God on Mute Read online

  © 2007 Pete Greig

  Published by Bethany House Publishers

  11400 Hampshire Avenue South

  Bloomington, Minnesota 55438

  www.bethanyhouse.com

  Bethany House Publishers is a division of

  Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

  www.bakerpublishinggroup.com

  Bethany House Publishers edition published 2014

  ISBN 978-1-4412-6628-6

  Previously published by Regal Books

  Ebook edition originally created 2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

  Other versions used are:

  ESV— Scripture taken from the English Standard Version, Copyright © 2001. The ESV and English Standard Version are trademarks of Good News Publishers.

  KJV—King James Version. Authorized King James Version.

  THE MESSAGE— Scripture taken from THE MESSAGE. Copyright © by Eugene H. Peterson, 1993, 1994, 1995. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group.

  NASB —Scripture taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE, Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

  Phillips—The New Testament in Modern English, Revised Edition, J. B. Phillips, Translator. © J. B. Phillips 1958,1960,1972. Used by permission of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 866 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10022.

  TLB —Scripture quotations marked (TLB) are taken from The Living Bible, copyright © 1971. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, IL 60189. All rights reserved.

  ANI MA’AMIN

  I believe in the sun even when it isn’t shining.

  I believe in love even when I am alone.

  I believe in God even when He is silent.

  (Graffiti found in 1945 on the wall of a basement in Köln, Germany, where a Jewish believer is thought to have been hiding from the Gestapo.)

  If you are hurting and secretly wondering

  “Where is God?” and “Why has this happened to me?”

  and “How come my prayers aren’t working?”

  then I dedicate this book to you…

  …and to Samie.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE ABOUT TERMINOLOGY

  Many of the names of people mentioned in this book have been changed to protect their privacy. I have also endeavored to use language that is broadly inclusive. For instance, I prefer to refer to the pre-Christian books of the Bible as the Hebrew Testament out of respect for our Jewish forebears to whom they were originally given. However, I have submitted entirely to the traditional usage of the masculine pronoun for God, although I do this recognizing that men and women together reflect the character of their Creator and that we do so in equal measure (see Gen. 1:27).

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Brian McLaren

  Introduction

  How I Developed a Powerful Ministry to Basketball Players, Thanks to My Intergalactically Stupid Friend

  MAUNDY THURSDAY:

  HOW

  AM I GOING TO GET THROUGH THIS?

  Chapter One

  Confetti

  Chapter two

  Seeking Magic Fruit and Finding Tears

  Chapter Three

  Into the Mystery

  Chapter Four

  Naked Prayer

  Chapter Five

  A Darker Trust

  GOOD FRIDAY:

  WHY

  AREN’T MY PRAYERS BEING ANSWERED?

  Chapter Six

  Wondering Why

  Chapter Seven

  God’s World God’s Will God’s War

  Chapter Eight

  God’s Will

  Chapter Nine

  God’s War

  HOLY SATURDAY:

  WHERE

  IS GOD WHEN HEAVEN IS SILENT?

  Chapter Ten

  Exploring the Silence

  Chapter Eleven

  Engaging the Silence

  EASTER SUNDAY:

  WHEN

  EVERY PRAYER IS ANSWERED

  Chapter Twelve

  Living Hope

  Chapter Thirteen

  Beyond Miracles Samie Greig

  Afterword

  Samie Greig

  Appendices

  A. Personal Checklist

  B. Heroes of the Faith and Unanswered Prayer

  C. Discussion Guide for Small Groups

  Endnotes

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author and the Artist

  FOREWORD

  Pete Greig has written an extraordinarily honest book, so I need to begin this foreword honestly, with a confession: I love the subject of prayer (because I love to pray) and I have read a lot of books on the subject, but I haven’t liked quite a few of them. Some have struck me as formulaic and full of easy answers, which is a euphemism for dishonest answers. They made unrealistic promises and were full of some of the unhelpful misguidance that Pete’s book effectively, but gently, seeks to correct.

  Several of these books were guilt-inducing, preoccupied with quantifying how much prayer is necessary for a truly committed Christian and shaming people for not praying enough, or the prescribed way, or whatever. This approach always hurts my prayer life, because after reading them, as soon as I say, “Dear God” or “Our Father,” my next thought is, I’m sure You’re already disappointed in me because I haven’t prayed enough this week. Oops, I probably didn’t start this prayer right. Okay, let me start again … er …

  A few of these books, though, have been so important in my life that they made getting through all the others worthwhile—just to find these gems. I think, for example, of Richard Foster’s Prayer, or C. S. Lewis’s Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer or Anthony Bloom’s Beginning to Pray. The book you are now holding is the most recent member of this B-list. (There is no A-list. B in this case means best, beautiful and be sure to recommend it to others.) In fact, I just gave this manuscript to one of my sons and made him promise to pass it on to my other son when he finished.

