A Prayer of Thanksgiving: Seeking the Presence of God

Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.

—Isaiah 55:6-7

The first time I walked into the church's prayer chapel, my heart sank. The dank, dimly lit room had become essentially a catchall. The walls were lined with boxes and dusty bookshelves overstuffed with old certificates, pictures, and other mementos (the congregation was gearing up for its 150th anniversary celebration). There were baskets of prayer request slips from services held years before. I don't even want to know how old the tissue box was! This space, once consecrated to God, was no longer used on a regular basis for the originally intended purpose. Instead it had become overrun with stuff, a lot of it junk.

There I was, the new pastor of a church that had a strong, proud heritage but more recently had experienced several decades of slow decline while nobly carrying on, a congregation like so many others these days. I was trying to envision through hope-filled eyes the potential for renewal and growth in that setting, but as I stepped into the prayer chapel that day almost all I could see was a bunch of clutter in a space that was supposed to be devoted to prayer.

One way to gauge the vitality of a church is to look at the place of prayer in that church's life. The same is true on a personal level; the role of prayer in one's life probably gives a good indication of the depth, breadth, and power of that person's faith. God calls us to be a people of prayer, a people attentive to God's presence.

So easily, though, the stuff of our lives can spread and take over, as it did in that prayer chapel. We will likely find such a place in most churches, as well as most human hearts and lives—spaces or areas that were at one point dedicated to God and God's presence, but have since begun serving other purposes or no purpose at all. Without sufficient formation and care, without the light and order that we need, without remaining open to the fresh air of God's grace stirring among and within us, parts of our lives can become cluttered and musty, stifling rather than encouraging spiritual vitality.

Thankfully, God gives us the sacraments, sacred gifts endowed with divine power to clean up our lives. By these outward signs of an inward grace and God's goodwill toward us, the Holy Spirit works invisibly in us, and quickens, strengthens, and confirms our faith in Christ. God authorizes and graciously imparts the sacraments to us for our sanctification. In his provocative treatise The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Martin Luther identifies three essential elements of a sacrament: a divine promise, Christ's institution, and a physical sign. As we in the church today face our own captivity to the forces of shallow banalities, cultural accommodation, and debilitating apathy, what better place to turn than the sacraments? Sacraments are those signs whose substance conveys to us the promised presence of Jesus Christ to the glory of the Father through the power of the Holy Spirit. Baptism and the Eucharist are grounded in the activity of the triune God. As the medieval theologian Hugh of St. Victor explains, in the sacraments God sets before the external senses these physical or material elements that represent by likeness, signify by institution, and contain by sanctification some invisible and spiritual grace. Through the waters of baptism God cleanses us, and through the Eucharist God feeds us and quenches our thirsty souls.

God with Us?

Before saying any more about what a sacrament is, though, and before focusing on the nature and purpose of the Lord's Supper in particular, we should return to the metaphor above about the cluttered space in our churches and lives that had once been devoted to God. The metaphor points to a deeper dilemma for us all: How can finite, messy, imperfect human beings encounter the infinite, perfectly holy God? What are human beings that God would want to be with us? For that to happen, surely God must make a way. The fundamental claim of the Christian faith is that God has made a way, a way through the one who called himself "the way, and the truth, and the life," Jesus Christ (John 14:6). Long before we ever thought to seek God, God had it in mind to come to us—and has done just that in Christ.

The saving benefits of Christ's coming into the world reach us as we believe and trust in him. He gives himself to us by his grace as a free, unmerited gift that we receive by faith. Before ascending into heaven, the risen Lord made this promise: "remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age" (Matthew 28:20). Jesus Christ is God with us, always and everywhere.

Thankfully, Christ's presence is not dependent on our actions. We do not need to have our lives all together for him to work in us. Taking the initiative, he meets us where we are. He met Peter and Andrew fishing and James and John mending their nets, and immediately they followed him (Matthew 4:18-22). Against the social customs of the day, he met the woman seeking a drink at Jacob's well in Samaria, and that encounter changed not only her life but also the lives of many others who believed in Jesus because of the woman's testimony (John 4:142). Jesus has a way of coming to us as we go about our daily activities as well. He comes to us and draws us to himself so that we, too, may follow him.

