Thursday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time
When I think of Jesus’ admonition that we do not babble when we pray like the pagans, I am reminded of prayers I heard in a small Mennonite church that I attended back in the early 1990s. The church was going through a tough time. Several members, like me, were graduate students who were not able to give a lot to the church financially. The budget was always a challenge.
But more than that, our pastor at the time was very much in favor of identifying our church as a welcoming congregation. Like many of us, he wanted individuals whose identity did not conform to the traditional gender/sex binary to feel that they belonged in our community.
Many in the church supported his vision of becoming a welcoming congregation. But some (typically more senior members who had been going to that church for decades) were very nervous about the pastor’s idea. They were unable to embrace his vision in large part because they thought it wasn’t biblical. They thought that God didn’t want LGBTQ+ who lived into their sexual/gender identity in His church. They were also worried that our small congregation would get kicked out of the regional conference to which we belonged if we made this move. More than one regional conference had kicked out churches that were welcoming. Other regional conferences left the denomination altogether when they determined that the leadership of the denomination wasn’t taking a hard enough line on the question.
For more than a year, our church held multiple meetings in which we discussed the question. They were often tense discussions. One dynamic that stood out to me was how some folks chose to use prayer time (often at the beginning and end of those meetings) to make a point regarding the question that clearly came down on one or the other side of the question. They might pray something like the following: “Dear God, help us to stay true to your word even when it does not conform to the progressive views now becoming more popular in our wider culture.” Or something like this: “God, who loves and embraces all of us sinners, help us to find our way to being more like you.”
At one point during these discussions, it felt like were engaging in dueling prayers. I couldn’t help but wonder what God thought of that. It didn’t feel very prayerful.
In the end, a bunch of those folks who had been members for decades and were tired of talking about the question threatened to take their church membership elsewhere. The pastor, knowing that the church could not survive financially without their financial support, and having grown weary of the many painful conversations that he had to endure with members who were convinced that he was taking the church down the absolutely wrong path, delivered his sermon on a Sunday morning and then announced his resignation. People cried. People were relieved.
I wonder what might have happened if instead of those “babbling” prayers we all relied more on the Our Father. What if, instead of dueling prayers, we asked that God’s will be done? What if instead of trying to score points for “our side” of the question, we asked God to forgive us for all the ways that we as a congregation made our pastor’s job so incredibly hard? What if we had trusted that God already knew what we needed, such that we would not feel compelled to make our points on the question with our heads bowed?
All of us (no matter where came down on the question) were determined to make history come out right. And we ended up with a church schism and an earnest pastor (with a young family) suddenly jobless.
Forgiveness. In the passage before us today, Jesus says not once but twice—if you want to be forgiven then you must forgive.
I carried anger around with me for many years after that schism and our pastor’s resignation. I was mad at the folks who presented the ultimatum: bag this vision of a welcoming church or we’re gone. And with us, our financial support.
As I reflect on all of this today, I hear Jesus calling me always to pray in the spirit of the Our Father. Humbly, honestly, and transparently. And in recognition that the point is not for my will to be done, but God’s.
Amen.
—Susan Trollinger