Matthew 6:14-15
For if you forgive others when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.



Forgiveness is at the heart of everything Jesus says and does.

Forgiveness is the hot molten core of everything his church is called to be.
What is forgiveness? Is it a single act of selflessness that we as free moral agents can choose at will? When we tell someone else that their “wrong” has been forgotten, even though we possess the moral authority to hold it over them? Is that all forgiveness is? Is that all Jesus is calling us to?

No, that is a tiny part of the whole. Jesus is inviting us into a way of life and of seeing the world that makes forgiving as natural as breathing. It’s nice if we can summon up the kind of courageous congeniality that would enable us to return good for evil on our own steam, but isolated acts of forgiveness interspersed here and there amid everyday self-centeredness isn’t the end goal of what Jesus is getting at.

It’s very easy to hear this as a command that we need to get up, go out and do. But in reality, forgiveness isn’t really something you need to get up looking for opportunities to practice. Start where you are. Right now, there is someone you can forgive. Yourself. If there is anyone right now you resent more than yourself - for your failures, limitations, shame, or regrets - you would be a very exceptional slice of humanity indeed. And if you are like me, you have an entire ocean of bitterness seething within you; directed toward yourself. Now, you may not think about it regularly on a conscious level; it may come out as anger directed at someone else or as an unexplainable bout of depression over some relatively minor thing. But if you were to pull up the roots of your fears and frustrations, you would find everything you hate about yourself underneath.

So a life of forgiveness begins with the experience of forgiveness. Once you realize you need to forgive yourself, you may be surprised (and disappointed) to find that you can’t. You can’t because you cannot somehow stop being you and look at yourself objectively. And since you are trapped in yourself, you can recognize your faults and limitations (some of them), but you can’t make them go away all by yourself. You can say you forgive yourself, and that’s not a bad start, but soon enough, you will come face to face with your shadow-self, and you will find yourself recoiling in utter despair as it begins to dawn on you that you will always be this way. You can’t change you, no matter what two-hundred million self-help books might tell you. You can make a few behavioral modifications here and there that may yield agreeable results; but your deepest faults will still be lurking underneath the surface looking for more “socially acceptable” ways to ooze out of you. Pretty soon you won’t be able to tell them from your virtues, because they will mask themselves so well, no one will notice them; if you hang out with the same kind of people as yourself. This is precisely what happened with the Pharisees. They hid their own faults so well and exposed those of the easy targets around them (promiscuous women, tax collectors, “wine-bibbers”); never realizing that their judgmental way of living was a far worse fault than anything the tax-collectors and “wine-bibbers” did. Jesus seemed to prefer the company of the latter, possibly because they were much more in tune with their shortcomings then the religious elite.

Paradoxically, the more aware you are of your shadow-self, the closer you are to his forgiveness and acceptance. This isn’t to gloss over them and pretend they don’t matter; it is simply to take a realistic look at their true nature. They are closer to being healed when they are exposed. The only downside is this: you are unqualified to expose and heal your own faults; mired as you are in them. For that matter, a friend may be able to help you identify and overcome some of your faults, but being mired in their own, they also can only go so far in the journey with you until they have their own emotional debris to deal with. Only God is able to forgive us completely and work with us from an entirely accurate vantage point. In order for God to be able to do this, you must also forgive yourself as much as you are able. How?

By letting you by you. By refusing to pretend to be anything other than what you are. By living out of your true heart, even if your true heart is half-rotten. The center will hold if the center is Christ. Christ will spread into the rest of you like a good virus. Just be open, and be real.

Then, as you experience the miracle of forgiveness, the Spirit of Christ will open your eyes to see the people around you who are all unable to forgive themselves for a myriad of failures and disappointments. He will give you ears to hear what they are really saying and a heart to empathize with their struggles and journeys - even if the outward manifestation is something hurtful aimed directly at you.

