Thy Kingdom Come…
“Aaron, you’ve got some ‘splainin to do!” said Moses to his brother ( the “Ricky Ricardo” translation) after returning from a forty day retreat with God on Mount Sinai. “But I just threw the gold into the fire…and it came out a calf!” cried Aaron in self-defense. We know that our affinity for idol worship is nothing new. So, I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised to find that we have even found a way to turn the spiritual disciplines into idols. Scott McKnight reminds us that prayer, fasting, almsgiving and similar spiritual practices are given to us by God “to increase our love for him and for others.” But we quickly learn that although we cannot control God or our relationship with God, we can control our prayer life, our journaling, and our fasting; and we certainly control our almsgiving and the amount of time we spend reading scripture or helping the poor. And it is so much easier to worship a god we can control than a God we can’t. So instead of allowing God to use the spiritual disciplines to transform us into people who love God and neighbor, we begin to polish and perfect these spiritual disciplines until they resemble bright, shiny, golden calves. But in doing so, we block the power of these disciplines to transform us into the image of Christ.
Consider the sustaining power of prayer in Jesus’ life. Prayer wasn’t just something Jesus did at the beginning and the ending of each day, he offered his whole life as one continuous prayer. When his disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray, he offered them the prayer we have come to know and love, “Our Father, who art in heaven…” But for Jesus, these weren’t just words; they were a blueprint for how to live as the light of God loose in the world. First, Jesus taught them the words; then he showed them what that prayer looked like in action. Several years ago, Walter Wangerin (“Reliving the Passion: Meditations on the Suffering, Death and Resurrection of Jesus as Recorded in Mark”) introduced me to the drama of the Lord’s prayer played out in the Garden of Gethsemane:
And going a little farther, he fell on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. And he said, “Abba, Father, all things are possible to thee; remove this cup from me; yet not what I will, but what thou wilt.
Mark 14:35-36
“Jesus cries his deepest and desperate desire: that the hour, by the power of his Father, pass away from him. This is the living substance of the sixth petition: Save us from the time of trial. Jesus pleads three times, ‘Remove this cup from me,’ the plea of the seventh petition: Deliver us from evil. But under every request of his own, he places an attitude of faithful obedience to his Father, saying, ‘Yet not what I will, but what thou wilt.’ Here is the third petition, which prepares us properly for any answer God may give all other petitions: Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. When Jesus teaches us to pray, he does not teach plain recitation. Rather, he calls us to a way of being. He makes prayer a doing. And by his own extreme example, he shows that prayer is the active relationship between ourselves…and the dear Father, Abba. (Wangerin, 65).
The cruciform nature of the spiritual disciplines knows nothing of distortion or idolatry. In right relationship to the one true God, spiritual disciplines are both hazardous and life giving — through them God will change you into one willing to submit to the cup of suffering, the time of trial, and the forces of evil for the love of God and the love of neighbor. And so we pray, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”