January 1, 2023: 7 people dead and 25 injured in seven mass shootings, in Mifflin Township, Ohio; Oklahoma City; Ocala, Florida; Clinton, Maryland; Durham, North Carolina; Chicago; and Allentown, Pennsylvania. It was an ominously bloody beginning to what has been a bloody year so far. Though there is no universally-accepted definition for a mass shooting, by one count there had been 223 this year as of last Sunday, including eight in Philadelphia, six in Chicago, six in New Orleans, and (oddly enough) five in Shreveport. Perhaps the worst day so far this year was April 15, which saw four shootings and fifty casualties, including four killed and 32 injured at a 16th-birthday party in Dadeville, Alabama. And the response of our body politic? Cue up the fiddle tunes while Rome is burning down around our ears. Everyone agrees these are bad things, but other than that, the only thing on which everyone is agreed is on approaching them primarily as opportunities for partisan attacks and political advantage. Brothers and sisters, this is our nation; we are in trouble.
I don’t just say that because of mass shootings, either. Thing is, of the various trends in our culture which disturb me deeply, that might be the only one where calling it bad is uncontroversial—and that points to the biggest problem of all. Those of y’all who’ve been around here long enough may remember I taught a few sessions in the Opening on family-systems theory, drawing primarily on the work of Rabbi Dr. Edwin Friedman. In his last book, published posthumously in 1996, Dr. Friedman judged the US to be in a state of emotional regression, rising anxiety in the culture producing hyperseriousness and driving the herding instinct. That process has only accelerated, tribalizing our politics to the point that even when everyone agrees something is bad, that just means the tribal warfare shifts to fighting over what to do about it.
To put it bluntly, we’re hosed. Our nation isn’t just coming apart at the seams, it’s busily inventing new seams to come apart at. That’s the bad news. As the people of God, however, there’s good news: we’ve been here before. For instance, the years after the American Revolution saw the church collapse. The Episcopal Bishop of New York, Samuel Provost, declared himself out of work and quit to find other employment. Chief Justice John Marshall wrote to James Madison that the church was “too far gone ever to be redeemed.” Crime skyrocketed; bank robberies became a daily occurrence; in a nation of five million people, 300,000 were confirmed alcoholics. In 1798, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church declared,
We perceive, with pain and fearful apprehension, a general dereliction of religious principle and practice among our fellow citizens, a visible and prevailing impiety and contempt for the laws and institutions of religion, and an abounding infidelity which in many instances tends to Atheism itself. . . .
The profligacy and corruption of the public morals have advanced with a progress proportionate to our declension in religion. Profaneness, pride, luxury, injustice, intemperance, lewdness, and every species of debauchery and loose indulgence greatly abound. . . .
The eternal God has a controversy with this nation.
This language was echoed in 1949 on the island of Lewis and Harris by the local presbytery of the Free Kirk of Scotland, which issued a statement lamenting “the low state of vital religion within their own bounds, and throughout the land generally.” The presbytery saw signs of God’s displeasure “not only in the chaotic conditions of international politics and domestic economics and morality, but also, and especially, in the lack of spiritual power,” and concluded, “the Most High has a controversy with the nation.”
Two sisters in their 80s, Peggy and Christine Smith, responded to the presbytery’s statement by spending hours on their knees in prayer. When Peggy was given a vision of revival, she sent for the parish minister and said to him, “I’m sure, Mr. McCie, that you’re longing to see God working. What about calling your office bearers together, and suggest to them that you spend two nights a week waiting upon God in prayer. You’ve tried mission, you’ve tried special evangelists. Mr. McCie, have you tried God?”
It was a stiff rebuke, but to his credit, McCie took it without demur. He began gathering with elders and others in his parish twice a week in a barn to pray from 10 pm to 4 am. The sisters, of course, continued praying as well. Things continued like this for several months with no visible result, until a young man rose in the barn one night and began reading from Psalm 24: “Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? Who shall stand in his holy place? Only the one with clean hands and a pure heart, who does not make false promises or swear dishonest oaths—only that one will receive blessing from the Lord and vindication from the God who saves.”
When he finished reading, the young man looked around and said, “It seems to me just so much humbug to be praying as we are praying, to be waiting as we are waiting, if we ourselves are not rightly related to God. Oh, my dear brethren, let’s take that to heart.” He looked up and asked, “God, are my hands clean? Is my heart pure?” and then dropped face down on the straw. His spirit of confession ignited a spiritual explosion in the Hebrides. Where the jails had been full and the churches nearly empty, the situation reversed itself—the churches were full to overflowing, while jails were shut up for lack of use.
