TELLING GOD WHAT TO TEACH [M, 7-12-21]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

I have never understood prayers—public or private—that go “O God, teach us that…” I mean, do we really think we are qualified to be instructing God that way, what to teach us?

This arises now because I am using as part of my own “daily devotions” the 1973 edition of The Upper Room Disciplines. I discovered it in a drawer of stuff I should have recycled a long time ago. I saved it because I had written a week’s worth of the material. It wasn’t the only year for which I was asked to write, but it’s the only one I have now.

I remember that I was very impressed with myself, to be invited to write for the URD. It wasn’t just the regular Upper Room, the daily devotional guide for just anybody and everybody, the spiritual hoi polloi. The URD was to be written a step above the UR. It was designed for ministers and other more theologically advanced folks. I was just a lowly campus minister back then, but several of my sermons had been published in national periodicals, and I had developed a reputation as a rabble-rouser and out-of-the-box theological thinker, applying my narrative theology--although nobody called it that then--to issues of segregation and war and abortion.

I also used it in my writing for URD.

So I was appearing in the URD along with such luminaries as Georgia Harkness and Massey H. Shepherd, Jr, and Webb Garrison. I won’t mention some of the other writers of august reputation, for they are the ones guilty of being so impressed with their high-flown insights, far above the simple readers of the regular UR, that they thought it reasonable for them to instruct God in what to teach us.

Now, it wasn’t as though they were asking God to teach us bad stuff, like how to keep black folks in their place, or trivial stuff, like to cheer for SMU whenever it met Notre Dame in football. Those kinds of prayers were prayed in those days, but not in the precincts of the upper room. No, it was good stuff, like teaching us to be nice and to spread the Word and to share with those less fortunate. But wouldn’t God know already that we needed to be taught those things? I mean, there was/is plenty of evidence that we need that instruction.

There is a story of the long-winded preacher who was invited to do the chapel service at Boston University School of Theology. The Dean, giving the pastoral prayer just before the sermon, prayed, “O God, teach us that this service must end promptly at 11:00…” That’s an exception to the rule about not instructing God through prayer. Personally, I feel it is okay to instruct God if it gets us out of church on time.

As I read the 1973 URD now, though, I realize that the one thing I can be really proud of in those devotions was how humble I was. [Yes, it’s intentional.] Most everybody else closed their day’s worth of words with a prayer of instruction to God. I just did a “prayer suggestion,” like “that we might be open to love” or “that peace may be real on earth.” I didn’t try to tell God how to do stuff. You know me well enough to realize that takes a lot of teeth-gritting.

The URD is still published each year, but they haven’t invited me to write for quite a long time. Methinks they’ve gotten smarter editors.

John Robert McFarland

“Humor is a prelude to faith, and laughter is the beginning of prayer.” Reinhold Niebuhr