Chad Hall is a pastor now in Hickory, North Carolina, but a few years ago he quit the church. He felt that it had lost what it meant to be in the real world. He likens the experience with to the movie A River Runs Through It. The Brad Pitt character is the wilder- spirited of two sons of a proper Montana Presbyterian minister. He is lousy at life but good at fly-fishing. At one point he says something like, It won’t be long till I’ll be able to think like a fish!

The church, Hall believes, has forgotten how to think like it the fish it swims with and has begun to pretend that it is more like the captain of a charter boat. We get preoccupied with keeping up the boat, with who’s in it and who’s not, with where we want to go, and we begin to lose our fish instincts. We forget what life in the water is like. He felt he had to stop going to church for the sake of the church, in order to regain a sense of that world we really live in. [“Six Ways I Quit Church,” in Leadership Journal.net (July 15, 2003).]

Forgive me for not jumping ship and going overboard for his idea, but I take the point and so should we all. Paul is concerned about the same thing at about the halfway mark of his letter to the Ephesians. He knows how easy it is to slip into old patterns and forget what makes the church the church. We’ve been tracking Paul for the past two weeks in chapters one and two as he lays out how the church is a chosen community. The church is a sacrament of the kingdom of God, a visible reminder of God’s love in the world. We exist to reveal by the way we live together just what God has had in mind for the whole creation from Day One, Genesis 1. This mystery that has burst forth from under the covers of history through Jesus the Christ is that God has chosen one and all to be saved and to live in peace as sisters and brothers to the praise of one Father in heaven. Last Sunday Jay Hogewood pounded home the truth that God is in the construction by destruction business, breaking down all the structures that we have built to keep people out, in order to welcome them in instead. God calls all of us home to our created dignity by forgiving our sins and putting us in right relationship with God, with others, and with our own shattered hearts or scattered minds. This is the kind of church we are meant to be, that every church is meant to be – a witness to the reckless mercy of God that cannot be confined despite our best efforts.

But we do try, don’t we? We are incorrigible. We are forever trying to make a club out of the church – insiders and outsiders based on racial, ethnic, social, or economic lines rather than the only distinguishing mark that matters – faith in Jesus Christ! So, we need to have the gospel reinforced over and over again in us, to get it through our thick skulls that it’s not about us; it’s about God.

Paul pauses in the middle of his letter and breaks into a prayer of sorts. His language changes, the way language changes when you move from talking about a recipe for chicken fricassee with your neighbor to talking with your lover in a gazebo by a lake under a moonlit sky with a warm breeze brushing your cheeks. The words get poetic and passionate, don’t you know?!: they move upward from the heart instead of downward from the head. Paul lifts his love to God by heaving his heart toward heaven. He even gets down on his knees to do it. He pleads with God that the whole Trinity will conspire together to strengthen and stretch the church in ways that will make it secure in its identity and mission. Paul prays that the Father above us will be present to us by the Christ who is in us, energizing us by work of the Holy Spirit. At the end of his prayer he blesses the God who is able do far more than we ask or even imagine. You hear me use this benediction from time to time at the end of our services. When we’ve come to the end of our words, we throw it all back to God to show the way to what is possible that we can’t conjure up by our own wits.

Prayer is the best resource we have as the church to reinforce who we are and what God wants to do through us. It is like strength and stretching exercises for the soul. As we get older, we begin to lose muscle mass and flexibility. We need to counteract that physically. Weight training is one side of it; yoga or Pilates or any kind of stretching and breathing exercise is the other side. I am a big believer in both of these, and therefore a bigger hypocrite for not doing either more than I do. Anyone else wish to confess?

A couple of weeks ago I was playing golf in California with my brother-in-law Bobby Grich. He played 17 years in the big leagues: seven-time All-star, four-time Golden Glover with the Orioles and the Angels. He was hitting the ball about 25 yards farther than I was off the tee time after time. Which chapped me off. I asked him where he thinks his power comes from. He pointed to his left forearm and explained. In 1977 he picked up an air conditioner for his apartment and ruptured a disk in his back. The surgery made him miss most of the season. During the off-season he started working out on weight machines with the Los Angeles Rams in Anaheim. He thought he was in great shape, but while his overall condition was good, he was not baseball fit. He had a terrible year in ’78 and decided to try something different. He got some dumbbells at his house, picked up a 20-pounder with his left hand and started to do curls. His right arm was much stronger than his left: he could do only about 14 reps at 20 lbs. So he started concentrating on building up that left forearm. He worked all winter on it, and by the time he hit spring training, he was doing 40 curls with a 45-lb dumbbell. The first time he stepped into the batting cage in Arizona that spring, the ball just rocketed off his bat. He hit 30 home runs in 1979 and had 101 RBIs.