The story was similar in the United States in the 1790s. In 1747, during the First Great Awakening, the great preacher and theologian Jonathan Edwards had published a short book urging the church to concerted prayer for continued spiritual revival. In 1794 a group of New England pastors republished it, starting a movement of consistent prayer for revival by the church throughout the region. Some churches met quarterly to pray for revival; some met monthly; some felt such urgency, they met weekly. Whatever the frequency, they kept praying until their prayers bore fruit. It took a while, but the years 1798-1800 saw the beginning of a powerful movement of the Holy Spirit in the US and Canada. Thousands upon thousands of people came to faith in Christ, planting churches, founding denominations—including, among others, the African Methodist Episcopal Church—and creating both the American movement for world missions and the abolitionist movement.
I could go on and on, but I’ll just briefly mention one more. In September 1857 a New York City man, Jeremiah Lanphier, distributed fliers and set up a signboard advertising a prayer meeting for businessmen in an attic room of the North Dutch Reformed Church in Manhattan on Wednesdays at noon. That first Wednesday he spent half an hour praying alone. By the end of the hour, there were six men in the room. The next week there were twenty; the week after that, forty, and by March of 1858 New York City had over 10,000 men gathering daily, and a revival had begun which would bring a million people to faith in Christ by the end of 1859—this when the national population was less than 30 million.
All these revivals were echoes of Pentecost, because the story of Pentecost doesn’t begin with our passage this morning—it begins where Emily ended last week: “All these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer.” And bear in mind, while we know the story, they didn’t. They knew Jesus had told them the Holy Spirit would fill them with the power of God, but they didn’t know exactly what that would look like, and they didn’t know it would only be ten days later. They only knew Jesus had told them to stay in Jerusalem until his promise was fulfilled, whatever that meant and however long it took, and so they went back to Jerusalem and settled themselves to pray until it happened.
Now, how we understand that matters a great deal. There are those who would say the Holy Spirit only came at Pentecost because they prayed—that their prayer compelled God to act. Whatever Christian language you dress it up with, though, that’s vending-machine religion: insert prayer in God, push button, get desired thing. Vending-machine religion isn’t Christianity, it’s paganism. On the other hand, there are also those who would say that God would have done what God was going to do whether the disciples prayed or not; this is where the “prayer isn’t about changing what God does, it’s about changing you” idea comes from. It’s the view of God William Carey met in 1786 when he dared argue for world missions to a senior minister in his Baptist denomination, one Dr. Ryland. He received the vehement response, “Young man, sit down; when God is pleased to convert the heathen world, He will do it without your help or mine.” God certainly could, but that is not how he chooses to work. I cannot think of a single great movement of the Holy Spirit that has happened when his people have not been praying for it with whole-hearted determination and—yes—power.
How we understand prayer is part of how we understand the whole question of our will and God’s will and how they fit together. Biblically, it’s bigger than we can tie off with a neat bow, but I think we can sketch out something of a picture. Yes, God is in the heavens and he does whatever he pleases, as Psalm 115 says, but he is not capricious—whatever he does is not for no reason. However that works, when we pray, that’s part of God’s reason for doing whatever he does. What he pleases to do is in part about what we ask him to do, even when the connection between the two is less than obvious to us. What he pleases is in part, as Pascal said of prayer, to lend us “the dignity of causality,” of being not merely the passive objects of God’s actions—nor merely the possessive hoarders of his gifts—but proactive participants in his work.
I’ve spent the last eight years—longer than that, really, reaching back to my time in the pulpit in Winona—asking God to do a great many things and having him say “no” to almost all of them. At my bleakest, I have been known to borrow a line from one of my favorite novels, The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold, and say I don’t hate anyone enough to inflict the results of my prayers on them. Yet for all that, the one thing I prayed for hardest and most desperately, something which was very personal to me, he granted; I told him if I only got one request, that was it, and he took me up on both halves of that statement. And for all the “no” answers I’ve been given, I’ve also been given the sense that they are necessary—that this whole season has been necessary to prepare me for when he finally says “yes.” And so, in hope which is half self-mocking and half because I simply can’t do otherwise, I keep praying, and I keep feeling that every “no” is part of a larger “yes,” even though I have yet to see it.
I say this not because any of it is really about me—there’s not much in life that is, to be sure, and I’m good with that—but because I think it highlights something critically important about the disciples’ season of prayer between 1:14 and 2:1: they were praying faithfully and fervently in between. In the most obvious sense, they stood in between Jesus’ departure at the Ascension and the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost. We don’t stand there, obviously, but there’s another way in which we all, from those first disciples to our own day, stand in between: to use the metaphor of French theologian Oscar Cullmann, we are in between D-Day and V-E Day. The kingdom of God has decisively invaded the kingdom of this world, and the outcome of the conflict is already determined, but that outcome is not yet here and the battle rages with terrible ferocity. The disciples only had to keep faith through ten days before they saw the Spirit come in power, but they prayed the rest of their lives without seeing Jesus return, and we’re still keeping that vigil. We’re in between the already and the not yet, what we’re living now and what it’s all for, and that between we know just as well as Peter and Mary did.