You will find yourself doing what Christ did. Letting them do their worst to you, and then forgiving them. They have done what they have done to you; whatever it is, primarily out of an inability to experience the forgiveness God is forever offering. If you forgive them in a concrete and accessible way, you have just made the Heart of God visible. Jesus is doing it through you; you can’t do it yourself. And something will change inside of them. Sadly, they could harden their heart even further, but there is an equal chance that their heart will soften a little. However they react isn’t your concern. That is between Creator and created. You have just been permitted an inside glimpse into the great forgiveness-project of God and your heart stretches in its capacity for more God.

But if you do not forgive, your heart hardens and shrinks. It clasps around the unforgiveness and grows a protective shell; keeping God out. And you will find yourself less and less able to receive and believe in the unconditional acceptance of God. In effect, “your Father will not forgive your sins” not because he stubbornly refuses, because you won’t give him access.

Then again, he has his ways of getting in anyway, and they hurt. So don’t despair. Just let your prayer led you to further openness. Rest in his forgiveness and do your best to respond to “Divine Whisperings” when you hear them.

He will give you the strength to forgive when you need it.
Until then, be kinder to the people you see all the time.
Including that clueless scalawag in the mirror.

Matthew 6:9-13
"This, then, is how you should pray:
" 'Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.'



Prayer is rooted in the stuff of life. Notice how Jesus teaches us to pray: we acknowledge who God is, we emotionally invest ourselves in his name being revered and his way of doing things happening HERE. And then, we pray about everyday, normal things. We open up every sphere of our lives to him - the food we eat, the people we bump up against, and the unknown future that is the source of so much worry and anxiety.

This prayer is often called “The Lord’s Prayer” or the “Our Father”, but it was given to the disciples as a prayer that we can pray together. Notice the use of plurals; “us” and “we” - not “I” and “me”. This is a prayer of community - it begins with adoration, moves into a longing for God’s rule to be established (as above, so below) and then it forces us to pray with and for each other; it’s almost as if the first few lines are fulfilled in the last few. Maybe God’s Kingdom is lived out as we pray for each other’s material needs, and live more generously the more we pray it. Maybe God’s Kingdom is lived out as we realize that our reception of forgiveness is entirely dependent on our willingness to “pay it forward”. And we pray for the well-being of each other; that nobody we are praying for and with would fall into the emptiness of the Dark Story of fear and worry, but live in the Real Story of grace and abundance.

In short, this prayer leads to action; and you can’t keep praying it without starting to do it. Jesus’ disciples ask him to teach them to pray; he replies by giving them a prayer that leads to a life lived out. How can you continue to pray for “our” (not “my”) daily bread and live a greedy, self-absorbed life? How can we ask for forgiveness and refuse to show any, and keep praying this prayer? How can we live apathetically, knowing there is an enemy (the Prince of Chaos) and not encourage and help each other through dark days? We can’t keep praying this prayer and not do the stuff.

But this prayer isn’t focused on doing stuff. This prayer is focused on OUR Father. Not “Jesus’ Father” exclusively (Jesus was willing to share!) or even “My Father”. OUR Father. The very first line places us in community, whether we like it or not. And as we realize that we are part of a larger story and a larger group of people, then we begin to see everything differently. The people around us are no longer separate entities passing by each other in a meaningless cosmos. They are our brothers and sisters. We share a common parent. We pray for his name to be “hallowed”. But the way we live either hallows his name or sullies it; regardless of what our mouths might say. For instance, if you speak very piously about how wonderful God is and very crudely about other humans made in his image, you are not hallowing his name. If you see yourself as somehow more spiritual or closer to God than anyone else, you aren’t being very Christ-like and are misrepresenting him to others. When we divide over miniscule doctrinal differences or theological pet peeves, we aren’t reflecting the heart of Jesus’ prayer for unity in John 17. When we make our own little group the “in-group” and refuse to let outsiders and sinners sit our table experiencing the complete acceptance of God as revealed in Emmanuel, “God-with-us”, we are grossly distorting his heart for his creation, and at the very least - not hallowing his name.

