about solutions to this problem so near a particular mass killing is somehow an insult to the victims and their families. Of course the tragedies just keep piling up and keep coming at us at a maddening pace that there is never anytime between massacres to talk of solutions, according to this silly, Orwellian logic. But Senator Marco Rubio of Florida is not seeking solutions – he is seeking to keep the people that gave his campaign 3.5 million dollars happy, keep them unaffected by the people’s anger that the cycle keeps happening over and over again, with the same types of weapons.
So, there, I got a bit political, but I do believe that the Gospel of Jesus Christ calls on us to seek a solution to injustice, and often times we need to address justice through political means. And I want to remind us that the reason why the Romans put Jesus to death was for political reasons – they did not care about his religion, about what he or anyone else believed about the divine. What the Romans did care about was how Jesus’ religion might cause the system of empire to be questioned by the masses, of how he might stir up the people to rebel against the injustice they were experiencing at the Roman’s hands. When Pilate entertained the complaints of Jesus’ religious enemies, he did not care about their disagreements with Jesus theology – Pilate only cared that the peace be kept, and if one man should die for the sake of Roman rule and power, so be it. Jesus was certainly a religious figure, but the Romans bought into the idea his enemies propagated that he was a political danger to the Empire – and to some degree, he was, his ideas being so radical that they might destabilize the religious and cultural status quo of his time, a destabilization the Romans feared might bleed into the political status quo. Now, before your alarm bells go off, please know that I am aware of the danger of people claiming to speak for God in the political realm - I know that acutely, and many of us are affected by some of these people, whether it be around gay rights or abortion rights. And I am aware that people of good faith and pure motives may disagree vehemently on what Christian justice might look like – but disagreements about the nature of what love looks like in the public square doesn’t mean we should stop having that sometimes difficult debate, or trying to enact our vision of what Christ’s love looks like when it is given feet in the actual world we live in.
In fact, that conflict, that debate about what justice looks like in the real world, which is really just a debate about what love looks like in the real world, is certainly what we are dealing right now, in this backlash towards those who offer nothing but their thoughts and prayers, even if it is no so obvious. For example, Marco Rubio, the senator from Florida who received millions from the gun lobby, tweets a daily Bible verse to his thousands of Twitter followers. And yet, his vision of love given flesh and bone in the world includes the idea that no restrictions should be in place for gun owners seeking guns used in war, or minimal ones at most. To his credit, he got on national television to answer and debate this question of what justice and love look like when it comes to guns, but that picture he offered around justice on this issue was just such so incongruent of any picture of Jesus one finds in the New Testament, of any semblance of the one who said that those who live by the sword will die by the sword, the moment when he told Peter to put down his sword as the Roman soldiers approached him in the Garden of Gethsemane. All that some politicians can offer to God and to us is thoughts and prayers, and so many of us have become disgusted by this almost meaningless gesture, especially in light of politician’s particular and unique ability to effect change around this issue. I posted a cartoon on our Epiphany Facebook page that depicts a man on the docks on some sort of body of water, and he spots another man who is drowning and desperately calling out for help. The man remains on the dock, and says to the other man that he is sending his thoughts and prayers to him, and when the man is finally yelling out his last call for help, his hand barely sticking out of the water, the man on the dock starts shouting “thoughts and prayers” at him, in a seeming attempt to drown out his cries. What are to do with fellow believers whose is response to injustice, is nothing, rooted perhaps in the belief that that she or he can do nothing to help, and who only offer prayers and thoughts, despite having the ability to jump in the water to save a drowning man, a drowning nation, from dying? How can this be Christian, how can this “doing nothing” be helping God to bring out the Kingdom into this world?
Today, I want to look a little closer at this gesture that Marc Rubio and others were willing to offer us and God after the mass shooting of school children, which is their thoughts and prayers. As I mentioned earlier, there has been a huge backlash to this offering of thoughts and prayers by our leaders after these kinds of shootings, because it seems as if their thoughts and prayers are for naught, as if it means nothing when something could be done, something we could do to prevent this madness. Now, it’s often skeptics of religion who hurl scorn at this gesture, and they’re reflected in various memes found on twitter and the Facebook – there is the picture of a back of the U-haul truck which is empty and the line that goes – “Excellent news – the first load of your thoughts and prayers has arrived.” Or the picture of the garbage truck with THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS emblazoned on its side, dumping those thoughts and prayers into a trash landfill. Or even the picture I’ve placed on the front of your bulletin today, with someone pressing the THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS button instead of the multitude of DO SOMETHING options. Look, I share the frustrations of those who are simply tired of people seemingly offer prayers of solidarity and concern for those effected by tragedy, but who don’t do anything, or won’t do anything, to help hurting people or prevent future mass killings. And “doing nothing” is probably all of us to different degrees, at some point in our lives, we who have looked away from the shadows in an effort not to feel burdened by what we feel we cannot change. One of my favorite Pink Floyd song is called On the Turning Away, during which the lyricist says “on the turning away from the pale and downtrodden, and the words they say, which we don’t understand. Don’t accept that what happening is just a case of other’s suffering, or you’ll find that you’re joining in the turning away.”
