BEGGARS AND MAGICIANS

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back. I’ve been posting about the five kinds of verbal prayer:  praise, thanksgiving, confession, intercession, and supplication. Let’s think about intercession.

Intercession is problematic for many faith people. The lame adage, “God answers all prayer. He says ‘yes,” ‘no,’ and ‘wait,’” was created to offset the reality of orisons devoid of action.

The theology underlying such a perception about prayer suggests that poor old ancient of days God has nothing better to do than jump to our beck and call when we require room service from him. Well, jump, say no, or make us wait.

Thus Being-itself with all its infinite vastness waits upon little old me.

Intercession is much deeper than that. True intercession is when I pray for other people, and with other people, in such a way that I spiritually become them in order to heal them.

When I was a kid, I prayed this prayer every day, “Dear God bless everybody in the world.”  There is nothing wrong with a prayer like that. I still intercede for the world in the same way. Somebody has to do it.

However, such intercession is easy. There’s a huge temptation to believe we have done our duty to the world simply because we prayed.

However, everybody in the world is not being blessed. Millions die every day without ever having one chance for a cure. They feel forsaken, you know, like a son of God might feel.

Some say God is blessing everybody. Yeah, right. Such blessings have a funny way of showing themselves—like live possums playing dead in traffic.  

The longer we live, the more life teaches us about suffering. Millions die from disease. Millions die from natural disaster. Millions die from accidents. Millions die from suicide, homicide, and that great purveyor of both:  war.

When I was a baby Christian, I prayed like an infant for Jesus. When I became a man, life surrounded me on all sides, became more complex, and I had to grow up.   

I confess that I have been cynical about prayer, not because I stopped believing in intercession, but because I outgrew our evangelical culture of magical prayer. When people got sick and died, that was God’s will; when people got sick and lived, that was God’s magical love.

How many times have I heard good country people say, “The doctors told me that it’s a miracle I’m alive. Every single one of my organs turned into chickens, but the good Lord kept them clucking smoothly.”?

God gets all the glory when a brilliant surgeon saves an evangelical’s life. The surgeon gets a thank you note. Researchers in the science of medicine and developers in the techniques of care receive little or no acknowledgement.

That’s just another way to prefer magical thinking over science. It’s a shame. Medical science is everlasting intercession.

Theologically, it can be argued that it’s a wonder any one of us is alive.

Biologically it can be argued that being here today, typing this post, is a wonder or sheer luck for me. Little-seed-me managed to out swim millions of  little-seeds-not-me free styling to be first to cross into my mother’s fertile membranous start line.

Indeed, Jesus’ powers to heal have increased as medical science has flourished.

I have a dear friend whose baby girl was born with a rare and lethal cancer near her optic nerve. We all prayed for his daughter to live.  A surgery was proposed. The medical team said, at best, the odds were fifty-fifty she would go into remission. Many people prayed for her and many churches.

My friend told me before the surgery about the cancer support group he and his wife joined. Others’ children did not live. Their souls followed their prayers on the way to god. My friend said that he did not believe that God would spare his daughter just because he and a lot of other people were praying for her.

If you think about, the whole kit and caboodle of this kind of prayer seems faithless. We seem to believe the rules of reality that work for us change for God.

We pray as we are begging God to change God’s mind. We pray as if we have to let god know the death of our dying children would irretrievably shatter our souls. We are afraid if we do not pray fervently then he won’t hear us. We believe with hearts we’ve flung to the floor that we must pray with as many prayers as we can or god will not be persuaded to grant our wishes.

What happens to some people when they lose a child is they are lost too.

Intercession must go beyond begging and magic. Our God of love works through minds and bodies. Love is the greatest intercession of all. Love urges us to rely less on knees that bend, more on hearts that give, and always on hands that heal.

Praise God for life!  Praise God for medical science!  Praise God for the strength to endure the edge of night!  My friend’s baby girl lives today. She speaks French. She loves art. She lives.

Let us give thanks.

Blessings…