Trying to Touch Him

Well, you can hear it in my voice. I've been retired for a while. And my voice is not in shape.

But I am grateful for the opportunity to be here at Laguna Niguel Presbyterian Church. We have a long connection with this congregation. I was on the Presbytery Committee that helped form this congregation and call your new pastor, Ken McCullen, and have had great friendship with the pastors of this church up to the present with Pastor Jim, who's in a covenant group with me.

And I just treasure that friendship. I see several of my friends from Laguna Beach that are here this morning, and I welcome them. And it's good to see you all.

Luke has a way of telling the gospel story that is both a blessing and a very troubling message for most of us American Christians in particular to understand and to appreciate.

Luke was telling really a theology of geographical journeying, of following Jesus to the various places that he went to do his ministry and a lot of that ministry occurred around the lake at Galilee. But Luke wants us to know that Jesus came into this world on a journey to the ends of the earth and that he had a purpose and a plan to call disciples, to represent him, to exercise his authority and power in a world that was broken, that was fallen, and in desperate need. And so Jesus moved from Jerusalem to Judea to Samaria and with intention to the ends of the earth.

It was an amazing journey. The text tells us that, as a part of his journey, he moved up the mountaintop.

There on the mountaintop, perhaps surrounded by an inner core of disciples, he prayed all night long.

All night long? You gotta be kidding. I remember my early days of being a disciple.

Just spending a few moments in praying to a holy God, my heavenly father, was a trial for me. I didn't know how to pray. And the disciples did not know how to pray either.

Later in the Gospel, they asked Jesus, teach us to pray even as John taught his disciples to pray. Teach us to pray. You ever prayed that prayer?

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread.

Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory.

That's the way Matthew tells the story in his Gospel, Chapter 6, of the Lord's Prayer.

When I was in seminary, I never had a course on prayer. I think they might have assumed that those of us who were training for the ministry might have known how to pray. But a lot of us didn't.

And we were searching for ways to learn how to be in the presence of the holy God of Israel who had become incarnate in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Some have said that prayer was the breath that Jesus breathed into his life continually. But Luke wants us to know from time to time, at the strategic moments of his life, that Jesus prayed, that he went out alone, he went to the mountaintop, and sometimes in other places, even to the desert.

And there he was alone with God, and in conversation and dialogue with his heavenly father.

Where did Jesus learn to pray?

Well, many have suggested that the Psalms of the Old Testament were the prayer book of Jesus and the prayer book of Israel. The prayers of the people of God that were sung and chanted in the temple in Jerusalem, the very center of the universe, from that perspective.

About 1991, I took a course on spirituality and ministry. And I was at a time in my own life in ministry where I really needed to learn how to pray. I was feeling empty, and I needed the touch of the presence of God in my life.

So I took a course that was taught by Eugene Peterson, Presbyterian pastor, teacher of spiritual formation, man of God. And I discovered that in his course on spirituality and ministry, that he had one intention, and that was to teach us how to pray the Psalms. And when to pray the Psalms.

If they were the prayer book of Jesus, perhaps it was the Psalms that really shaped, formed the mind of Christ and the mission of God in the world. And so since about the early 90s, I have done what Eugene suggested that we do. And that is to daily pray five Psalms.

And if you pray five Psalms a day, in a month's time, you can pray through the whole Psalter of 150 Psalms, and then you just start again. And it is an amazing thing how that discipline shapes and forms your life, and prepares you for what God intends for you to be and do. Walter Brueggemann, a great scholar on the Psalms, said that there are three major themes that emerge out of all 150 Psalms, and they are these.

Psalms of orientation are well-being. The psalmist is praising God and thanking God for all the good things of his life. His crops are prospering.

The enemy is not nearby. The temple is safe. Jerusalem is not about to be invaded.

Rather, his life has just been blessed, and he praises God. The Salter is filled with those kinds of prayers of thanksgiving for all of God's rich blessings in our life. Psalms of well-being, of positive orientation.

But there are just as many, and maybe more, of Psalms of disorientation. And I'm so grateful for those Psalms. Psalms that were prayed by the writers of those prayers.

When the author of the prayer was facing a time of chaos, he was broken, he had fallen, he'd sinned, Israel was in danger, the crops weren't coming in. All the things that we might consider to be threats to our well-being. The economy goes bad, we get sick, we face the possibility of death, death of ourselves or death of a loved one.

The psalm is prayed prayers of crying out to heaven, talking about the difficulties, the troubles of his life, asking for God to intervene.

And then thirdly, psalms of new orientations. The psalmist has experienced a new beginning.

Healing has come. Death has been averted. Jerusalem is safe.

And there's well-being again, and the psalmist is filled with praise. Psalms of new orientation.

For the last 25 years, I've been on a monthly basis, sometimes in person, sometimes on the telephone, talking to my spiritual director, Wilkie Al, former Jesuit priest. And we've talked a lot about the Psalms, and the context of everything that was going on in our lives, and in the life of the world. Indeed, the world's been filled with chaos and trouble, hasn't it?

And as a nation, we face a time in which we are more divided than ever before. The church is caught up in all of this. And we are not sure what the future holds.

And Wilkie and I have, we've remembered our blessings, but in the last year or two, we've been talking a whole lot about the disorientation and chaos that is coming to the world and into the church.

This last week, we were talking, and listening to Wilkie, it's the first time I've ever heard him really laughing with me. We've gone through all kinds of times. Last year, I lost my wife, and it's been months of grief, and a process of healing, and prayer for new beginnings.