And yet we Christians are said to believe in the power of prayer, and we are taught by our Savior that we are to ask and we shall receive, knock and the door will be opened to us. In one of our texts from the Gospel of Matthew, we have Jesus saying that when we look, we will find, and that God will treat us as we would our own children, we parents who would not give our child stones when they asked for bread, or snake when they asked for fish for food. God is father of good gifts, Jesus says, and all we are to do is ask for goodness, and it will be given to us. Now, look, as many of us have found these words to be true of our prayers to God, that God was as kind were as generous and kind as our parents were at their best, we also probably have stories when we did what Jesus asked us to do here, to pray for what we needed for ourselves or for another, and nothing seemed to come of our prayers – for some of us, stones and snakes were what we actually got, at least seemingly. And, of course, you have that moment in the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus begs God to spare him the horrific death he knows is coming on a cross outside Jerusalem, on a hill that was called Golgotha, at the place of the Skull, tortured to death in a humiliating death days after riding on a donkey into that very city, in an act of triumphant humility. Jesus begs and begs for God to spare him, and yet, in the end, he knows that God is God, and he is not, and so he ends this prayer with humility, knowing that God will ultimately choose whether or not he will receive bread or stones, death or life. We may ask, we may want, and we may deserve what we pray for, but, in the end, seemingly everything is up to God’s will or sometimes even random chance.
But, and this is, as they say, a big but, there is something else that begins when we end our prayers with “your will be done,” and that something is spelled in our second text from the Letter from James, where the author says that a faith, a trust in a good God that doesn’t embody that goodness in the world, is no faith at all, not really. Praying that someone receive a good meal but not giving them that meal is not faith. Praying for people to receive bread instead of stones, and not getting up from that prayer and looking for bread for others is not a prayer at all, and certainly not a faith recognizable by Jesus. To tweet our thoughts and prayers to those we can actually help, that we can do something for and yet we doing nothing, like passing no legislation, well, that isn’t prayer, and that’s not faith – it’s the empty words that the skeptics think that our “thoughts and prayers” are, in reality. Prayer without doing what we can to make that bread a reality for ourselves or for others is not prayer, and is as empty as that empty U-Haul full of thoughts and prayers. Yes, ultimately, we can’t control everything and we can’t always provide the bread we and others need, despite our best efforts, but we need to participate in the bringing about the kingdom of God, the reality of God, the justice of God – and if we do not, we are almost guaranteed to receive snakes instead of fish, stones instead of bread. Those who mock us Christians and who mock those politicians who claim the Christ for their thoughts and prayers, but who do nothing, they do have a point, after all. We usually know what the right thing to do is, what an answer to our prayer might look like, what bread might look like in our hands, and we Christians need to put feet to our prayers, hands to our prayers, and become the good gifts we are asking for, for ourselves and for others. Love is the measure rod of any debate for us Christians – is this solution, is the policy, is this action, loving God and loving others? Many years ago in the United Church of Christ there was a favorite line that you would see sometimes see on the back of cars, with the UCC logo next to it: “To believe is to care; to care is to do.” Indeed, so true, so very true, echoing the very God truth James shares with us in this text.
Look, I know that sometimes we pray, and we get up and we look for bread, we look for fish, we look for justice, we look for change, and we find little or none of these things. Sometimes we can embody our prayers to God and sometimes we can’t, either because we searched and could not find, or we had no ability to search at all, no emotional or spiritual energy to help God bring out the results we’re praying for. But that doesn’t mean that our thoughts and prayers mean nothing if they cannot be always be fully realized now on this side of eternity – the realm of God, the kingdom of God, the work of justice, the work of healing, rarely happens in a singular moment, a single action, or the finding of a single piece of bread for a particular person or group. It is all those thoughts and prayers that were embodied in some sort of action that will eventually bring about the realm of God, the goodness of God, the ultimate healing of all things. I don’t believe that we should dismiss our thoughts and prayers as meaningless unless something immediately comes from those prayers – sometimes we spend lifetimes getting up from our prayers and seeking the bread we were promised, and the very seeking of that bread, the very seeking of that fish, the very seeking of healing and justice, is part of the slow work of God in the world, and in our lives. I don’t think I’ll be giving up my thoughts and prayers anytime soon, but I do know and I invite to know this as well, that our thoughts and prayers, our voicing of what we and others are in need of, the bread we need, is only the beginning of that prayer – the next part of that prayer is the seeking of that bread, the doing of that justice, the being of that love we wish to see embodied in this beautiful and broken world. Amen.