A number of years ago, a poet penned poignant words as he saw the beginning of the end for the greatest nation of his day. He saw that the far-flung influence his country had thrown over much of the world could no longer be held. The people who had felt pressed by it were demanding their own voice. He saw also that his own people would be tempted to sink to terrible depths trying to maintain their place in the world. In a time of crisis, we are tempted to take matters into our own hands, we are tempted to forget history, and worse, we are tempted to forget about God’s will and God’s ways. We start to think we must win by any means necessary. And that is dangerous indeed.
We would do well to hear this poet. His name was Rudyard Kipling. It is his prayer as he saw great changes for Britain:
“God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung battle line,
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine –
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!
The tumult and the shouting dies;
The captains and the kings depart:
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law –
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget!
For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that build on dust,
And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word –
Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!”
I’m sure that we have all been hit with a wide range of emotions this week. I have felt shock and disbelief – that anything of like this was actually going on. I felt disappointment – that our defense systems had not caught the attack. I felt loneliness, and just wanted to be at home with those I love most. And I felt what I could only call the weight of the moment – a heaviness for our human condition, for the exceeding sinfulness of sin. I felt lots of things. But some things I did not feel. I did not feel terror. I did not feel overwhelming anxiety. I did not feel despair. And there is a reason. It has to do with prayer, and it has to do with the will of God.
Jesus told us to pray, “Thy will be done”. What is that? Is that a sigh of resignation? “You have beaten me down, great big God, so have it your way?” “Thy will be done”. Or is it a breathless scream into the night? “You are awfully late, Lord, in doing what You are supposed to do, so get to it?” Or is it that our prayer for the will of God to be done is something more – something that carries with it a reason to hope and even the source of joy?
“Thy will be done”. Even after an attack on America. How? Jesus found Himself one day faced with some frustrated folks. His disciples had tried to cure a sick child, and they had failed. We’re not given many details, but Jesus expressed deep disappointment. He called His disciples “faithless” and “perverse” and wondered out loud how long He would have to put up with them. They had tried to do something they thought was in the will of God, but it didn’t work. Why not?
I
I want you to see that when we talk about the will of God, we need to couple that with understanding the ways of God. The will of God is always joined with the ways of God. They go hand in hand. They will not contradict one another.
Sometimes we get a peculiar picture of what we think the will of God is. We seize it, we hang on to it, we go for it. It has to be right, because we thought of it! It’s God’s will, and so we plunge ahead and try to make it happen, by any means necessary. The results are often disastrous. We have forgotten the ways of God. We have forgotten to look into God’s heart.
I don’t pretend to be any kind of carpenter. I’m afraid that when I have a carpentry job to do, I take the lazy way out. Instead of drilling pilot holes before joining two pieces of wood, I just start driving in screws. Never mind that the wood fibers are too dense or that the screw is too large; if I want it in there, I will work it and work it and work it some more until – pow! The screw snaps off, or the wood splits, and I’ve made a mess of it. Do you see what’s wrong? I have decided what is to be done, I have decided to get it done by any means necessary. But the end is a disaster, because I have willed what I want to do, but I have not thought about the right way to do it.
All too often in human history people have announced what they believed was the will of God, and then have pursued it by any means necessary. Certain Muslim groups – not all, let’s not paint with too broad a brush – but certain Muslim groups have selected political goals and military targets and have declared their destruction to be the will of God. These groups have then has pursued their aims by any means necessary, up to and including suicide missions and the wholesale destruction of lives. My poor words are not sufficient to condemn so vicious a thing. My eloquence is not adequate to describe the horror of such wanton destruction.
But rather than attempting to scold Muslims for their terrible wrongs, I look into Christian history, and I find that the very same thing was done by Christians. In the Middle Ages, Christian kings and knights set out for the East to capture the Holy Land, killing Arabs wholesale and looting as they went, all of it in the name of Christ. It was God’s will, they said. But they never added to their idea of God’s will any attention to God’s ways of love and justice and mercy. While we weep that others kill in the name of God, let’s remember that Christians too have committed crimes under the heading, “the will of God”.