  I said this is an honest book, but it’s not just politely honest; it goes a lot farther than that. I’m tempted to say “brutally honest,” but there’s nothing brutal about this book. It would be better to say “tenderly honest” or, even better, “compassionately honest,” because compassion makes a veteran in prayer tell even painful or embarrassing or troubling truths so that beginners (and other veterans) will know they are not alone in their confusion, discouragement, doubt, anger and disillusionment with prayer. I think you’ll find yourself saying, Oh, thank God, I’m not the only one, after all, who has ever felt that way! I’m not the only person who has thought or asked that.

  Along with honesty, this is a book of theological depth. Pete draws from the Bible—not in a superficial proof-texty way, but reaching deeply and broadly into the biblical texts, with a mature sensitivity to context. Not only that, but he draws deeply from his own circle of friends and, of course, he draws deeply from his own experience. One senses that, for all his honest confessions of doubts and confusion, this is a man who talks and listens to God, not just a man who speaks and writes books on how others should do so.

 
Honest and deep. These qualities would be wonderful enough, but this book is also skillfully written. Pete’s style reminds me of some of our best contemporary writers, like Don Miller and Annie Lamott. To have important things told with spark and flash, with a laugh and a tear and a wink, with irony and understatement and also great, naked, simple, open-eyed sincerity … reading doesn’t get much better than that.

  My conviction is that simply praying is one of the most important things we do, however inept or bumbling or insane we feel when we do it. One of my wisest friends, systematic theologian John Franke, has told me many things that have deeply helped me. Among them, he distinguishes between first- and second-order disciplines. Praying, giving to the poor and reconciling with an offended sister or brother in the church are first-order disciplines. Having a theology of prayer, or a theology of economics and development, or a theology about reconciliation are second-order disciplines. John taught me how important it is to stick with the first-order disciplines even when our second-order disciplines are shaky or even crumbling.

  Praying is a first-order discipline. Just doing it is what matters most. But all of us know that if our second-order theology of prayer is in disarray—if it is wobbly or limping or even crippled by some recent tough experiences—we will find it hard to do the first-order discipline.

  Nobody can do the first-order discipline for us. That’s up to us. But what Pete does in these pages is so important: He helps us sort through our second-order theology of prayer, our thinking about prayer, our understanding of how it works and doesn’t work and why. I think that will make it easier for us to actually do the thing that matters: stay in touch with God.

  Having said all this, it only seems right to conclude this foreword with a prayer to take us forward:

  Gracious God, You are so wonderful, so powerful, so mysterious, so good that when we say a name for You—God, Father, Lord, Creator, Almighty, Holy One—we hardly know what we mean. Our best thoughts of You are like a baby crying “Mama! Papa!” She knows so little about her parents. She has no idea of the depths of their minds or the range of their knowledge and experience. She knows nothing of their sorrows and very little of the depth of their love for her. But simply in calling out to them, with her limited understanding she establishes the bond through which, over the years, she will come to know them more and more.

  So I pray, Source of all our comfort and wisdom and strength, that You will meet each reader of this book as they read, reflect, digest and discuss the insights here … insights You have graciously given to Pete through his trials and struggles, his doubts and joys, his triumphs and setbacks in his walk with You.

  You sent Your Holy Son, empowered by Your Holy Spirit, to liberate captives and free the oppressed. Many readers are captives to bad ideas and oppressed by misconceptions and false assumptions. Let these pages be liberating freeing and life-giving. Help beginners to learn how to pray for the first time. Help the disillusioned to unlearn bad patterns and relearn better ones. And help the experienced to find reminders and refreshment and reassurance.

  What a gift You have given us, almighty and ever-living God: the gift of Your attention, the gift of Your interest in what we have to say. Thank You. Thank You. Thank You. In the name of Jesus and in the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

  Brian McLaren

  Laurel, MD, USA

  www.brianmclaren.net

  Introduction

  HOW I DEVELOPED A POWERFUL MINISTRY TO BASKETBALL PLAYERS, THANKS TO MY INTERGALACTICALLY STUPID FRIEND

  If your deepest, most desperate prayers aren’t being answered, if life sometimes hurts so much that you secretly wonder whether God exists, and if He does whether He cares, and if He cares why on earth He doesn’t just do something to help, then you’re not alone. Surprisingly, the Bible reveals that Jesus—even Jesus—suffered the silence of unanswered prayer. The One who turned water to wine, healed the sick and even raised the dead, was also denied and apparently abandoned by the Father. What’s more, as far as we can tell from the Gospel accounts, Christ’s unanswered prayers seem to have been concentrated on His time of greatest need: the four days of His Passion.

  On Maundy Thursday, Jesus asked the Father to spare Him from suffering, but every crucifix testifies to the agony of that unanswered prayer. Earlier that day, Jesus had prayed repeatedly for Christian unity. But look around you! Tragically (and for whatever reason), that crucial request also remains unanswered.

