Last
Spring, I came across an article in The Presbyterian Outlook magazine,
that brought me up short! I
have thought about its message many times since
then. I would like to share it
with you.
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"My
prayer used to be for God to make me useful. Make me
useful, God! Where this plea originated during days already
overflowing with unending tasks and responsibilities, I do not know."
"Praying
at a hospital bedside or serving in a soup kitchen makes me feel needed and
useful.
I suspect
physicians suturing a wound or teachers helping children learn to read or
mechanics fixing an engine, understand the satisfaction of unequivocal
usefulness."
"But 'make
me useful' morphs quickly into 'make me valuable, admired,
affirmed.' Make me useful has 'me' at the center. My silent
prayers of confession become less an exhibition of a contrite heart and more a
display of my need for approval, both divine and human. I share this not
for self-inflicted public shaming (which is just another form of
egotism). I name it because this personal prayer has non-spiritual
implications."
"Prayers
for usefulness fit nicely in a culture that prizes individual agency and
independence. In our modern context ---- where everyone from artists to
prospective adoptive parents need platforms for self-promotion, where aging is
a moral failing and poverty is a mortal sin, where illness is attributed to a
lack of willful, positive imagination ---- usefulness smacks of the
American Gospel that ---- God helps those who help themselves. God aids
the efficient and effective. God approves of those with a can-do spirit,
the 'try-hards' as my grand kids dub their relentlessly top-grade-seeking
peers. We come to believe the 'blessed are the useful', for they shall
get a cookie and a gold star. Hence, our need for regular worship,
as an antidote."
"Worship
suspends the loop of endless, self-referential usefulness. Jesus said
blessed are the poor and the meek, the hungry and merciful. Jesus
lollygags around dinner tables and keeps company with the least useful
of society ---- children, the blind, lame and shunned. The story we
proclaim and call the Word of the Lord in worship counters the
heresy of usefulness-seeking professed on every American street corner."
"Jesus
came to save sinners, not laud winners. God's grace for us in
anticipation, reveals our worth. Our self-achieved worth does
not earn us God's favor. Neither aging nor illness, disability nor
exhaustion, failure nor ineffectiveness will separate us from the love of
Christ Jesus our Lord. God looks upon people not as we do, and works
through those we think unlikely candidates ---- murderers, adulterers,
shepherds, fishermen, Samaritans and tax collectors. In other words,
people for whom we often have no use. The reconciliation
of the world was ushered in on a cross, not an award ceremony or military
parade."
"Worship,
by definition, moves our focus away from ourselves and to God. 'Me' gets
un-centered in the hope that I might get out of my own way. Nothing we
have or possibly could do merits or moves God's loving kindness towards
us. God in no way needs us. God's plans include us but do not
depend upon us. While we were yet sinners Christ died for us. While
we yet sin, Jesus prays for us."
"Furthermore,
Jesus loves the ones I don't like, and I am called to love them, too. We
are commanded to love our enemies, rather than cozy up to the powerful no
matter the cost to others."
"Collective
personal confession, prayers of the people, the Lord's Supper, the Word read
and proclaimed week after week, and worship, will shatter the myth of my
usefulness goals and the entire American gospel built merely around pragmatic
achievement, and the supreme worth of the individual human spirit alone."
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These
thoughts are brought to you by CPC's Adult Spiritual Development Team, hoping
to encourage some spiritual growth for you this fall.
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