Collect for the 3rd Sunday after Easter God calls us to pray. Even our "unruly wills and passions" are not to prevent us asking of God in prayer. Yet for some of us our unruly wills and passions scare us off praying freely. Perhaps we fear our prayers are too petty or impetuous. We often feel the need to footnote our prayers with the disclaimer "...if it is your will" - a caveat with which we hope to throw a loin-cloth of modesty over our own shamelessly exposed wills. In a sermon published in "The World in Small Boats", Oliver O'Donovan reflects on the shame we sometimes feel in asking directly of God...
Jesus is clear that we are to ask of God in the manner of a child freely addressing her attentive father (Matthew 7), not in the manner of a bureaucrat justifying some contentious community grant application. Yet even as we ask freely, we become aware of where our wills and affections most need re-ordering. An analogy from O'Donovan from the same sermon...
We are not asked to subdue our own wills and affections BEFORE asking of God in Prayer. Indeed, we often do not know the true nature of our wills and affections UNTIL we begin to pray. It is through actually ASKING God in prayer, that our own desires begin being trained towards the light of his revealed will. Jesus' own "will and affections" were never unruly as ours are, yet he too knows what it is to have one's will ordered through prayer to the Father.
We are to ask freely of our Heavenly Father. And as our own wills are exposed before the light of his perfect will, our unruly desires and passions will begin to be trained by him. For more about Oliver O'Donovan, check out this Oliver O'Donovan Facebook Page.
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 One of the fondest childhood memories I have of my father, is my wrestling with him. I loved even those occasions on which the sparring ended in tears, as mum had usually warned it would! It is also a precious aspect of experiencing intimacy with my own kids. Christians also often describe their relationship with God in terms of "wrestling," though perhaps in somewhat less nostalgic terms. We likely speak of wrestling with God in prayer, or wrestling with the text of scripture. But does God really wish for us (or require us) to wrestle with him? Psalm 119 recognises that reading God's word is often not easy, but never speaks of God's word as an opponent whose meaning is wilfully difficult for us to grasp. Oliver O'Donovan warns against thinking of the scriptures as a sparring partner... If we suppose we have defeated it in battle like some Goliath, we shall, no doubt, triumphantly cut off its head. We shall then be fools twice over: first in conceiving that our cunning overcame the text when the text overcame our naive simplicity, second in not allowing the text to overcome our second simplicity, which is the pride we take in analysis to the neglect of a synthetic understanding of the text as a whole. (Oliver O'Donovan. Vol.2 page136) The terminology of "wrestling" does reflect something true of our experience. But If we wrestle in reading scripture, it is not wrestling with the wilful obscurity of God's word, but the wilfulness of our own hearts. And what about in prayer? What about Jacob's wrestling the angel? Didn't God make Jacob wrestle a blessing out of him? I don't think so. Jacob didn't need to wrestle anything "out of" God. Quite the opposite. Jacob needed to learn that God's blessing comes as a gift to be received. Jacob only grasped that once the mysterious man touched his hip, crippling him as a reminder of the weakness of his own flesh. It WAS a struggle for Jacob to come to terms with God's grace and acceptance, but he had never needed to wrestle that grace from God's hands. (see John H. Walton's work on the text of Genesis) Once again O'Donovan offers a corrective to how we typically think about "wrestling" with God, with these wonderfully moving words on prayer: A tradition of Protestant exhortation, taking its cue from the story ofJacob's wrestling by Jabbok in the night (Gen. 32:22-32) and Jesus' parable of the importunate widow (Lk. 18:1-8), has attempted to make a virtue of impatience in the struggle of prayer to wrest fulfilment of the promise out of God's hold... For [Jesus], prayer may be altogether too drawn out, too histrionic and stormy, to evidence faith in a generous Father. Even the widow of the parable is not meant to encourage dramatics, for God is not like the unjust judge she has to deal with. He needs no bribing or bullying, but gives out justice speedily and readily... Our prayers may gain intensity from their circumstances, of course. When someone we love is in peril, it is natural that we pray with tears and terror. But when we find ourselves at our last breath, passionless prayer will have to suffice, for the energy of passion will not be at our command. Wrestling in prayer is wrestling with ourselves, not with God. (Oliver O'Donovan. Vol.2 page176)
For more about Oliver O'Donovan, check out this Oliver O'Donovan Facebook Page. .  I recently led a discussion on “How to Worry Well” at my church weekend away. In preparing for our discussions I came across this wonderfully insightful comment from Oliver O’Donovan, who includes some in-depth reflection on the nature of modern anxiety in his book “Finding and Seeking.” He notes that much modern anxiety is conceived in the passionate throws of anticipation: an elicit union of “breaking-news” and consequentialism (the practice of justifying our present actions on the basis of their anticipated consequences). Why are our first impressions of events so important to us...? It is because we feel our identities are at stake... Every culture concerns itself with news-bringing in one form or another; most other cultures have been more relaxed about it. Perhaps simply because we have the power to communicate news quickly and widely, we are on edge about it, afraid that the world will change behind our backs if we are not [up-to-date] with a thousand dissociated facts that do not concern us directly. It is a measure of our metaphysical insecurity, which is the constant driver in the modern urge for mastery...”