  On Good Friday, we witness a third unanswered prayer. Nailed to a cross and slowly suffocating, the Son cried out to the Father with a chilling question: “My God,” He gasped, “My God, why have You forsaken Me?” And there was no response to the “why.” No dove descending. No booming voice. No answer to prove the question wrong.

  On Holy Saturday, the hopes and prayers of every disciple lay dashed and broken in the grave. But God did nothing. Said nothing. No sound but the buzzing of flies around the corpse of the Son.

  And then, on Easter Sunday, God broke the silence. He awoke. He spoke. And for those of us who walk (however reluctantly) in Jesus’ footsteps from Gethsemane and Golgotha to the Garden tomb, Easter Sunday offers irrepressible hope. That one ultimate miracle—the resurrection of the Son of God from the dead—assures us that every buried dream and dashed hope will ultimately be absorbed and resurrected into a reality far greater than anything we can currently imagine.

  More Prayer than Sex

  When I asked my friend Mike if I could share his experiences of unanswered prayer in this book, he laughed laconically and said he’d prefer to be featured in the Forbes rich list. “Being held up as an example of unanswered prayer is not exactly what I dreamed about as a kid,” he joked. I know how he feels. But however zealously we may pray for health, wealth and a happy home, sooner or later life goes wrong.

  We all get hijacked eventually. One moment you’re cruising from A to B at 30,000 feet, fiddling with the earphones and feasting on life’s pretzels. The next, you’re more scared than you’ve ever been before, caught in a situation you prayed you’d never be in, and heading somewhere that you never asked to go. The terror comes in many guises: a sudden trauma, a long-term illness, the loss of someone you love, the death of a dream.

  Michael Stipe is right. Everybody hurts sometimes.

  And when we hurt, most of us turn to prayer. Way more than you might think. Way more than we go to church, at any rate. The girl at the checkout hoping she’s not pregnant, the businessman staring at his sales figures, the teenager laying flowers by the roadside. The Queen of England does it, football fans do it, priests and professors do it, surgeons do it, and so do terrorists. Even atheists backslide from time to time. More Americans say they pray every week than work, exercise or have sex. I read somewhere (but I find it hard to believe) that a whopping 20 percent of agnostics and atheists sheepishly admit to praying daily! So there’s a lot of praying that goes on out there. “It is not possible for us to say, I will pray, or I will not pray, as if it were a question of pleasing ourselves,” observed the great theologian Karl Barth. Prayer, he noted, is “a necessity, as breathing is necessary to life.”1

  But the brutal fact of the matter is that while most of us pray, prayer does not always seem to work, and it’s not easy to be honest about this.

  At university, I knew a guy called Captain Scarlet (nicknamed after the lead puppet in the cult TV series called Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons). Everyone liked Captain Scarlet because he was pretty much nuts and very, very enthusiastic about things no one else wanted to think about. He was a Christian, and he combined this with being about as positive about positive thinking as it is possible to be. For a while, Captain Scarlet believed that God wanted everybody on Earth, especially students and Africans, to be spectacularly wealthy, eternally healthy and as addicted to Kenneth Copeland teaching cassettes as he was. Which is, let’s face it, a whole lot better than being penniless, depressed and into Marilyn Manson.

  The Captain was the only 19-year-old
I’ve ever known who viewed televangelists as aspirational role models. For the Captain, Jesus Christ was the King of ker-ching. Anyway, one time he told me that he had been healed of a serious back complaint that had been causing him a lot of pain, adding with complete seriousness, “It’s just the symptoms I can’t seem to get rid of.” That’s honestly what dear-old Captain Scarlet said, and I was so bewildered that I just said, “Wow!” and tried to give him a hug, which, because of his symptoms, turned out to be a bad idea.

  I still don’t agree with Captain Scarlet’s view of faith. In fact, I think it’s potentially dangerous to put so much faith in faith that we ignore the facts and kiss our brains goodbye. However, I’m not a cynic. I believe in the goodness and greatness of God, and I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to help others believe too. Maybe that’s why, like Captain Scarlet, I sometimes find it so much harder to admit my disappointments and frustrations in prayer than I do to broadcast glad tidings of great joy to all mankind.

  I’m convinced that miracles great and small do happen more often than people realize and that when one comes to us we should shout it from the rooftops! But let’s be honest, too, about the reality of unanswered prayer so that we can think intelligently and relate sensitively around the deep questions of our lives.

  Glory Stories

  A few years ago, one of my friends (whose sense of humor is, admittedly, warped) took it upon himself to send a spoof letter to a well-known Christian leader informing him that I had recently persuaded an entire basketball team to convert to Christianity. With a final flourish of creativity, my friend added that the team now had the catchy little phrase “Jumpin’ for Jesus” embroidered on their shorts. Embarrassed, I phoned the leader to explain that the whole thing was a hoax and to apologize for the intergalactic stupidity of my friend. I explained that there was no basketball team. There had been no conversions. There would never be any shorts embroidered with the phrase “Jumpin’ for Jesus.”