Our call, then, I think, is to pray intentionally out of that in-betweenness. We need to keep looking back to re-member—to make again a present reality in our minds and hearts—what God has done. There is a resurrection! We need to keep looking ahead to re-mind ourselves—to re-form our minds again around the promise—that God is still doing. We will see all things made new, as they most truly were. And we need to keep ourselves present to ourselves and our present moment, asking the God of sight and blindness to give us eyes to see. Open our eyes, Lord, to see our sin truly before you; and open our eyes even wider to see truly what you are doing in us; and open our hearts and our mouths to confess both to one another, that we may be dispensers of grace and voices of truth in each other’s lives.
Now, this is not just hard to do, it’s hard even to ask for. It’s hard because it means laying down our defenses against one another, leaving ourselves open to be wounded by the worse angels of our nature. It’s harder because it means letting others stand defenseless before us. What Emily said last week about the power of preaching is absolutely true—it’s why James says, “Let not many of you seek to become teachers, knowing that we who teach will face a stricter judgment”—but that’s only a power concentrated in preaching, not one unique to it. When your defenses are up, I can just be passive toward you, we can have whatever interactions we may have, and I don’t need to take up the terrible weight of being consequential in your life—of my actions having consequences in your life which I would have to own. Honestly, it’s terrifying enough to think how badly you could hurt me if I let you, but far worse to think how badly I could hurt you—and that without even trying, just by being the clumsy, bumbling, oblivious fool I all too often see in the mirror. Better anything than that.
Or . . . almost anything. Because truth is, the hardest thing of all is laying down our defenses against miracle and leaving ourselves wide open to a perilous and untameable God. This is the hazard Annie Dillard laid out memorably in what might be my favorite paragraph ever written by anybody anywhere, at least outside of Scripture:
On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return.
I’ve said it before: if the God of the universe would go willingly to the cross, there is nothing we can say he won’t do, and nothing we can say he won’t ask us to do. And if that’s the case (and it is), and if Dillard is right (and she is), then fervent, urgent, wholehearted prayer is a tremendously risky thing. Why would anyone want to run that risk?
I don’t have any of the obvious answers for you. Tell truth, I don’t believe in them. I just have what I think is the true answer. One of our elders in Winona liked to say, “If you keep doin’ what you’ve been doin’, you’re gonna keep gettin’ what you’ve been gettin’.” He was right, and avoiding that risk is what the human race as a whole has been doing since Adam and Eve walked out of Eden. It’s also what the church tends to do when it feels it has anything much to lose. And what we’ve been getting . . . well, remember where I started this message. There is no hope in safety. There never is, really, but when there’s nothing to shake our complacency, we can forget. We can forget that what the world offers as life leads only to death, sooner or later.
In our own strength, the best we can manage is a series of buggy upgrades of the world as we know it—not even version 2.0, just version 1.3.9.2. We need more than that. I used to say we need the world turned upside-down, riffing off the British band at the surrender of Yorktown, but that’s not quite right. Our world is upside-down; we need it right-side-up. Our world pursues death and calls it life, diving into darkness and naming it light; we need true life and true light from the one who created both. What we need, we will only have in full when Jesus comes again, but there are foretastes and portents in this life; though only imperfectly, we can live in the life of the world to come even in the midst of this world, and we can share that life with others.
Like those disciples praying fervently in that upper room, I don’t know what God will do or when he might do it; those who come later will know how the story ends, but we’re still in the middle of the chapter, and we have no idea how many chapters there are, or how many pages in the book. I can tell you this much, though: the God of that Pentecost is the God of this Pentecost, and all those in between, and all those yet to come. He’s the God who called light to shine in the primordial darkness, and he’s the God who is preparing the holy city to come down out of heaven when he at last makes all things new. He’s the same God who called Abraham into the desert, called a shepherd boy to be a giant-killer and a king, and called fishermen to follow him as he took away the sin of the world; he’s the same God who heard the prayers of his children and filled them with his Spirit, giving them the power to heal the sick, raise the dead, and set the prisoners free, and he’s done it again and again and again. He’s the same God, and just as he called Abraham and David, Peter and John, he’s calling us. Will we answer?
Pentecost mosaic. Artist unknown. Public domain.