The "O" of Prayer

Jacob prays, "O God of my father Abraham and God of my father Isaac, the Lord said to me, 'Return to your country and to your family and I will deal well with you.'" [Genesis 32:9]

So frequently, our prayers are well mannered and carefully theological, but Jacob’s "O God" is a truly living theology. The "O" is a theology in itself. Just as Paul cried out, "O wretched man that I am!", Jacob cried out of passion and despair, out of existential knowledge of Who God was and who Jacob was before Him. When we talk to God, we often use many formulae and Christian slogans. But where is the "O" in our prayers?

Jacob prayed to the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac, to the God Who has said certain things to him. When I was in prison, I would cry out, "O God of Jucika" [the speaker’s faithful wife] or "O God of Sándor" [a godly fellow prisoner]. Do others see anything in my life that would encourage them to pray to my God? To the God of my spouse? To the God of my best friend? Can we imagine anyone praying to the God of - insert the name of your church - ? Do our lives testify to a God worth praying to?

[FV, 1998]

Life Together

"For where two or three have gathered together in My name, there I am in their midst" (Matthew 18:20)

Jesus Himself says that when even two or three gather in His name, He is there in their midst. He has the audacity to declare Himself not just mediator, but the very medium of our relationships in the daily life of the Church: as surely, and maybe more dramatically, in the prosaic task of getting along as in the more visible ministries of word and deed.

When we are divided, Paul says that we live as though Christ were divided (1 Corinthians 1:13a). So we must live our lives in the question of what it means to truly gather in His name. We know that when we experience it most fully, there will be the joyful pain of happiness and sorrow multiplying as they are shared. We find this in Paul's concentric emanations of affliction and comfort for the sake of the Gospel (2 Corinthians 1:3ff.). In its absence, there is at best distant politeness and perfunctory kindness, and ultimately nothing but "hyper-fighting" and "glory-emptiness" (the "vain-glory" of the KJV) (Phil. 2:3).

Why is there quarreling among us? Only when Jesus is standing "in [our] midst" does He say to us, "Peace be with you." (John 20:26)

Expressed in the categories of our language, Jesus in the midst of three gathered in His name is "among" them; in the midst of two, He is "between." Though we are many members of one body, this fact is in tension with the quintessential two to which relationship devolves. This is the "I and Thou" of Martin Buber, and is modeled in the relationship of the Father and Son in the person of the Spirit.

In Him we live and move and have our being as the living Church.

[AV, 1998]