Before he would become one of the most influential figures of his era, as well as one of the great saints in the history of the church, Augustine was a young man enslaved by worldly desires. One day in a Milan garden, in the midst of a personal crisis, he was weeping in bitter agony when God spoke words of cleansing, freedom, and new life to his tortured, tainted soul. Augustine describes the events in this way:

suddenly I heard a voice from the nearby house chanting as if it might be a boy or a girl (I do not know which), saying and repeating over and over again "Pick up and read, pick up and read." At once my countenance changed, and I began to think intently whether there might be some sort of children's game in which such a chant is used. But I could not remember having heard of one. I checked the flood of tears and stood up. I interpreted it solely as a divine command to me to open the book and read the first chapter I might find.... So I hurried back to the place where ... I had put down the book of the apostle when I got up. I seized it, opened it and in silence read the first passage on which my eyes lit.

It was Romans 13:13-14: "Let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires."

Augustine continues, "I neither wished nor needed to read further. At once, with the last words of this sentence, it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart. All the shadows of doubt were dispelled." The Lord came to him.

God Comes to Us through Grace

Jesus is the Word of God made flesh, God coming to us, God pursuing us. He reveals his presence more fully to us as we engage in specific practices designed and decreed by God, disciplines that deepen our discipleship, like Bible study and prayer. Christians throughout the ages have described such practices or disciplines using the phrase "means of grace." For example, John Wesley used that expression to denote those "outward signs, words, or actions ordained of God, and appointed ... to be the ordinary channels" by which God conveys grace to us.

What is grace? Grace is God's presence and power for us, in us, and through us. It is the unmerited favor and activity of God on our behalf, a gift, in Christ, that is beyond what we could ever deserve or even fully comprehend. Yet we can see its effects in our lives. By grace, the Holy Spirit leads us on the way of salvation that is our journey back to God, our journey to becoming the people God calls us to be, or in short, our journey home.

Grace is free but not cheap. It is free to all people, in God's gracious providence, and is meant to be transformative for us as we respond in faith. The grace of God, however, is anything but cheap. Cheap "grace" (because it is only so-called grace) asks or demands nothing from us. Such "grace" is a fraudulent pretender, a disgraceful counterfeit. Yet it remains deceptively captivating to a church that is woefully undisciplined and, worse, undiscipled in the way of Christ. Cheap "grace" is not at all the grace of God, for this grace—truly divine grace—confronts us as a radical call to follow Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, and showed in his own life, the grace of God is costly. The narrow road that leads to life is paved by grace, summoning us to submit fully to the lordship of Jesus Christ, who freely sacrificed everything for us all.

The command that God gives us through the prophet Isaiah pulsates with urgency: "Seek the LORD while he may be found, call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the LORD, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon" (Isaiah 55:6-7). We can seek and find God only because God has first sought and found us. God can be found in the means of grace because in these gifts and practices God promises to meet us, and unfailingly does.

Wesley cites three chief means of grace: "prayer, whether in secret or with the great congregation; searching the Scriptures (which implies reading, hearing, and meditating thereon), and receiving the Lord's Supper, eating bread and drinking wine in remembrance of him." As Wesley goes on to explain, God is always above these means. They have no power apart from God's action through them. What makes these practices spiritually significant is that God meets us here, as promised. They are channels of God's presence and power graciously opened up to us by the living God, who invites us deeper into a relationship of love with the one who is Love: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

The gifts that Wesley identifies as the three most important means of grace—prayer, Scripture, and the Lord's Supper—all relate to the order of worship that encompasses the actual receiving of the bread and cup. In fact, the Eucharist is itself a prayer rooted in the Scriptures. It is, in its entirety, a prayer of thanksgiving for the biblical saga of redemption, for all that God has done for us in creating the world and redeeming it through Jesus Christ.

John Calvin articulates a similar perspective, reflecting on how God's saving work for us evokes from faithful hearts a response that is grounded in gratitude and expressed in the worship and service of God. For Calvin as well, the meal is a gift of God, and like every gift, it is an invitation to give thanks to the One who is the source of all goodness, graciously revealed in Christ, as recounted in the scriptural account of creation and redemption.

