Piety
“Remember, merciful Jesus, That I am the cause of your journey.” ……………………………………………..(from Mozart’s “Requiem”)
Some prayers are harder to pray than others. Thanking God for his blessings, his gifts, and his presence is a whole lot easier than praying about our own inadequacies, selfishness, and spiritual timidity. Asking God for his assistance on behalf of others, is much less difficult than having to admit to God our own desperate needs.
Part of the traditional observation of the season of Lent has been the practice of denial, or sacrifice. The discipline of fasting is one such practice. By voluntarily putting aside some one thing during the forty days of Lent, those who were fasting were giving themselves a physical reminder to pray and be conscious of Christ’s sacrifice for them. Some people give up sweets, or meat, or fried foods. In some countries, even today, the acts of sacrifice done by individuals are attempts to take on some of the actual pain of Christ. Pebbles in shoes, horsehair shirts, and self-flagellation are such practices that the producers of “Real Videos” and “Ripley’s Believe it or Not” seem to find many practitioners of.
Such spiritual disciplines that involve physical pain are based on a faulty assumption of what it means to suffer with Christ. There is nothing- NO THING- we can do to earn our approval by Christ. We can, like some of the disciples did at the Last Supper, jostle for position in the misbegotten idea that there is a hierarchy among disciples, that some are more important in the Kingdom of God than others. In doing so, we will be acting as foolish as they did.
Public piety is an ugly thing. Jesus said so himself, just before he taught his disciples how to pray, in private, with humility. He said that those who posed on street corners had already received the answer to prayer they sought- public applause. But that’s all they were going to get!
John Wesley saw true piety in action in a way that caused those of us who are United Methodists to be United Methodists! While on the ship he was aboard on his way to Georgia to be a missionary in the 1730s, a terrible storm blew up on the Atlantic. Wesley and many other passengers spent their time panicking and hanging over the sides of the ship, seasick. Wesley also noticed, however, that there was a group from Germany- the Moravians- who sat on the deck of the deck calmly singing and praying during the storm. Even their children were well behaved. This aroused Wesley’s curiosity and admiration so that he later traveled to Germany to meet the Moravian Christian Community there and studied with some of their leaders. He observed their methods of aligning themselves with God’s grace, and he made those means of grace part of his own spiritual disciplines. The quiet praying, singing, and community of the Moravians were incorporated into the personal worship of the young Wesley and the other Methodists.
Mozart’s prayer brings us back, when we need to be brought back, to a real understanding of our relationship with Christ. We are the reason for his having to come among us in the first place! That’s not something to stand on street corners showing off about! That is something to respond to with quiet and grateful acceptance. It doesn’t matter where we are sitting at the table in relation to him. It doesn’t matter what we have in our shoes or on our backs, or what we are denying ourselves or not.
It only matters that God’s grace has blown over us and brought us to the place, wherever it is, that we can pray such a prayer.
Some prayers are harder to pray than others. Thanking God for his blessings, his gifts, and his presence is a whole lot easier than praying about our own inadequacies, selfishness, and spiritual timidity. Asking God for his assistance on behalf of others, is much less difficult than having to admit to God our own desperate needs.
Part of the traditional observation of the season of Lent has been the practice of denial, or sacrifice. The discipline of fasting is one such practice. By voluntarily putting aside some one thing during the forty days of Lent, those who were fasting were giving themselves a physical reminder to pray and be conscious of Christ’s sacrifice for them. Some people give up sweets, or meat, or fried foods. In some countries, even today, the acts of sacrifice done by individuals are attempts to take on some of the actual pain of Christ. Pebbles in shoes, horsehair shirts, and self-flagellation are such practices that the producers of “Real Videos” and “Ripley’s Believe it or Not” seem to find many practitioners of.
Such spiritual disciplines that involve physical pain are based on a faulty assumption of what it means to suffer with Christ. There is nothing- NO THING- we can do to earn our approval by Christ. We can, like some of the disciples did at the Last Supper, jostle for position in the misbegotten idea that there is a hierarchy among disciples, that some are more important in the Kingdom of God than others. In doing so, we will be acting as foolish as they did.
Public piety is an ugly thing. Jesus said so himself, just before he taught his disciples how to pray, in private, with humility. He said that those who posed on street corners had already received the answer to prayer they sought- public applause. But that’s all they were going to get!
John Wesley saw true piety in action in a way that caused those of us who are United Methodists to be United Methodists! While on the ship he was aboard on his way to Georgia to be a missionary in the 1730s, a terrible storm blew up on the Atlantic. Wesley and many other passengers spent their time panicking and hanging over the sides of the ship, seasick. Wesley also noticed, however, that there was a group from Germany- the Moravians- who sat on the deck of the deck calmly singing and praying during the storm. Even their children were well behaved. This aroused Wesley’s curiosity and admiration so that he later traveled to Germany to meet the Moravian Christian Community there and studied with some of their leaders. He observed their methods of aligning themselves with God’s grace, and he made those means of grace part of his own spiritual disciplines. The quiet praying, singing, and community of the Moravians were incorporated into the personal worship of the young Wesley and the other Methodists.
Mozart’s prayer brings us back, when we need to be brought back, to a real understanding of our relationship with Christ. We are the reason for his having to come among us in the first place! That’s not something to stand on street corners showing off about! That is something to respond to with quiet and grateful acceptance. It doesn’t matter where we are sitting at the table in relation to him. It doesn’t matter what we have in our shoes or on our backs, or what we are denying ourselves or not.
It only matters that God’s grace has blown over us and brought us to the place, wherever it is, that we can pray such a prayer.
posted by D.Barry Weber at 7:52 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home