What Bobby did was to exercise the right part of his body for the strength he required in his sport. And the apostle says he is praying for the church that they may be strengthened in their inner being, that they may be rooted and grounded in love. Prayer has that effect upon us, if we use it as a spiritual exercise to that end. Unfortunately, we often use prayer as a means to ends that are far more superficial than they might be. It isn’t wrong to pray for success in our relationships, for our business to prosper, for our kids to make good. But at the end of the day being rooted and grounded in the love of Christ, and having a soul that is strong in deep places, so that you can enjoy ecstasy and endure adversity is the far greater focus for prayer. Praying that you do not fall back into the old tapes of unworthiness when you have been graced and accepted and loved forever and ever by the eternal God of the universe: this is the nobler aim of prayer. It allows you to internalize the truth and not succumb to the weakness of the spirit that tries to sabotage your security in Christ.

I have a friend who calls me every now and then for a checkup. She knows the answer before she calls, but she needs to call anyway to hear again so that she can believe it a little more this time that God doesn’t look upon her as worthless slime. She had an earthly father who made her feel that way, and she continually transfers those attitudes toward what God must think also. But we are dealing here not with our earthly fathers — good or bad; we are praying to the one Father from whom all families on earth take their name, and he trumps every human father. It is crucially important that you get it through your head who you really are in Christ, because if you don’t you will forever be living a lie and trying feebly and fruitlessly to make it truth. We are what God has made us, Paul says in chapter 2 (10), created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life. God did not prepare beforehand for us to find our life by getting enough money to live in white neighborhoods, send our kids to the right schools, converse only with people of our own social standing, and engage in a politics of protecting our possessions. All that only leads to insecurity and anxiety instead of security and peace. What’s worse, it doesn’t lead to heaven.

Paul prays and wants us to pray that we will get this straight in our inner being so that as a chosen community we can show how God wants the world to look by looking at us. But prayer is supposed to stretch us, too.

A couple of years ago I had some lower back pain. There’s nothing so bad for your sense of humor as a sore back. It just wears on you all the time. Well, I went to a doctor and found out that there was no damage, but I had to stretch my hamstrings every day in order to relieve the strain on the back and allow the legs to carry more of the burden of my considerable frame. Once I did, the back pain went away, and I was as good as new. Well, almost.

Prayer is the exercise of the soul that allows us to bear the burdens of a weighty world. What’s more, it moves us beyond the limits of even the highest knowledge. The world we think we know by our senses is not the only world there is. We are largely defined by our knowledge, but God is bigger than our minds, and there is something the breadth, and length and height and depth of which is accessible only by love.

St. Thomas Aquinas is one of the greatest minds in human history. In the 13^th century the Dominican priest produced a compendium of theology, the ambitious work Summa Theologica, which purported to gather all the knowledge of God and the world between its binders. He believed that by expanding the human intellect, we journey toward union with God. But in December of 1273, he quit writing altogether. He had a mystical experience that changed him completely. Saying mass in Naples one Sunday, he said: I can do no more. Such things have been revealed to me that all I have written seems as straw — and now I await the end of my life. He died three months later.

The Wackowski brothers have brought us two Matrix movies, with a third on the way. The premise of the fable is that we are all caught in a matrix of slavery that is ruled by rules and controlled by machines. We are so assimilated that we do not know which is the real world and which the lie. Freedom is found in a progression from truth to love: from comprehending the nature of things first, then transcending them by the only force that is stronger than death. Knowledge can lead you to the door, but only love can take you through it.

Love is not anti-intellectual; it gathers up the intellect and perfects it. The heart knows things the mind cannot grasp. And the church learns these things through the kind of prayer that strengthens and stretches the soul. Prayer is the language of love. Prayer is pillow talk with God. Prayer leads you into the fullness of God.

You don’t have to quit church to do it. You have to quit playing church and start praying church instead. If you are ready for that, then let us pray. …