Perceptions from a Pewboy

At our church conferences on the Washington District this year, we are joining together in praying this prayer for rebirth—a prayer that has been on my heart for quite some time. We invite you to pray it with us. Beyond that, we invite you to come with us into the transformed life into which a prayer like this can lead us.

God of the ages;
Source of our birth and our rebirth;
Author of every blessing that we experience;
Origin of every breath that we breathe:

Usher us into a spiritual rebirth, that our lives might become a song of praise to you…

As we continue to live into the aftermath of last night’s shooting at the LA Fitness in Bridgeville, Pennsylvania, the connections between this tragedy and the United Methodist Church are becoming painfully clear.

One of the victims who died, Heidi Overmier, was an active member (with her 16-year-old son, Ian) at Bridgeville First United Methodist Church. (Heidi’s sister is a member of Irwin First United Methodist Church.) Another victim who died, Jody Billingsley, was a member of the Sugarcreek United Methodist Church, not far from Franklin, Pennsylvania. Two people who were present at the LA Fitness center during the attack are members of the Bridgeville Campus of Crossroads United Methodist Church.

All of the lives lost were precious. The fact that some of those lives were connected to that portion of the body of Christ called United Methodism simply gives to some of us a deeper sensitivity to the closeness of this tragedy.

This blog post is not a theological reflection, but a request for prayer.

Please be in prayer for Pastor Josephine Whitely-Fields and for the people of Bridgeville First Church as they cope with their loss and as they minister to Ian and the other members of Heidi’s family.

Be in prayer also for all of the churches in the South Hills (including Crossroad’s Bridgeville Campus and its pastor, Jonathan Fehl) as
they mobilize to be in ministry to a portion of western Pennsylvania that is experiencing both grief and shock.

I am currently in Nashville, Tennessee, attending a meeting of the United Methodist denomination’s General Board of Discipleship. While here, I have been deeply touched by the way in which my brothers and sisters in Christ on the General Board of Discipleship have allowed
their hearts to be broken by the shooting. We have been in prayer together for the situation and for the Western Pennsylvania Conference
throughout the day. It has been an inspiring reminder to me of the beauty and sanctity of my denomination’s connectionalism.

As I type these words, my prayer is that God will give to all of us strength, comfort, discernment, and courage as we continue to manifest a radical and Christ-centered peace in a world that is often terribly violent.

As many of you have heard, La Mar Carlson, a United Methodist pastor and the District Superintendent of the Washington District in Western Pennsylvania, suffered a major stroke on Sunday afternoon. La Mar, his wife Rachel, and their son Nathan have been at the center of my prayers ever since. Their extended family has been good about ministering to them in these difficult days—a ministry that includes staying in the Carlson’s home in Washington and managing their domestic responsibilities.

The following is an e-mail that I just sent to the members of our church’s intercessory prayer team. I sent the e-mail to update the prayer team concerning what I know. I asked Rachel and Nathan for permission to share my update with a wider audience. Their response was essentially this: “By all means, share it with everyone, so that all might pray.”

Here’s the e-mail that I just sent:

Hello, members of the prayer team.

Nathan Carlson asked me to stop by Mercy Hospital yesterday (Tuesday), which I gladly did. I was Nathan’s candidacy mentor in his journey toward seminary, and we have established a good friendship over the years. It was a blessing to see Nathan face to face in this difficult time.

While I was there, Rachel asked me to visit La Mar and have prayer with him. Again, I was glad to do it. It was hard to see La Mar so incapacitated, as he is such a vibrant individual. But he seemed to recognize me, blinking once for “yes” when I asked if he could hear me and even shedding some tears in the course of our prayer time.

Rachel is a strong woman of faith who seems to be holding up remarkably well, considering the circumstances. I would say the same about Nathan. They both asked for continued prayers and are very much grateful for the support and love of their brothers and sisters in Christ.

La Mar is my district superintendent. Much more importantly, La Mar is my friend and has been a faithful mentoring presence in my life for many years (since I was a seminarian, in fact). My heart is broken over this entire matter. But I know that we have a God who specializes in healing, sustenance, and deliverance. Therein is our great hope.

It all reminds me of how incredibly fragile and precious this human journey really is. One Sunday afternoon, in the middle of a lovely meal on Mother’s Day, everything changed in an instant for the Carlson family.

In one sense, La Mar, who has always been a bold and creative preacher of the Word, is preaching an important sermon to us, even in the midst of his struggle. His sermon is this: “Live every day as though it were your last. Tell the people dearest to you how deeply you love them. Cling to the Lord Jesus, who will faithfully stand beside you, both in days of health and rejoicing and in days of struggle and sadness. And live the kind of life that matters, the kind of live that foreshadows the eternity that God has prepared for us.”

Thanks for being there, my friends. Your prayer ministry means the world to me.