And I was sharing with him how at the beginning of January, life took on a whole new feeling of laughter, and Wilkie and I, I heard him laughing with me, psalms of new orientation, of new beginnings, and I was so grateful to God. For the presence of Christ in my life. And for the lifting of the cloud of grief, I saw you were having grief recovery workshops.

And that can be one of the most important things you can do.

So Jesus had a lot to pray about on that night. It took him all night to pray about the things that were of concern for him. And if you look at the crowd of people who surrounded him and who sought him out, trying to touch him, to experience his authority and power and healing, you can see that there was much to pray about.

There were the blind and the deaf. There were the rich. There were the poor.

There were the sinners, those who needed forgiveness, those who were lame. Those filled with all kinds of troubles and felt the oppressive heel of Rome and the legions and the insensitivity of the religious community in Jerusalem. There was much to dare to pray about.

But I think that night that Jesus remembered Israel's story of God's salvation and that great Exodus event in which he delivered his people from slavery in Egypt and led them into the promised land that he celebrated that night. And he longed once again to hear the Father's voice, You are my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. And same words on the Mount of Transfiguration.

You're my beloved Son.

Listen to him, the Father's voice said, to Peter, James, and John.

The Disciples presented Jesus with an amazing challenge. You might say they are typical members of a congregation. You know, ambitious, upwardly mobile, thinking that they had backed the right horse.

And as soon as they arrived in Jerusalem, they would rule with him and exercise the authority and power of the Kingdom of God. Share in his power. These, you know, like the 12 tribes of Israel, Jesus was going to appoint 12 disciples who would be named apostles, those being sent on a mission, a mission that would take them from Jerusalem throughout Judea and Samaria to Ephesus, to Athens, and finally to Rome and to the uttermost parts of the earth.

And they would face persecution and hardships as they went along, and Jesus prayed for them. He knew they were not up to it, any more than we are often up to it. Discover ourselves totally dependent upon the presence and the power of Christ in our lives.

Luke does a very interesting thing with the Sermon on the Mount. It says, Blessed are those who are poor, for they will be completed.

Yell, Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. They'll be satisfied. Blessed are the weak and the poor and the sick, and those who do not have access to power in the way the world understands power.

But woe to those who in this life seem to have it all, and are totally insensitive to the things that break, that have broken the heart of God, and which God intends to break our hearts as well with human suffering.

At the end, nearly the end of the Gospel of Luke, Jesus told a parable about two men. One a very wealthy man who lived in a mansion. Every day he'd go in and out his mansion to do his business, and he never once saw the poor man, the suffering man, the powerless man on his doorstep.

The rich man died and went to hell because he had not heard the message of the whole Bible. Love God with the totality of your being and your neighbor as yourself.

What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? See the need of the world, and know that your response to the need of the world, to the lack of justice and the powerlessness and the sickness and death. And understand that your response to those needs will determine your eternal destiny.

That's why Luke is so difficult to listen to.

How hard is it to show mercy?

As a pastor preaching systematically through the scriptures, there are times when I would just as soon dodge a passage like this. Because what Luke is talking about is a reversal of fortune. If you've got it all now, you're likely not going to have it in the kingdom of God because you've neglected that which was central.

And I don't know about you, but I find that really convicting. And yet I need to hear the message. And I need to hear the call for mercy.

Be merciful even as your heavenly father is merciful. Your eternal destiny depends upon it.

I was touched by the bishop's sermon at the National Prayer Breakfast, in which he called the president to show mercy to the immigrants and the others' marginalized people. And he heard that. And I was watching the faces of everyone who were there listening to that message, a simple, compassionate call for mercy.

And I've never seen a more troubled crowd.

And perhaps one of the reasons is that we in the church have neglected the message of the coming of the kingdom of God in Jesus and exactly what Jesus has in mind. He did not come to wield power as the world yields power and authority. He came as a suffering servant to lay down his life for the sins, the brokenness of our world.

And if I'm going to live in this life in the present and in the age to come, I need to let that message claim my life. And not think of the gospel as just purchasing a cheap ticket to heaven in the sweet buy-and-buy, but a gospel that has power in the present for the church and which calls the church to suffering love, to compassion and mercy for the people that God loves. God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that whoever believes in him will not perish, but have eternal life.

So the rich man died and he went to hell, and he looked up into heaven and saw Abraham, Abraham's bosom. And who was there in Abraham's bosom? It was the poor man Lazarus, comforted by Father Abraham.

His fortunes reversed.

And he cried out, Father Abraham, send Lazarus down here, with just a drip of water to place on my tongue that I might be comforted. And Father Abraham says, no, there's a chasm between us. Then Father Abraham sent Lazarus to warn my brothers about their eternal destiny if they do not respond to the claims of the kingdom.

No, if they will not listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not listen to anyone. Listen. The most important thing the church can do in our time, I believe, is to listen to the Word of God and to allow the presence and power of the Holy Spirit of God to build within us, to form within us the mind of Christ so that we can go forth free from all the things that hold us in bondage, to walk in newness of life, new beginnings, new orientations in which we have been and are being healed and made new by the touch of Christ.

Pray with me. Oh, Lord God, we lift our hearts up to you. You have been so gracious to us.

You've met us in our hours of need, in our joys and our sorrows. And your spirit has been at work in bringing healing and new beginnings to us. So we would ask that that work will continue in each one of us.

That you'll open our eyes, that you'll open our ears, you'll open our minds and our hearts to receive all that you want to give to us. And send us forth, then, as those who are called to represent the apostolic faith, to reach out well beyond ourselves and beyond the safety of our church, to touch hurting lives, to be the agents of reconciliation and healing love. This we ask in His name. Amen.