I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. ~ John 12:24

Jesus said to them, “I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. ~ John 6:53

Once there were two men who longed for real tomatoes with good flavor unlike the bland, waxy variety found in the chain supermarkets. So they both decided to start their own home gardens.

The first gardener bought the best seeds in the best seed catalog and picked out a nice patch of dirt behind his house with good sunlight. Since tomatoes are the gateway drug of home gardening, he couldn’t help but purchase a few pepper plants and eggplants too. He dug in the hard soil (there was a lot of clay in their area) and planted and watered his seeds, careful to space them apart properly, and reflecting on how – in a sense – the seed had to die before new life could spring from it.

Every day he was diligent to water and weed his garden and, sure enough, in about a week little sprouts poked through the surface. But neither the tomatoes nor the others plants grew as big as those in the catalog pictures, and although his tomatoes tasted far better than the waxy supermarket variety, they looked a bit scrawny and didn’t produce very much.

The second home-gardener bought the best seeds he could find in the best seed catalog and picked out a nice patch of dirt behind his house with good sunlight. Since tomatoes are the gateway drug of home gardening, he couldn’t help but purchase a few pepper plants and eggplants too.

Because there was a lot of clay in their area he rented a roto-tiller and spent a day plowing up the hard dirt for his garden bed. The tiller violently ripped into the hard soil about a foot deep, churning everything over and deeply cultivating the topsoil and clay into a soft new mixture. Then he went to the local compost facility where grass clippings, pulled weeds, and other yard waste from all over the city was allowed to rot and decay into smelly black piles of rich organic matter. He filled his truck bed to the brim with this living-dead dirt and shoveled it onto his freshly-tilled planter beds. To this he added earthworm castings (worm poop!). He then folded the compost deep into the soil turning it over and over again one shovel-full at a time.

Then he added organic fertilizer, made from decomposed bone, kelp, and fish meal. He sprinkled the ashy white powder all over the planter beds and raked it into the dirt, shaping the beds into gently sloping mounds, which were now smelly, soft, and a deep dark brown color. Into this graveyard of decomposed animal and vegetable waste he planted and watered his seeds, and reflected on how they would have to break open and “die” in order for life to spring from them. And he thought, too, of how the young plants would be – in a sense – eating the flesh and drinking the blood of all the animals and plants that were sacrificed and given on their behalf, and he marveled at how much death was required to produce rich, full life.

That summer his tomatoes outgrew their cages, and the pepper plants were so full they crowded each other in the beds. He picked so many big, beautiful tomatoes and peppers that he had to share them with his friends and neighbors since it was more then he could possible eat all by himself. And his tomatoes were tasty.

There is perhaps no greater example of Jesus in prayer than the lengthy, swirling “high-priestly prayer” recorded in John 17.

One of the striking things about this passage is that although Jesus is God in the flesh, he seems to rely heavily on prayer as a means of accomplishing God’s will. He doesn’t simply teach his disciples what the right way is or “fix” them in some “supernatural” way. He spends time praying to God the Father on their behalf, here in John 17 and many other places. The New Testament is also clear that the risen and ascended Jesus continues to pray for us (Rom 8:34; 1 John 2:1). Prayer is apparently still the way that God’s work gets done.

One example of this can be found in In Luke 22:31-32. Jesus foresees that Simon will be tested severely. Though Simon thinks he is ready to die with Jesus, he will find out that when it comes down to it, he will quickly, easily deny that he even knows Jesus. You would think Jesus would want to secure the future of the church by perhaps re-wiring Simon’s brain so that he responds differently, to somehow guarantee his eventual success. But he doesn’t. Instead, Jesus says, “Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift you as wheat. But I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.” One would imagine that Jesus desperately wants Simon to pass the test, but instead of trying to engineer the outcome, he simply prays for him. It speaks volumes about Jesus’ trust in God that he sees prayer as the best thing he can do for Simon in this very crucial, dangerous time.

