"Prayer Changes Us And Then We Change Things"

Sacraments, Covenant, & Doing Better

Dear Friends,

This past weekend I had the pleasure of spending time with some of my Province 1 (aka the Episcopal Church in New England) formation colleagues, along with our special guest, Byron Rushing. As part of his presence with us, Rushing took us through a deeply personal recounting of racial division in the Episcopal Church and the ramifications of our baptismal covenant. In beginning his talk, though, he said something striking:

“I used to believe that prayer changes things. Now I believe that prayer changes us, and we change things.”

It’s a striking sentiment. Think, for example, of a saying I’ve surely written about here before: “If you pray to God to move a mountain, prepare to wake up next to a shovel.” In other words, we can pray for something but God isn’t a magician. If it’s God’s will, the outcome may still depend on our willingness to act.

As a poet, though, I’m taken by the work that first period is doing. You could hear it clearly in Rushing’s voice – the long pause that suggests, if the sentence was all there was, that prayer is useless. But that’s not the argument. It’s a moment of intentional misdirection. Prayer doesn’t change the world – the material facts of it – but it changes us so that we can change those material facts. And in this season of Lent, a season of prayerful reflection, this is an important shift for us to pay attention to.

Teach Us To Pray

Over the last year, I’ve had the opportunity to work on a lot of prayer material in my different congregational settings. And one thing that feels so important to me when I’m doing this work is to make sure we haven’t cast God as a magician, especially when talking to children about how and why we pray.

It’s easy to let children believe prayer changes things. It’s easy because we want to believe it, too. But it’s a lot harder to teach children that prayer changes us so that we can change things, to teach them that prayer isn’t like making a wish on your birthday cake. When we focus on the idea that prayer changes us, we get to the second part of what Rushing spoke to us about this weekend: that the work of being a Christian, our baptismal covenant, our prayers, our participation in the sacraments, should make us do better. That we are called to follow Jesus - called to action, not just existence – and that’s a lot harder than just trying to be better. Saying morning prayer regularly may make me feel pious, but it’s for naught if it doesn’t make me behave differently.

So, what does this look like in practice? I’m still working that out. I hope you’ll tell me what it sparks in you, though.

On Doing Better

Maybe I’m feeling a little too literal when I say that I don’t know what prayer and piety making us do better means in practice. Because there’s something I need our community to do better about right now, specifically as we prepare for the Easter season.

As a preface, I want to explain that I grew up in New York City, where school holiday breaks are largely structured around major Jewish holidays. My father, though he didn’t realize it, would occasionally offer up a suggestion directly linked to our Jewish heritage – his grandfather had converted to Catholicism when he got married. Many of my closest friends are Jewish and generally I find that I’m well-versed in Jewish traditions. But, as the ongoing saga of this newsletter very clearly establishes, I’m not Jewish. I’m Christian – and there are things those of us who are Christian need to stop doing.

Specifically, I wouldn’t have thought that I needed to say anything about Christian seders to an audience like this until I saw a recent post in a progressive Christian FB group asking about offering a “mini seder” when discussing the Last Supper. A few weeks before that, another Christian formation practitioner asked about writing Jewish feast lessons. And let’s be clear, neither of those things should be happening.

It is an honor – and something you should absolutely say yes to! – if a Jewish friend invites you to participate in a seder. It’s almost always appropriate to invite members of the Jewish community to teach about their traditions in your congregation or to ask them about what resources they would suggest you teach from. But there is no reason for Christians to create resources on Jewish traditions or to attempt to participate in closed practices. The story of the Last Supper is a rich enough part of our tradition. We don’t need to co-opt our neighbors’ traditions, and we especially need to be careful about this in light of our problems with supercessionism. So let’s aim for something easy here: we can do better by being good neighbors to our Jewish siblings and not getting mixed up in Christian seders or other foolishness.

Here’s more on avoiding anti-Judaism during Holy Week and Easter from Amy-Jill Levine.

Turning Toward Holy Week

We all know that that Holy Week is going to sneak up on us awfully fast, especially if you work in a church, so it’s time for another resource round-up. Here are a few things that might be helpful to you in this season:

• Holy Week With Jesus from TryTank: This is pretty cool, y’all! You can sign up via the contact information below (or at the link included with this bullet point) to receive real time messages walking Jesus through his final days. This is a great way to ground anyone in the events of Holy Week, but I think this would be a particularly cool recommendation for teens since it’s low effort but also sort of unavoidable.

• Many families find themselves coloring eggs during Holy Week – when else are you going to get ready for that Easter Egg hunt? – but this doesn’t have to be a disconnected activity. Particularly given the reality that Ukraine has been under attack for over a year now, we can turn our attention to this matter through a series of Holy Week activities including learning about pysanka and coming up with ways to be of service either to local Ukrainian communities or to those elsewhere. At its core, Maundy Thursday turns our focus to being of service to each other and to our shared vulnerability and humanity, and like foot washing, other acts of service can make those commonalities more obvious.

• Are you planning a Stations of the Cross event? Consider Rev. Emily Garcia’s revised collects specifically designed for doing Stations with Children. She’s also got Children’s Sermon tips that avoid turning children into objects of entertainment, a notorious struggle, especially around major church events.

• As I continue to find routines, I encourage you to visit the A Bird In Church Instagram account. I may have schemed up daily themes meant to support formation programs (Material Mondays and Title Tuesdays, anyone?), so come see what I have in store over there.

We’re well past Ash Wednesday at this point, but Dust We Are And Shall Return by The Brilliance is one of my favorite songs for this season - I hope it’s a tune you can settle into in the weeks to come.

Peace,
A. Bird