What is the Prayer That No One Wants yet Everyone Needs? This One.

I had no idea.   I thought.   I’m going to hang out for a week, drink some beer, have cool conversations with the monks.   But in that week, I only spoke to one monk, the one who got me my room.  After that, I hardly spoke to anyone, much less drank a beer with them.  The monks intended it that way.   You ate in silence at every meal.   And in between, I spent long hours reading or staring out the window or taking walks in the fields around the monastery. 

Then one night after dinner, I decided to take one more walk, which was weird.  It was drizzling, foggy, miserable, not at all walking weather.  But I went.  And in the middle of that walk, in a wet, muddy field, I fell right on my face.  I didn’t trip.   I went down intentionally.

I can’t describe what happened exactly, but twenty-five years later, I still feel its power.  God didn’t give me some ecstatic, wondrous experience.  No, basically, God took me down, literally to the ground.  And in those moments, painful moments, I saw my shallowness, my fears, my broken places, stuff I didn’t want to ever see.   And I understood like never before the power of the prayer that we’ll talk about today.  This prayer will change your life like no other.  But no one wants this prayer, but everyone, everyone, at some deep level, desperately needs it. 

And once God opens you to it, breaks you open to it, then what power comes, what change, what new life.   So, what is this prayer that no one wants, yet everyone needs?  In these two stories, Jesus points the way. Let’s listen and hear what Jesus has to say.

Mark 14:3-9, 22-24

In these two stories, two stories that God placed remarkably close together for a reason, God tells you.   In these stories, God is telling you that if you want to break free, then the breaking has to come first.   You may not want it, but you desperately need it. What do I mean?  

The best example of what I mean happens every day of the week not only in every American city and small town, but in countless places across the world.   There people gather, grateful for the breaking that happened in their life.  Why?  If the breaking hadn’t happened, then they would never have broken free.   What places am I talking about?  I’m talking about the rooms of AA or NA or OA or Alanon or any of the other groups that use the 12 steps created by the two founders of Alcoholics Anonymous.   If you know about those steps, you know they begin with a painful admission.  You have to admit you are powerless over alcohol or whatever it might be that you are addicted to.  You have to admit that your life has become unmanageable.  Then in step 2, you admit that you need a power greater than yourself to restore you to sanity.

But folks never decide to admit that powerlessness right away.  No, first they face some sort of bottom, a brokenness that wakes them up.   Maybe their spouse leaves them, or the law comes after them or they lose their job or maybe all those things and more or maybe they simply feel empty.  But before they get to those rooms, before they take the steps that break them free, they  go through the breaking first.  

And in this first story, we are seeing that happen, both the breaking and the breaking free.  Do you see what happens here?   A woman crashes a dinner party, not just any dinner party, the dinner party for a prominent religious leader, all to do a stunning thing.  But before we get there, let’s imagine a bit about who this woman might be. 

The perfume gives us a clue. Only two types of people could afford perfume, the super wealthy, and well, prostitutes because it was a professional expense.   And likely, she was the latter, as she crashes a party that a person of wealth could have got invited to.  A parallel story in Luke, implies too that this is the work she did.  But if she was a prostitute, do you think that’s what she wanted to be? Did she grow up dreaming of becoming a prostitute?    Does anyone?  Still somewhere along the way she came to do just that.  Maybe financial desperation drove her there. Maybe, because of abuse and pain in the past, she didn’t feel worthy to do anything else.   But at some point, to survive, she had reconciled herself to it, to this life.  Maybe she even came to rationalize the life it gave her, the money, the seeming independence.  We don’t know.  The Bible doesn’t give her back story.  All we know is whether she was a prostitute or wealthy or likely both, something changed.    She came to a point where she couldn’t do it anymore, where she knew.  She had to make a change.   She had to break free.

And so, in a radical move, she comes to Jesus.   She had almost certainly seen Jesus before, seen him touch the untouchable, welcome the unacceptable, include women among his closest disciples.  Heck, he’s having dinner in the home of a guy named Simon the leper.  So, that gave her the courage to come to him and to break free in a way so stunning that Jesus said.  No one will forget it ever.  So, what does she do?  She anoints Jesus with perfume, lots of perfume.

