 Rev. Jeff Nelson |
And the People Said
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Every year when we take the youth group to Memphis, the highlight of the week is the trip to Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church. Mississippi Boulevard is an African American church nestled in the heart of downtown Memphis. Ask any kid who has gone on this trip and they will tell you that from the moment they walked in the door until the moment they walked out, they found themselves standing on holy ground. The hospitality of the people of Mississippi Boulevard is truly amazing. They are genuinely glad you are there. (Yes, I know that when sixty white people walk into an all-black church, you are noticed and they know you are visiting. But I tell you, it’s deeper than that.) They truly make you feel you are among friends and that they have been waiting all summer long for you to arrive. Although we only go once a year, every time we walk through that door, I feel like I am back home. In fact, the pastor, Dr. Frank Anthony Thomas, took one look out at the congregation—a sea of a hundred black faces with an island of white faces in the middle—and said, “Friends, it looks like we have ourselves a bit of an ethnic problem, and there is no such thing as an ethnic problem in the Body of Christ. So church, get up and go get one of our guests and have them sit by you, won’t you?” And sure enough, folks got up and grabbed the hands of those of us sitting there wide-eyed, wondering what was about to happen, and moved us to another part of the auditorium. They welcomed us, introduced themselves, shared their Bibles, their testimonies and even a bit of their hearts with us. We all knew that this would be a special night, indeed. Then the music began. It was spirited and emotional. It lifted you up so high that you thought you might be able to actually reach out and touch God. Both hands and voices were raised to the God that was surely present in that place. They moved from music to prayer—and I am not sure you’ve been prayed for until you have been prayed for by someone at Mississippi Boulevard. No stone of God’s good creation was left unturned by the woman who prayed. “Dear Lord,” she prayed, “thank you for waking me up this morning. Because, Lord, I know there were some who didn’t wake up this day. But because I woke up this morning, Lord, I want to ask you to walk with me today, Lord. I want you to help me live the kind of life that would give you glory, Lord Jesus. Help me remember what is important today, Lord. Fill my heart with gladness. Take away all my sadness. Bring me safely through this day so I may lay my head on the pillow tonight and thank you one more time.” Then it was time for the preaching. And I’ll tell you, I am not sure there is anything that can equal the finest preaching of the African American church. The message literally jumps off the page and is alive. If you have ever experienced preaching done in the Black gospel style, then you know that preaching is not a one-way communication. It is not just the preacher preaching and the church listening. In the African American tradition, the sermon is dialogical—it is interactive, an invitation to give and take. As the sermon rose to its crescendo, the preacher took off his jacket, loosened his tie, rolled up his sleeves and began to really bring the message home. At this point, he had a phrase that he used to get the congregation to respond. He said, “And the people said,” to which the congregation responded with a resounding, “Amen!” He would borrow from the words of the prophet, preaching, “Let justice flow like the water and righteousness like a mighty stream. And the people said…” “Amen!” From the life of Jesus: “He would say, ‘I am the bread of life, and will never leave you hungry.’ And the people said...” “Amen!” Or from the old spirituals: “I believe there is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul. I believe there is a balm in Gilead that makes the wounded whole. And the people said...” “Amen!” By the end of the message, everyone in the room was caught up in an “amen moment.” Amen. Now there is one of the words that is a regular part of our religious vocabulary. We say amen at the end of almost every prayer we pray. We say it so often, and use it so casually, that we probably have no idea of the radical thing we are asserting when we end our prayer with this little word. The word amen is an ancient word. We find it throughout the scriptures. It is common to both the Hebrew and the Christian scriptures. So what does that little word mean? It is simply a fancy Christian punctuation mark, like a period or exclamation point. The word amen literally means “Yes, this is true” or “Let it be so!” My concordance explains that the Greek translation for the word amen literally means “a solemn expression of certainty.” “Let it be so!” So to use amen at the end of our prayer means we hope, and we expect, that everything we have just said will come to pass. “Let it be so!” To be so bold as to say amen at the end of a prayer means that we aren’t just uttering a bunch of nice religious words strung together that have no real meaning in our lives. Rather, to say amen is a signal that we are prepared for the words we just prayed to have a real impact on us, on those we pray for and on the world we live in. Think about it. When we say amen after a prayer to bring healing for the bodies and souls of our family and friends, we signal that we are expecting healing to come. We may not know when it will come. We may not know how it will come. But to say amen—to say “Let it be so!”—is to say we know healing will come. To say amen after a prayer for healing is to trust that God will be present with those who are sick. To say amen at the end of a prayer for healing—to say, “Yes, this is true. Let it be so!”—is also to signal God that if there is anything we can do to help bring God’s healing to those we are praying for, we will do it. To say amen, “Let this healing actually come,” is to say that if it is needed, we will visit. We will send cards. We will cook meals, make calls, hold hands, give hugs, lend an ear or simply be present. To say amen at the end of a healing prayer is to say to God that if God needs us to be part of this healing, we are ready to do our part to be the answer to the prayer we have just prayed. The same is true, then, when we say amen at the end of a prayer for peace. I love to pray for peace in the world. Perhaps my greatest yearning is for war to cease, hunger to be abated, justice to be enacted and peace to be realized. But in thinking about what it means to say amen at the end of a prayer for peace, I began to realize that it is really a bold thing to do. To say amen, to literally say “Let it be so!” at the end of a prayer for peace, is to be audacious enough to say that we actually believe that peace, and things that make for peace, can indeed come to our planet. To say amen at the end of a peace prayer is to declare that peace is not just some silly, sentimental pipe dream, but instead it is to believe that God and God’s people can actually be a part of reconciliation between the Israelis and the Palestinians. It is to believe that some day Iraq will not be a place torn apart by war. It is to say that one day the continent of Africa will no longer be ravaged by AIDS, poverty, indebtedness, corruption and terror. To say amen at the end of a prayer for peace is to really believe that one day:
The wolf will live with the
lamb, To say amen at the end of a prayer for peace is to believe that one day:
They will beat their swords into
plowshares To say amen at the end of a prayer for peace is to signal God that I am willing to be a channel for his peace in the world—that I am willing to go or to help others go to the war-torn and poverty-stricken places of the world and be the face of peace, the hands of justice and the heart of love. To say amen—to say to God, “Everything I have just asked for, ‘Let it be so!’”—changes the very nature of prayer. Prayer can no longer be just an act of private devotion, but instead it becomes an invitation to God to be active in our lives and in our world. Prayer becomes an invitation for God to change the very direction of our lives. To say amen is to ask that the words of our prayers be more than just words. To say amen is to realize that our prayers don’t change God. They change us. To end our prayers with an amen—to literally say, “Let it be so!”—is to ask God to help us make the longest and toughest journey we may ever take—the journey from our heads to our hearts. To say amen is to ask God to help make the faith we profess with our mouths a reality in our lives. To say amen is to ask God to make the Christ we know through the creeds evident in our deeds. So how do we make this “amen journey,” this journey from head to heart, from confession to compassion? How do the prayers we pray, week in and week out, bear fruit in our lives? What difference does the prayer we say on Sunday make on Monday? One a day a young seeker came to Jesus asking these same questions. He asked Jesus to unlock the greatest essence of all the spiritual teachings. He asked, “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law? You whose life so greatly matches what it is you teach, tell us what it is that we are supposed to do. How are we supposed to live? What is the secret to this life, anyhow?” Jesus answered this seeker by saying, Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments. So there we have it. The road map to the “amen journey,” the pathway from head to heart, the instructions on how to arrive at a personal life that matches our prayer life. Love God and love your neighbor. Our private devotion of God must meet the public demands of the world. Love God. Love your neighbor. It is tempting, isn’t it? Just to keep our spiritual life private. To keep our prayer life personal. We like that first part of Jesus’ counsel: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” Truth be told, we’d like to stay there, in the just-between-me-and-God stuff of our faith. To keep my faith and my prayer private means I don’t have to worry about the messy and hurtful things of the world around me. The suffering. The hunger. The poverty, war, hatred, abuse. Just as my faith is between me and God, so then the faith of my neighbor—and the problems of my neighbor, for that matter—are between my neighbor and God. It is simply not any of my business. That is why Jesus yokes the first part of the commandment to the second: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments. There is simply no way around it. If we are to make this “amen journey,” this journey from our head to our heart, then our private devotion of God must meet the public demands of the world. Years ago, renowned preacher Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick said: The world has tried to get rid of Jesus in two ways. The first was to crucify him. That failed. The risen Lord could win more people than the man of Nazareth. The second way was to worship him. That has almost worked. The same can be said of prayer. If prayer is simply an act of devotion—only a means of worship, an opportunity to get a little “Jesus fix” to get us through the week—then I am afraid we will find that much of our prayer will not bear the fruit we hope for. But if we begin to realize what it means to say amen at the end of a prayer—to honestly say to God, “Let the things I have asked for, whether it be a change in attitude, a change in employment or finances, the end of an addiction, the healing for a body, the safety of a loved one, or an end to hunger, poverty, oppression and war, let those things actually come to pass”—then we will find ourselves also asking that God would make us more open to the change that must then happen in us and around us if our prayer is to be an act of transformation rather than just an act of devotion. This summer we have looked very closely at the words of the Lord’s Prayer in hopes that the words would be planted deeper within us and the life to which this prayer calls us would be experienced through us. I hope you have come to realize, just as I have, that we don’t say the seventy words of the Lord’s Prayer week in and week out just to say them, but that we pray this prayer in earnest every week in hopes that these seventy words will indeed lead us to live our lives in ways that match the very words we hold so dear. We pray these words each week, so that we may live them each day. And so tonight, as we come to the end of our journey through the Lord’s Prayer, we come to the 71st word—and that word is, of course, amen. But we can’t just say amen and get out of here, because to say amen is to say something profound indeed. When we come to the amen at the end of the Lord’s Prayer, we are asking God to make this prayer real in our lives, in the lives of our neighbors, and in the community and world in which we find ourselves living. And so, friends, I am going to ask you to humor me a bit. I am going to ask you to journey down to Memphis, Tennessee. I want you to imagine that we are sitting in the pews of the Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church and that I have been the preacher for the night. The sermon is coming to a close—just as our series on the Lord’s Prayer is coming to a close—and it is time to bring it home. Brothers and sisters, let us not forget that when we pray the “Our” of the Lord’s Prayer, this prayer is a community. The Father is ours…the bread is ours…and the forgiveness is ours. And the people said…Amen! Let us remember that when we pray “Our Father, who art in heaven,” we are indeed all God’s children—that you are my brothers and sisters, that I am yours and you are mine—and that in this family, our heavenly rich, poor, black, white, old and young are all united. And the people said…Amen! We best not forget that to pray that God’s Kingdom would come “on earth as it is in heaven” means that our faith has as much to do with life before death as it does with life after death. And the people said…Amen! And to pray that we be given “our daily bread,” we must order our lives in a fashion that ensures everybody gets some bread, and that nobody has too much bread, and nobody goes without bread. And the people said…Amen! And Lord, help us remember that when it comes to “forgive,” it is not seven times, but seventy times seven that we must forgive. And the people said…Amen! And when we say “amen,” make it more than a period at the end of our prayer. Let it be an invitation to become the change we want to see in the world. And the people said…Amen!
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