Help!

Proper 23 A, October 12, 2014
http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearA_RCL/Pentecost/AProp23_RCL.html

Lord, we pray that your grace may always precede and follow us, that we may continually be given to good works…


Today’s brief Collect, composed for the first Prayer Book, tells us something vital about our relationship with God.

Annie Lamott would agree. She is a good writer who manages to put God on the best-seller list, not an easy thing to do these days. People love Annie’s style because it is at one and the same time wise and yet simple and accessible, speaking of ordinary life.

Annie is a recovering alcoholic and has experienced a great deal of pain and brokenness. She is very candid about this in an un-self pitying way. In her little book Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers, Annie places “Help!” as the first and most essential of our prayers. Says Annie: “If I were going to begin practicing the presence of God for the first time today, it would help to begin by admitting the three most terrible truths of our existence: that we are so ruined, and so loved, and in charge of so little.” Our only possible response to these deep and terrible truths is “Help!” or “Lord have mercy”, or “Kyrie Eleison” if we wish to be traditional and sound mystical.

Often here we engage people deeply immersed in the dominant culture’s message. That message goes something like this: everything is OK and life is meant to be sweet and gentle, you are completely all right and in complete charge of your life and do not let anyone or anything tell you otherwise. In the NW we tend to take life easy, and if one has some money and some good fortune life is sweet. In addition, many who come to us have experienced some version of Christian formation, or deformation, that they wish to put behind them. So messages such as Annie’s are not greeted as good or welcome news. It sounds first and foremost like “negative theology”, because people hear only the broken and the not-in-charge part, an argument for shame.

But this is the deep truth of our lives and our existence. We learn it over again when the downsizing happens, or the doctor comes in with test results and closes the door before sitting down. We learn it when the child crashes and burns, or when the spouse no longer speaks to us, or the car appears out of nowhere impossibly close, right before that horrible noise, on what had been up til then an ordinary commute.

Annie’s words struck me at the end of this week, when the demands of my multi-tasking life—rector of a congregation in a process of re-birth, clinical chaplain in a hospice organization in the midst of change and growth, occasional hospital chaplain as well—became overwhelming. I arose exhausted yesterday wondering how I could continue to make it all work. The answer came: “You can’t.” Certainly not on my own.

An essential component of any Christian life, or of any ministry, is embracing the reality that only God can make things work, that we are wholly dependent on God. Funny how the most basic lesson must be learned and re-learned, a kind of repetitive Continuing Ed class that we need to take over and over again. Perhaps we learn this truth a little more deeply each time we take the class.

The Scriptures come alive when seen through the lens of our complete dependency on God. “Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us”. “Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God”. And that strange story of the man who had no wedding garment? It is said that in those days a king would hand out wedding garments to guests. All the undressed man had to do was to ask.

Ask, ask. Many of us are ashamed to do that, reluctant to admit our dependency, perhaps afraid to become some sort of spiritual Doug or Wendy Whiner. But all we can do is ask. In our lives, in our re-birthing parish as well—do we ask? Have we listened for the answer? Do we believe God responds to those who ask? Today’s Collect asks for God’s help, at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end.