In our own nation, only a century ago people spoke about “manifest destiny”. The idea of manifest destiny was that the United States was destined by God to take over much of the rest of the world. That’s roughly how we got Puerto Rico and the Philippines. And where American arms went, so also went American Christian missionaries, blessing these military prizes with the notion that all of this was “the will of God”. But now who paid any attention to the ways of God? Who noticed that our God conquers us with the power of His love, and not with the edge of the sword? Who noticed that Jesus said that whoever lives by the sword will perish by the sword? Almost no one. We so easily forget that what we think is the will of God will always be consistent with the ways of God.
Never mind all this about history. Just look in our own hearts. What do we do? We decide what we want – usually something that is to our advantage – and then we go out there to get it, calling it the will of God. We do not want to know anything about the ways of God. We want what we want when we want it, and are prepared to get it by any means necessary. That’s what brings on disastrous results.
Oh, I can bring it down home for you. I’ll break it down so that we can all get this idea. There was a preacher who received a call to a much bigger church, with a much larger salary. He told the pulpit committee, as he knew he was supposed to, “I’ll want to pray about this first.” But then, with a broad grin on his face, he told his wife to go upstairs and start packing while he went downstairs to do a his praying! It was a done deal! It had to be God’s will, right, because it felt so good?!
Jesus called his disciples “perverse”. They were “perverse” because they had made up their own minds what God’s will was, and they set out to make it happen, so that they could get the credit for healing the boy. They thought they knew God’s will, they decided they could use any means necessary to make it happen, and they failed miserably.
II
But now, notice that this distraught father brought his son to Jesus, and when Jesus took charge, Jesus reacted in a very different way. Jesus took very careful, very measured, steps to do what needed to be done. The text says that Jesus “rebuked the demon, and it came out of him, and the boy was cured instantly.” Jesus reacted to the need in front of Him in a careful, deliberate, appropriate way. He rebuked that demon and cured that boy. Jesus did not rebuke all demons. He did not summon legions of angels to wipe out every demon wherever it might be. He did not utter grand speeches, nor did He throw caution to the winds. Jesus did not try to kill a flea with a shotgun. He stayed calm, He dealt directly with this issue, and He went on with His life.
Some of us, when we feel injured, want to use any means necessary to get revenge. Some are calling for all-out war. Some want blood! Some want to feel that we have struck a blow! We just want to hit something or somebody. I have a friend who, when he gets frustrated and upset, will say, “I just have to hit something”, and will put his fist right through a window or a wall – all that pent-up energy that just has to go somewhere. Maybe we just want to slander a Middle Easterner living on our street. Maybe we feel like throwing a brick through the window of a mosque. Maybe that’s what we feel today. The militant spirit that gave birth to today’s phrase, “By any means necessary,” just wants to reach out and slap everybody who’s different, everybody who is the wrong nationality or the wrong race or the wrong religion.
But Jesus didn’t do that. Jesus didn’t overreact. Jesus didn’t pop off about demons in general. He rebuked this demon. Jesus didn’t go into panic and suggest the slaughter of anything. He dealt with this demon, he cured this boy, and He kept things in proportion. Let us resolve today that as we pray “Thy will be done”, our prayers will not be license for this nation to use any means necessary or to ventilate our frustration. Justice must be done, yes. God is a God of justice, of course. Whoever did this must face a judge so awesome that words cannot describe Him. But let us as a nation react responsibly and seek to do no more than genuine justice requires. Let us not overreact and forget who we are and what we truly value.
III
“Thy will be done”. What does it really mean for us now? This prayer involves repentance for our not having done the will of God as we have been given it. And this prayer is a prayer of recommitment to those things that we know our God wants us to do and the way He wants us to do them.
The disciples said to Jesus, “Why could not we cast [this demon] out?” And His reply speaks to me.
“Because of your little faith. For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.”
Why could we not cast out the demon of terrorism? Why could we not rid ourselves of the scourge of militancy? Could it be that our faith is too small and our commitment to God’s ways too tiny, too timid?
