Do
you know that feeling when you’ve had something absolutely amazing happen—when
your whole world has been rocked and nothing will ever again be the same? Have
you ever had an experience so incredible and otherworldly that you have to
share it? I hope you have. And I bet most of us at least have some idea what that
is like. Every once in awhile the stars align and we have that perfect, often
unexpected, moment. But if you have had such a moment you probably also know
the feeling of trying to share it with somebody else.
It’s
hard for us to relate to subjective experiences. After our youth’s mission trip
to Colorado last
year we tried to share with you what it was like to experience some of the
relationships we built and the emotions that we felt. Again this year when we
return from our mission trip to Idaho
we are planning to take a Sunday to share the same things. Of course, mission trips are far from the only time we experience these
seminal moments in our lives. It happens when babies are born; it happens in
moments of intense spirituality or the euphoria of your sports team winning a
championship. Each of those moments is beautiful and equally challenging to
share with others who are not a part of them from the beginning.
You’ve
probably been on both sides of this. You’ve not only tried to share an
otherworldly, awesome experience with others; you’ve also been the one
listening to others explain their otherworldly experience to you. So you know
that it’s sometimes vaguely annoying to hear about this awesome experience that
someone else had. Babies and mission trips are one thing, but other experiences
further outside our realm of what is normal can be weird and, frankly, awkward
for us to enter into.
I
think part of our problem with the book of Revelation is that we feel like that
person listening in on somebody else’s incredibly spiritual experience.
So, there were these four creatures with the
head of a lion and an ox and an eagle and a man, and they were worshiping this
lamb on the throne. And there were angels and these twenty-four elders and
golden bowls of incense, which were the prayers of the saints, of course. And
they were singing all together with so many others you can’t even begin to
count, “Worthy is the Lamb.” You should have been there!
You
should have been there…
Nothing
can substitute for being there.
Last
weekend I had the pleasure of attending the NW Minnesota Synod Assembly and
listening to the keynote presentations from Dan Wolpert, who spoke on contemplative prayer. We began each presentation with
a couple minutes of silence and ended most presentations the same way. Now, I
can always sense uneasiness whenever we pray in complete silence. You know what
this is like when it happens in church. Even if the leaders are completely
clear about it, there is something deeply unnerving about over a hundred people
sitting in complete silence. Pretty soon you start looking at the organist or
the other people in the pews, wondering if perhaps somebody forgot their next
part. A minute feels like twenty. We’re startlingly afraid of what the silence
will do.
In part I think
our problem is that we also have this illusion that everybody who is practicing
meditation has spectacular experiences like what we read today in Revelation. It’s
simply not true. In his question and answer during the breakout sessions, Dan surprised
some people by saying he finds contemplative prayer boring. He admitted he
thinks the same, stupid thoughts he did when he was a teenager, which—if you’re
like me—would be awfully boring. This is not the way to sell your spiritual
practice. I think people had the impression that he would be selling us on visions
and experiences like we see in Revelation. It’s just so un-American to be honest about the
things that matter to us. This is not infomercial Christianity, but it’s true:
sometimes the spiritual life is boring because God has to bulldoze through our egos before we even realize he is there.
Our
problem is that we-Christians want to consume other peoples’ experiences and
live vicariously through them rather than opening ourselves up to what God may
speak to us as individuals. Opening ourselves up to God’s presence requires
vulnerability and patience—things we are afraid of. We prefer the stories of
others, and we hold on to them as articles of faith. Do you know how many books
have been published in the last few years about intense spiritual experiences?
Hundreds, thousands. Probably many of you are familiar with books that talk
about life-after-death experiences. These things sell because have an
unquenchable urge to consume spiritual experiences. We think that hearing about
it and reading about it will assure us of the reality we want to believe. But
even if we resonate with the story, even if it feeds us on some deep emotional
level, we will nevertheless be left with a kind of coldness when we are done
reading, because these were not our experiences, and they might assure us but
only long enough for the next best seller to come around.
So,
let me return to the “boring” practice of contemplative prayer. When Dan said
that contemplative prayer is “boring” he was being honest about the way that we
most often experience the Holy Spirit. It happens so often not in a flash of
light or a vision like John gives us in Revelation. Our experience of the Holy
Spirit so often happens in the complete boringness of silence. Unfortunately,
most of us spend our entire lives combating boredom so that when the Holy
Spirit lands upon us we are so busy with our iPods, automobiles, radios, TVs
and other toys that we don’t have even the slightest chance of noticing God’s
presence.
I’m not saying we all need to become hermits
and go off and live in the wilderness, but we have certainly swung far too
drastically in the opposite direction. If you want to know why Revelation
stresses us out it is not primarily because we find the images too frightening;
it is primarily because the images have become too normal. Dragons, right.
There are about a million movies about dragons. Thrones, yep, we got
everybody’s favorite HBO series all about that. We could go on and on—every
image in Revelation has been re-made into pop culture icons that we now find,
frankly, boring. Under the guise of feeding our imagination with fantastic
images we have completely dulled our imaginations by removing boredom from the
equation. And the worst side effect of removing boredom is that we’re more bored
than before!
This
has to stop. Martin Luther had this great quote that I think rings true still today.
He said, “I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours in
prayer.” That’s the kind of mentality our world needs to hear more; not “I have
so much to do so I can’t spare a moment for you” and not “I have so much to do
that I can’t add another thing.” No, instead, we need to say, “I have so much
to do that I must first spend some time to stop.” First we can work on the
stopping, and then we can work on the praying. Only when we stop and clear our minds of our boring little thoughts
will we be able to experience the God who has been there all along. God is
always in the present with us; the problem is that our minds often are not. Our
minds spend something like 99% of their time in the past or the future. The present remains elusive.
So,
today, my hope for you is that you can take a moment to just stop. Do it at your own time and your own
pace. It’s not easy. I bet you have a ton of really boring thoughts in your
heads. But allowing yourself to sift through that mess and re-create the
imagination you were born with is the surest way to understand where Revelation
is coming from, and it’s also the surest way to experience God. I think that matters enough to give it a try.
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