Lord help us Trust.

You know a good prayer when you hear it. The best prayers, those that are most authentic and heartfelt, those shorn of tired clichés and pious platitudes, are often our shortest prayers. The writer Anne Lamott insists that she has prayer down to one word: “Help!” The psalmist for this week in Psalm 16 utters a prayer notable for its brevity, tenderness, and power. It is just five words, and you can pray it at any time, at any place, for any reason: “Protect me, O God.” It is a prayer rich with pastoral and political ramifications, particularly in light of the current situation the Covid-19 virus has placed us in.

The psalmist’s prayer implicitly acknowledges what we all know from experience, that far too much of our world, for far too many people, is not a safe place. For many the world is a horror of devastation and destruction, vulnerability, and sorrow. In a favourite hymn we hear, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” the Protestant reformer Martin Luther (1483–1546) admitted that ours is a “world with evils filled, that threaten to undo us.” Still, the Hebrew psalmist is confident about the God whom he worships; a God who counsels and instructs, and to be sure he will not abandon us. In an unsafe world God is a God of protection, preservation, and refuge.

In 1910, a leading British pundit, Norman Angell, wrote The Great Illusion, which rightly argued that national economies had become so interdependent, so much a part of a global division of labour, that war among the economic leaders had become unimaginably destructive. War, Angell warned, would so undermine the network of international trade that no military venture by a European power against another could conceivably lead to economic benefits for the aggressor. I wonder if there is a lesson for the leaders around the world today such as in USA and China.

Angell surmised that war itself would cease once the costs and benefits of war were more clearly understood. Angell was correct, economically speaking, but just a few years after he published his book, World War I, a Great Depression, then World War II, unleashed catastrophic consequences, economic and otherwise, for all the world. Vovid-19 has done this in our time.

Christian prayer to stop war is thus both a pastoral and a political act. We pray for soldiers and civilians alike, for governments and diplomats, for peacemakers and treaty negotiators, for Iranians and Congolese, Palestinians and Chechens, as much as for Australians: “Lord, keep us safe. Somehow. Some way. Save us from our warring impulses. Please, keep us safe.” People pray that we may find a vaccine or cure for this virus and that we may be kept safe and of course with little damage to the economy we have.

  

On another path for this week’s scripture readings I want to reflect on Acts 2:14a, 22-32 which brings us a portion of Peter’s sermon delivered on the church’s first Pentecost. Does it seem out of place, perhaps better suited for Pentecost Sunday? The text is fully appropriate when one considers the ancient tradition of the Great Fifty Days. Indeed, Eastern Orthodox Christians call their service book for Eastertide the Pentecostarion. Hearing Peter’s sermon reminds us that Easter faith is lived in the power of the Spirit.

The Second Sunday of Easter offers the John 20:19-31 reading each year of the three-year cycle. What should we hear? Note that the disciples were gathered together, but that the doors “were locked for fear of the Jews.” Jesus came and stood among them anyway. As we are told, Thomas was not there on the evening of the first day; for that matter, neither were we. Now here we are a week later, standing with Thomas and listening to the text. We should not be too hard on this one who has long been called “the Doubter.” The other disciples had seen the Risen Lord and had testified to that fact, yet the doors of their assembly were still shut a week later.

This text is about believing and that shape of believing. Indeed, “that you may come to believe” is the goal of John’s Gospel. What does “believing” for us mean? I note that it is important that we who are Christians do not assume that we and others have a well-developed understanding of what believing means. Although the disciples had received the Spirit and were given a commission to forgive sins, they were still huddled in their room. What manner of believing is that?

What locked doors are we standing behind? Can we trust the Risen Christ to help us move beyond them? Challenging questions for all of us as we seek a safer better world than the one, we currently experience. A challenge as we start to become desperate for a change in our isolation status and seek to go back to a normal. And what will that normal be? Will we start again to care for the poor, the downtrodden and those suffering. The new normal certainly can’t be what we had before despite the attempts of the greedy to return to that. Maybe in a similar vein to the Psalm for this week we need to pray Lord help us to trust and maybe add Lord keep us safe.