Now, you might think.  Ok, that’s nice, in sort of a weird way, but stunning, breathtaking, really?   To understand what she did, you need to understand one word about this perfume, denarii.   A denarius represented the median wage of a worker for a day.  And this bottle of perfume cost 300 of those days, a year’s wages.   More than that, she wore that perfume because it served as a subtle advertisement.   It told everyone that she was available…if you were willing to pay.   And when she broke that bottle, a bottle that she had likely earned through work she wanted to never do again, she was saying to Jesus.  I am breaking free.  I am breaking free of this broken life.  And I will not go back to it again.   And I am literally giving it all to you.  I am taking my wages, my very livelihood and emptying it out over you.   

But to get there, to take that radical a step, she had to come to the end of herself, to a moment when she said, “I can’t do this anymore.”   Before the breaking free, the breaking had to come.

You see, that’s the human problem.  We’re all addicts.  We all get dependent on something or someone too much.   It doesn’t have to be bad.  It just becomes bad because we come to love it or depend on it too much.   So, you become addicted to success or a relationship or a person, to the approval of others, to stuff, to food, to financial security, to your kids, to your work, even work for God.  It could be anything.   But when you love that thing too much, it doesn’t belong to you.  No, you now belong to it.  But too often, you can’t see that.  You can’t see how bound you are until, at some point, a breaking comes.

When I walked in that field at the monastery, that’s what happened.  I broke.  I saw how addicted I was to a certain image of myself, how slavishly attached to the approval of others, how shallow and empty it had made me.   And when I fell down into that field, face down to the ground, I was telling God.  I’m broken, and I’m ready.  I’m finally ready for you to break me free. 

Here’s the stunning truth.  In your life, if you want the freedom God yearns to give you, then the breaking comes first.  Think about it.   In times, when you made a radical change to your life, didn’t something like that happen?   The psychiatrist Scott Peck said it well.  He said “The truth is that our finest moments are more likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. Why?  It is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.”   What was Peck saying?  Before the breaking free, the breaking comes and sometimes that breaking can be brutal.

Have you ever heard the name, Rick Warren?   He leads a mega church, Saddleback in California.  He wrote a book that sold like crazy, over 35 million copies.  But before all that, Warren broke.  He had started the church.  Things were going great.  He was working insane hours, but the church was growing.  And one Sunday, in mid-December, he was preaching until he couldn’t do it anymore.  I mean that literally.  He stopped mid-sermon.  He couldn’t see the words on the page.  He began to fall.  He had just enough time to call his assistant pastor to take over while he found a seat.  For years, Warren had suffered anxiety and depression, but what happened after that Sunday made those pale in comparison.  He and his family left the next day for Arizona, to stay in a home, his wife’s family owned.  He stayed there nearly a month, over Christmas, struggling with overwhelming depression.  Then he heard these words.  “You focus on building people,” God said, “and I will build the church.”  Do you see what God was saying? Now that you’re broken, Rick, you can break free.  You can let go of this idea you’ve gotta build this, not me.   And Warren returned to Saddleback, still fragile but determined to find a way to do this church thing differently.   And out of that struggle came the small groups that became key to the church’s impact to this day.   But before that happened, the breaking had to come first. (this story is taken from the book - Power of Habit)

But you might ask, okay, that’s wonderful for Warren.  But I don’t wanna be broken.  Sheesh, who does want to be broken?  And that’s when this second story comes in, the story where Jesus breaks the bread, where Jesus pours out the wine.  

Do you see what Jesus is telling you?  He is saying.  This is what I did for you.  I was broken to make you whole.   I was poured out to fill you with my love, my forgiveness, my life.   But you have to let go too.  It’s in the breaking, that the breakthrough comes.   It’s the letting go that opens you to get the gift.   It’s the emptying that frees you to be filled.    You see.  The breaking is not the end of the story.  The healing is.  The love is.  The filling is.

But the breaking comes first.  Why?  The breaking breaks your delusions.  It breaks the delusion that whatever you are looking towards, loving too much could ever fill you.  And when the delusions break, then you see.  You see the love God poured out for you, how in Jesus God broke himself for you.  You see the truth of this love, this love that sets you free.    And when you see that, well, everything else pales in comparison.  So whatever needs to be broken and emptied, let it be.   For in that breaking, that emptying, Jesus will break you free.