Looking at Jesus in prayer teaches us that it really is a powerful tool for seeing God’s will done on earth as it is in heaven. Of course it always must be married to faith-filled action, but action without prayer is powerless to effect real transformation and belies a subtle form of unbelief where we think nothing of value can come from people simply praying. The life of Jesus and the Scriptures indicate otherwise: “The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective” (James 5:16).

Prayer Exercise:
Set aside 20-30 minutes to think about the following questions:
+ When you want to see transformation happen in those you love, is your first instinct to pray for them?
+ Or do you first begin strategizing about how you could steer them toward change?
+ Do you perhaps trust more in your own persuasive abilities than in God’s Spirit?
+ How would you like your prayer life to change based on your answers to these questions?

Now read John 17 slowly, meditating on the fact that Jesus is praying for you right now.

There comes a time in every kind of training when your body hits the wall. It doesn’t matter how bad you want it on the inside, you just can’t keep going. This is one of the best examples of how our spirits and our bodies are intimately connected.

Jesus’ best friends had this problem at the worst possible time. At the cusp of his betrayal, public shame, and impending death sentence, Jesus took his closest partners on the greatest revolution of man and headed into the grove of olive trees at the garden of gethsemane for one reason: to pray. Jesus was on the verge of personal breakdown, beseeching God to change the course of history – if possible – and sweating blood in anxiety. He asked Peter, James, and John, his closest friends, to pray.

“Then he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping. “Simon,” he said to Peter, “are you asleep? Could you not keep watch for one hour? Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the body is weak” (Mark 14:37-38).”

They fell asleep.

I’m fascinated by this passage, mostly because of what Jesus is teaching about prayer, but partly because pf what we can infer.

Prayer is “watching”
Jesus talks about “seeing” in spiritual terms quite frequently, and here he seems to indicate that prayer is a kind of watchfulness that will actually make a difference. It’s important enough that he wakes them up to continue. I wonder how many of us feel that same sense of urgency about active prayer? Do we really think prayer will reveal anything? Do we think it matters?

The watchfulness of prayer guards us against temptation
Being watchful apparently had something to do with guarding against temptation. But what temptation? Usually when we hear that word we think of personal seduction – lust, greed, lying, etc. – but this isn’t the setting for those sorts of sins. It’s the middle of the night in an olive grove! I’m reminded of Jesus’ words in John 5, “I can only do what I see the father doing.” Perhaps Jesus is tying prayer to the ability to recognize what God is doing, and the inability to recognize God at work causes us to be tempted to resist it. After all, it was immediately after this that Peter tries to resist Jesus’ arrest with the sword, cutting off a soldiers ear. Jesus prayed, and recognized the work of God. Peter didn’t, and resisted it. Was that his “temptation?” If so, how often do we miss the move of God in our own midst because we’re not “watchful” in prayer?

Prayer is rigorous
Most disturbing, how often do we miss God’s move because we’re simply to spiritually “flabby” to keep up the pace? Jesus makes it clear that his three best friends don’t fail for lack of sincerity, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Jesus is a seasoned veteran, able to keep long watch and run the spiritual race to completion, but the boys – being still only a few years into their training – are simply unable to keep up. Prayer is far more than an occasional therapy session with God that comes along whenever we feel the urge. Done properly, it is a rigorous endeavor that taxes the body as well as the mind, just like any other serious discipline. Only those who train accordingly, like Jesus, will persevere to see the prize that can only be recognized in prayer.

Prayer Exercise:
Time to stretch your limits. If you were training to run, you would add a little distance or a steeper incline. Let’s do the same. You’ve learned the Lord’s prayer as an outline for coming before God, now use it to push yourself. However long you normally pray, set aside a longer session. If you typically pray 10 minutes, set aside 30. If 30, set aside, 45, and so on. Now use each line of the Lord’s prayer as a point of meditation to walk yourself through a prayer that moves from reverence, to intimacy, to petition, confession, forgiveness, etc.

