Prayer

Minister Robin R. Meyers offers an important perspective in his 2020 book “Saving God From Religion: A Minister’s Search for Faith in a Skeptical Age.”  He wrote: “Because churches today advertise prayer as the answer for everything (pray harder, pray more often, pray ‘without ceasing’), this is a radical idea.  Jeremiah even suggests that if worship is substituted for justice, the Temple itself will be destroyed (Jeremiah 7:5-7).  Perhaps this is now the fate of the church?  

For saying this, Jeremiah was almost killed by his contemporaries, foreshadowing the fate of another Jewish prophet named Jesus.  The message is exactly the same: participation in empty ritual without personal and social transformation is a mockery of prayer.  To have expressed a good thought is not the same thing as to have done a good deed – even though we have been seduced into thinking so…” (end)

Lent is about prayer, fasting and giving.  We should focus on all three, especially the latter.  When we do, there will be no mockery.  Deeds are what Lent requires leading us to personal and even social transformations.  

Ash Wednesday is this week.  Let’s remember the spoken words when ashes are traced on our foreheads: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return” or “Repent and believe in the Gospel.”  These commands mark the beginning of our Lenten transformations.  

Lord, hear our prayer, especially for the Ukraine and a responsive world to Putin's hostility and madness.

Deacon David Pierce