We can’t pray the prayer and continue to live like religious snobs.
And yet. This is hard stuff. To just hear it spoken like that makes it sound like God expects us to become this kind of person overnight. Just a cursory glance at his relationship with his disciples is enough to dispel that myth. He walks us through it. He shows us how. He does it himself through us. And when we fall, he picks us up and washes our feet. We see him doing this with his disciples again and again. He is not trying to get a perfect performance out of any of us; he is helping each of us become more and more like him by letting us experience his joys and his sorrows. In this way, we are formed from within, through the Spirit, so that we are authentic in how we live. He doesn’t want pious pretenders; he wants participants.

So maybe the best way to react to this is by saying, “Jesus! You ask too much!” Because it’s true; he does ask too much. And pretending that we are okay with it is just phony. I look at the life he calls me to and say, “No way.” It’s too hard, the world is too scary, people are too mean and I don’t naturally want to put myself or anyone I love in harm’s way. I don’t want to be open and vulnerable. I don’t want to wish good things for people I can’t stand. I don’t want to live this way. I want to live for my own self-preservation. I don’t want to do hard things; I naturally desire the cowardly way. Let someone else do it. It’s someone else’s problem. Let the Mother Teresas and Saint Francises heal the world. I would rather just stay home and watch T.V.

Why say all that? Isn’t it just setting me up for defeat? Isn’t it just heaping more discouragement into my life? No, it’s me being honest. And if I ever want to go where Jesus is taking me, I have to be honest about where I’m at. I can’t airbrush my life so that nobody else can see my foibles and flaws and expect to be a disciple of Jesus. So I continue to pray this prayer, and little by little, I find myself living differently. While I am honest about what a scalawag I truly am, that tiny shred of honesty is what opens my heart wider for some more of his light to get in. It’s not mouthing a bunch of words I don’t mean that enlarges my capacity to receive him; it’s speaking from where my heart really is. When Adam and Eve “fell” by eating the forbidden fruit, they hid themselves. We can hide ourselves just as easily in sweet little prayers and sentimental religion.

But when we get a glimpse of the dangerous adventure Jesus calls us out into, our first reaction had better be to try to run the other way, because it shows that we see it for what it is. And that is precisely what every disciple did in the Garden of Gethsemane when the Temple Guard came to arrest Jesus. One disciple had to disrobe and run away naked just to escape. Shortly after, the same Peter who was so confident in his own spiritual strength denied he ever knew Jesus, just to save his own skin. It’s something every disciple of Jesus goes through; it’s a rite of passage of sorts.

But then, we realize that the place we run to isn’t any safer, and it’s a lot emptier. Staying home watching T.V. just makes us lonelier. Trying to find solace in pleasure for its own sake only opens the floodgates of despair in our souls. We find ourselves in a dark place, where there is “weeping and gnashing of teeth”. The Outer Darkness. The “me-first mentality” will lead us to utter isolation and an inability to break free from meaninglessness. Some call this a dark night of the soul; others compare it to the “far country” that the prodigal son ran off to. Whatever it is, don’t stay long enough to map the place out; go back to the places your heart hurts. Revisit the old wounds you’ve been trying to forget about. Cast yourself in a helpless heap where your deepest fears lie. Because that is where he can be found. The dying places in your soul are his stomping grounds. The deep dry places will be flooded with gushing springs when he arrives. And that is how you will be changed. Not by mouthing a prayer or reading words on a page - by walking with him through the parts of your life that hurt the most.

Does it sound easy?
Try it sometime.
And then give up, for Christ’s sake.