Gratefully,
Eric

Many believers probably sang GOD BLESS AMERICA last weekend during worship. It certainly would have been an appropriate congregational prayer to be offered in song. Our country, after all, is rich with the kind of freedom and opportunity for which many in the world are desperately hungry. The very least that we can do is to pray for our great nation and to call upon God’s blessing on our nation’s behalf

And yet, as much as I have come to appreciate prayerful hymns like GOD BLESS AMERICA and MY COUNTRY, ‘TIS OF THEE, I am even more appreciative of the hymn THIS IS MY SONG—a hymn that calls upon God to bring a blessing, not only upon America, but upon all the nations of the world. Here is a portion of the poetry of that great hymn of faith:

This is my song, O God of all the nations,
A song of peace for lands afar and mine.
This is my home, the country where my heart is;
Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine.
But other hearts in other lands are beating
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

(Note: The words to the hymn THIS IS MY SONG were written by Lloyd Stone and Georgia Harkness)

What I love about those words is the way in which they communicate both a celebration of American hopes and dreams and a stubborn refusal to slip into a condition of nationalistic idolatry and irresponsible jingoism. The words remind us, in other words, that the hopes and dreams that we celebrate as American believers need not blind us to the preciousness of the hopes and dreams of others around the world with whom we share a common humanity.

By the third verse of the hymn, the tone has become even more prayerful and global:

This is my prayer, O Lord of all earth’s kingdoms:
Thy kingdom come, on earth thy will be done.
Let Christ be lifted up till all shall serve him,
And hearts united learn to live as one.
O hear my prayer, thou God of all the nations.
Myself I give thee, let thy will be done.

Every time I sing those words, I am reminded of the fact that, when believers gather for worship, we bear witness to the existence of a different kingdom. It is a kingdom that transcends national boundaries and ethnic backgrounds (without ignoring them). It is a kingdom in which brotherhood and sisterhood in Christ is more cohesive than political affiliation or national creed. It is a kingdom in which citizenship can be shared by Americans and Iraqis, by British and French, by Asian and African.

The kingdom to which I am making reference, of course, is the kingdom where water is thicker than blood, baptismally speaking. Jesus inaugurated this kingdom with his life, death, and resurrection, and the world will never again be the same.

On this Independence Day, I celebrate our nation, its freedom, and its ideals. May God bless America in a way that leads to an ever-deepening commitment to justice and peace.

In the process, may God bring a similar blessing upon all the nations, so that the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdom of Christ, where he shall reign for ever and ever.

This is my song.

Check out this report from an Amsterdam newspaper:

A Dutch police station trying to help Muslim detainees face Mecca for their prayers painted arrows in cells pointing in the wrong direction. The Segbroek police station in The Hague borrowed the idea of putting compass marks on ceilings from an Amsterdam hotel, the Dutch daily De Telegraaf reported on Friday. Muslims pray five times a day, facing east in the direction of Mecca. But the arrows in Segbroek pointed west. ‘This is a really gigantic, stupid blunder,’ a police spokesman told the De Telegraaf.

As followers of Jesus, of course, we are not particularly concerned with the geographical particulars of our prayer posture. Nevertheless, this news report inspired me to wonder about how many times I have found myself “praying in the wrong direction,” metaphorically speaking.

How many times, for example, have I treated prayer as an extension of my own egocentric wish-list, as though prayer were nothing more than a means by which to manifest my personal agenda?

How often have I prayed with a spirit of unadulterated arrogance, looking upon my prayer as an opportunity to instruct a perfectly sovereign God in matters of world affairs and human relationship?

How many times have I attempted to impress God with the frequency, the earnestness, or the vocabulary of my prayers?

On how many occasions have I evaluated the effectiveness of my prayer by the number of words or petitions that I have offered, or by whether or not God has responded to my prayers with precisely the response that I have sought?

How frequently during my prayers have I been facing in the direction of my own will instead of subordinating myself to the Lordship of Jesus and listening humbly for his voice–a voice that often resonates within our soul when we will dare to quiet ourselves in prayer?

How often, in other words, have I prayed in the wrong direction, not geographically, but spiritually?

The most important lesson in prayer that I ever learned came through the experience of a dear friend of mine whose son had to be life-flighted to Children’s Hospital with a severe head injury. For a 24-hour period, no one knew whether the boy would live or die.

He lived. Beyond that, he made a complete recovery and is now enjoying his high school experience.

A couple of weeks after the experience, I had lunch with my friend, the boy’s father. “You know,” he said to me that day, “throughout the whole time of crisis, my family felt completely sustained by the prayers of God’s people.”

Without thinking, I responded with a vapid inquiry. “You really believe that, don’t you?”

“Absolutely,” he responded. “There were 14 different churches praying for us. Catholic Churches. Baptist Churches. Methodist Churches. Non-denominational churches. We were being held up in prayer by all kinds of different believers. And I knew in my heart that those prayers were going to accomplish one of two things for us.”

“One of two things, Nathan?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I knew that those prayers were either going to save my little boy, or they were going to save the rest of us if my little boy died.”

I knew that I had just encountered the theology of prayer that I want to have when I grow up–a theology of prayer that believes that the prayer of righteous people is powerful and effective, no matter whether or not prayer produces our intended results. It is a theology of prayer that recognizes that, when our prayers are not answered in precisely the way we want them to be answered, it does not mean that God is not listening or that God does not care. It simply means that God is responding to our prayer in a way that we do not yet understand. It may even mean that God is utilizing our prayers to bring about a result that is far more redemptive in the long run than the immediate result for which we had prayed.

The theology of prayer that I encountered that day, in other words, demands prayer that is prayed in the right direction. It demands the kind of prayer that is more about relationship than it is about immediate results; the kind of prayer that is more about leaning into God than it is about manipulating God; the kind of prayer that is more about a receptive heart than it is about an established agenda.

I ask you to pray for me. Be assured, I am praying for you.