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Rooted to the Earth
By Administrator | October 29, 2007
Rooted to the Earth
By the Reverend Alicia S. Rapp
Luke 18:9-14
October 28, 2007
I heard this old joke again last week: a group of scientists became convinced they could create a more perfect human being than could God. What’s more, they were sure they could do it in less time, using their own secret formulas and chemicals, resources and technologies. They challenged the Holy One to a match. God accepted. So, on the prescribed day and at the assigned location, the scientists and God met. Lines were drawn, the timer was started, and the teams started to work. Then God looked over to see the scientists scooping up a mound of earth. “Whoa! Wait right there,” said God. “Go get your own dirt.”
The word for the day is humility. On Wednesday in Bible study we learned that the Latin root word for humility is “humus,” which means “earth.” Humility then is to understand oneself as being “of the earth.”
Children, when they cross the boundaries of acceptable behavior, when they begin to exceed limits, are often grounded by their elders. What marvelous language! What excellent correction, to be reigned back in to where one belongs, where one lives. To be grounded is to spend some time at home until one again appreciates what home is all about, where one is, under the best circumstances, taught love and respect for others. Then, when wandering around out in the world, one can draw on this depth of knowledge. One can know when it is time to come home. That’s humility.
Every year, there is a special service of worship we hold in the Christian church on the fortieth day before Easter. On Ash Wednesday, we are invited to come forward and have ashes marked on our foreheads as the pastors say these words: “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.” If, in those previous 364 days we have become ungrounded, if we come to think of ourselves as being put together more perfectly or more preciously than others, if we have been distracted by diamonds and gold, or even more sadly by plastic and fiberglass, then on this day we become grounded. We return home to be reminded that we are of the earth. We find our humility, and in it our equity with all of God’s creation.
This, of course, was the sin of the Pharisee—not that he was overly-righteous with all his prayers and his tithing and his fasting, but that he was not equitable. When he failed to love his brother, the tax collector, he failed God. When he forgot that he was at home on this earth with everyone else, he forgot the One who created him from the earth. He lost the very ground beneath him. The failure of the Pharisee was that he thought himself as one with God, but not as one with the tax collector.
The story tells us that one of the men went home from the temple justified and the other did not. To be justified was both a legal and religious term. It meant to have cleared the slates with God—usually by ritual prayer and sacrifice—so as to be pronounced good, innocent of all charges. The Pharisee, who lived his life according to the law, had it made. His appearance in the temple was a formality. The tax collector should have the book thrown at him, would be lucky to get out with his life. Then they prayed, and everything was turned upside down.
We’ve had a vigorous discussion over the past two weeks about prayer. Is God listening? Does God listen to some people more than others? Why doesn’t God answer our prayers? As during every time of disaster or tragedy, the newspapers have been reporting these questions in terms of the California wildfires. “Victims in Wildfire’s Fickle Path Say ‘Why Me?’”, with the story reading that one house would burn to the ground while the one next door would escape. Who is justified? How does God decide who to save?
These are the kinds of questions that have been shaped out of a basically good and powerful prayer life—being in relationship with God means saying anything you want, any way you want to say it—but our theology of prayer is sometimes rotten.
The two blows against modern ideas of prayer are these: that it is a private and personal concern and that God is up in heaven on a throne and we’re “phoning it in.”
How many times have you been asked if you are saved, if you were to die tomorrow, could you be sure you are going to heaven? All you have to do is pray this little prayer. Prayer becomes all about you and your righteousness, just like that Pharisee. But historically, biblically, though the prayer lives of God’s people seem to be highly individualized, they are always in service to the community. It wasn’t all about Moses, but about how he would lead a people out of slavery. It wasn’t all about Esther, but how she would rescue a people from certain genocide. It wasn’t about Paul, but rather about a new community of love established in every city he visited, even at the cost of imprisonment. And if Jesus is our guiding model, the intimacy of a good prayer life can lead to arrest, torture, humiliation, and death, for the sake of the world.
Nelson Mandela, I’m told, did not pray and work only for himself while he was in prison for those 26 years. He molded and modeled for others what a new South Africa might look like, based in reconciliation and non-violence—in a prison no less. They began there the school of democracy, training prisoners for what they could not see but for which they could only hope. When apartheid came crashing down, Nelson Mandela was ready, not to justify himself, but to usher in God’s justice for the community of South Africa. That is the miracle of prayer.
The other piece of prayer which we seem to have askew is perspective. A couple of weeks ago, the children reminded me of a great modern parable on prayer, the 2003 movie “Bruce Almighty.” I rented it this week to watch it again. It is both funny and on target. Bruce, a man who is almost 40, in a dead-end job, with everything going against him, begins to blame and blaspheme God. In response, God gives him the job of being the Almighty for a week. Bruce, quite expectedly, gives himself everything he wants. But since he can’t change free will, he loses the love of the person most important to him, a woman named Grace. For how can a Pharisee who only cares for himself, have grace in his life?
Then Bruce, plagued by the prayers of all of Buffalo, New York, just answers “yes” to everyone. He causes a tsunami in Japan, massive power outages throughout the state, and finally, a city-wide riot when everyone wins the big lottery and only takes home $17. Apparently, it’s not easy being God.
At the end of the movie, when Bruce has surrendered, given up not only his divine powers but also surrendered himself to God and to the earth, become grounded again, he asks where God will be, if God will be listening to him, how he can find God when he needs to. “That’s the problem,” God replies, “everyone’s always looking up.” Bruce, though, has a divine spark within him, God says. And a homeless man who appears all through the movie, mostly to be chastised by Bruce, turns out to be a God-figure.
Where is God in our lives? Is God one of the ancients, as in Rome or Greece, sitting high above us to perform magic at his whim? Let this house burn. Save the next. Or is God more than that, Spirit without and within? What then is prayer?
A Pharisee and a tax collector went up to the temple to pray. One was not grounded, was not of this earth. The shell of his heart was so hard against his neighbor that he could not know grace in his life. He could only think of himself. What prayer was this? The other man, most truly a sinner, face to the ground, allowed his prayers to begin to change him, for his sake and for his community. And grace stepped right on in.
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