Sunday, February 26, 2006

Getting Over Grief (February 26, 2006)

"How long will you mourn for Saul?" (1 Samuel 16:1)

I was surprised how much those words took me aback when I read them in preparation for a Sunday School lesson on David. Before David's story begins, God has to tell a very depressed Samuel to "get over it." The first king that he had anointed, Saul, proved unworthy. Saul's line was supposed to continue forever, but now his kingship would not even make it to the second generation. What a blow! Samuel had selected, supported and pinned his hopes on Saul. When Saul turned away from the Lord, Samuel grieved. It would have been wrong not to.

Just as it would have been wrong for him to go on grieving forever. There comes a moment when you have to say "O.K., enough, time to move on."

Of course you can't say that right away. The Lord himself "grieved" over having made Saul king (1 Samuel 15:35). Jesus paused a while to weep over the death of his friend Lazarus (John 11:35). Job's friends grieved with him seven days (Job 2:12-13), and that turned out not to be long enough.

I don't know what is the right amount of time to grieve. It varies depending on the loss. We grieve little at the passing of an aged saint; much at the sudden departure of a young man. Then again, Israel "grieved for Moses...30 days, until the time of weeping and mourning was over" (Deuteronomy 34:8) - but even one day was too long to mourn the wicked young traitor Absalom (2 Samuel 19:1-8).

People differ on what they feel they have a "right" to grieve over. When I heard a young preacher talk about how much he and his wife suffered when she miscarried early in her pregnancy, I remembered my mother saying that a woman should not even announce that she is with child until she is pretty far along. All child-bearers miscarry, she said (she herself had lost several that way), and, relative to losing
a full-term baby, it is a minor sorrow that should be borne quietly.

It is hard for those who have not suffered a particular loss to intuit its severity. My sister lost both her son (he was murdered) and her husband (he cheated on her and abandoned her) the same year. Which is harder - to lose a son to death or a husband to wickedness? According to my sister, it is not even close: her husband's betrayal was worse than death.

But even deaths and worse-than-deaths must not be allowed to hold hostage forever our duties of work and our pursuits of joy. My mother sometimes quoted Joshua 1:2, where God says bluntly, "Moses my servant is dead. Now then, you...". That is, quit crying about Moses and get busy with the task at hand.

May God give us grace to know the opportune time when we must discard righteous sorrow in order to resume even more righteous activity. And may he supply all the strength for that too. We'll need it.

Sunday, February 12, 2006

Prayer Meeting Paradox (February 12, 2006)

I would like to introduce you to an effect that I have found so odd, so striking - and yet so common - that I have decided to give it a name. I'm going to call it the "Prayer Meeting Paradox."

I first became aware of the Prayer Meeting Paradox in 1989, when my wife and I and our year-old son were living in Costa Rica learning Spanish. On occasion Linda and I would hire a baby sitter and go see a movie. First-run Hollywood movies only cost about 50 cents, and they were in English. (We ignored the subtitles.) We only got to see about four or five movies during our year in Costa Rica, so whenever we went I looked forward to it as a real treat.

But, I confess, I was never that eager to go to a prayer meeting. It is not just that I was struggling to learn the language. It was more of - well, let's face it - a prayer meeting is something you go to out of duty, not because you can't wait to have such a good time. Frankly, I would have been glad to have an excuse not to go ("It's raining buckets tonight - even with my umbrella I'll get soaked. Better stay
home."). But if something prevented my seeing a movie, I probably would have been peeved. My problem is that by nature I am just not that spiritual. As C. S. Lewis once confided to a friend, "Being religious really goes against my grain."

But after going to a few movies out of joy and a few prayer meetings out of duty, I noticed an effect that amazed me. After a movie I'd leave the theater feeling either vague dissatisfaction or nothing at all. But after a prayer meeting I would have such a rush of joy it was like walking on air. Every prayer meeting left me exultant. This is the Prayer Meeting Paradox: you don't want to go, but when you do, you wind up being unbearably glad that you went.

I have experienced the Prayer Meeting Paradox many times since. Thursday afternoons in seminary, for example, I would drag my reluctant self over to the nursing home for prayer and Bible study with the old ladies - and then by the time our fellowship would end an hour later, it was like somebody (the Holy Spirit, I guess) had slipped me an Ecstasy pill.

There may be explanations, sociological and biochemical, to account for the Prayer Meeting Paradox, but I don't think they exclude this spiritual explanation: The devil does not want you to pray with people, and he tempts you to avoid such gatherings. But once he has succeeded in tempting you away, he has no reason to reward you with pleasure. You're like the male praying mantis who, having rendered his service, is chewed up and digested by the mate who cares nothing for his well-being.

God, on the other hand, delights to reward our obedience with some "after-the-fact" joy. But since he desires obedience for its own sake, the joy that follows must be a little elusive, not precisely sought after, perhaps dimly remembered, and experienced only as a byproduct. Were it not so, then our good actions (like prayer meeting attendance) would be mercenary. We would be lab rats pressing the "prayer bar" just for the release of sweet endorphins. God does not want behaviorally-conditioned rats though: he wants sons and daughters. To that end, the connection he establishes between obedience and joy must be nuanced, even a little paradoxical.

There is a way to test my theory empirically. But you have to drag yourself to a prayer meeting to find out.

Sunday, February 5, 2006

I Welcome Your Disagreements (February 5, 2006)

My heart gave a little leap for joy in our Sunday School class when someone raised her hand and said, "I disagree with you."

Great! Now the discussion can get interesting. Not that it was dull before (though, who knows, maybe it was), but a direct challenge to a statement of mine or of anybody else gives the whole conversation a keener edge. The sharp blade of disagreement is the tool a teacher needs to refine his own thoughts, retract his mistakes and clarify his obfuscations. Learners benefit when disagreement is expressed, since no other dialectical knife can better carve our thoughts into lean and worthy units.

The worst teacher I had in seminary was one who took disagreements personally, and who graded us on how precisely we regurgitated his opinions back to him. My how dull his classes were! It seemed we were learning not to engage and reason but to listen and repeat. The"listen and repeat" method is fine for multiplication tables, but
truths that are deep and satisfying are arrived at by weathering bombardments of "I think you're wrong," or, "I would put it differently."

Solomon liked a good argument. When he wrote "As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another," he was indicating in part his dissatisfaction with the dullness of thoughts achieved in isolation. Even the wisest man in the world needed the stimulation of a few "No-Men" to fine tune his proverbs. St. Paul also liked it when people refused to take his word for it. Acts 17:11 says, "The Bereans were of
more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true." Paul wanted them to test his words against Scripture.

In C. S. Lewis' The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the ship's crew come to an island inhabited by invisible simpletons, the Dufflepuds. The two parties sit down for dinner, and Lewis writes,

The meal would have been pleasanter...if the conversation had not consisted entirely of agreements. The invisible people agreed about everything. Indeed most of their remarks were the sort it would not be easy to disagree with: "What I always say is, when a chap's hungry, he likes some victuals," or "Getting dark now, always does at night," or even "Ah, you've come over the water. Powerful wet stuff, ain't it?"

Yes, yes, the ocean is wet, night is dark and hungry people like to eat. Snooze. Your life should be purpose-driven. Snore. (Sorry - that last one was a cheap shot.)

Don't be a Dufflepud. Once in a while say something people might actually object to. And if other people (even your pastor!) say something amiss, speak up with a hearty "You're wrong!" If your words are seasoned with grace, no reasonable person will be offended.