I’m asking you to join me in repenting of our little faith and in recommitting to the things that God has called us to do, in light of this week’s tragedies. We cannot do much about Osama bin Laden. But we can turn ourselves to a new commitment.
I repent today of my little faith, and I want to recommit to the full work of the church, to prayer and teaching and ministry, to evangelism and to community. Despite all the disruption and all the other work I needed to do, I felt myself this week drawn to reach out to others. More than usual, I wanted to make calls and visits and work more intensely at calling people to the Kingdom. I found that I really do believe that the answer to hatred is love and that the antidote to violence is Jesus Christ Himself. I found myself with a renewed commitment to the work of outreach. I repent today of my little faith, and ask you to join me in recommitting to the full work of Christ’s church.
I repent today of my little faith, and I want to recommit to the work of missions. In this immense world, there are so many who do not know the love and the power of Christ. Sad to say, we just barely tip our hats in a token for the work of missions. We need to be a church that is truly global in scope, truly interested in all the peoples of the world, just like our children’s song says, “Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight.” And that means involvement in missions efforts around the world. I know that some will say, “But missions is a part of that American arrogance you talked about. We don’t need to stir up tensions by trying to change other people’s religions.” I know some feel that. I simply say that missionaries go out not just to beat people over the heads and rack up numbers. Missionaries go out with love and with ministries focused on health and education, the things that people need right here and now, and use that to show them what the love of Christ can mean. We need to commit to missions.
I repent today of my little faith, and I want to recommit to leading a prayer-filled, faith-motivated, Biblically-informed, love-cultivating Christian church. I want us to do church right. I want us to experience Christ personally, not just routinely go to meetings. I repent of our religiosity and recommit to a soul-stirring experience. I repent of our middle-classness and our concern about money and I recommit to the radical hope that puts confidence in nothing but the love of God. I repent of our comfortable closeness to one another that lets us see only the people we want to see, and I recommit to touching Jerusalem, Judea, Jericho, and the uttermost parts of the earth. I repent of my little faith, and recommit both to God’s will that all might know Christ and to God’s ways of compassion and tenderness. I repent and I recommit. I hope you will too.
I repent of wanting what I want when I want it, calling it God’s will, and then devising any means necessary to get there! I repent because I stand under the Cross, and see there the broken heart of God at the pain of His children. I stand under the Cross and see there that God suffers. God has absorbed this enormous pain and loss into Himself. Throughout the whole dismal history of the human race, we have violated one another in horrible and cruel ways, but His Cross it stands forever as a reminder of how each such death stabs at the very heart of the Creator. The Cross puts a human face on God’s heart. I repent because I stand under the Cross.
But I have more than repentance in my heart today. I told you that after Tuesday I did not feel terror, or despair, or overwhelming anxiety. I told you that I felt a reason to hope and even a source for joy. I feel those things today because not only do I stand under the cross; I also stand in front of an empty tomb. I stand at a place where death was defeated and evil was stopped in its tracks. I stand at a place where all the powers have done their worst, but from that tomb that morning burst forth the first-fruits of them that sleep. And so this thing is settled; it’s finished. It is a done deal. Victory is coming. Life is on its way.
I know what the headlines say. I do not for one moment minimize the horror of these days, nor do I trivialize the grief of thousands of families. But I do know that God in the Risen Christ has done already what must be done. All I must do is to have faith, faith like a grain of mustard seed, and wait to see the goodness of the Lord in this land.
Let there be no frantic boast, nor foolish word. Let our hearts not give way to panic or anxiety. Let us not give vent to anger nor grant room to vengeance. Let us not take up the cry “by any means necessary.” Let us simply repent of our own arrogance, let us learn again the ways of the Lord. The works of man may crumble, all valiant dust that builds on dust. But when we pray, “Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven”, our twin towers are the gracious will of God and His loving ways.
The works of man no longer stand; but “still stands Thine ancient sacrifice, an humble and a contrite heart” – Thou will not despise.