In contrast, FAITH in God's past action gives us firm ground from which to launch our moral decision making, and HOPE gives us the confidence to stay the course, despite the disorienting fog of the immediate future lying before us. Faith and Hope free us from the relentless need to anticipate the where the "times" are heading next, and instead focus our attention upon the next step of love that lies immediately at our feet. For more about Oliver O'Donovan, check out this Oliver O'Donovan Facebook Page.  Today I had Oliver O'Donovan's latest book, Entering Into Rest, turn up on my doorstep. Eagerly flicking through the index I discovered he'd given extended consideration to the significance of human work. O'Donovan gives particular attention to challenging the view that only "enduring work" can be considered good. The select quotes below are from p112-114. O'Donovan sets the scene for the discussion by recounting the way in which both Teilhard and Volf have framed their theology of human work: " 'With each one of our works we labour,' Teilhard wrote, 'to build the pleroma; that is to say, we bring to Christ a little fulfilment.' (1).... Miroslav Volf, in what was perhaps the last echo of the mid-century tradition, put the same challenge more bluntly. Only 'cumulative work,' he insisted, could 'have intrinsic value and gain ultimate significance.' (2) " O'Donovan evocatively draws out the implications of this perspective on human work: ...we might be tempted to conclude that our work would be effective in proportion to the durability of its products. Making the terracotta army would be better than making gingerbread men for the children's party, planting a tree better than cleaning a room, manufacturing the plastic bags that hang around forever caught in the branches of trees better than making biodegradable ones. However O'Donovan warns that..... "...we should hesitate before reaching such a conclusion, not only from a scruple about ephemeral work, but because we know the deeds valued most have often been those whose future effects the actor could know nothing about - such as the hours spent wrestling with a piece of writing no publisher may ever touch." O'Donovan goes on to conclude....
"So we must not allow ourselves to be forked on the suppositious alternative of a work that is precious because permanent, and a work that is worthless because its effects are impermanent. Work is made precious as impermanent, since God has taken time and its works to himself, restoring them through and from their passing away, not "cumulatively" as a process, but by an act that bears testimony to himself as creator and redeemer, which is resurrection." 1. Teilhard, Le Milieu Divin, pp. 54, 56. 2. Miroslav Volf, Work in the Spirit (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2ooi pp. 9o-91. Buy Entering Into Rest - it looks fascinating! In the section following that outlined above, O'Donovan goes on to address the difference between work and leisure, and work and self-realisation. For more about Oliver O'Donovan, check out this Oliver O'Donovan Facebook Page. Work. It forms such a big part of our lives. We desperately long for it to have meaning. But what meaning? In the paper linked below, I compare/contrast how O’Donovan and Volf explain the relationship between our creational and evangelical work. The introductory section briefly reviews reformed thinking on vocation, before moving on to Moltmann’s, Volf’s and then O’Donovan’s proposals. 
 This paper was originally posted at:
https://graceinvader.wordpress.com/2014/05/27/volf-odonovan-an-evangelical-theology-of-work/ |
AuthorI'm Steve. Anglican Presbyter, Practical Theology Enthusiast, and Graphic Design Hobbyist in Sydney, Australia Archives
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