This is the first in an ongoing series on prayer that I will probably end up compiling into a book of some kind. It's based on the Russian Orthodox spiritual classic "The Way Of A Pilgrim" about a man who roams the Russian country side trying to figure out how to "pray without ceasing." A helpful spiritual guide makes him aware of a "secret chain of prayer" - a string of verses throughout the New Testament that give us a picture of what prayer is all about. Here is the first installment:



Matthew 6:5-8
"And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”

Prayer is not a performance. God doesn’t care how eloquent you are. He doesn’t even care how many words you use. Jesus is laying out the basics of what a life of prayer is and isn’t. Sometimes, in the back of our minds, even though we wouldn’t articulate it in this way, we believe some very hideous things about what God is like. First of all, we believe that talking to God is like placating a bureaucratic oaf with just the right combination of checked boxes and rightly-placed signatures. We imagine that there is a procedure for getting a prayer answered or for becoming a man or woman “of prayer.” But what Jesus says here is very hard to misunderstand. He basically says, no, there’s no procedure. There is only a Father who is already well aware of what you need. Don’t assume that God wants to hear you mouth a bunch of “right beliefs” or “faith-activating statements” to get his generosity all lubed up and ready to bless. He is generous already and if we don’t get exactly what we pray for, it’s because we haven’t asked for what he knows we need. It’s because whatever he has planned, it is so much better than what we are asking for. And when we continue to come to him, even though he doesn’t always answer in the way we have specifically asked him to, that is faith.

There’s an unfortunate myth going around that faith is a substance like electricity or magnetic energy and the more you have of it, the more stuff you can get God to do for you. But faith is not a “thing” in itself, faith is a relational reality, completely dependent on the person you put your faith in. Turning faith into a substance that can be accumulated like rainwater in buckets is putting your faith in faith. It’s a bit like falling in love with falling in love; nothing relational happens. That’s why going into your room and closing the door has it’s own reward; although it may not be the reward we are going into it looking for. The reward is relationship. Yet, even just going into a room by ourselves and closing the door behind us doesn’t preclude the possibility of performing our prayers. The audience might just be you, and you might catch yourself marveling over what a wonderful, self-sacrificial “prayer warrior” you are. Of course, this usually happens in group settings, where a prayer meeting is hijacked by someone with a theological ax to grind and it quickly turns into a captive audience for longwinded, overbearing sermonizing thinly veiled as a prayer. There really is no reward in that situation, because most everyone can tell what is happening while it is happening. The pristine, eloquent prayer that serves only to send a message that the person praying knows how to pray, that can impress other humans and impressing humans is all it will get you. God is yawning the entire time, even while other humans are on the edge of their seats.

So the natural reaction is that any eloquent prayer is sinful, therefore we should make all of our prayers as ineloquent as possible. We should grunt our prayers like uncouth Neanderthals. We should mispronounce words on purpose, just to sound inarticulate. Surely that’s the way to go! But again, we are simply looking for the “right way to pray.” It becomes a performance yet again; a mechanical process designed for maximum efficiency. We are looking for the kind of prayer that “works.” And again, if it ever does work, or make people think more of us, we’ve got our reward.

Prayer works, but it does more than just work. It brings us into conversation with the almighty creator of the cosmos. And conversation, as awkward as it can be initially, can get very interesting. Eventually, as you converse with someone else you find fascinating, you begin to forget yourself. You are asking questions not to sound smart, but because you are genuinely curious. You open yourself, not because you want or need validation, but because you want to share more of who you are; you want to be known. Yes, along the way, every friendship has benefits - favors can be asked, time can be set aside, kindnesses can be given and received. But they are never the main thing (not the reward) but the byproduct of a deepening friendship. Relationship is the ultimate reward of any conversation. Conversations that see anything other than relationship to be the ultimate reward are manipulative, not real interaction.

