Do you ever wake up at 3 or 4 a.m. and wonder, “Why am I awake?!” It seems like a daily occurrence lately. This morning I wondered if it was to pray. As I couldn’t think how to pray, I decided that the Lord’s Prayer might be the best thing, asking for God’s Kingdom to come and all, instead of my usual, “God, smite the terrorists, please!” For a moment I was afraid I’d forgotten the words and that made me even more fearful. How could I forget something so important? I finally prayed it through a couple of times and ended up asleep again, as usual.
The next day I longed for church, a place I hadn’t been in months. I needed to hear something soul-stirring and inspiring. I needed to feel like part of something bigger, like maybe GOD, in fact. So off we went and the most wonderful thing happened. A woman was there in front of us, preaching on a passage from Luke, the one where the disciples ask how to pray and Jesus says, “Like this,” and proceeds to teach them the Lord’s Prayer. I could feel the tears stinging my eyes and my breathing catch for a second in my throat. There’s a reason why this lady is kind of a big deal in the preaching world. She’s really, really gifted.
She talked about God’s Kingdom coming and what it means. She talked about apocalypse (literally “revelation”) and how the times when we feel the most despair and the most fear are actually when God draws nearest to us. God in those moments is revealing God’s self to us. She spoke about times when we come to the end of ourselves and all of our big ideas about what would be best for the world, that it’s then that God comes in … when we see we need Divine intervention. In these times, God calls our souls to something bigger, something better and brighter and nobler than revenge and self-protection.
She talked about Jesus as a baby and about his next coming, and about how he’s already here and always will be. (“Emmanuel” = “God with us”, right?) The over all message was, “God will always prevail.” She talked about Jesus’ own suffering and how he must have known he would be killed; how he spent his days teaching about God’s idea of Kingdom and justice, and his nights on the Mount of Olives, praying for his life. Sitting in that church, singing familiar hymns of compassion, was a healing balm.
Then this afternoon I watched a television interview with Malala, the young Muslim woman who was shot at age 16 by the Taliban because she spoke out for the education of girls. Lo and behold, it was the same theme. (Her father, with tears in his eyes, said that he had an actual encounter with God on the day Malala was shot in the head, how in his fear and despair God found a way in to him…”revelation”, again.) Malala said she doesn’t harbor hatred toward her attackers. For her, Islam is about peace, so she knows the terrorists were not true Muslims. (Just like I know a murderous American terrorist is not behaving like a Christian.) She knows they were desperate, confused and have been misled. She said that we’re constantly faced with a choice between courage and fear, and if we choose courage it will always bring about a better result. She believes she survived to make a contribution toward love and truth in this world. Her courage was, and is, humbling. I know I’m rambling but it all seemed to fit together today in a way that was reassuring and affirming.
Things feel bad right now because they are bad. People are lost oftentimes. They get brainwashed and confused by crazy ideologies that make them do crazy things, like shoot up clinics in Colorado or cafes in Paris. Some hijack religious talk to perpetrate evil. There seems no end to it because the knee-jerk reaction to hatred is always more hatred.
Most of us want God’s kingdom to be different than it is. We want a bad-ass-powerful Savior to ride in and slay all our enemies. Or at least we want to slay them all ourselves, and then ask God to bless it. If there’s one thing Jesus taught, it’s that the reign of God is not like that. To us it looks upside down, but it isn’t–we are upside down. Jesus taught the love of enemies. Why? Because he knew that hatred is contagious shite, and that only Love is stronger. We want to save our bodies, our property, our belief systems; Jesus wants to save our souls. We see with temporal vision through a glass darkly. The Christ sees that the choices we make have eternal consequences. What good is a body that that has emptied out its own soul? All things will pass away … with one exception: Love. Love is the stuff of which forever is made.
Might we instead wish for all, even those who do terrible things, to find peace and truth and hope and healing? Whatever our exterior common sense practices are for survival (and we need these, too), our inner work is to keep our souls free of hatred. Otherwise, the “bad guys” win because we become “bad guys” ourselves. We have to find the courage to love; God is love; God is our work. This is no small task for the weak of heart. Compassion takes much more courage than revenge. It’s probably why Jesus said, “Fear not,” so very many times, and “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.”
So for those times when we wake up at 3 a.m., maybe we could pray for God to give us a supernatural dollop of courage, enough to love the whole butt-ugly gorgeous world, and for the kingdom, God’s Kingdom, to really come.
Candles near Tomb of Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem
Thanks for reading.
