Prayer and Projection

Back "I can’t pray anymore. I feel so betrayed. That man preached like an angel. To think that he was involved in that shameful business…"



"Unless he promises to stay at that church forever, I’m not going to join. I had a priest I loved leave, and he wouldn’t even come back for my wedding…"



"I will never vote Democratic again, after the way he dishonored that office…"



"We had thought he was the one to redeem Israel. He was a prophet mighty in word and deed…" (Luke 24:21).



"Could you not stay awake and pray with me—even one hour?" (Mark 14: 32-42).



"Rabbi, we tried to heal this guy. We did just what you told us. But it just didn’t work. We need you to be with us, otherwise, nothing happens…" (Mark 9: 14-29, paraphrased)



"You must trust the President. He knows what is best for us. He has special sources of information that we don’t have."



"We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and folly to the Gentiles…" (Paul in I Corinthians 1: 23).



(You will notice I am using a technique of interspersed quotes that Margie used in the last Scarborough Evening Light service). These quotes come from people’s comments about church and political leaders, and from the dialogues between Jesus and his disciples about what it is to be Messiah.



Prayer is the process of relating what lies inside us to the truth and power of God. I believe that God places in us a longing for wholeness. We saw it at the communion table last week. This past Ash Wednesday at the family service we looked at the story of Jesus healing the man with the withered hand in the synagogue in Galilee (Mark 3: 1-6). Jesus knows that longing for wholeness is there, and he also knows that we keep God’s power outside us. The Pharisees who understood the purity of the Sabbath to be about God’s perfection, even if it kept them powerless to heal that man. Our dreams of perfection and of wanting to be god-like are dangerous, but it is also dangerous to deny our own power and project it all outward. Belief in Jesus is belief in the One who sent him.



When Jesus heals people, what he says is: your faith has made you well. Even the woman with the bleeding who touches his garment in a crowd, who takes power from Jesus when he is focused on another errand. She knows it is God’s power in this man; and that man, Jesus, says that it is God’s power in her, finally released, even in her desperation. Jesus is the catalyst and the template. Part of his healing her is to find her, and look her in the eye, to address her as a person, and affirm that she took that power from him, and that it was her power and God’s power brought back together.



We grow from childhood through a process of projection, first onto our parents, then our teachers—including our Sunday School teachers, and also our religious leaders. Then we sometimes start putting our projections on cultural figures, even popular classmates, sports and military heroes, presidents and corporate chieftains. These figures themselves can become inflated; power is a potent drug, fame is a tricky but real goddess, and television and the movies today have big roles in elevating, magnifying, distorting reality. And then disillusionment can come, bitterness, disorientation—because we live by identifying with positive role models and figures. So projection is good when we emulate what is good, but not when we split our good and our evil outside and live in false powerlessness and false innocence.



I am casting a big net here, because our prayers encompass many things, but also because our prayer is where our hope and our disbelief struggle. Prayer is the core of Lent, and Lent is the time when the nature of Jesus’ messiah-ship was revealed most clearly. Our faith includes our understanding the power of Jesus to be the healer, the community leader, the brilliant poet and parable-teller, the fearless prophet, spell-binding miracle-worker. And yet when a man comes up to him saying, Good Rabbi, what must I do to inherit eternal life? Jesus turns on him and says, "why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone." (Mark 10: 17-18). For those of us who believe that Jesus was sinless, we always need to deal with the several places where Jesus does not claim to be perfect. Why does Jesus often say to those he has healed, and even to the demons who recognize him as he casts them out; keep silent. The Gospel of Mark especially shows Jesus in a fight with the evil powers, but when the demons scream—we know you, Jesus, you are the Son of >God, Jesus shuts them up and refers to himself as the mysterious Son of Man.



In prayer we start with the adoration and praise—the awareness of >perfection and wholeness, like the great images of the divine in our two Old Testament readings. These images derive something from the sense of what earthly kings are, but God is greater than any earthly king. There is also the holiness of the Temple, but God’s holiness is greater than the Temple. Jesus, many centuries later, is raised in a culture that still worships a kingly God who is above all worshipped in his Temple-palace. And yet Jesus is going to live out a different way of relating to that God and of using power. He is going to be revealed as a different kind of Messiah. To be the divine king, he will not need earthly power. And he will tell us, you don’t need a big temple or even a church like this, to have the Spirit inside. You are a temple of the Holy Spirit, as Paul echoes Jesus.