A word of caution: the point of this exercise is not length, it’s depth. Don’t go babbling on just for the sake of stretching it out (we’ve already learned about that, remember?). We need to learn to plumb the depth of our hearts, our world, and our God with our imagination in prayer. This is one way the Spirit get deep into us through prayer and begins to reveal to us what God is doing. This is how we learn to see.

Sunday night we wrapped up our series of discussions on community formation with an overview of mission. This represents the outer layer in our proposed rhythm of life: Discipleship > Community > Mission. The subject of “mission” and being “missional” is a hot topic in Church circles these days, so it’s important that we capture a way to think about what this means for our lives together.

Mission Belongs to God
Taking John 5:1-30 as our focus, I proposed that mission is the missio dei, or the “mission of God,” which is His act of entering into the world and doing His work of redemption and restoration. Fundamentally, then, mission belongs to God – not the Church. He initiates it and sustains it. We don’t bring God to people, God is already “at work” in the world (John 5:17) bringing about His redemption and restoration, making the world right again.

To put it another way, the church doesn’t have a mission, the mission of God has a church.

Last night we had a great discussion about what it means to be a community of faith and what some of our challenges might be. This week I’d like to use this website as a way to anchor that ongoing discussion.

This will be the only major post this week. I’ll add a few brief quotes and links over the next few days that hopefully with stir the pot a bit, but for the most part this is the critical discussion we need to have in depth.

Last night I suggested that community life together is where discipleship actually occurs most powerfully. I would add that it’s only in our community relationships with one another that we encounter biblical “salvation.” If you want to dig in a little right now, here are some key biblical narratives for gaining a vision of how the people of God are to live out salvation concretely in community:

So far I’ve said that everything we do is spiritual, therefore everything we do is worship. When it comes to discipleship, or “spiritual formation,” that means every realm of life is open to spirituality – and that spiritual training should involve every realm of life.

But some will object that doing so will lead to religious legalism.

Nobody wants to be in a legalistic church, where people judging themselves and others according to petty and meaningless external behaviors. This is already the case! According to studies of Christian character the Western Church by-and-large already produces an insincere form of religious legalism - it just happens to be a shallow form. But shallow religiosity is still religiosity. Setting a low bar of expectations has not saved us from the error of the Judaizers, it has only created a modern, secularized form of it. We’ve pressed the lessons of Luther and Calvin to the point of complete absurdity, making salvation nothing more than a matter of pure motives and approved doctrines. Now, instead of suffering under the blight of a works-based righteousness, we suffer under the blight of an information-based unrighteousness.

Another thing we discussed Sunday night was how we could look to Christ as the example of how we might live our our faith as a community. I other words, how would we see church differently if we viewed Jesus Christ as the prototype of the Church?

Theologian Chris Wright says Jesus is the “hermeneutical coherence” through which all disciples must read the texts that “lead up to” and “on from” Christ. In our case, this means developing a prophetic imagination that is able to grab hold of Christ’s example to be a foundation for our own gathered lives as missional pilgrims in 21st century America.

Not surprisingly, examples of Christ acting as a missionary to his own culture are everywhere in the gospel narratives, but I’ve chosen a specific passage to highlight because I believe it reveals so much about Christ’s overall posture toward the people of God, the world, and the gospel itself: John 5:1-30.

Today is our day to practice worship together. If you’re not part of the Ikon Community, get together with a group of friends and practice the following exercises:

• Eat together
• Receive communion together (choose a reading from John 6:43-58, or 2 Cor 11:23-26, a liturgical book like the Book of Common Prayer)
• Read all, or some portion of, Matthew 4 together and share your experiences from your exercises this week
• Pray for anyone in need

Jesus is the narrow gate through which we enter God’s Kingdom and are enabled to become His eikons again.

No other person in human history has comprehensively demonstrated the ability to partner with God to conquer sickness, personal immorality, systemic evil, political exploitation, religious manipulation, and even death. Jesus is the master of human spirituality. All other teachers fall short.