Some experiences leave us so grateful that all we can say in response, whether aloud or in our hearts, is simply "Thank you. Thank you." When our son was born following some difficult complications with the pregnancy, Molly and I were overjoyed. All we could say was "Thank you. Thank you." In the weeks and months that followed, it was more like: "Thank you ... and please, God, help us get more sleep!"

In the Lord's Supper, we join our voices with the church from across time and space in a continual prayer of thanksgiving. Viewing the Lord's Supper for what it is, namely, a prayer thanking the God of our salvation, brings into focus the profound spiritual meaning of what is said and done during this part of worship. It is not an act to rush through but one to form us, deep within our hearts and lives. Communion is far from the empty ritual that some might see it as today. Instead, this gift of God's grace actually makes possible, for us, a fresh encounter with the living God.

A Journey through the Liturgy

The Invitation

As recounted in the liturgy (or order of worship) presented in The United Methodist Hymnal, the words of invitation to commune with Christ and with others in his name set the tone for what follows: "Christ our Lord invites to his table all who love him, who earnestly repent of their sin and seek to live in peace with one another. Therefore, let us confess our sin before God and one another." Who doesn't like to be invited to a party or celebration? Receiving an invitation is like an affirmation that yes, I am included and invited. Out of love, Christ invites us all to come to him and find rest for our souls (Matthew 11:28-30). We respond to the Lord by faith and in prayer.

Confession and Pardon

Specifically, it is fitting for us to begin that response with a prayer of confession. Confession may be out of style in a largely therapeutic age, like our own, that teaches us to feel good about ourselves and to think the best about who we are and what we do and say. Nevertheless, if we truly wish to enter God's presence, then we had better come clean. The Scriptures teach us that basic point, as we see in the experience of the prophet Isaiah before the Lord. Isaiah's vision of God in the temple—"sitting on a throne, high and lofty" and surrounded by angels proclaiming that God is "holy, holy, holy"—overwhelmed the helpless prophet (Isaiah 6:1, 3). "The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. And I said: 'Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!'" (Isaiah 6:4-5). Later, the coal cleansed Isaiah's lips. His sin was forgiven, and he was sent forth to serve as a representative of God. For us, too, standing in the presence of almighty God should have the same effect, leading us to exclaim, "Woe is me!"

While God used the coal to cleanse Isaiah's lips, in a similar way the use of ashes as a sign of our mortality and repentance has a long history in Jewish and Christian worship. For Christians, Ash Wednesday is a call to repentance and reconciliation. One woman was facing difficulties on several fronts, including the ongoing grief over the death of her husband and the challenges of battling health issues of her own. It was enough to weigh her down spiritually, and she was struggling with bitterness and despair. She came to our church's worship on Ash Wednesday and received the imposition of ashes on her forehead in the sign of the cross. She shared in Holy Communion. Through it all God used that experience to renew her mind and heart by drawing her closer to Christ and his cross in an especially meaningful way. Weeks later she remarked, "Ever since the Ash Wednesday service, I have felt like a totally new person on the inside." The difference was perceptible on the outside, too, as others in the church noticed a change in her demeanor. For a long time she had tried to hold herself together on the inside, and then she came to realize, through an encounter with God, that there is nothing we can hide. Jesus wants us to come to him as we are, not just if we have our lives in order.

The prayer of confession represents a candid, sobering acknowledgment that before God, all our pain and brokenness are exposed, and we are fully known. One person who regularly attended worship would intentionally stay home whenever the church celebrated the Lord's Supper. He explained his rationale for skipping worship on Communion Sundays by saying, "I just don't feel like I have that much to confess." He apparently thought, perhaps as others have as well, that the meaning of Communion was reduced to the confession of our sins. Ironically, by justifying his absence with a claim of having not "that much to confess," he sounded awfully prideful. Plus, that is no excuse to miss out on what is happening when the church gathers for the Lord's Supper. Confession is a critical component, but there is more to the service of Communion than mere confession. Ultimately, the purpose of confession is not for self-loathing but for God's glory and for our good, that we may be restored to right relationship with God. By confessing our sins, we humble ourselves before God and ask God to forgive us, heal us, and raise us up to live a new and better life.