I think Jesus’ messiah-ship is still not understood by us, partly because we have so much power to re-shape the world, even violently. So the drama of Lent speaks wildly to the drama unfolding in our outside world. Are we the world’s messiah? Are we perfect enough to wield power? Is any of us wielding all the power that God gives us? How do we fight evil without becoming like what we focus on? That may be the meaning of Jesus words, Resist not evil—even when he is advocating active non-violence. This sense of not letting evil define our righteousness is the way biblical scholar, Walter Wink, interprets it in his book on "the Son of Man" texts that has influenced this sermon.



Now, as I have indicated, we grow by identifying with good figures, saints, heroes, etc. This past two days I was in Louisville, KY, for the 30th Anniversary of the Witherspoon Society, the Common Cause-like group with whom I have been active since 1977. I go to conferences to be inspired and to learn, and in this case to meet with leaders of our denomination. We heard from two fine theologians, the President of Union Seminary, NY, the Stated Clerk of the General Assembly, a great preacher, an innovative musical team, a talented woman pastor who is running for moderator, a deeply spiritual past moderator, and a great poet, Wendell Berry. This is not the time for that report, which I will put in the Newsletter, since you subsidized my going through the continuing education benefit you have put in my salary.



One of the speakers, a professor of theology and minister, Mary McClintock Fulkerson, had a story at dinner that relates to the phenomenon of projection. You may recognize the name, Fulkerson. He husband is the head of the surgical team at Duke that transplanted a heart and lung set of the wrong blood type into a teenager, who then had a re-transplant and then died. Bill Fulkerson is used to being at the top of his profession, and regarded as semi-divine. Even the surgeons themselves regard themselves as more divine than other doctors. Sixty Minutes did an adoring program on the Duke medical team maybe 9 months ago. But now Sixty Minutes is coming back, with the hatchet.



We may imagine what it is to be judged by a single failure. We all know how a single bad moment can define a person—a goalie who lets in the winning goal, despite his fabulous abilities, an actress who exposes too much for too long in the wrong film, a politician who has one major flaw. In the Fulkerson case you can imagine the surgeon’s need for nerve and lack of >self-doubt, and we can pray that the entire Duke team regains confidence in their true powers, even as they are shorn of any inflation. Certainly Sixty Minutes will try to rip the projections of perfection off them.



When the disciples try to do what Jesus does and fail, they suffer from self-doubt and it does cripple them—they can not, of themselves, un-cripple the crippled. But bigger than self-doubt is the projecting all power onto Jesus. Through humility one deals with self-doubt because one comes to affirm one’s God given strengths. That is one thing Jesus is saying to you of low self image: God did not create you that way. What God is also saying, through Jesus, is that we are to be like Jesus. Our humanity is un-cursed. And Jesus even goes beyond that. He is the Messiah because he refuses to be the Messiah, but invites us to exercize our own healing and even redeeming power, even at great risk. What is Jesus’ way? Does Jesus’ way work in the real work of evil powers? This is where we are led back to prayer.



Right now I do not think we can responsibly duck talking about the war. But we must speak in Christian categories, of messiahship, of idolatry, of empire and of church. We saw in Fred Rogers last week the reframing of neighbor—in his neighborhood. (In contemporary terms, Jesus is reframing not just Messiahship, but nationhood, personhood, doing justice, punishment, forgiveness, repentance, neighborship…). Right now the Pope and most religious leaders are appealing to the UN and all nations against the war. But as one Catholic friend of mine said, the Pope and the bishops don’t get it. Because of the abuse of priestly office, they have no prophetic voice. Their moral authority is shot—at least, the moral authority that was projected upon them which they accepted. Ironically, people then project their power and wisdom on the President, and dislike dissenters because dissent strips off the projections—(the king has no clothes).



In the Reformation, we stripped many of the projections off the church itself. We also began the democratic process, ceasing to worship kings and presidents as well as bishops and saints. Jesus is the one mediator and we are all his agents. But we kept many projections on Jesus so we did not need to act like him, or suffer like him. We stopped the incarnation. Yet God, through the Spirit says, listen to him.



And what does Jesus say, "There is no greater love than this, that a man should lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends, if you do what I command you. I call you servants no longer; a servant does not know what his master is about. I have called you friends, because I have disclosed to you everything that I heard from my Father." John 15: 13-15: Amen.
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