What is the place for written prayers in the divine conversation? Aren’t written prayers all meant to make us sound more eloquent than we are? If that is the case, we’d better stop reading the Psalms. Or saying the Lord’s Prayer. But these are “prayer-templates” graciously given to help us enter into the Living Conversation. Yes, if they are used to try to manipulate God better, then don’t use them. But if they express something that you can latch your Amen onto, and help you put into words something that was previously very difficult for you to express, then by all means use them. God might employ them to reveal something to you about himself and then you find that the ball is rolling and you two are interacting. Or short sentence “prayer darts” that you can shoot off can be very helpful during the day during work or other situations in which it is difficult to say more. Or even repeating a very profound sentence of scripture can be a wonderful way to come into The Presence. Or even just a few words and a lot of silence. Don’t look for the right, human-approved way to get God to do what you want him to. Just start the conversation and remember there are two sides to it.

"The Voice - a scripture project to re-discover the story of the Bible."

I received my copy from Amazon last week and I am enjoying it immensely. I would recommend this translation (and it IS a translation - not a paraphrase like the Message) for the person who wants to read the New Testament in bigger chunks than usual. This isn't a translation for verse-cherrypicking. It's deliberately rendered in such a way as to make cherrypicking obsolete (something I'm very happy about). It is rendered in way that the richness of the poetic text and the storytelling becomes the main focus. The language isn't English tech-speak like so many translations that approach the text as a spiritual technical manual. The result is that you naturally read MORE of the text and become more familiar with the big picture of the narrative rather than the little disputable details. This translation majors on what's actually major: grasping the "meta-narrative" of the New Testament. Overly technical translations make certain passages unnecessarily cryptic and breed unhealthy obsessions over what a certain cluster of words mean within OUR cultural understanding, completely bypassing the original cultural matrix that the words were originally penned within. The unintended result is a misreading and misapplication of the text, which God will still use in our lives, gracious as He is, but so much of the original treasure is lost in translation. We are impoverished in the process (and reading the New Testament becomes a chore and a bore).

This is why I have embraced The Message as much as I have. Yes, it's a paraphrase, but it is a paraphrase that excavates the original Story wonderfully - preserving the poetry and the richness of the original language. Yes, it may gloss over some of our favorite pet-doctrines and not give the same attention to our favorite passages that we would, but that is what paraphrases do, and The Message doesn't pretend to be anything more than a paraphrase. And if you think there is anything wrong with paraphrases, stop listening to sermons and teachings, because they also explain the text and paraphrase it for contemporary ears. And really, translation in itself DOES involve a certain amount of paraphrasing. You have to consciously decide whether you are going to use antiquated english or modern english, or even post-modern english in which certain phrases would have that extra "zip" to us while certain older english equivalents would be like a nice comforting glass of warm milk for the soul. Both are valuable, but a translation has to deliberately choose one over another.

In a sense, we have an OVER-abundance of english translations while there are probably some less-euro-centric languages that have zero. And yes, that is not a good thing. But the majority of english translations all seem to fall into the old forced dichotomy - word for word equivalency vs. idea to idea equivalency. Storytelling and poetic sensibility are never a concern. Which is a shame because good storytelling is what keeps you reading, and the gospel-authors were amazing storytellers. Paul was a gripping communicator, even if his translators were not. Sometimes you need to align people with simular gifts to the original authors rather than just technical-minded analysts. The Voice does this. See for yourself. Go here and sample some of the freebies. I can't recommend this translation enough. Here it is on sale at Amazon. Here is a free pdf of the gospel of John.

Check out this album - tell five friends about it and get it free or pay what you want (minimum $1).

Alright, make sure you aren't drinking milk while you watch...

Baby Preacher...

Yeah, yeah...sorry I haven't posted much this week... anyway here's a new online zine I will be following quite a bit; they really cover my preferred brand of music. The Old Guard.. or the "dinosaurs" of Christian Rock (Lost Dogs, 77s, Bill Mallonee, The Choir, Daniel Amos, Mike Knott, etc) who have been around the block a few times and care more about artistry than image. So here's the link... I'm going to go to lunch and flip through my printed pdf right now!